Set Me Free (4 page)

“Things are… fine,” he said. A proper Protestant pause.

She asked, “It’s been—what? Two years?” She tried to scroll back in her mind. Lately, time had become a tangle of sorrow.
It moved strangely and left her lonely. But she was sure it had been at least two years.

“How are
you?”

“Fine,” she said, “I’m fine,” even though that was a lie. “What’s wrong? You sound…”

He sighed. One of those famous Barrow sighs that bordered on self-pity. “We’re getting old, aren’t we?”

She was caught off guard. Each day she felt her skin sagging, her hair thinning, her knuckles knotting up. But she was never
going to admit it, least of all to Elliot Barrow. She forced a laugh. “Speak for yourself,” she said as confidently as she
could.

Most people would apologize. Elliot was not most people, and Helen was left to wonder at his silence.

“How’s Amelia?” Helen asked finally, hoping to change the odd course of their conversation. Poor Ferdinand was loping toward
Helen, pleading with his wide puppy eyes. She felt a guilty sort of relief at hearing Elliot so preoccupied. It was good to
talk to some-
one who didn’t know the details of her own particular brand of awful.

“She’s great. Thanks for asking. Just started boarding school in Portland.”

“She’s not at Ponderosa Academy anymore?”

“Well, I can’t provide her with the kind of serious musical training she’s craving these days.” Helen fought the urge to roll
her eyes. “And you?” he continued. “How’s the First Stage? How’s Duncan?”

The first drop of rain bashed against the windowpane. Helen held her breath and watched as another one hit, and another and
another. The wet erected a bleary wall between her and the outside, until she heard her voice again. “The season’s already
begun. Duncan’s tackling
Romeo and Juliet,
if you can believe it. Never thought he’d do a romance. Busy busy busy. And I’m here holding down the fort.” She wanted to
avoid getting into details, especially with Elliot Barrow. He’d hear weakness and pounce.

“Good, good,” he said. “Listen, I’m wondering if you could do me a big favor.” She’d forgotten. He sensed weakness when he
wasn’t too busy thinking about himself. Which was once in a blue moon.

“What’s the favor?” She asked this evenly. No commitment.

“It’s a little odd. But I think you’ll understand.” He cleared his throat. “I’m wondering if you can help me. See, I read
The Tempest
again this summer. I hadn’t read it, oh, since I don’t know when. I haven’t the slightest idea what possessed me to pick
it up off Amelia’s shelf. But in reviewing it, I was struck by how much our man Will got about what people like the Neige
Courante are facing. He composed the play sometime between 1609 and 1613, just a few years after Pocahontas and John Smith
came face-to-face. How could he have predicted that in 1996, we’d still be dealing with these same themes: race relations,
the ravages of colonialism…”

“You’re asking me?”

“No, no, I’m saying… This may sound very odd, but reading it got me to thinking. It made me remember why I wanted to start
this school in the first place. The project of the Academy’s been sixteen years in the making. I’ve been so obsessed with
getting things off the ground that I forgot how good it feels to have something to aspire to.”

“I’m sorry, Elliot. I’m confused. What’s the favor?”

“I want the school to put up a production of
The Tempest.
I want Shakespeare to sing across the prairie. There are practical reasons— this is the right time and the right place. But
more than that, I realized we need some poetry in our lives. These kids need… I don’t know. Maybe this all sounds crazy.”

So Elliot still had the ability to plumb Helen’s depths in a matter of seconds. “I don’t think it’s crazy,” she said. “But
you may not want to take my advice on this. You know how I feel about Shakespeare. I believe…” She was moved. She hadn’t had
a conversation like this in months.

He took her silence as a chance to press on. “I want to bring these ideas to my students, because for them, these concepts
are personal. Skin color, stereotyping, discrimination will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Something like
The Tempest
will give them tools to consider these ideas critically. I’m afraid I haven’t been doing enough for them in that respect.
I can’t take them all to a Shakespeare play in Portland or Ashland, and anyway, even if I could afford it, I’d be taking only
the students. I want the whole community to be a part of this. So I’ve decided to bring Shakespeare here. And that’s where
you come in.”

Helen felt an indescribable rush of flattery. Her logical mind knew that as the founder of a prestigious off-Broadway theater,
she shouldn’t even register a tiny gig at a school in the boondocks of Oregon. Though she would have to let him down easy,
remind him with irritation that she had an actual day job that required her expertise, she couldn’t help feeling a little
proud. Amazing what a little approval from Elliot Barrow could still do to her after all these years. Her heart was beating
faster than she would have admitted, and she found a smile resting at the corners of her mouth.

“I’m wondering,” he continued, “if there’s anyone you can recommend.”

The sky landed on Helen’s house like a great thundering beast. A burst of lightning lit the dusky room. Ferdinand curled around
her feet with a whine, and she tried to soothe him as she gathered herself. She was angry with Elliot but even angrier with
herself for being so stupid. Of course he would call today, of all days. Of course she would fall into this trap again. Of
course she would act like a schoolgirl. And she had only herself to blame. She felt as though someone had hit her across the
jaw; she was that kind of stunned, that kind of hurt.

“Helen? You there?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m here.”

“Do you think you could help me? Is there anyone you can recommend?”

“I’ll do my best, Elliot. I’ll have to think.”

“Thank you,” Elliot said. “Thank you, Helen. I just want someone good. Someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“Yes, okay,” she said, her words clipped with frustration. “I’ll call you in the next few days.”

“Great.” He gave her his number and hung up. In the minutes that followed, Helen sat in her empty house and watched the sheets
of rain come down. She would have to watch out. In under ten minutes, Elliot Barrow had opened up a longing in her that she
didn’t even know she had, and then he’d stolen all hope of fulfilling it.

She didn’t realize how well he knew her. She didn’t recognize what he’d just pulled. He knew this was the only way to get
her to come. He had to make her believe it was her idea.

C
AL

Amelia, Willa, Helen: each one of them would tell you the story began at the instant her world cracked open, and with that
crack,
her life began to change. They don’t agree on the moment because they are not telling this story; they are just living their
lives.

I am the one who is telling this story. So I’ll begin with what my illustrious father had to say about stories in the first
place. There he’d stand in front of a crowd of white senators, or Hollywood types, or—because he wasn’t a total hypocrite—a
flock of reservation kids, and he would say, fire in his eyes, “Only stories, true stories, can heal the crack at the heart
of the world.”

He was a windbag, a blowhard. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t impressive. He could get you to believe that the entire field
of American constitutional law and the subfield of land-use rights were an epic fashioned out of the malleable material of
he said, she said. All dressed up in formal coats, sure, but what were precedents except fancy stories that illustrated the
convictions of a few individuals? Who were judges except self-important, sometimes pompous literary critics, deciding how
well a story held up to some standard called The Law?

My father could talk and spin stories and evoke tricksters and remind his listeners that the volcanoes on which our people
once stood freely were full of fire that came from the sky. He could remind his listeners, white and Indian, that the Neige
Courante, the Running Snow people, were the cold waters that had been called to soothe the fire inside the land, to make life
tolerable. And in solemn gratitude, the sky and the land and the salmon and the berries had offered themselves to us. It was
not simply that the Neige Courante had the “legal right” to fish the waters of the Deschutes and the Columbia, but, more basically,
the Neige Courante were of those waters. To extricate us from that land, that life, that water, was to crack open the world,
to crack open the heart of things.

My father worked well in front of audiences predisposed to liberal guilt. These people wanted to be told truths that transcended
the narrow white ways of doing things. He had many, many white friends, but deep down, he hated all whites with a combination
of
fierce pity and passionate respect. He hated them because, he believed, they were wrong about the world, and remarkably, they
couldn’t care less so long as they got what they wanted.

When I was a little boy and had begun to ask questions about why things were the way they were—who were those people on television
shows, anyway? where were those buildings that grew to be so tall?—Maw-Maw gave me two little pickle jars, washed and dried,
and sent me to the creek to catch some water. “This much,” she said, indicating with her fingers the wingspan of a blue-winged
moth.

I came back with the water. She took one jar from my hand, inspected it, and screwed on the cap. She set it on the windowsill
over the sink, next to the salt shaker, and pointed to a space right next to the first jar, where I dutifully placed the second
one, still openmouthed. “Don’t fiddle,” she said. “Wait. See what happens.”

I remembered the jars for a day or two, then forgot them entirely, until one day I was eating cereal and caught sight of them
out of the corner of my eye. I got up from the table and went to the sink and grabbed the two jars. The open one was completely
empty, with a white uneven ridge circling it. The capped one still contained water, but it was thick on the bottom, and pale
brown flecks and green blobs bobbled in the murk. When I unscrewed the lid, things smelled. Bad.

When Maw-Maw came in, I showed her, and she sat right down at the table and took the jars in her hands and inspected each
carefully, and laughed with her eyes, and said, “He said it would work. Just look. It worked.”

“Who?” I asked.

She went on. “Do you remember why you did this with the jars?”

I nodded, but that wasn’t good enough. She expected an answer in words.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“You’ve been asking questions about things out there. Out there in the white world. This is an answer.”

I waited, said nothing.

“Most white people act like some things about the world are true. Act like everyone should know those things. They’re wrong.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“How did it feel to
own
that water there?” She motioned to the jars.

“I didn’t own the water,” I said. “All I did was put it in jars.”

“Yes,” she said. “You know this. You are Neige Courante. You know no one can own water. Water is not for owning. Water is
for itself. For the land and the fish and the people.” She paused. “White people think you can own water. But see what happens
when you catch it? It escapes or it dies.” We both looked at the pitiful jar of dead water, and the empty jar too.

“But if white people are so stupid, then how come they invented TVs and those buildings and cereal in boxes?”

“Who said
stupid?”
asked Maw-Maw. “This is nothing about
stupid.
What they are is pretenders. They pretend the world is a certain way—like you can own water. While they’re pretending, they
pretend everyone else is pretending too. In their game,
they
buy all the water.
They
buy all the land that no one can own. When
you
go to drink this water on the land—you who are the one who didn’t know you were pretending—they make you pay for it. You
pay for what can never be a person’s in the first place. And if they give it to you? The water? They expect you to thank them
for it. Instead of thanking the water itself, for agreeing to still your thirst.” Maw-Maw shook her head. “White people are
pretenders, Calbert. They want us all to pretend along with them.”

I thought about the way water feels in the hand—how you can’t hold it, how it escapes—and I liked how smart Maw-Maw was.

She read my thoughts. “You think I came up with this myself?” She laughed. “There is a man you will meet. Someday. This is
his lesson.” She gathered the jars and went about the rest of the day.

That man was my father. And no matter what his public teachings entailed, his private lesson to me was simple. Stories may
begin
to heal the crack at the heart of the world, but every story about a father is, in essence, a mystery story, and who knows
whether any of us will live long enough to solve it.

When I was twenty-six, and my father had died, I had already studied among the pretenders. I had loved some of them and hated
others. I had learned that, yes, for most of them, everything, even people, can be bought and sold. But I had come back to
the reservation with my big head swollen because of a restlessness in my being.

Here is the crack in my life where my story begins.

It was hot and I was tired. My second cousin Eunice’s car had no air-conditioning and only two working windows. I was fresh
and agitated, steamed at everyone. Steamed at Eunice for calling up that new school and offering my services. Steamed at myself
for sitting on my ass for months and proving I was exactly what all the wide world thought I was: a lazy Indian. Seven years
on the East Coast had changed me piece by piece. Even my fingernails seemed sacred to me, better than all that QVC crap my
cousins filled their houses with. And yet I lived with them, eating their bread, mocking their husbands for their jobs down
at the rest stop on 26. You’re smart enough to tell that my resentment was very convenient. But that’s another story.