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but you had a documentarian’s eye, too, didn’t you? And a playwright’s ear. You didn’t have a camera, but you had a pen, and its nib was sharp enough to cut right to the center of the day, the year, the era.
The depravity of man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what binds us one to the other.
Your fantasies know no limit, do they, old man? Leave anyone too long alone with his own thoughts, and every possibility will be not only explored, but poked and prodded until it raises its shaggy head, settles its lidless eyes on you. Such is the price of isolation, and that mulling that never ceases. Though of a different order, I feel I’m nevertheless a monk in his bare cell, with only a quill and scroll to converse with.
“What brings me here today,” he repeated in the lips shut way he speaks, as if this question were a knot too complicated to loosen with a mere reply.
I’ve watched some of you napikwan at night around your camps, and I know you carry stacks of little paper cards with you, to lay out and study, trade back and forth, fight and laugh over. I’ve sneaked into camp when everyone’s sleeping and studied those cards, laid them out in all different orders, but there’s just marks and squiggles on them, not a woman carrying water, not a girl finally throwing an arrow through a hoop. Those are what I carry on the cards I keep inside, that I lay out before me every night and study like I can go back if I look hard enough, if I remember it down to each
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My father used to tell me that I needed to pay attention to where I was instead of looking farther away than I could see, and I know he was right, but knowing and doing aren’t the same thing.
After the tragedy of last week’s loaf of German bread having disappeared so quickly but lingered so long in memory, I am, with this unexpected bounty, limiting myself to one middling thick slice after lunch and one after dinner, and, so far, only a single thick slice betwixt lunch and dinner, as a crutch to get from one to the other.
that’s how good it is to feed on a two-legged like I’m supposed to. It’s better than cold water from the creek after a long hunt.
“And places low value on human life,” I said with all due reverence. “Or a higher value on himself,”
“You’ll stay here with me this winter, not with the bears. They’re getting tired of you sucking their dreams, but they’re too sleepy then to stop it. When they wake, they remember lodges and camp, and your wives and children, and they shake and shake their heads like rattles but they can’t shake the memories all the way out, even though they’re making trouble when they go down, try to live in the camps.
I fell to my knees in the middle of them and while the Lost Children moved across the sky I just stayed still, not able to do anything.
And now all the sausage is gone, as I didn’t want it to go bad. My writing hand is leaving smudges of pungent grease on this paper that make it transparent, admitting the previous page’s words through into this one, which is emblematic of the past rising, pushing through, insisting on making itself apparent to all.
You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.”
I was born the year the stars fell, and I grew up always knowing that there was nothing I could ever see that would be like that.
I here confess that it feels good to return to this practice of expelling my thoughts in delicately traced ink, line by line. It means those thoughts can stop swirling behind my forehead, and in the tremble of my fingers.
I give myself permission, thanks. It’s what we white folk do.
Everyone longs to be in a storybook, do they not?