One 1964 #2
“He was a carpenter, self-taught,” she said one blustery evening over tea and sugar cookies, the light from an oil lantern barely enough to see, as she embroidered tiny purple flowers onto the edges of pillowcases.
“Could build anything just from seeing it in his mind. Or he’d see something in town and come home with a pencil and some paper, sit in that chair where you are right now, and draw it out.
Before you knew it, there was a new headboard for a bed.
I mean, he built sheds and outhouses to pay the bills, but he was a master with the wood. ”
I never saw much of what he made. The furniture he designed and carved out of trees from the woods behind the house was sold to folks in town to keep my grandparents fed and clothed, to pay for a trip each year to visit with family.
When the men arrived, informing her of his death, there was nothing left except the house he’d built them, a starter, he’d called it.
Three rooms, sturdy and warm, to start a family.
But that was never meant to be. When my mother was born, her father was shooting men for reasons he didn’t truly understand but believed would make him a man in the eyes of his country.
When she took her first steps, he was in a trench somewhere in France, his feet blistered and sore, his hair full of lice.
When she had her fifth birthday, he was waiting for his leave so he could go home.
By her sixth birthday, he was buried at the edge of the Catholic graveyard.
Catholic enough to be buried there but too Indian to take space from the white folk.
But my grandmother always took pride in the little poppy that was displayed on his grave and his title of Private First Class.
“First Class. That’s gotta mean something,” she sighed every year when we took flowers to his grave on his birthday. “First Class.”
Kiju lived in that house he built for her and slept in the bed he’d made for her and chopped vegetables at the table he fashioned out of an old maple that had fallen in a winter storm.
In a way, each time she gently washed the crumbs from the counter, or the dust from the headboard, curved and made to look like braided sweetgrass, she was communing with him, talking to him, telling him that his memory was still floating around on this side of the spirit world.
I liked to watch her and how delicately she touched everything that he had touched.
It felt intimate, not in a way that would make me turn away, but in a way that told me I should watch and learn how delicate and precious love can be.
She’d given birth under the same tree where my mother had given birth to me.
And hours before the sun rose, she took her child back to that house and showed her the things her father made.
She took my mother’s tiny fingers, pruned and delicate, and ran them along the wood, connecting a father and daughter across miles of trees and fields and so many miles of waves that she could never comprehend the distance.
I suppose she took my mother to his grave before she took me, but she didn’t talk about that.
We would go to see my mother on a different day, on her birthday, on a day when the sun was useless and the wind unforgiving.
When the snow covered the small stone that lay in the ground, not above it like the others, but in it.
My grandmother, with her mittened hand, wiped away the snow.
Margaret, Daughter and Mother, 1940–1955.
“I would have liked it to say more, but I didn’t have the money. So I put what she meant to me and what she meant to you.”
“It’s perfect,” I responded.
After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “Did my mother look like him, or like you?”
“A little like both. She had his nose, the same one you now carry on your adorable face.” She took my chin in her hands and squeezed.
“But she had my hair, thick and quick growing. Always catching twigs and burdocks if we weren’t careful, if we didn’t have it pulled back in a tight braid.
Once, even some chewing gum. She wasn’t allowed to chew gum, but someone at school gave her some and she waited until she was in bed so I wouldn’t see and started chewing.
She fell asleep and it fell out of her mouth, and I had to cut it out of her hair in the morning.
I remember being so angry, and now all I can do is smile. ”
“I like these stories, Kiju.”
“Me too, Aliet. And you should have seen it. A big round short spot in her hair. She begged me not to go to school, but she went. She got made fun of, but that was nothing new around here. At least this time there was an excuse—not a good one, mind you, there is never a good reason to mock a child, but an excuse nonetheless when everyone around you is nine years old.”
I’ve always been able to feel my family in the walls of that house, even those I’d never met.
The house was small, but spirits existed in every nook and every cranny.
Two people fit there comfortably, but on the rare occasion when there were more than two, it felt no bigger than the hen house.
The front door opened in the middle, the kitchen on one side, the living room on the other, defined in their difference only by the furniture.
Behind the kitchen was Kiju’s bedroom and behind the living room was mine, the room that had belonged to my mother, where she had slept and dreamt.
Between the bedrooms, a narrow hallway led to a back door and to the garden and the animals.
Rust-coloured hooks held our jackets. In the winter, wet boots by the door.
This house, in all its smallness, was only ever intended to be the beginning of their lives together.
Sometimes I envied the folks in town with their big houses and big windows and indoor plumbing.
Other times I would know that someone who once dreamt of me, who once dreamt of my mother, had built this home.
And when I remembered, I would run my hands along the boards of the floor or the walls, the same way my grandmother ran my mother’s newborn fingers across the table, and I would know that those big houses with their windows and their running water were nothing compared with what I had.
This house held on to the past, kept the dead alive.
I think that’s why my grandmother refused to get the indoor plumbing for so long and refused to build on to it.
The house was a remembrance of those she’d lost. Altering it threatened the memories she held so sacred.
“They tried to take it away once,” Kiju said one night, “this ‘shack,’ as they called it. They tried to make us move, to give up the land where we raised chickens and grew vegetables, the land where we cut down our winter wood with the help of Big Ben.”
Big Ben stayed to help every October after all the other apple pickers had packed up and gone home.
No one else stayed, not any of the relatives who supposedly shared the same blood and at least some of the same stories.
They were gone as soon as their work was done, never offering a helping hand for Kiju, who let them camp on her land, who gave them molasses when they needed it, who made tea to calm an angry belly after too much whiskey.
Only Big Ben and Sally stayed. I tended to their children while Ben chopped wood and Sally helped Kiju with preserving or stowing the last of the root vegetables.
My grandfather bought this land with his own money directly from a farmer, a handwritten bill of sale since Indians still weren’t technically allowed to own land.
But the farmer, Mr. Armstrong—who, when I was young, I was disappointed to discover did not have big, strapping arms with muscles that pulled on the stitches of his shirts—was nice and had no use for the land, having too much to work on his own since he had six daughters and not one son.
So he sold it to my grandfather, and apparently everyone knew it, but the people from the county sometimes came and threatened to take it anyway.
They even had the nerve to come and try when my grandfather was away fighting in their war.
This bothered my grandmother when she told these stories.