Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

But it’s home because the bannock is still browning in the oven and your kokum is still making tea and eating Arrowroot biscuits. It’s home because it has to be—routine satiates these pangs. And, given time, it becomes mobile—you can take those rituals with you, uproot your home as if it were a flower.

I wonder how Tias is doing, ask the Creator to exorcise his pain so he never gifts it to his children, never re-gifts it to himself.

But I just laughed and I think he got mad—I wish he knew that when an NDN laughs, it’s because they’re applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.

We stopped resisting the waves and let the water push us back to the shore, our shoulders and hair moussed with seafoam.

Momma says that when I was born, my kokum took me into her arms and inspected my hair, my eyes, my body, my little fingers wrapping around her ring finger like seaweed. “Oh, thank God,” she said, “he looks white.” Momma scooped me back up and lay me on her chest. “Thank the creator,” she retorted, “he’s Native.”

You have to perform in any situation, so you may as well pick your battles. Hell, I played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here I played white in order to be queer.

All I wanted was to shift back up inside my mother in the bath water of her uterus, to count time as a crawfish would, for days to mean something other than another notch on the wall, another treaty dollar earned.

I am my own best medicine.

Instead of saying we liked or loved each other, we just lay there on our backs, our brown skin shiny in the rosy light that poured in from the evening sun. We surveyed each other’s body: him seeing the scar above my clavicle from when I fell down the stairs as a kid, and me seeing the patch of hair missing from his scalp. I knew then that I loved him. Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like, “I’m in pain with you.”

And I thought about now, thought about my mom’s advice: if I want to survive, I’d have to leave. But it’s hard, you know? Each second I’m away from home is time that’s gone forever, driving us that much closer to the end. How much more time do we really have? And by whose measure? Like she said, maybe there aren’t that many more moments to come. But at least there was this one.

It was then I decided that love sounded more like a full stop than a semi-colon, and I moved too much like water.

I wanted so much to hate Roger who thought like them, and hate my mom for loving him, and hate the home that squeezed the queer right out of its languages.

Those slippers are still in my closet, and I think about all the folds, those colours, the way she’d weave a hole big enough for your feet, all of this, accomplished little by little. I think about what all went into those slippers, all those wishful thoughts, those hands that smelled of bannock and tea, NCI-FM playing Loretta Lynn in between bouts of the entire rez wishing so-and-so a happy birthday during commercial breaks. I think of the skin and dirt and grit that’s stained deep into the grains of that fibre from her nail beds, the scent of her perfume, her tears, blood, saliva, cells, her stories, all of her wrapped up in the weave of her knitting.