“Yeah. I saved some of the good things from Ann Landers. But I burnt all my own stuff.”
I thought he might be joking with me to see my response. But there was no twinkle, no nuanced pauses, in his manner. He was intent upon his mission. “Come on,” he said. “Here.” He sprinkled a little more sweetgrass on the fire and beckoned me to do the same. “You’re going to need the help, Nerburn. Come on.”
I sprinkled the green leaves on the fire. The flames bit at them, then swallowed them into a haze of sweet smoke. Dan chanted a few more words. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. Those pages had been my book and that book had somehow been my hope. I stared into the fire, numbed, like someone whose house had just burned down.
Dan was positively cheerful. “This is good,” he said. “Grover was right. This will be better.”
I didn’t answer. What I saw in my mind’s eye was the loss of several months worth of work. And worse, the whole burden of the project now fell on me. Dan’s words no longer existed, except insofar as I could extract them from him and get them down in a meaningful fashion.
Dan must have been following my thinking on his own. “It’s not the end of the world, Nerburn. You’re a good writer.” He sprinkled more sweetgrass on the fire. The wind blew the smoke around my legs like a playful kitten. “Here. Put some more on. We need to make a strong prayer.”
Halfheartedly, I dropped more sweetgrass into the diminishing flames. Cheap metaphors of dying embers of hope filled my mind.
“You’re thinking, not praying,” he said. He raised his voice in a lyrical, rhythmic chant. I stood silent, watching the crumpled edges of several stubborn pieces of paper as the flames crawled their way up and curled them into ash.
I waited what I hoped was an appropriate time before speaking. “So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Grover was right. It’s all inside of me. We’ll do it the Indian way. I’ll make talks and you watch and listen. Then you just write it down.”
“Oh.” It didn’t seem that simple to me. But Dan was as lighthearted as a child. I had a sense of the burden those boxes must have been to him, filled with the best and deepest of his own thoughts, closeted away in a dark corner of his house from which they might never emerge except to be burned in an anonymous fire in the event that he died before finding a way to give them voice.
Now he had burned them himself. Now I was the box. Now he was going to fill it again.
CHAPTER THREE
TALKING FOR THE GRANDFATHERS
“Here. Smoke with me,” Dan said. We were sitting on his front stoop listening to the larksong and the keening of the morning wind.
I had always been uncomfortable taking the pipe when it was offered to me by Indian people. It was not that I didn’t want to smoke with them. I wanted to do so desperately. But it somehow did not seem to be my place. I was so attuned to the “wannabe” syndrome that I tried to stand back, putting myself last at the table, as it were, so I didn’t seem to be feeding hungrily at the trough of Indian values because of the emptiness of my own inner life.
“Here,” he said again, holding the stem toward me. There were just two of us. It was a private, intimate act; he did not have to offer it if he didn’t want to. I took the pipe.
I smoked several puffs, cupping the smoke with my hand as he did, forcing it toward the ground, then the sky, then around my head. Then I handed it back.
He puffed several times more before it went out.
“You need to understand this, Nerburn,” he said. All levity was gone from his voice. “You’re not a good liar.”
“No, never have been.”
“I know, because I see how bad you lie.”
I flushed a bit. I didn’t think I had lied to him. And old people always scared me when they made observations like that. It was as if they had a second sight that allowed them to see more clearly.
“Have I lied?”
“Not in words. Only by silence.”
“By silence?”
“Yes. Silence is the lie of the good man, or the coward. It is seeing something you don’t like and not speaking.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You were mad the other day when I burned those words of mine. You were angry at Grover, too. You thought you had done good work. You didn’t think Grover knew what he was talking about.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I guess I’m easier to read than I thought.”
“You are. So don’t lie to me again.”
His manner was authoritative and final. I felt like a small child being scolded. I waited for him to say more, but he had spoken his peace. I was left with the echo of his reproach floating like smoke around my head.
He occupied himself with emptying and disassembling the pipe according to some private rituals. It was as if he no longer knew that I existed. I sat there next to him, half watching, as he wrapped it gently in a pouch of some soft animal hide.
When he was finished, he spoke again. His tone was formal. “We have smoked together. It is not a joke. You have made a promise to me not to lie with your words or your silences. It will not be easy for you, because you think you aren’t a liar. You will have to watch closely. That’s why we have tobacco. It makes us look hard for the truth.
“Remember when I told you to bring tobacco and to offer it to Grover? Did you see how he changed?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The tobacco was why. The tobacco is like our church. It goes up to God. When we offer it, we are telling our God that we are speaking the truth. When Grover took the tobacco from you, he was telling the Great Spirit that he would do the best he could.
“Wherever there’s tobacco offered, everything is wakan — sacred, or filled with power. When you gave Grover the tobacco, he had to stop bullshitting. Now he’s promised the Great Spirit that he will help. It doesn’t have to do with you or me. It’s a promise he made to the Creator.
“It isn’t important that you didn’t like what he said. I didn’t like it either. He knew that. But he didn’t care. He had made a promise to speak the truth.”
I felt sheepish and ashamed. The simple rectitude of Dan’s words made my concerns about wasted work seem tawdry and fraught with self-interest. But Dan was no longer concerned with redirecting me. His thoughts had taken wing, and he was ruminating on larger issues.
“You know,” he said, “That’s a lot of why we Indians got into trouble with the white man’s ways early on. When we make a promise, it’s a promise to the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka. Nothing is going to change that promise. We made all these promises with the white man, and we thought the white man was making promises to us. But he wasn’t. He was making deals.
“We could never figure out how the white man could break every promise, especially when all the priests and holy men — those men we called the black robes — were involved. We can’t break promises. We never could.”
He picked at a loose splinter on the side of his step.
“It’s really kind of funny,” he continued. “We didn’t always agree with the religion the white man brought. But there were things in it we could really understand. Like the Communion, how that made something sacred whenever it happened. That was just like our tobacco. And the way there were vows, like for marriage. We had vows, too. We