Jeremy Stone
Authors: Lesley Choyce
JEREMY
STONE
Lesley Choyce
Dedicated to the memory of Rita Joe
Contents
Sitting Still Through Math Class is Hard
Somewhere in the Back of the Class
I had Forgotten about Geronimo
The Difference Between Me and Jenson Hayes
The First Time He Walked Up to Me
Just Standing Around in the Drizzle Talking to a Dead Dude
The Troof Versus Paper Clip Heaney
My Mom in the Kitchen Staring at an Unopened Pack of Smokes
Awkward Moments in the Kitchen
When I Learned to Talk Again
The first words were
leave me alone.
Said it like I meant it
to that person
some idiot
who examined me.
My mom was determined I should go
back to school.
Think about it.
School.
Yeah, as soon as I told the shrink or
whatever, whoever that pisser was,
to kiss my ass (guess I said that too)
he said, then my mom said, and the school said
I was ready
to go back to school.
Let Me Take You Back First
Shut up.
Just shut up.
Everyone
kept saying it to me.
Shut
the hell
up.
So I
did.
And I fell in love with silence.
Head
over
heels.
The words just stopped flowing,
stopped jumping
out of my
mouth.
The great god of silence took me on
as a disciple.
I found a new wilderness
inside me.
A beautiful place
to camp,
place to hang out with spirits
place to live alone with just
me.
Jeremy Stone, Me
No, don't stone me.
Me, Stone.
Like a rock.
You know, you can throw me but
you can't break me
or crack me open
easily.
I'm that hard.
Stone hard.
Stoner, some said.
Well, yeah, maybe sometimes
but not often.
Stoney stuck, though
as a nickname
sometimes.
I am (or was, not sure) a sink-to-the-bottom
stone,
language heavy inside me
but not always getting out to breathe.
Had this hard outer shellâ
plain-looking, I know, gray, dull.
But inside.
Yes, inside.
All hard jagged crystal.
Beautiful in sunlight but if kept in the dark,
damn
just a little too weird.
To get me
to understand me,
you have to know what
a geode
is.
My father
gave me one
this gray nothing-looking rock
when I was little.
Break it open, he said.
But I couldn't.
So he did
and inside
it was all hollow
with tiny glittering crystals.
Pointed, shiny.
God, look at that
my father said.
Gotta love that rock.
Oh Yeah, My Father
My missing father
going
going
gone.
I was ten and he kept getting
older
thinner
farther
away.
Did I tell you that my people,
his people,
go back 10,000 years here?
Maybe more. Who knows?
Maybe my ancestors were flint and obsidian and coal and
amethyst.
We go back to the Stone Age.
Hah.
Get it.
My father's humor.
He had humor once when he had a big belly
but
he
thinned
down.
He lost
a lot of things.
I saw the lights going out
in his eyes
as he
got more hollow
more hurt.
So he shared that hurt sometimes.
No humor in that. Nope.
He shared it by hitting me.
He hit me some.
Not too much.
(It's okay, Dad. I forgive you.)
He stopped hitting
when he
disappeared.
I missed him right away.
Better to be hit
than to not have him at all.
Damn.
I Had a Grandfather Once
I really
did
and he was filled with history
fed up with history, too
but he told stories of the old times
before
you know.
He said his grandfather had handed all those stories
over to him.
When my grandfather wasn't telling old-time stories
he was kinda quiet.
People made fun of him
when he went outside the community:
the long hair
the way he walked
the hesitation in his speech.
His stories were great
but he couldn't shed the dark part of that damn history
and I don't think he was good with understanding time.
He told me this:
One day our people are happy as clams
and hunting saber-toothed tigers and big hairy
mastodons.
The next thing you know
the Europeans
show up
and the fun is all over.
Everyone just called him Old Man
so I did too.
My Grandfather's School
Old Man had gone to one of those places,
a residential school,
where you dressed like everyone else, slept in big rooms with everyone else,
ate the same food as everyone else, spoke English like
everyone else, got
punished like everyone else.
The cops brought you back if you tried to run away
and be yourself. Be different.
And if you got sick and threw up at mealtime
they made you eat
your own puke.
It's called education,
Old Man said.
So you run away again
and they bring you back
so they can teach you
how to stop being
who you are
and learn to be
someone else.
Who I Am
At my new school,
at first
no one really knows who I am.
They think maybe I am Italian
or from South America.
No one knows me here not even me.
But I think I am becoming more like my grandfather.
Old Man.
I remember his stories
but not much about my own past.
So I need to find little Jeremy Stone.
I'm pretty sure he was never Italian.
My mother promised to help me find him.
Find me.
She'd been trying
to tug some words out of me for three years.
Before that she had lectured me for being
too loud
too rude
too curious.
And then she really lost it
and hit me. (Like my dad had done, only different.)
At least I think she hit me
or someone did anyway.
That's when I stopped talking.
Went silent like a stone.
But I'm not gonna blame her
No.
Not my mother. She tried her best
but had wrestling matches with her own personal demons.
Ya know.
Drink.
Men (after my father evaporated).
Some kind of pills.
She said none of it would kill her.
Not even the men,
or the smokes. (Tobacco is sacred, she said.)
Changed her mind after the coughs.
Good thing too.
Me,
I never smoked.
Not tobacco anyway.
But my mom
she loved me
and thanked me when I found my tongue again
and words spilled out. But I only spoke to people who
really knew who I was
and that was
a pretty small group.