One 1964 #3
“Not a bone of common decency in any of them, Aliet. Still makes my blood boil.”
I could hear the residual anger in her voice.
Anger nurtured for decades. While I like to believe that I inherited only the good from my grandmother, her wisdom and her patience, instead it is the ability to preserve and store anger and resentment that seems to be our shared trait.
Hers was rare and generally harmless, while mine, as I grew older, showed itself to be destructive.
“But they didn’t get it, Kiju. We’re still here,” I would say in a joking voice, trying to help her forget the anger and return to the present.
“Yes, yes. I know. I hold on to these little offences and let them sour me from the inside. Never let yourself do that, Aliet.”
I wish I could have made that promise and kept it.
The land bought from Mr. Armstrong bordered the plot of land where the other Indian families lived.
Four families lived together in a little hollow.
Close enough that someone could get there quick in an emergency but far enough away that we had our privacy.
Trees lined our property, protecting us from prying eyes and nosy souls.
But a few years before I was born, the government came and told my grandmother that she was being moved.
There was a need to gather all the Indians together to keep better track of us.
“It’s in your best interest, ma’am.” The man in a grey suit stood at the door, holding a little piece of paper with the exact words he was meant to say to be persuasive, to convince her to give up her home.
“There will be services there, and nice homes. Homes with plumbing and running water, electricity even.”
“And why would I want to leave here? My home? On land I own?”
“We don’t need to talk about ownership just now. And you should go for the reasons I’ve already mentioned.”
“Those aren’t good reasons. We get along fine here without them.”
“But—”
“I’m not interested. I’m going to stay right here on this land where I intended to stay with my husband.
And where I now stay with my daughter.” She closed the door, not hard but with conviction.
He knocked again, a weak knock, but she had moved to the stove and was stoking the fire to make tea and pretended not to hear.
This is the way she told me about it once I was old enough to be angry at their callousness along with her.
Two of the other families left with the man in the grey suit, packing up their belongings and placing them on the back of an old truck.
But they were back before the end of the year.
They told us how the white men had lied.
The houses promised were worse than the ones they’d left.
Might as well live outside in the winter, they’d told us.
So our little community stayed the same in the end.
When I was much older and the stories had become a part of history and not simply a means of amusing a bored child in winter, I found them distressing.
The cruel irony of men in suits and shiny shoes trying to take away the land that had been stolen from us, the same land we bought back from the thieves.
But by the time I came around, by the time my mother had me under the tree, the attempts to rid the land of the brown people had ended.
They’d succeeded in some places but not this one.
My grandfather was missed, to be sure. By my Kiju especially, and by the people who visited us and who knew him.
But he was so far away from me, from being a part of my life, that he was more like a character in a story.
My mother was different. For a brief minute, we had both existed on earth, we had been together.
Most of the time, I feel like I know her in the stories I’ve been told.
Other times she feels like an absolute mystery.
Each autumn when all the apple pickers showed up, I would be introduced to her all over again.
Those who camped on our property brought family and tents and stories, and when they saw me, walking shyly behind my grandmother, their stories turned to Maggie.
Over the years, I would ask if she had, perhaps, been in the background of a family photo, or if someone might’ve caught her accidentally on film, but I was always disappointed.
As my memory grew stronger, their stories locked tight, I began to wonder who she had once loved or if she had loved at all.
No one seemed to know, and the conversation turned quickly any time it came up.
My father was a man without a history. He was absent in the minds of people who held generations of memory as easily as they held a loved one’s hand or a perfectly formed apple before letting it fall into a box with all the others.
But I never stopped wondering. And in moments of self-pity, which grew infrequent the older I got but never disappeared altogether, I would try my best not to be angry with my mother, who took my father’s identity with her to the other side.