I made my way up the steps and into the door. The matter-of-fact way he accepted my arrival had me confused.
The house was full of man smell. Fried food. Stale cigarettes. Old coffee.
Dishes stood in the sink. One wall was covered with photographs — a 1940s-vintage sepiatone of a young man and woman standing in front of an old car; a department-store posing of a little girl in a taffeta party dress; a graduation photo of a solemn young man in a mortarboard. An old Life magazine photograph of John F. Kennedy stood framed on an end table.
“Sit down,” the old man said. He beckoned to a yellow Formica table that stood in the middle of the kitchen. “Do you drink coffee?”
I told him I did. “Good,” he answered, and poured me a cup of thin brown liquid from a white enamel pot he kept on the stove. Then he padded over and slid into a seat across from me.
He must have been almost eighty. His face was seamed and rutted, and his long grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He had on a plaid flannel shirt over a white T-shirt. His pants were held up by suspenders and he wore sheepskin-lined slippers. One eye was clouded over, but there was a twinkle in his look that matched the twinkle in his voice.
I reached into my pocket and handed him the Prince Albert. My days in Red Lake had taught me that the gift of tobacco was the gift of respect among Indian people.
The old man looked at it.
“Hmm,” he said. He reached across the table with a hand twisted by arthritis. He took the packet and shoved it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “You wrote those ‘Red Road’ books.”
“I helped the kids.”
He folded up the newspaper on the table. To Walk the Red Road lay underneath, as if it, too, had been awaiting my arrival. Small notations were written all over its cover.
“They’re pretty good.”
“We tried our best.”
He spit once into a coffee can he kept by his chair.
“I don’t like white people much,” he said. He was looking straight at me.
“That’s understandable.”
“Did they?”
“Who?”
“The old folks at Red Lake.”
“Not all of them.”
He picked up a can of snuff from the table and slid some behind his lip.
“What about you?”
“You mean, did they like me?”
He didn’t answer.
“I think so. Some didn’t. They thought I was a pushy white guy. But what could I do?”
“You did okay.” He tapped the cover of To Walk the Red Road. “Now, let me ask you something else. Do you know why they let you?”
I smiled a bit and took a sip of my coffee. “I think so. I think it’s because I like people and they could tell that. That I wasn’t going to screw them. That the kids thought I was okay so they decided to trust me.”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s something else. You don’t try to be an Indian.”
I smiled at the compliment and let him continue. He was clearly a man who formed judgments quickly.
“White people that come around to work with Indians, most of them want to be Indians. They’re always wearing Indian jewelry and talking about the Great Spirit and are all full of bullshit.”
“Yeah, I know the type,” I said.
He peered around the side of my head. “You got no ponytail. That’s good. You don’t have any turquoise rings on, do you?” I held up my hands. They had no rings, no watch. “Good,” he said wryly.
He picked up his train of thought. “Or else they think we need some kind of white social worker telling us what to do. Some of them come here because they can’t find a job anywhere else and end up out on the reservation. We got them here, all of them.”
I nodded my head.
He leaned over as if to tell me a secret. “You aren’t like that, are you?” he asked.
There was a kind of conspiratorial hush in his voice. I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a joke.
“I try not to be. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like Indian people.”
“That’s okay. It’s good that you like Indian people. I like them too. But how much do you like white people?”
The question seemed strange.
“I’m not much thrilled with the culture we’ve created.”
“Yeah, okay. But how about white people?”
I didn’t know what he was driving at.
“I like white people just fine,” I said. “I mean, after all, I am one.”
“That’s what I mean,” he chuckled. “That’s good. That’s good. If you hate your own people you can’t be a very good person. You have to love your own people even if you hate what they do.” He gestured toward the mug on the table. “Here. Drink your coffee.”
I took a gulp to placate him. It tasted like something brewed from twigs and rubber tires. “No, I don’t hate white people,” I said. “Sometimes I’m embarrassed by us. But white people are okay.”
He waved his gnarled hand for silence. He was done toying with me. He fixed me with a solid stare.
I was suddenly intensely aware of my whiteness and my relative youth. I wanted to know what this was all about, but I had learned through hard experience that Indians make their own choices and take their own time. The old man would come to the point when he wanted to.
He pointed to a picture on the wall. “That’s my grandson,” he said. “When he graduated from Haskell.”
Haskell is an Indian junior college in Kansas. The people I knew who had gone there looked upon it with a great sense of pride.
“Did he like it?”
“He’s dead now,” the old man answered. “Got killed.”
“He was a good-looking boy,” I offered, unsure of what else to say.
“Yes. He drank too much. Would have been about your age.” He fixed me again with that hard stare. “I want you to help me write a book.”
The abruptness of the request left me speechless.
“I’m seventy-eight,” he continued. “This is a hard life. I want to get all this down.”
“All what?” I asked.
“What I have in my mind.”
I thought he wanted me to write his memoirs. “You mean, like your memories?”
“No. What I have in my mind. I watch people. Indian people and white people. I see things. I want you to help me write it down right.”
He got up and went into his bedroom. When he came out he had a sheaf of loose-leaf papers in his hand.
“I’ve been writing some things down. My granddaughter said I should do something with them.”
I was shocked and excited and nervous. I didn’t know whether I wanted to see the pages or not. The old man might be a crackpot full of wild religious theories. But there was always the chance that he was one of those rare chroniclers of life who had managed to catch the living, breathing sense of the times he had lived through.
He handed me the pile of papers. “Read them,” he said.
After