#41: VETERANS DAY (short story draft)

(NOTE: This short story draft is part of a collection on militarization. Available as a Word-document (5 pages) here.)

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Mom remarried, and her new husband brought to live with us his father and his three oldest children. The new family members were Absentee Shawnee, and their name was Starr. I was not around when mom married The Shawnee as I stayed much of that time with Susie, one of my sisters, in her tiny rented shotgun duplex located several blocks from mom’s house. One day, Susie hung up the telephone and told me that our mom had remarried.

I was a very shy kid and would speak only to other kids, my mom, and my brothers and sisters—all of whom I adored and would trail after in that imprinted ambling manner so characteristic of the youngest in families. The first time mom had brought her future husband to our house, I was playing by myself in the front yard. As soon as pick-up lights shone onto the lawn, I ran to hide behind the towering cedar tree where I did not budge despite mom’s calls for me to come over and meet her friend. Weeks later, I must have sensed that these were people that would be around for a while. I relaxed my guard and I allowed his teenagers and him to listen to me read aloud. In turn, they taught me different card games. One of the boys worked with me to learn to recognize the differences between the four directions.

After the remarriage, Susie moved to Alaska and then, rather quickly, to eternity. Another sister moved out of town to begin her new life, and so I was back fulltime with my brothers, my mom, and the new family members. That first summer together, we all moved into a white clapboard, two-story boarding house across the street from the municipal park. The acreages of the park spread out like a very little Central Park in the middle of our little Oklahoma town, and it played host to all the community activities that thrived before the town was taken over by a shopping mall and a Wal-Mart and more television channels. Back then the town had an active Main Street and there was no mistaking that, in spite of the Yahoos, this place was a bustling Indian Town. One of so many thriving intertribal towns that existed well before the onslaught of commercialized contests and competition, before the seeping in of economic enterprises that de-triblize a people, standardize the cultures, and drain a community. And such hot summers. Languid, sweltering, yet we kids refused to stay indoors despite the humidity outside. The summer evenings brought numerous works of orange and red sunsets, and plenty of lightning bugs.

That first summer together, the boys lived in one of the upstairs apartments, across the hall from the apartment given to Grandpa Starr. My parents, my new sister and I lived downstairs in an apartment across the hall from a man we nicknamed Mr. Biscuit. During those months, the last summer I had before starting school for the first time, I played with the neighborhood kids, and then I would run across the street to spend the afternoons at the municipal pool and exploring the park. Sometimes, in the evenings, mom sent me upstairs with Grandpa Starr’s supper. “Thank you,” he would say, when I set the plate on his table but I could not bring myself to answer back. In all the years he lived with us, Grandpa Starr and I spoke less than a hundred words to each other.

When summer came to a close, the nine of us packed up from the boarding house and said “good-bye” to Mr. Biscuit and drove to the west side of the town. We moved into an apartment complex surrounded by homes that someone told me were called “Indian housing.” For reasons that she explained later, my mom did not enroll me in the nearby Indian school and so I was apart from the apartment community for much of the day. But after school, and on weekends, in between my readings and explorations and daydreams, I would play with the other kids. Afterward, I would make my rounds and tiptoe up to the neighbor adults, whom I was learning to trust, as they sat on the benches and in the stairwells. Or, if their front door was open, I would try to sneak up next to them while they sat on the couches. They would all welcome me and fuss after me to speak up, and then forget about me as I made myself comfortable next to them. From their conversations, I kept up with the goings-on occurring at the complex and I learned of other things, too. Such as that there had been a war-war-one that had happened before the war-war-two discussed and analyzed continuously by my mom’s husband and the other grown-up men in our livings room and at the VFW and at the pow-wows. From school, Walter Cronkite, and bracelets worn by some of the neighborhood women, I understood that there was a war occurring even then far away from our neighborhood. I must have caught glimpses of this on the TV, because once, when I was sent to visit my oldest sister at the university, I saw a group of college kids standing on a flatbed and I mistakenly thought they were being taken away by the police for demonstrating. According to my mom, Grandpa Starr had fought in war-war-one.

It seemed to me that he was very old, like Grandpa Curly Chief in Anadarko, who was always lying in bed, either asleep or looking at the ceiling, whenever we visited his wife and him. Except for a lady friend in California, it seemed that Grandpa Starr had outlived all of his friends. I think that relatives rarely visited him, although I must be mistaken because we lived in the area that his Nation had been relocated to by the United States and so he would have had kin and they certainly would have come by to visit with him. Yet my recollection is mostly of him sleeping or of watching television. Every once in a while, mom would take the two of us to the clinic and, after checking us in at the front desk, she would depart. Grandpa Starr and I would sit there in the waiting room, silently, waiting for each of our names to be called by the nurse.

I was told by mom, either then or later, that Grandpa Starr used to dress-up in his finest and meet his fellow war-war-one veterans downtown once a year in November. There they would stay until the town closed; now I like to think that the town closed a bit later for them on that day. But then he became the lone survivor of that group, and so those annual outings ended. I was told that Grandpa Starr had gone to the Indian boarding school, but then, so had all the other Native grown-ups I knew. I listened to so many memories of those schools, it seemed like the grown-ups could not stop talking about it once they started in on a story about a matron or of peeling potatoes or of being sent into a closet as punishment. Conversations about those schools, which I quickly understood to be a different school than the one I was attending, I realize now, were my first lessons into our language, our tribes, and our ancestors. It is where I began to learn about our grandparents and our parents.

Those conversations at the apartment complex, at the powwow grounds, at the church, at the fair grounds, around kitchen tables, park benches, around the fires, were my introduction into a vast history that the grown-ups seemed to have had seared into their memories. Those who could talk of such histories and those who were unable to share their memories, did they look at us children and wonder about us, the first generation to not be forced to move away to an institution? Were they curious as to what would be our fate as we ran through the HUD apartments and houses playing tag? What did Grandpa Starr think about when he saw the boys rushing in and out of the apartment, of the little quiet girl who went to the Indian Clinic with him?

Summer went away, then fall began to disappear. At that first Christmas, and for the next several ones to come, Grandpa Starr, along with others, drank too much. And then he was no longer quiet. He would sit there in the little kitchen, and he would begin to talk and talk. And talk. Then he would rest his forehead on the palm of one of his hands, his elbow propped up on our little dining table, and he would start reminicising about the old days, before the War, after the war. He would start crying after a while, and then he would say, at that time each year, that he did not want to go on living. After that, he would start speaking Shawnee. And then nobody in our apartment could understand him anymore.

I would sit nearby and play with my paper dolls and, out of the corner of my eyes, watch him and my mom’s husband who alternately comforted and cajoled him. I listened to them—father and son—amid the blaring of the TV airing its annual showing of Dickens’ “A Christmas Story.”

(October 2007)

Veterans Day by Julia Good Fox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.