I Know This Much Is True (131 page)

“What . . . what are you saying?” My heart raced; my breathing went shallow. Now that the moment was finally here, I was afraid to know.

“I had promised her, you see? Your mother. . . . She only told me a couple months before she passed away. I didn’t know anything about it before then. We didn’t talk about that kind of thing. I was just as much in the dark as you were. But after she got sick, it weighed on her. She needed to tell someone, so she told me. Made me promise not to say anything. But I don’t know. It’s different now. There’s money involved.

. . . She couldn’t have seen that coming.”

What was he talking about?

“She was kind of ashamed of it, you see? Of what she’d done. Of course, nowadays, they have babies out of wedlock all the time, all colors of the rainbow, and nobody even thinks anything about it. But it was different back then. For the Italians, especially. People didn’t like them, see? They resented them. They’d come over here in droves, up from New York to work in the factories. . . . People used to say they were smelly, greasy, all sexed-up—the same kind of thing you hear about the coloreds.” He looked around, hastily, for blacks. “The Italians needed someone to feel better than, I guess. Lots of them were prejudiced as hell when it came to the coloreds. The Indians, too. Her father, for instance. He would have murdered her if he’d known.”

I was listening without really hearing him. He’d just mentioned Domenico. He was about to tell me that my grandfather was my father.

“She told me she’d always worried that if you two found out—well, not so much your brother as
you
—that . . . that you’d hate her for it. Or hate yourself. But I don’t know. Things are different now. You have a I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 877

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right
to know, same as I had a right. To know about Edna, I mean. And now with that thing down there.”

I closed my eyes. This was it, then. Just
say
it.

“He died four or five months after you two were born. Never knew a thing about you. . . . She was kind of naive, of course—in the dark about a lot of things. She told me she didn’t even figure out she was pregnant until she was almost halfway along. Back then, there was no TV, of course. That kind of subject didn’t get paraded around the way it does now.”

Ray was wrong. Domenico had died
before
Thomas and I were born—had had his stroke in August. She had delivered Thomas and me four months
after
his death.

“He got killed over in Korea,” Ray said.

I looked up at him. “What?”

“He’d been stationed over in Europe. Germany, I think she said.

And then, when MacArthur went into Korea, he got shipped right over. Didn’t even get to come home first. Got killed right at the beginning, I guess—during the landing at Inchon.”

Was this right? My father was . . . ?

“She read about it in the paper. That was how she found out he’d been killed. Got in touch with some gal she knew—one of his cousins or something—and I guess she filled her in a little more on what had happened. But he never got home. Your father. Never even knew anything about you two guys, she said.”

“But why . . . how come she . . . ?”

“He was a colored fella. Well, part colored, I guess. Heinz fifty-seven varieties. But you know how it is. You got some colored blood in you, you’re considered colored, no matter what. Least that’s the way it was back then. People didn’t mix the way they do now. Or have babies out of wedlock, either. . . . Her father would have killed her, Dominick. You see? He probably would have disowned her. Course, the funny thing is,
he
was the one who introduced them. Your mother and Henry. That was his name. Henry.
Your
grandfather knew
his
father.”

They’d worked together at the mill, Ray said. After Henry’s father I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 878

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died, Connie’s father had more or less kept up with the family. Had sent the mother a little money from time to time because the kids were still young. It was unusual for her father to do that, Connie had said.

“Her old man was pretty tight with his dough, I guess. But he helped Henry’s family out here and there. For some reason. He really ruled the roost, you know—your grandfather. Over at the house. What
he
said
went
.

“He worked at the store where they traded, you see? Henry. So she got to know him that way. Saw him every week when she did the shopping. That was how it started—because her father had known his father and because she saw him all the time at the store. They were just friends at first, for a long time. For years, I guess. He used to sneak over to the house and visit her. Her father worked nights, you see? Then, I don’t know, I guess one thing just led to another. They were human, same as everyone else. And like I said, she was kind of naive—didn’t know too much even by the time
I
come along. Kind of in the dark, still, even after she’d had two babies. . . . Her father would have killed her, you see? If he knew she’d fallen in with a colored guy? If he had lived, he probably would have put her out of the house. Sent her over there to live with his folks.”

“You guys save any room for dessert today?” Kristin asked. Man, I jumped. “Oops, sorry. Did I scare you?”

“No,” I said. “No thanks. We’re right in the middle of something.”

“Oh. Sorry. I can take this whenever you’re ready. Or if you want, you can—”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. Thank you.”

We finished our coffee. Sat there, for a few minutes, in silence.

Then Ray reached across the table and patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s like I always say. Mongrels make damn good dogs.”

“Henry what?” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Henry what?”

“Drinkwater.”

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f

I drove out to the Indian graveyard first. Walked right up to him.

Henry Joseph Drinkwater 1919–1950. In service to his country . . .
I stood there, unable to feel much of anything. He was just a carved rock. A name and two dates. Up the path, over the rise, I could hear the Sachem River, the never-ending spill of the Falls.

At a pay phone, I looked up the address of the Wequonnoc Tribal Council office. Drove up to a dilapidated two-story house with trash in the yard. Following the sign, I climbed the fire escape stairs to the second-floor office. The door was locked; the inside empty. RELOCATED TO WEQUONNOC BOULEVARD, WEQUONNOC

RESERVATION (ROUTE 22), the hand-lettered sign said.

I drove down to the reservation—past the bulldozers and cement mixers, the land that had been cleared and stumped. The coming casino. The tribe’s new headquarters sat at the end of a rutted road, the beginning of the woods—an impressive three-story building made of cedar and glass. Brand new, it was. Drilling and hammering echoed inside.

I entered. Asked an electrician if he knew where I could find Ralph Drinkwater.

“Ralphie? Yeah, sure. Second floor, all the way down. I
think
he’s still here. That suite that looks right out onto the back.”

He was hand-sanding a Sheetrock seam, lovingly, it looked like to me. I stood there, undetected, and studied him. He’d sand a little, blow on it, pass his fingers across it, sand a little more. RALPH

DRINKWATER, TRIBAL PIPE-KEEPER, the plaque on the door said.

The office was handsome. Huge. Cathedral ceiling with exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace that faced an entire wall of glass. Jesus, what a life he’d had. His sister gets murdered, his mother goes off the deep end. And then that scummy business out at Dell Weeks’s house—posing for dirty pictures just so’s he’d have a place to stay. But he had declared who he was all the way through:
Well
, I’m
Wequonnoc Indian. So I guess not
all
of us got annihilated.

. . . You guys ought to read
Soul on Ice
! Really! That book tells it like it
is!
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down at the psycho-prison for a living . . . and had still managed to be a good man. To rise up out of the ashes. And now, he’d arrived at this big, beautiful room. This big, brand-new building. He’d come, at long, long last, into his own.

“This going to be your office?” I said.

He pivoted, spooked a little by my voice. Stared at me for three or four seconds more than was comfortable. The dust he’d raised from sanding gave him a frosted look.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

I told him I wasn’t sure—that I had just needed to find him, talk to him if he had a minute. “I found something out this afternoon,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That my father’s name was Drinkwater.”

I watched the surprise flicker in his eyes. Watched them narrow with well-earned distrust. He nodded, leaned against the wall for a couple seconds. Then he turned his back to me and faced his wall of glass. Faced the woods. A crow flying past was the only thing that moved.

“This afternoon?” he said. He turned around again. Looked at me. “What do you mean—you just found out
this afternoon
?”

I started to shake; I couldn’t help it. I walked a few steps over to the raised hearth of his big fireplace and sat. Told him about my conversation with Ray.

He had known all along we were cousins, he said; he’d thought I’d known all along, too. That I’d wanted it kept a deep, dark secret.

“Well, I
didn’t,
” I said. “I’ve been in the dark until two o’clock this afternoon. I’m just . . . I’m trying to figure it all out. And I need
help,
man. . . . I need some
help
.”

He nodded. Came over and sat down on the hearth next to me.

The two of us looked straight ahead, out at the tangle of trees.

My father and his father were brothers, Ralph said. His aunt Minnie had told him one time, way back before she moved to California. Before his sister died. “Do you ever see two little boys at your school named Thomas and Dominick?” Minnie had asked him.

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“They’re twins, same as you and Penny. They’re your cousins.”

There were four children who’d lived, Ralph said: Henry, Minnie, Lillian, and Asa, in that order. Asa was his father. “Ace,” everybody’d called him—the youngest and wildest of the bunch. Their parents were mixed: their mother, Dulce, was Creole and Portuguese; her maiden name was Ramos. Their father, Nabby Drinkwater, was Wequonnoc, African, and Sioux.

Every one of the kids but Minnie had died young, he said; Lillian of encephalitis, Henry in the Korean War, and Ace from driving drunk. He’d never married their mother; Ralph and Penny Ann were three years old when he flipped his car over and killed himself. Minnie was seventy-two or -three now—a widow, retired from a job with a packing company out in San Ysidro. He’d gone out to see her once—had hitchhiked most of the way. They wrote back and forth. Minnie was considering moving back to Three Rivers, once the casino got under way. Did I remember his cousin Lonnie Peck, who’d died in Nam? Lonnie was Minnie’s son. She had four other kids—two boys, two girls—all well, all with families. Minnie’s son Max was a gaffer at Columbia Pictures. Ralph had seen his name at the end of a couple of movies—right there in the credits at the end. Maxwell Peck, his cousin. “Yours, too, I guess,” he said.

Ralph had hated my brother and me when the four of us all went to River Street School, he said—Thomas and me, him and his sister.

He’d hated the way everyone always lumped us together—two sets of twins, one black, the other white and therefore better. And then? After Penny Ann got murdered? That day I read that speech about her at the tree ceremony? He’d wanted to kill me that day, he said—pick up a rock and bash my skull in with it. “I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought you wanted to deny your own father. Your Wequonnoc and African blood.” The first time he’d run across the word
hypocrite,
he said, he’d thought immediately of Thomas and me: the Birdsey twins, who lived a lie.

And later on? That morning when the two of us showed up on Dell Weeks’s work crew? Man, he’d wanted to bust my head in that day, too. Mine and my brother’s. Six different public works crews I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 882

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and they’d stuck us with
his.
He was as good as we were—as smart, if not smarter. But there we were, his big shot “white” hypocrite relatives, home from college and rubbing his face in how much further you could get in life if you lied about who you were. If you kept it a deep, dark secret.

It had been our mother’s secret, I told Ralph. Not Thomas’s and mine.

“Your brother knew,” Ralph said. “How come he knew and you didn’t?”

“He
didn’t
know,” I said. “She kept it from us both.”

But Ralph said he and Thomas had talked about it once—during that summer on the work crew. That
Thomas
had brought it up: how they were cousins. “I remember that conversation,” he said. “He said your mother told him.”

“He
couldn’t
have known,” I said. “She wouldn’t have told him and not me.” And as I said it, it came flying back at me—hit me right between the eyes: that day I’d finally sprung him out of Hatch. That trip we’d taken out to the Falls. Thomas had stopped in front of Penny Ann Drinkwater’s grave.
Remember her?
he’d said.
We’re cousins
. And I’d dismissed it as more of his crazy talk. . . .

He’d known.

She’d given
Thomas
his father but had withheld him from me. . . .