The next day was beautiful. It was early August but it was sunny and crisp and clear. My cousin Sam had arrived in the night with his girlfriend and they were tangled up on the couch. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; this is obviously a family trait (one I don’t share). They woke up and we talked a bit and then they left for the café to get some breakfast. I talked my grieving mother into going down to the café, too. After breakfast we drove back up to my grandmother’s trailer and I asked her if there was anything I could do. There’s always something to do. That’s one nice thing about Indian funerals whether Catholic, traditional, or a mixture of both. There’s always something—gathering sage, cooking, digging the grave, getting tar paper to cover the mound of dirt until a gravehouse can be built, building the rough box, carving and shaping the clan marker, getting drunk. I actually like digging the grave. It’s mindless and communal.
My grandmother asked me to do two things. Would I be willing to write a eulogy to read at the service? And would I go up to the big house and take care of the bedroom? Clean it up. We want to make it look nice in there, she said. She was shaky. Her eyes watered constantly. We just want to make it look nice. And your uncles, well, you know; they just can’t go in there. She asked me to do this not because I had been close to my grandfather but because, compared with the rest of the family, I hadn’t been.
It felt strange to be in the big house without my grandfather there. He had spent eighty of his eighty-three years in Bena. Sixty of those years had been spent in that house. Whenever I came over to visit him I’d find him sitting in his chair by the window, the police scanner on—with the scanner, he could often follow the progress the police were making tracking down our relatives. He’d smoke and drink coffee. If he was lucky he’d have peanut brittle or beans to eat.
A stack of books and the Bible rested to the left of the chair on the small end table laden with all sorts of other things: two broken watches, glasses, a screwdriver, long and unreadable information about his medication. The chair was empty now. But his cigarettes and lighter were on the table, as though he were about to smoke. Someone had written “Dads” on a Post-it and stuck it on the pack. Without the possessive it made me think of fathers. Dads. Parents and mothers and cousins and brothers and sisters and all of us and how we could have ended up like this. I sat at the table across from the chair and smoked one of my own cigarettes. When I was finished I walked back to his bedroom.
A narrow iron-frame bed. A dresser stuffed with socks, mostly the nonslip hospital kind, and T-shirts. A drawer full of medical supplies. A large oak table mounded with clothes and the weird effluvia that are a product of living in the same place for a long time; a broken printer, two dusty bedspreads, a boom box, and a portrait of my mother as a high school student, painted by his brother-in-law while he was in prison. A small safe served as his night table. When I opened it I found a few bundles of one-dollar bills, banded into stacks of 100, some rolls of quarters and silver dollars, and my cousin Vanessa’s cheap gold necklace. This was the necklace she had been wearing when she got into an argument at a party and drove across two yards, up a ditch, and onto the highway, where she was struck by a passing motor home.
I looked down at my feet. A small throw rug was turned at a funny angle. What looked like grape juice had blotted through it in places. When I lifted it I found the blood.
And then I got to work.
I emptied the dresser, removed the drawers, and bagged the clothes on the oak table and the contents of the safe. I lifted the safe out of the room and lugged the mattress through the narrow door. I saw that, unbeknownst to anyone, my grandfather’s dog had been waging war against him by shitting under his bed. That dog’s turds, no bigger than those of a cat, were hard, preserved, nested in the humus of hair, dust, and dead skin that had collected there. I choked on the dust. The whole room smelled like my grandfather. Especially the blood—it didn’t smell like “death.” It smelled like him; sweet, smoky, thick.
I took a break and wandered through the house until my older brother Anton arrived. I was glad he was there. He has the right personality for such jobs—calm, seemingly unperturbed.
Anton and I lifted out the heavy furniture until all that was left was the small rectangle of a room and the smaller, more potent, more significant rectangle of the braided throw rug that covered what was left of my grandfather’s brain. We weren’t doing a great job and neither was the rug. It tugged at the feet, and carrying furniture while stepping over it was hard, and in short time the rug had been stepped on and flipped over and bunched up. Quite a lot of blood showed through. We tried not to notice.
We moved the bed frame out to the garage. Since my grandfather, in addition to being a hard-ass, was somewhat sentimental, he held on to a lot of junk. For instance, he had saved all of his father’s logging equipment, and so one wall was covered with two-man Swede saws, crosscut saws, axes, peaveys, and the like. In the far corner hung a small hand drum. I remember hearing about this drum from my mother.
When she was a young girl, growing up in Bena in the 1940s, everyone was Catholic, or at least acted Catholic. Her parents made all the children get dressed and go to church on Sundays even though they themselves did not attend. The Catholic church in Bena is a small, very modest building with the footprint of a very small house. The usher was a man named George Martin, an old, quiet man, who lived across from the church with his wife. My mother said that everyone was scared of George because he was rumored to be a medicine man. Whenever a dog went missing everyone would say, George must have got him. Watch your dogs or George will get them. Every Saturday night you could hear him singing medicine songs on a water drum. The drum, whose sound can carry for miles, sounded throughout the village. But then, on Sunday morning, George would be standing by the front door of the church in a brown suit, showing the good people of Bena to their pews and helping to pass the plate and tend the grounds. He never took Communion or knelt or joined in the prayers. Before he died he gave my grandfather—a man, it should be said, who had absolutely no interest in hand drums or traditional songs or anything of the sort—the hand drum that he had used when he played the moccasin game (a team gambling game involving singing and sleight of hand). George was the last grand medicine man from Bena.
My brother couldn’t stay long. He has seven children ranging in age from six months to fifteen years. I told him I’d finish alone. I did.
The day had grown warm and as I cut the carpet and rolled it the dust and dander rose into the air and choked me. It was not hard work as far as tearing up carpet goes, but it wasn’t fun. The carpet tore easily, and that was a blessing. Nonetheless, I took my time. I stopped occasionally and wandered out into the main part of the house and sat across from my grandfather’s chair and smoked cigarettes, still a little shocked that he wasn’t there. When I went back to the bedroom and was confronted by the patch of blood, brain, and lymph, I had the strange feeling that my grandfather—all of him, his body and self and words, his whole life—had somehow disappeared into the floor. I began to resent the carpet. So cheap. So easily torn. So incapable of holding my grandfather’s blood, which had soaked through the carpet and into the subfloor.
I began to curse. I cursed that carpet as I’d never cursed anyone in my life. On I went. I hated that cheap, thin, blue, foam-backed, glue-down carpet more than I have ever hated anyone or anything. That carpet, that cheap cheap carpet, that carpet the same color as the reservation is colored on some maps of northern Minnesota. And just as torn, dusty, and damaged. Just as durable. Just as inadequate. We all struggle to do our jobs—the job of living, the job of dying, the job of muddling the two—but that carpet didn’t do its job. It didn’t keep its end of the bargain.
I left for home in the early evening to write the eulogy and it wasn’t until eleven o’clock that I finally crawled into bed. I couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t say I was traumatized by my grandfather’s death or by cleaning up his blood and brain. But when I closed my eyes all I saw was blood. I read for a