Go as a River

by Shelley Read

The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.

One rule my mother taught me by example was that a woman does herself a favor by saying very little.

By showing on the surface only a small fraction of her interior, a woman gave men less to plunder.

After Mother died, the men expected me to slip silently into her role—to cook their meals, clean their pee off the toilet, wash and hang their soiled clothes, and tend to every last thing in the house and the coops and the garden.

didn’t know if I was doing the chores correctly, and certainly not as well as she would have done. More than anything, I was unsure I wanted to do them at all or if I was allowed to say so.

I was a girl alone in a house of men, quickly becoming a woman. It was like blossoming in a bank of snow.

I wondered how many war veterans, legless and miserable like Og, might have suffered a little bit less had the president not hidden his chair in shame.

I was speechless. I had never seen an Indian before. All I knew was what I learned in school about their violence against my grandparents’ generation as the whites tried to civilize the West, and how the government had long ago relocated them where they wouldn’t cause more trouble.

“Our boarders would be fit to be tied if we started allowing Injuns here, not to mention the disease they’d spread.”

The men left the kitchen in a clattering mass, taking their cruel talk and sharp smell with them, leaving the table strewn with crumbs and dishes and a chicken carcass so clean picked it could have been devoured by vultures.

“Oh, I ’spect most folks aren’t ’fraid of her so much as just naturally wary of peculiar. They’ve forgotten she wasn’t always such ’n odd duck.”

“From what I understand, she went funny after the flu swept in ’round here. Maybe from the fevers. Maybe from the grief.”

I was away from the farm overnight, a woman making choices and taking risks rather than an obedient and timid girl.

Just as a single rainstorm can erode the banks and change the course of a river, so can a single circumstance of a girl’s life erase who she was before.

Just as I had stepped into a motherless life, I would step into the life of a mother. I would heed the call of necessity. I would rise.

Never had I imagined he would be someone I would recognize from somewhere deep and unnamable within my being, this baby with these dark eyes, uncannily familiar.

He knit his tiny brows and we stared at each other a long while like two souls reconnected after being a universe apart.

“Go as a river,” I whispered to her, as Wil might have done, and, I swear, I felt her spirit rise.

I figured that if my trees could survive, uprooted and against the odds, then, damn all bad fortune, so too could I.

“I mean, the only reason we’re sitting here right now is they got forced off all this land we like to call our own. Just because people ignore that fact doesn’t make it any less true.”

“I’m not saying it’s the same. I’m just saying the government can do anything it damn well pleases, and people suffer,” she said. “And we don’t learn one scrap from history.”

I later cut out the newspaper article—minus Matthew Dunlap’s infuriating quotes—and tucked it into Mother’s Bible. If Iola would soon be erased, my family would want me to save some proof it had once existed.

Eventually, I gave up the notebooks and novels I pointlessly carried in the diaper bag and stopped longing for the life I might have had. Instead, I surrendered to motherhood. The choice was motherhood or madness.

everyone is from somewhere or a mixture of something, half this, half that. Not to worry, love. Just a grumpy old man.”

She, too, had known loss, like uncountable women before us. She knew I still felt it all in my body, just as she felt it in hers.

“And what about what you need, V? This is about you just as much as him.” I shook my head. “It’s not. Women endure. That’s what we do.”

“A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.

I would say I had tried, as Wil taught me, to go as a river, but it had taken me a long while to understand what that meant.

Her brimming tears told me she had held me in her heart these many years, just as I had held her, in such an odd but certain way, two mothers of the same beautiful boy.

I whispered into her sweetly scented hair the words I had for two decades been longing to say: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

left me believing that they were like many families, their lives together a weave of sad and complex and happy and sweet and tragic all at once.

I reached for Inga’s hand, and then I reached for Zelda’s. We stood there, three women, waiting for what came next.

I’m not crying…😭