Heart Berries: A Memoir

by Terese Marie Mailhot

There is permanence in physical craft.

Love is tactile learning, always, first and foremost.

Salish stories are a lot like its art: sparse and interested in blank space.

“He said you wanted too much.”

I drove straight to your house. I was angry. I knew that I wasn’t too much. A man had shown me that too much could be managed through kindness and recognition.

before you saw me out of control. You had loved me like a man with the capacity to keep his promises and sacrifice for his family. You loved me completely, with a type of trust I didn’t realize was rare.

We had full hearts for each other, still.

You had a person who wasn’t “all consuming,” like a black hole.

I realized that love can be mediocre and a safe comfort, or it can be unhinged and hurtful. Either seemed like a good life.

If you were hurting me, I knew it was not intentional.

Romantics can be comforting.

I was polite enough, and considerate enough, to hurt myself like a secret.

I told you that I wanted to be chosen.

You told me that you chose me.

our love felt impossible and necessary.

Because, if my sons want to see how terrible our love was, and why we chose it, they can see us closest here.

it seemed like a solution to a fight neither of us could ever win: Do you love me enough? Can I be good to you?

Romanticism requires bravery and risk.

Indians aren’t always allowed to rest in peace. I want to be buried in a bone garden with my ancestors someday. I’d like to belong to that.

We are both worse for loving each other, it seems.

You deserve a body without violation.

All of us had substance abuse problems, which are still welcome over the very sober pain of remembering.

monster.

I was pale from not sleeping and sick of myself.

I knew immediately that the Thunder Being inside of me had good bones. I thought of the bones from my lineage, which had been cemented inside the walls of residential buildings. I thought of my ancestors.

pain didn’t burden me. Trying to forget damaged me the most.

He seems like the child my brothers, my sister, and I—could have been.

I considered an Indian death myself, while walking along the country roads of my reservation, before I really considered life.

As an Indian woman, I resist the urge to bleed out on a page, to impart the story of my drunken father. It was dangerous to be alone with him, as it was dangerous to forgive, as it was dangerous to say he was a monster.

Making Indian women inhuman is a problem for me. We’ve become too symbolic and never real enough.

In the past, I wanted to tell her that some things can’t be loved away, but I think she knew that.

I don’t write this to put him to rest but to resurrect him as a man, when public record portrays him as a drunk, a monster, and a transient.

I don’t think I can forgive myself for my compassion.

So much of the world shames me.

Little ghosts don’t carry little wounds. I think our pain expands the longer we’re neglected.

I understood I had sacred blood, but what would that mean to a white man like you?

I inherited black eyes and a grand, regal grief that your white women won’t own or carry.

if you knew more about my pain, I might feel less of it.

She wanted me to see the deficit white people leave.

Nobody wants to know why Indian women leave or where they go.

The truth of our leaving or coming into the world is never told.

Native women walk alone from the dances of our youth into homes they don’t know for the chance to be away. Their silhouettes walk across highways and into cars at night. They are troubled by nothing but the chance that they might have to come back someday to bury their mothers.

He didn’t think I was like that, but I was clearly like that.

There is some stillness, even in my history—a good secret in so much bad. It almost feels like a betrayal to have good thoughts.

Things were created by story. The words were conjurers, and ideas were our mothers.

I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about.

The right love is an adhesive.

Every child deserves a type of servitude.

More than a drunken father or monster, and more than the bright of my iris, or the hope I was given from my grandmother. I’ve exceeded every hope I gave to myself.

I don’t think he was wrong for demanding love—it was the manner in which he asked, and whom he asked that was unforgivable.