Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (36 page)

While spearing walleye on Round Lake that April I felt this way of life and the language that goes with it felt suddenly, almost painfully, too beautiful to lose, unique and too impossibly beautiful to be drowned out by the voice of a talk show host or by any other kind of linguistic static. And I thought then, with a growing confidence I don’t always have: we might just make it.

Eugene Seelye and son Lance (Lanny) Seelye at Bena Cemetery, 1969

Courtesy Luella Seelye

Eugene Seelye with grandsons Micah and David Treuer, Cass Lake, 2003

Courtesy of Ronna Dingal

EULOGIES

A few weeks after my grandfather’s funeral in August 2007, my mother called me and asked if I wanted to take over the payments on his new truck. My grandfather was a hard-ass and a skinflint. And he was sentimental, too. He never bought clothes or books. He never went to the movies. The furniture in his house was older than he was, and only occasionally could my grandmother sneak in something new to replace something that was falling apart. The only things he ever bought new were vehicles. He bought a new truck every two years and many used ones in between. You never really knew what he was driving because just when you got used to the Buick Century or the white Ford F150 he’d come rolling up in something else. By the time you visualized him in the new truck—the black Maxi-Cab GMC Sierra, say, or the tan Silverado with silver pinstripes—he’d have moved on to something newer. This was one of the strange exceptions to the usual stasis of his life. He wouldn’t even let my grandmother change the curtains in the house, because his mother had sewn them fifty years earlier: since “Ma Seelye” had put them up, only she could take them down. I asked him once why he bought so many cars (after all, he had only his pension from the VA to live on).
I was supposed to drive a truck in the army, boy. But my truck didn’t make it past Normandy
. So what did you do?
I didn’t have nothing to drive in Belgium during the Bulge
. So what did you do?
I shot people instead
.

The day after my mother called, my uncle Davey came over to her house with the truck. It was a maroon 2006 Chevy Silverado with gray and silver decals, a tonneau cover, chrome running boards, tan leather seats, XM radio, OnStar, an off-road package, and a tow system. One hell of a truck. He’d barely driven it before he killed himself. There were only 14,000 miles on it. Davey took out some chains and some #120 body-grip traps from the back, and a battery charger (which Davey pronounced “bat tree,” just like my grandfather) from the rear seat. There was a large piece of tagboard in the backseat.
You can have that,
said my uncle. The tagboard was hot pink and someone had taken a lot of care writing out and coloring in the phrase GRAND MARSHAL—BENA DAYS’ PARADE. A few half-deflated balloons eddied on the floor.
What the hell is this?
I asked.
Oh
,
said Davey.
We had Bena Days last week. The one hundredth anniversary of the town of Bena. Ma was the grand marshal
.

Davey’s getting older. But he is still a tough guy. He possesses a toughness matched with a sense of humor and a sweetness not found in most people (a combination that always made him my favorite uncle). He was the first person to give me a drink, the first to take me deer hunting, the first (and only) person to catch a snowshoe hare with his bare hands because he thought I might want it as a pet. Once when I was feuding with a well-known Indian writer and Davey caught wind of what the other writer was saying, he slapped me on the back and said,
If he comes up here I’ll be waiting and I’ll stick him in the neck. With this,
and he lifted his shirt to reveal his skinning knife stuck in his belt. Once he came over and his glasses were held together with tape. I asked him what had happened.
Some guy cold-clocks me at the bar and breaks my damn glasses.
So I get up and beat him down and then his dad comes to help him and I beat him up, too
. He’s tough like that. But he’s loving, too. Good to family. Good to me. That toughness is still there along with the tattoos acquired in North Carolina when he was with the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg.
Best time of my life,
he said about his time in the All American (AA) 82nd Airborne, an airborne infantry regiment that had included, among others, Sergeant York (who single-handedly took thirty-two German machine guns, killed twenty-eight German soldiers, and captured 132 others during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in World War I), Strom Thurmond, and Chief Dave Bald Eagle, the grandson of Sitting Bull.
I jumped out of planes all over the world—Africa, Scotland, Asia. Night jumps, blind jumps, high altitude, low altitude.

Once when my grandfather was alive and we had taken out his World War II infantry uniform just to look at it, Davey had said,
Second Division! Second to none. First to run!
as only a member of the 82nd Airborne could say (even to his father, who had fought in Normandy, Belgium, and Germany and had been attached to the 101st Airborne Division). Even my grandfather laughed.

You should have seen it, Dave,
he said, speaking of the Bena Days parade.
I drove the truck and Ma sat in the back on a lawn chair like a prom queen, waving all the way down the street.

I could imagine it. My grandmother—still beautiful; still elegant; still, even in the worst instances, so poised—sitting on a lawn chair in the back of the truck, the other trucks and four wheelers and tractors and skidders snaking up from the old gravel pit past the empty Catholic church, the rectory, the empty Bena Grocery, the full Bena Bar, past the community center and new post office, and down to the ball field. She’s almost blind, my grandmother, but I could imagine her riding in the back of her dead husband’s truck. They had been together for more than sixty years but now were suddenly separated. I could imagine her waving to all the people, all the town, all that she could not see, while the truck (so plush, so stable) crunched along the gravelly asphalt and the people cheered. I could imagine her smiling at the hazy lines of people—whites and Indians, loggers and ex-cons, pipe fitters and guides, heavy-equipment operators and derelicts, maybe waving at the ghost of her husband in the ground for not even two weeks. Good for her, I thought. Though I also heard that she didn’t ride in the Silverado at all. I heard that she was in a silver Mustang convertible.

There was a lot of paperwork we had to get through to put the truck in my name. I went to the Cass County Department of Motor Vehicles. But since the truck was registered through the tribe, I had to go across Cass Lake and talk to the folks at the Leech Lake Reservation Department of Motor Vehicles. I was told that since my grandfather was enrolled at Leech Lake but my grandmother was enrolled at White Earth and I lived in Minneapolis, I’d have to register the truck through the state. So I went back to the Cass County offices. Then I went to the bank to see if we could simply transfer the loan over to me rather than refinance. I was told there that I would need a credit report, all my financial information, and a copy of the death certificate. This I had to ask my grandmother for.

They just need proof,
I told her.
Just some proof that he’s gone.

She didn’t have a copy of the death certificate, but my mother did, so I had to drive back over to my mother’s house. Then to the bank.

I walked into First Federal Bank in Bemidji and approached a teller. I told the teller I was taking over payments on my grandfather’s truck and I needed to speak to a loan officer. I said my grandfather had died and that the truck was passing to me.

Oh, I’m so sorry,
said one of the tellers. Young. Pretty. I was guessing farm-raised.
Who was he?

Eugene Seelye.

Her hands flew to her face.
Oh! I know him. I’m so sorry. He was so sweet. He was such a sweet guy.

No, I corrected her. Eugene Seelye
.

Yeah, sure. Old. White hair. Kind of like Elvis.

Sweet? I asked.

The final step required that I come in with my grandmother, since she was the beneficiary of his estate. I met her outside the bank with my uncle Davey.

So they need the death certificate? You’ve got it?
asked my grandmother.

I said I did.

Does it
— She paused.
It doesn’t say what he did, does it? It doesn’t say how he died?

I assured her it didn’t. She seemed happy about that.

In the months after he died and I drove the truck around on the rez and off I had a strange feeling. Often as I pulled up in someone’s yard or at the bank or the grocery store or a boat landing, people would stop what they were doing. They would stare at the tinted windows. Their hands hung by their sides. Rice knockers would drift down to rest against a leg. Wrenches would miss the nut. At first I thought all this activity stopped because the truck was so nice, or because people couldn’t believe my success. But one after another they would say,
I
thought you were Gene
. Or,
You scared the shit out of me
. It seemed they hadn’t gotten used to the idea that he was dead, either. They expected him to ease his body out of the Silverado and wipe his eyes and say something smart-ass or sweet, depending. They expected him but they got me instead.

It got to be that so many people looked and saw the truck and saw my grandfather in it that I began to see the truck that way, too. I felt there was some overlap. I was driving it but so was he. I was behind the wheel but so was he. It wasn’t a matter of succession (him and then me) but of overlap—he and I. Not just that. I was driving and he was driving. I was smoking and he was smoking. I picked my teeth with his toothpicks and he did, too. I drove down the main street of Bena and we were both in the cab and my grandmother was in the back, waving, waving. And my uncle’s traps were still there, and the “bat tree” charger. And when my mother took a ride in the truck she rode as “Maximum Margaret” and the “Queen of Bena” and the tough girl she’d been and the tough woman she’d been and the tough mother. And all of us—Indians all, and also writers, and judges, and vets, and criminals, and mothers, sons, grandfathers, and grandsons, and brothers, and sisters, and pagans and lapsed Catholics and unbelievers, and all of us; not succeeding one another and not shedding and donning but taking it all on at once. They say you can’t step into the same river twice. But maybe a truer saying is that you can’t ever dry off.

Before I got the truck, on the day of his funeral, I delivered the eulogy in the Catholic church in Deer River as my grandmother had asked me to do. Deer River is just over the rez line. The Catholic church in Bena is in disuse and services are no longer held there. The priest wore his vestments and the sash over his shoulders was beaded—some good Ojibwe Catholic must have made it for him. I had never spoken in a church before. I’ve never been to Mass. I’ve never been baptized. Christianity seems very strange to me—so ethnic, heavy in its symbolism, with liturgy and different clothes and all the kneeling and standing. My Ojibwe religion, in comparison, feels much more vanilla, much more matter-of-fact. The medicine men I know wear sweatpants and baseball caps more often than not. And there isn’t the same kind of respectful heavy silence at the ceremonies. There’s a lot of laughter, for one thing, and dirty jokes.

So I read my eulogy and my cousin Dereck read two passages from the Book of Lamentations. At the wake, when Father Paul had asked if one of us could read from the Bible, we’d all looked at one another in a panic. “I can’t do that,” said my brother Anton tactfully. “But maybe Nate can.” Nate suggested Sam. Sam thought perhaps Megan could do it. Everyone was either too shy (never having read aloud in public before) or too pagan (such unbelievers that to read from the Bible would have felt like mocking it and mocking our grandfather, who did believe in it). Finally Dereck said, “Sure, I’ll do it. I was an altar boy for Christ’s sake.”

Dereck usually wore baggy clothes, urban-style: drooping pants and hockey or football jerseys (Raiders). He also usually wore gold chains. His ear was pierced. His black hair was spiked and gelled. But on the day of the funeral he wore a suit. He wore it well. When it was his turn to speak he loped up to the altar confidently and opened the book to where Father Paul had marked it and began reading.

“Now I read to you from the Book of Lamentations. I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all the day. My flesh and my skin hath he made old: he hath broken my bones. He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail. He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old. He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out: he hath made my chain heavy. Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer—”

Father Paul interrupted Dereck impatiently and motioned to me. I rose from where I’d been sitting next to my mother, who was holding my grandmother’s hand (I’d never seen them hold hands before). I was nervous, more nervous than I’d ever been before. I’d done hundreds of readings, but this was the first time I was going to read something I’d written for my family. The audience was all family. And the family knew my subject (my grandfather), if not better than I did, then certainly differently. I eulogized him as best I could.

The drive from Deer River to the cemetery seemed long, though it’s not. It was a beautiful day. As we drove I looked out at the ditches and remembered that for many years, as a member of the U.S. Forest Service, my grandfather had cut that grass and brush and applied Agent Orange to the trees growing under the power lines, dispensing the chemical out of a canister strapped to his back. And the trees, still growing, still going about their single-minded business of up up up, had been logged by my grandfather’s grandfather Charles Seelye. I thought of how, down Highway 8, my grandfather had shot a male lynx that was hanging around the dump. How he used to drink at the Bena Bar. How, up the Winnie Dam road, the dam itself had been built with Indian labor from Raven’s Point—our ancestral village—brought across the lake on a steam-powered barge and put to work clearing the ground and driving the pilings and installing the sluices and that when it was done the water rose and flooded them out, flooded out the very people who built the dam and that’s why the village moved to where Bena is today. Everything had been shaped by us in that place for a couple of hundred years. Everything I saw was saturated with family, with him, with us.