The Tao of Nookomis Read online

  And he was thinking, why is it we are so weak? We try to be good, so many of us. But our shadow sometimes calls us to dark places. Always we need to work on living the gentle way.

  The fact his only nephew was misusing alcohol brought a special kind of foreboding to Eddie for too many reasons. Alcoholism had played center stage for too many years in his own life. He knew first hand how it could steal a person’s soul and blind them to give up everything good and right. Eddie had buried too many uncles and cousins and friends who had driven through trees or been kicked to death in drunken brawls, or who had died in drunken stupors after swallowing their tongues or from throwing up and choking on their own vomit. He had seen too many elders lose their dignity when drunk, having peed in their pants or passed out in cars and yards and even on the sides of roads. He had seen how alcohol made people laugh too loudly and too easily. And Sara. All of Sara came flooding back to him that day.

  He looked at his brother and stood up and walked into the house, and his hand lightly brushed him on the shoulder as he went by. Just for an instant their eyes met and their looks said, “Are you going to be all right?” A response, “Uh-huh.” A slight smile.

  EDWARD BAINBRIDGE had been in love with Sara Ann Bear a thousand years before they met as little children the first day of ricing (wild rice) season at a canoe landing, because there is a love that is sometimes born and passed down through generations, only to find its way to where it belongs. Their families had been ricing a small lake just south of Ashland, and every day early in the morning the parking area and boat landing would begin filling with old Model T Indian cars and pickup trucks full of parents and all of their children. The adults, for the most part, all knew each other. They were neighbors, some, or relatives, or had met at summer pow-wows or at other ricing lakes. They greeted and conversed with each other in familiar ways, ancient ways.

  “Aneen ezhi a yah yan (Hello, how are you)?”

  “Nimino, aya. (I’m fine).”

  Quiet laughter. Old-time Indians always laughed that way. The thumping and clunking of canoes unloading, car doors closing, and older children being given instructions on caring for their siblings. Coughing, a smoker’s cough. Late summer smells of mud and reeds and fish, and leaves just beginning to think fall.

  “Now you watch your sisters and brothers. Don’t let them go in the water. Make them stay at the landing. Make them share lunch,” a mother would say, the last part with special emphasis toward the one child everyone has who doesn’t know how to share.

  “And no fighting, either,” a mother would say, looking over at the younger children. “And you listen,” she would say to a child who she knew would inevitably both fight and not listen before the day was out.

  Eddie and his little brother would be cared for by their Auntie Marilyn, who was nine years old. She was a good babysitter because she let them do anything they wanted to do.

  “I made you kids some potato sandwiches (sliced potatoes and pepper on homemade bread). And cake (chocolate, no frosting, just a large chunk wrapped in wax paper). And tea (a half gallon jug). And, Eddie, you leave your brother alone, too.”

  Eddie glanced to the side, plotting.

  Then before anyone had a chance to think about being alone without adults for the day, their father and mother were off in the canoe along with the other ricers, with some twenty-odd children left on the banks of the lake for the day.

  Always on the first day of ricing, the kids tended to stay near their cars until they became familiar with their surroundings. As soon as their parents left, many of them went back to the cars to get some more sleep. The more outgoing boys began bartering with each other over lunches, slingshot rubbers, marbles, agates, and other trade goods that lived in their pants pockets.

  “I’ll trade you this potato sandwich for one of your jam ones.”

  “I have cookies. Oatmeal (oatmeal cookies had a higher trading value than, say, sugar cookies). Trade for some of that?” Lips would purse and point to a piece of cake, a muffin, lugalate (a pan bread), fry bread, or some other treat. Even the young people pointed the old-time Ojibwe way, with their lips.

  There was no trading for NBA basketball cards or video games. In those days, everyone was poor, but no one knew it because it was before the war on poverty. Hand-me-downs in the form of tattered jeans, yellowed t-shirts, faded print dresses, and shoes without laces were the fashions of the day. All the kids smelled like kerosene oil or wood smoke, or both. Slingshots and mud pies ruled.

  Eddie and his little brother sat in the back seat of their father’s car drinking tea and sucking on crackers while their auntie slept in the front seat. It wasn’t until Eddie left for his second pee break of the day and was returning to the car, rounding the rear bumper of his father’s old Chevy, that he saw for the first time the girl who would become the woman he would forever be in love with sitting in the back seat of her father’s car, all hazel-eyed and faded blue flower-print dressed. All four years old of her. For when his small dark eyes met hers and he gave her a slight smile, and she gave him one of those, “you smell bad” looks, even though he was only six years old at the time, he knew.

  They didn’t say a word to each other that day, or in the days that followed, but Eddie would find ways to observe the little girl as she played with her friends. If she noticed him, and he would make sure of that in some way, he would give her his slight smile. Through days of playing cowboys and Indians, shooting slingshot rocks out into the lake, playing hide and go seek, trading marbles, and picking on his younger brother, Eddie would always find the time to go running past the little girl, or he would say something purposely loud enough for her to hear, just so she would notice him. Eventually one day she noticed he was noticing, and on the second-to-last day of ricing on that lake she returned his smile, this little girl who even at the age of four made good mud pies. On the last day he worked up the courage to say to her in a laughing way, “I’ll trade you half of my potato sandwich for one of your mud pies.”

  To which she replied, “I don’t like potato sandwiches.”

  But there were other lakes to rice and other boat landings in which the kids would play while their parents worked, and eventually Eddie and Sara Ann became friends.

  Except for the times they saw each other at the ricing landings each year, the two rarely played together. When Sara was old enough for school, she rode the rez bus to St. Mary’s Catholic School along with Eddie. She was, however, two years younger and, therefore, in a different peer group. Eddie was a Red Cliff village kid and Sara lived far out of town, and with the exception of school and ricing, she rarely ventured from home. So it wasn’t until they were older, fourteen and sixteen respectively, that they began really noticing each other in hormonal ways.

  It turned out that Sara lived out in Frog Bay, rural Red Cliff to some, if living in a remote community in northern Wisconsin could ever have places more isolated. She, along with nine brothers and sisters, lived in a small white frame house near the end of a long dirt tote road that wound its way out of Red Cliff and ended at the shores of Lake Superior some five miles out. Sara’s mother was a quiet, dependent and enabling housewife, a white woman who could trace her French ancestry back to the sprawling vineyards near Bordeaux. Her father was a quiet, brooding alcoholic, whose binges would transform him into an abusive and neglectful man. He was one of those half-breeds, Sara told Eddie, who could pass for white and, therefore, was allowed in town bars still illegal for Indians to enter. He served as the drunken caretaker for several summer residents whose retreats far surpassed in size and splendor anything the rez residents could ever imagine themselves living in.

  There was being poor, and there was being dirt poor, and Sara’s family was the latter. Deer meat soup and pancakes were diet mainstays in her household, and Sara would tell Eddie when they were older how her younger and mildly retarded brother would often come running into the house after a wild day out playing in the woods. How he would dash into the kitchen a
nd pull the cover off the kettle of what was on, proclaiming with genuine glee, “oh boy! Pancakes!”

  And that was after a month of pancakes.

  She also told him of the times her father would use her as part of an excuse to go on one of his binges. How he would tell her mother that he needed to go into town to get his hair cut, and take Sara along as a decoy, thinking that if he took one of the kids along he would stay sober and actually do what he said he was going to do. But more often than not, Sara would end up sitting in her father’s old car outside some bar for nights on end, where she would occasionally have to go inside to beg her father to take her home, or to get her a bottle of orange phosphate, a nut goody, or a pickled egg. Her first boy crush, she once told Eddie, was another young person sitting in a car next to her father’s while his father sat drunken in the bar. She remembered once her father took her to a three-day party out near Makwah, where she played for days and late into evenings with strange children, all the while surrounded by adults who were always asking her name as they breathed their wine breath on her and laughed grotesquely until they passed out in chairs and on floors. And although she never would tell Eddie, she remembered another time when one of her father’s drunken friends touched her in places that made her feel confused and dirty and shameful, making her sit on his lap while he bounced her up and down. When she was an adult and thought back to that incident, she would question how some of her own people could have moved so far away from their traditional ways that they would do these things to children. What happened to them, she would ask herself. What has happened to us?

  When these drunken binges ended, Sara would later tell Eddie, it was she who often had to drive home.

  “I was just a little girl,” she would say. “I was only seven or eight years old when I had to learn to drive. I couldn’t hardly even see over the dash, and always my father would pass out, and there I would be driving home in the dark with those dim old car lights blinking through the trees.”

  When they made it home, Sara would say, she would sneak into the house and make her way to the bedroom, where she would find a place to cuddle in the warm sprawl of her sleeping brothers and sisters. She found comfort there, she would say. She knew the father who had taken her out on one of his binges, who had fed her pickled eggs and nut goodies from a bar, who had made her drive home, would become an enraged drunk before the night was out. Invariably, her father would awaken and start the car, only to find he was too drunk to drive. Sometimes he would roar up and down their long driveway, going forward and in reverse and in and out of the ditch. Once he hit the house, shaking everyone out of bed. At other times he would sit out in the car with the headlamps on, roaring the motor and honking the horn, as if to proclaim to the world he was home, the lord and king of the domain was home, wanting the attention afforded to those who ruled over domains. And always, she would say, there would be a special dread when he entered the house, so much so she remembered her stomach muscles cramping up she was in such fear of him, because the quiet man who was her father when he was sober would transform into an abusive ogre.

  There he would sit at the kitchen table, tapping his foot on the floor and singing some song he heard at the bar.

  “Get me something to eat,” he would proclaim to a house that was filled with his frightened and silent children, as well a frightened wife.

  “Why don’t you just go to bed,” their mother would say. But he would call her something demeaning.

  “You’re nothing but a fuckin’ whore,” he would yell. “Get your fat ass out here and get me something to eat.”

  So while his children lay frightened in bed, their mother, the woman who bore his children, would arise and enter the kitchen, carrying the household’s only kerosene lamp with her. Sara would later tell Eddie how at times like this she was embarrassed for her mother, for the degradation she had to endure, and how she once could no longer bear to hear any more abuse and went into the kitchen to confront her drunken father.

  “You leave her alone! You leave my mother alone!” she screamed.

  “You get out of here, you little shit,” he yelled, coming after her. She remembered running from the house, and seeing her father hitting her mother as she stepped in to intervene. She remembered her little brothers and sisters sobbing and sleepy and frightened, running out with her into the cold and dark of night. Of them running out to the dark cleave of the field and hiding behind trees, while their father stood at the door with his gun, proclaiming he was going to kill “all you little bastards.” And she remembered her mother sitting in the tall, wet, late evening grass with the two smallest children, sobbing.

  She told Eddie about how her father once sold their icebox while on a bender and how two town men came into their home one afternoon and sheepishly told her mother that they had bought it from her husband. Sara would never quite get over her mother putting what little was in the ice box onto the floor, and how, later, she would come upon her mother crying softly in a corner of the one bedroom they all shared, sitting in her old rocker, her fingers touching her lips, her eyes filled with disappointing tears from too many years of unfulfilled dreams and broken promises. She would never forget, she once told Eddie, how when her mother died her father so mourned her passing he seemed to forget all the awful things he had made her endure, this woman who had given up all her promise to a man who so selfishly took all her pride, all her dreams.

  Unlike Sara’s family, Eddie was raised in a functional home by parents who didn’t abuse alcohol, and who believed that children were precious gifts given to them, entrusted to them. So while he found himself to be a good listener to Sara’s stories and could empathize with her, his life had not taken him down that path.

  How was it these childhood friends would become lovers? How was it that friends who sat next to each other on the school bus each day, or friends who shared a potato sandwich at summer catechism or during ricing season, or friends who passed and acknowledged each other during the long walking circles at summer pow-wows would one day notice each other in the ways of lovers? What was it about fate and luck and timing and circumstance that took people to certain places and put certain events before them that forever changed their life path? Eddie tried to pinpoint it down to a day, a moment.

  Always at pow-wows there are eagles, and once when Eddie and Sara stood leaning against the rail that separated the dance area from the rest of the pow-wow grounds, she would say, “I’m from eagle clan. My dad’s dad, my grandpa, was a white man. So I have to be.”

  Maybe then they both realized it was appropriate in the eyes of the community that they would begin to see each other as lovers, for to see each other in that way and to be from the same clan would have prompted a talk from one of Sara’s Ojibwe aunties, or from one of Eddie’s paternal uncles. Eddie knew his father was bear clan because the home he grew up in was filled with bear memorabilia, pictures of bears, a bear wall hanging, a bear claw necklace hanging from a family photograph. His father had told him they were part bear.

  “What part of me?” Eddie remembered asking.

  “Those beady little eyes,” his father had said, laughing. But Eddie also had a way of extending his lower lip when he pointed to things, the ways bears do. I think my lips are part bear, too, he thought.

  That is also where timing came in, because if they had been born just a generation earlier, neither their courtship nor eventual marriage would have been allowed. Sara’s parents would have arranged for her marriage, and she may not have found out about who was to be her life partner until the day of her marriage. In those times there was no refusing, or questioning the decisions of parents. That was not the way. But times had changed. What was considered culture had changed.

  Sara Ann Bear was seventeen years of age when she married Edward James Bainbridge in the tiny Catholic church in the village of Red Cliff, the same church where as babies they had been baptized, where they had attended their first and second communions under the stern tutelage of n
uns who didn’t want to be teaching reservation children, and where they had been officially confirmed by a now long dead bishop. Neither was a practicing Catholic. Sara lived too far from town to attend Mass. Eddie was Catholic by default. One of his grandmothers shamed his mother into it. In many ways his family still followed their traditional ways, and he attended ceremonies the church would certainly have banned if they knew of them.

  Like so many rural village churches, this was both a place of great joy and great sadness, and even when the church pews were filled for such a joyous occasion as a wedding, there were the remembrances of times of loss and grieving. Among the people of Red Cliff that day there was a collective recognition that the circle of life is a dance of light and shadow, of extended times of sunlight and winters where nights will not end. Just a year earlier in the same church, Sara had attended the funeral of her sister. A carload of drunks sliding off an icy road. One of her brothers had rushed into the house to tell an already unhappy home of a horrible accident. Sara and her mother and brothers and sisters had rushed to the accident scene. There her younger sister lay trapped in a car that had careened into a power pole while on a drunken joy ride. But what would haunt her most was the memory of having to hold her mother back as the fire and rescue crew tried to free the girl from the car. Of her mother standing knee deep in snow in the dead of winter without boots or a coat, crying, “oh, my God! My little baby!” Her mother would scream over and over again, long after the priest would come to them in the emergency room at Washburn hospital and tell the family a daughter and sister had died.