But my mother? And her love? How do I define that? Well, damn, the world is filled with people who can tell you stories about my mother’s cruelty—about her arrogance and spite. And, sure, other folks, including my siblings, can tell you stories about her love and compassion.
But, as her son and as perhaps her most regular opponent, I remember only a little bit of my mother’s kindness and almost everything about her coldness.
Did she love me? Did my mother love me? When I gather up all the available evidence, I have to say, “Yes, Lillian Alexie loved Sherman Alexie, Jr.” But I can only render that verdict with reasonable doubts.
In 1983, when our cousin Eugene was shot and killed in a stupid alcohol-fueled tiff with his friend, I wept. And I say “tiff” because it was over the minor issue of who got to take the last drink from a bottle of fortified wine. My cousin died arguing over backwash. How could I not weep for that death and for the utter inanity of the way it happened? I sat on the bed in my basement bedroom and cried for hours. I loved Eugene.
“Junior, you’re a weird kid,” he once said to me. “But you’re weird in a good way. Nobody gets you yet. I don’t get you. But people are gonna get you someday.”
After Eugene was shot and killed, my father took me to the outdoor basketball court on the rez. We silently shot hoops for hours. That was how my father mourned with me. I felt so much pain that I thought I might shoot basketballs forever, and I think my father would have kept shooting forever, too.
As I sat in my basement bedroom, it felt like I might weep forever. And, after I had wept for hours, my mother opened my bedroom door and said, “Shut up, Junior. That’s enough crying.”
I stopped weeping.
My mother went back upstairs and sat on her couch directly above me.
I stopped weeping. But I stood on my bed and I screamed and punched the ceiling.
My mother sat directly above me. I stopped weeping. But I stood on my bed and I screamed and punched the ceiling.
My mother sat directly above me.
I punched that ceiling until my knuckles bled.
I think my mother still sits directly above me.
I think my knuckles are still bleeding.
I think I am still screaming.
52.
The Quilting
My mother made quilts.
She would sew instead of sleep
And laugh at sunrise.
Cotton, denim, wool,
Needle, thread, scissors, thimble,
Blister, callus, cut.
Square by square by square,
My mother constructed quilts
And sold them for food.
My mother made quilts
With rheumatoid arthritis
In her neck and hands.
A memory quilt
Contains pieces of your past
Rejoined and renewed.
My mother made quilts.
She would sew instead of sleep
And rage at sunrise.
When Elvis perished,
My mom wept and wrapped herself
Inside a dark quilt.
Two hundred babies
Have slept beneath my mom’s quilts.
Ah, such tenderness!
How many babies
Were conceived on my mom’s quilts?
No one knows for sure.
My mother’s hands ached
As she punched needles through wool,
Denim, canvas, jute.
I own fourteen quilts
That were built by my mother.
I use all of them.
My mom made a denim quilt
That was too heavy to lift.
She cut it in half!
Quilt by quilt by quilt,
My mom made enough money
To pay the mortgage.
My mom’s arthritis
Turned her hands into cages
That captured ten birds.
My mother made quilts.
She would sew instead of sleep
And weep at sunrise.
We buried our mom
With a quilt she didn’t make.
We gave her a break!
She made her last quilt
To honor a Native boy
Heading to college.
If you want a quilt
Constructed by my mother
Then you’re out of luck.
My mom never slept
Beneath a quilt that she made.
Or maybe she did!
A memory quilt
Is designed to remind you
Of what you have lost.
I never sewed quilts.
My sisters made many quilts
Alongside our mom.
My mother started
To make a quilt from my poems,
But never finished.
As she made her quilts,
My mother sang Christian hymns
And old tribal songs.
My mother made quilts.
She would sew instead of sleep
And sigh at sunrise.
She once made a quilt
With thirty Jesus faces—
The Shroud of Too Much.
My wife doesn’t quilt
So we don’t have old fabric
Piled in the garage.
I miss my mother.
I miss watching her make quilts.
Sewing was her art.
My dad only slept
On top of sheets and blankets
Layered on his bed.
My mom only slept
Under many heavy quilts
On the front room couch.
When Mom and Dad slept,
They rarely shared the same bed
Or the same warm quilt.
My mom’s arthritis
Turned her hands into fires
Fed by ten dry twigs.
How long do quilts last?
I think they’ve discovered quilts
In a pharaoh’s tomb.
My mother made quilts.
She would sew instead of sleep
And mourn at sunrise.
How many coffins
Have been draped with my mom’s quilts?
Too many to count.
When old quilts tattered,
My mother would repair them—
The Quilt Whisperer!
Square by square by square,
My mother constructed quilts
And sold them for wood.
Always cold, my mom
Often walked around the house
Quilted like a queen.
Even wrapped in quilts,
My mother kept our small house
Burning like the sun.
In flames, we kids kicked
Aside our quilts and thirsted
And desiccated.
Square by square by square,
My mom also abandoned
And ignored her quilts.
Ah, that poor half-quilt
Can only make a half-ghost
That haunts half of us.
A memory quilt
Is constructed with dark things
You’d rather forget.
I think I was raped
On one of my mother’s quilts.
But my eyes were closed.
Wrapped in my mom’s quilts,
I wept after funerals
For so many friends.
When my big sister died,
I wanted to gather quilts
And burn all of them.
My mother made quilts.
She would sew instead of sleep
And collapse at dawn.
Square by square by square,
She punched anger through our skin
And turned us into quilts.
Wrapped around our mom,
We quilts absorbed her anger
And her fear and pain.
Wrapped around our mom,
We quilts absorbed her courage
And
her love and grace.
Square by square by square,
We quilts honor our mother
And her strange genius.
She taught us survival
With needle, thread, and thimble
All stained with her blood.
53.
Three Days
1.
Why is it that I never remember
How to spell “resurrection”?
I have to Internet search
For the correct spelling every time.
2.
Three days after my mother’s death,
She rolls the stone from her tomb
And walks into my dreams.
Most people would insist that it’s actually her
Or her soul reaching out to me.
But I’m not a literalist. I know,
Even as I’m dreaming,
That my subconscious is only fucking
With my conscious, or vice versa.
And, yet, as I dream of an ordinary day
Where I take my sons to school,
Grocery shop, drive through
For fast food, and browse a bookstore,
My mother feels shockingly real
As she follows me everywhere.
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t touch.
She just follows me and follows me.
She’s in the backseat, smiling at me
In the rearview mirror. She’s knocking
Oranges and apples from the displays
In supermarkets. She’s the barista
Making my coffee. She’s the hum
Of the refrigerator. She’s that tree
Heavy with crows. She follows me
Until the simple act of dropping
Ice cubes into an empty glass
Sounds like a thousand angels
Screaming with grief and rage.
3.
Dear Mother, I am sorry
That I don’t believe
In your ghost. I am sorry
That you are a ghost.
Dear Mother, I would call out
Your name, but I’m not the one
Who made “resurrection” more
Difficult to spell than “doubt.”
54.
Navigation
Hey, Smartphone, I’m lost. What am I supposed to do next?
—Dear Sherman, you must eventually forgive your mother. Don’t forget.
Wow, Smartphone, I don’t have the inner resources for that. Not yet.
—You better hurry. I’ve scheduled you for increasing amounts of regret.
Damn, Smartphone, that seems rather mean.
—Well, pal, just like me, Grief is a relentless machine.
So, Smartphone, does this journey have an ultimate destination?
—You might get somewhere, but it won’t be cause for celebration.
Okay, Smartphone, how do I take the first step? Then another?
—I already told you, asshole. You gotta forgive your mother.
55.
Sedated
AND THEN, ONE summer night, when I was seventeen, my mother asked me to go find my father. He’d left home a week earlier on a drinking binge. And he had diabetes. After seven days, we had to go looking for him. It was a family rule. We had arbitrarily decided that my father would only begin to seriously endanger his health after a week of booze and bad food. Plus, we’d get lonely for him. So I got into my car and drove from our home on the Spokane Indian Reservation to the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. My father, a supposedly full-blood Coeur d’Alene who had a suspiciously full mustache, had not lived on his reservation since he was a child, but that’s usually where he went to drink. He was always trying to fill some indigenous absence. There were five or six party houses where I would search for him. And then, once I found him, I would have to persuade him to come home. My mother used to exclusively perform this family chore. But once I earned my driver’s license, it was something I was often asked to do. My mother never commanded it, but she also knew I was unlikely to refuse the mission.
So, on that particular summer night, I discovered my father asleep in a chair in our cousin’s house in the little town of Worley, Idaho. He was barely conscious and smelled of beer, vomit, urine, and shit. I didn’t want him to stink up my upholstery, so I walked back out to my car, grabbed the old army surplus blanket out of the trunk, and covered the passenger seat. Then I walked back into the house and tried to fully rouse my father.
Most times, he’d argue with me. He was never a violent man, drunk or sober, but he often deployed a drunk’s persistent, if incoherent, logic that I’d have to overcome in order to get him home.
But that time, when I woke him, my father was so hungover and exhausted that he got into my car without protest. And then, as I rolled down the car windows because of my father’s stench, he tried to drunkenly explain our family history.
“That was the year your mother was addicted to Valium,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
My mother was a recovering alcoholic who’d sobered up when I was seven years old.
“Don’t you remember when she was chewing her lips and tongue all the time?” my father asked. “That was the Valium.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said.
But I think I didn’t want to remember it. My mother was often verbally cruel and emotionally unpredictable, but she was sober. I would only later learn that even a sober alcoholic can go on dry-drunk rages and sprees. But, in any case, I preferred my angry sober mother to my angry drunk mother. And I hated to think that my mother’s sobriety extended only to alcohol.
“You were little when it happened,” my father said.
“That was when she started sleeping on the couch all the time, right?” I asked.
“No, that was a different year.”
As we traveled through the pine forest, I desperately tried to remember my stoned mother. But I could not. I could not. And then I did.
“Oh, wait,” I said. “I remember when she thought she had MS and she was slurring her words.”
“That wasn’t MS,” my drunk father said. “That was Valium.”
“And didn’t she have a mini-stroke once?”
“Valium.”
“And didn’t she use to wear a blindfold because of migraine headaches?”
“Valium,” my father and I said together.
I drove us into Wellpinit, the center of our world.
“Where did she get the Valium?” I asked.
“I think that white doctor at the clinic was in love with her,” my father said.
“So instead of flowers,” I said, “he gave her drugs.”
“She was in real pain, though.”
“What kind of pain?” I asked
“The pain of being Indian,” he said.
“Oh, come on, Dad.”
“That’s why I drink so much.”
“You drink so much because you’re a drunk.”
“No,” my father said. “I drink because I’m an Indian. I’m an Indian because I drink.”
I laughed at my father’s bullshit. When I was younger, during my father’s extended alcoholic absences, I would become inconsolable. But, in my teen years, I had come to accept that my father would never stop drinking and would always leave home on binges. In order to survive, I think I’d learned how to love him a little less. I don’t know what my mother did to survive his boozy sojourns but, hey, maybe Valium had been her temporary escape pod.
“How did Mom quit the Valium?” I asked.
“One day, she said she was done with it,” my father said. “And she was. Never took them again.”
“Maybe you should follow her example,” I said. I was never mean to my father when he was sober. But I’d often insult and challenge him when he was drunk. So maybe I never did learn how to love him less. I don’t know anything about my mother’s strategies for loving him. I do know this sad fact: My father was at his most emotional
ly engaged with the world when he was somewhere between pretty-damn drunk and all-the-way drunk.
“How am I supposed to follow your mother’s example?” my father asked, playing dumb.
“You’re going to have to sober up someday,” I said.
“That’s never going to happen,” he said.
He was telling the truth. My father died of alcoholism when he was sixty-four.
When I turn sixty-five, I’m going to throw the biggest birthday party of my life.
“Daddy, Daddy,” I’ll sing, “I lived longer than you.”
56.
At the Diabetic River
Salmon disappear.
My father goes blind.
He kneels on the bank
Close to the river
So I can wash his face
With the sacred water.
O the ghosts of salmon.
O the ghosts of my father’s eyes.
57.
Reunion
I release these salmon
I release
I release my father and mother
I release
I release these salmon
Into their personal rivers
The river of bitterroot
The river of broken bone
The river of stone
The river of sweet smoke