The Lovebird (34 page)

“Sweetheart!” Ruby said. “I’m so glad to see you. I’m ailing, Evelyn. I thought I should come down here and ask you for some medicine. I said to myself, ‘My sister, the root digger, I know she’ll be able to help me.’ ”

“Of course,
basakáataa
.
^*
What is it?” Granma and Ruby
walked hand in hand toward the kitchen, murmuring in Crow. Then Ruby spotted me, the stranger carefully embellishing Cora’s Crow Fair leggings (after much guidance from Granma) with a single rosebud in the place where Cora’s right knee would be, and her sunken eyes sparkled.

“Hello there,” she said with a vivacious smile, giving her cane a twirl.

“Ruby,” Granma said, “this is our friend Margie. She’s visiting from California.”

Ruby exhaled a long whistle. “Wooooo, California, eh? Mighty far away from home now, aren’t you?” Turning to Granma she commented, “Oh, she’s so pretty! I wish I’d been born in California.” Granma spoke a few sentences in Crow to tell Ruby something about me, and the words, though foreign, sounded soft to my ears:
kalée
 …
bíakalishte
 …
báthe
 …
táachiiate
 …
dakáake.
^†
Ruby nodded her head as if she comprehended a secret. She shot me a wink.

Jim emerged from his bedroom with a book warming in the crook of his arm. Ruby exclaimed, “Here he is! Young James. My, my,” she clucked. “I can never believe this tall drink of water was once a chubby little boy following his dad around, always covered in dirt, always asking all kinds of questions—could never keep quiet.”

Jim darted a glance my way and a deep blush spread over his face. “How are you, Auntie?”

“I’ve been better, son. But your mother is going to fix me up.”

Granma said she and Ruby would need just a minute, “and then we can all”—she placed a hand on my shoulder—“go to the buffalo pasture.”

I felt nauseous about the hunt. I looked at Jim. He had sat in a sweat lodge with Josie’s brothers in Wyola the previous night, and his skin had a translucent gleam. He looked even more
lambent than usual, alive and anticipatory—like the young James to whom Ruby had nostalgically referred. But he avoided my eyes, and I felt as though my looking at him sapped some of his boyish excitement, so I turned my face away. Something in my chest clamped closed when I saw him carry a rifle out to his truck.

I looked into the kitchen, where Granma opened the cupboard of mysteries below the silverware drawer, the one that I never disturbed. She pulled out several coffee cans and a few old greenish glass jars with metal lids. As Ruby confessed her complaints in a pained and plaintive whisper, Granma, the prairie apothecary, pulled a few unfamiliar roots and stringy plants out of those most common of containers.

I thought about medicine, how it had so many forms. There was the medicine men made, and the medicine the earth gave birth to—Granma was adept at using that kind. There was the medicine Rasha had studied, which had also been tied to the fruits of the earth, and resulted in an invisible kind of beauty. And there was the kind of medicine that Granma’s mother had used, which had made her lost. It was the same kind Jim had used, too, and the kind in which I had also overindulged during the months of my Middletown malaise. And, for as long as I could remember, it had been Dad’s medicine of choice.

I wondered if Granma could use her kind of medicine to heal Dad. A few days earlier, I had told Granma about him, about his Maker’s Mark with a splash of water.

“I’VE KNOWN LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO TRIED
to dull their pain with drinking,” Granma had said, “even Jim. The problem is they end up creating more pain for themselves eventually, and plenty for those around them, too.”

“But,” I was quick to say, “I know he loved—loves—me.”
I couldn’t bear even the slightest hint of criticism to be directed Dad’s way. He was too defenseless in his crumbling house, in his robe, with his sweetly swooping eyelids. He came to my mind so clearly in all his broken beauty, his black hair, his Ivory-soap-and-cigarettes scent, his green eyes. “Maybe you could help him, if he could somehow meet you,” I said. “Do you think you could fix him?”

“He has to want it,” Granma answered. And then, more seriously, she added, “Don’t romanticize me, honey. I don’t work magic. Anyone can do what I do. I used to be lost, too, and feel disconnected from everyone and everything. I made a choice to live close to the earth. I feel like I have more strength here, hidden away on this patch of land, than I ever did anyplace else. I get it from her. And from my prayers. It’s yours for the getting, too. And you might be able to help your dad someday, if he is ready.”

WHEN THEY EMERGED FROM THE KITCHEN
the sisters were smiling. “Okay,” Granma said, “are we all set?” Cora and Josie came out of the bedroom.

“… never seen a ring like that before,” Josie was saying.

“I want to wear it for Crow Fair, but I don’t know if it will be ready in time,” Cora said.

Josie and Ruby followed us out to the buffalo pasture in the big brown truck. On the drive, I was overwhelmed with dread. Even though Granma explained, “We’ve lived in close relationship with the
bi’shee
since the beginning. They sustained us for a long, long time. That’s why the tribe keeps its own buffalo on the reservation now, because they’re sacred to us, and they are a traditional food for us,” and even though Cora beside me knocked her pointy knees together in buffalo-excitement, I was pale with misgivings.

I didn’t know what I would do once we got to the pasture. Possibly I would be like Marilyn in
The Misfits
when Clark Gable and his gang capture the wild horses, and run far, far away from the hunt, and hurl anguished screams at Jim across the prairie, and call him a murderer. Possibly I would close my eyes, or be sick.

But I was going along because Granma had beseeched me—had been compelling me to come, in fact, for weeks—and because there was some promise implicit in her asking, some treasure tucked into the mellow timbre of her voice, a treasure that—underneath all my dread—I dared to hope might become mine.

When we arrived at the pasture, Josie split from us and drove off with Ruby toward her brothers’ truck in the distance.

There were dozens of buffalo ambling over the grass. They looked like boulders covered in dense, shaggy coats of reddish brown. For a long while, we just drove slowly around them. They were the first buffalo I had seen in the flesh, and I was as awed by their stature as I was by their stillness. They impressed me with their unexpected air of peace, and their confidence and composure, which made each of them seem ages old. If our presence was a disruption to their contentment, they did not show it. They perfectly echoed the placidity of the prairie and seemed an integral part of it. Never before had the marriage between a place and a creature been so plain to me. I thought again, as I had that day in the river, about everything being all of a piece, knitted together, as Granma had said, with a single long strand.

“How about him?” Granma pointed, and Jim stopped the truck.

“Beautiful!” Cora exclaimed.

The buffalo was enormous. He watched us sideways out of his melting chocolate eye and breathed heavily through his nostrils. I was shocked to see a stripe of pink on the underside of his long gray tongue, which he revealed to us when he licked his nose—a
line of pink like a wound. It was as pink as Jim’s underskin had been when he’d scraped his knuckles with the grater. He was so rumpled, so large, plodding, and dark. But his tongue with its pink stripe seemed to me to be the symbol of his secret sensitivity. That stripe hinted at his essential nature, and when it appeared, curling carelessly out of his mouth, there was something almost unbearably naked about it. It was the symbol of what was inside of him and, I thought, inside of everybody, inside every alive thing—a crushing softness, a bare beauty, a pure vulnerability beneath fur, skin, and skeleton. It was the most immediate representation I had ever seen of the quality that always made me ache when I perceived it in a person or animal. And when he showed it, my left ovary contracted like a hand closing.

Far away from us, Josie’s brother fired at a buffalo from inside his truck, but Jim wanted to get out.

“Are you sure, Dad?”

“Yes, it’ll be okay. Just stay behind me.” We all stood on the grass. The grasshoppers jumped over our shoes.

I watched Jim. He blinked at the sight of the buffalo’s striped tongue as if suddenly struck by its beauty. I thought he might lower his rifle, but he kept it raised, and then Jim’s belly burst outward with a big breath. I sucked in my own, and held it.

AMONG HIS REAL ESTATE LISTINGS
, Dad had once counted an ostentatious Spanish-style house with a black-bottomed swimming pool in its backyard. In one of his rare but characteristically romantic flashes of inspiration, he suggested we go swim in it one Saturday (the owners had already moved away) when he was done mowing our front lawn. And so, in the manner of two trespassing teenagers, we climbed, snickering sneakily, over the side gate—a needless maneuver, since Dad had a key to the front door. He lounged poolside in a plush chaise and sipped his
usual beverage, iced, from a thermos while I showed him my dives and, when I tired of that, practiced holding my breath. “Time me, time me,” I asked him again and again. I took in all the oxygen I could and swam down to sit on the pool’s bottom, staring straight ahead with my cheeks puffed out. After my fifth effort, I resurfaced to find Dad snoring lightly, his cheeks burning in the sun. I got out of the pool and stood, dripping, in front of him to shade his face while he slept, and still I practiced holding my breath until the puddle of water that had gathered at my feet completely evaporated and he awoke. That was what I remembered when I breathlessly watched Jim and the buffalo. I waited for the buffalo to become aware, to wake up, to somehow save himself.

HE NOSED THE GRASS, LOOKING FOR
appealing pieces. I wondered why he didn’t move away to be separate from us, far from our strange two-legged figures and our unusual smells, which must have seemed dissonant against the odor he knew best, the dusty green fragrance of the prairie. But he seemed undisturbed, his inscrutable lashy eyes calmly blinking while he chewed.

Cora’s hands hovered like hummingbirds at her sides. Granma prayed in Crow.

Then the buffalo stopped blinking, stopped tearing at the grass with his square yellow teeth, stopped licking. He turned his head so that he faced Jim and his rifle. The buffalo stood still, and he stared, as if waiting. Granma prayed, Jim fired, and Cora started at the sound. The buffalo pitched forward. His front legs, so slender compared to the rest of him, buckled and folded beneath his body when he fell. He made a low sighing groan, like a big man snuggling into a soft bed.

I LOOKED AT JIM’S FACE
and saw tears leaving fat tracks down each of his cheeks. “Thank you,
baaláax
,”
^‡
he said.

“Come, Margie,” Granma beckoned. We crouched around the buffalo. They all put their hands on him and at Granma’s request, I did, too, tentatively. At first I put only one near his throat, but then, feeling the warmth of him, and the secret pink stripe of his nature, I put down the other, too. I wanted to feel as much of him as I could, to catch his life.

Josie, Ruby, and the brothers drove over to us. “He’s a beauty,” Ruby said. Granma cut his belly open and pulled out his kidney. She tasted it, and they all did, one after another. And then it was my turn. I couldn’t refuse him. I had
seen
him fall down for us. I just grazed the kidney with my lips. It was still hot.

I touched him again and tears splashed my hands, but I scarcely took notice of them in all my wonder. Here he was, transferring himself to us. He had stood and waited and watched as if to give himself to us. Whether he had actually meant to give himself, I couldn’t know. But Granma, Jim, Cora, and the others seemed to believe so. And he would dissolve into us, when we ate him. His strength and placidity, his sensitivity and sturdiness, his thoughts, his grass delights and prairie dreams—all would be a little bit ours now.

It was a kind of communion, like the ones in which Father Murphy had always led us back home at Holy Rosary. He would be resurrected in us. And that was my treasure.

ON THE DRIVE BACK TO THE HOUSE
, Jim said, “I’m grateful for him, but that was hard. I felt different this time. I almost feel like a drink.”

• • •

IT TOOK DAYS TO BUTCHER
, prepare, and preserve all the parts of the buffalo. Granma made a big stew with his meat, and she made pemmican with some of the chokecherries we had picked, and sausages, too, and I ate those creations and many others that he had made possible. Later, Granma gave me his furry hide to lay on my bed.

I felt more connected to him than to any other animal I had ever, in my pre–Operation H.E.A.R.T. days, eaten. And (excepting my Charlotte) I felt more connected to him than to any of the creatures I had, as a member of the Operation, saved.

Sometimes, lying supine on the floor of my Middletown studio, when Charlotte had perched on my chest and licked my face as she often did, I had felt that in even her simplest gestures she was giving me a glimpse into a realm I would be better for entering, if only I could. Rescuing lab mice and protesting pony rides weren’t drawing me any closer to it. We weren’t in relationship with the animals when we did those things; we were still imposing our will. It was still, always, us in our realm and them in theirs.

Now, I felt that realm was not so closed off to me—not because of anything I had done, not any campaign, but because of a centuries-old understanding, one in which I’d been invited to share. It was because I had come to this other place, an invisible kind of place, a seemingly bleak place in what felt like the middle of nowhere, a place pulsing with the richness of its own life. Maybe that was what I had unknowingly sensed on the day I first arrived, when I’d fallen fast asleep on the hood of Bumble’s blue rental car. I had been cradled in its arms, though I had not known. And what was coming from those mountains they all cherished so much, the Bighorns? What was in the roots, the wild fruits, the moon’s white light, and the
sidelong glance of the buffalo’s brown eyes? What was it there, so loving? So lovely? It was her, it was her, she was woven through it all.