Set Me Free
Authors: Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
The text of
The Tempest,
by William Shakespeare, is taken from
The Riverside Shakespeare.
New York: Houghton Mifflin © 1997.
The epigraph is from
National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest,
Peter Alden and Dennis Paulson et al. New York: Alfred A. Knopf © 1998.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56961-3
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Contents
Act One: We Run Ourselves Aground
Act Two: This Is a Strange Repose, to Be, Asleep with Eyes Wide Open
Act Four: Let Me Live Here Even; So Rare a Wonder’d Father and a Wise Makes This place Paradise
Act Five: O Brave New World, That Has Such People In’t
For David
—
“I would not wish any companion
in the world but you.”
And for Daddy,
who has taught me “the rarer action is
in virtue than in vengeance.”
Unlike those of most conifers, the cones of Lodgepole Pines stay closed on the branches for years, until the heat from a forest
fire opens them. Afterward, the fire-resistant seeds sprout en masse, producing tall, straight Lodgepoles in extensive pure
stands that support many of the birds and mammals widely distributed in other coniferous forests.
—National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest
I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts, Show thee a jay’s nest, and
instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmazet. I’ll bring thee To clust’ring filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee Young
scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?
—Caliban,
The Tempest
(II. 2. 167-72)
Spoken by
C
AL
W
hen I was a little boy, Maw-Maw would often take me on her lap and tell me about Our Way. I took Our Way to mean the Traditional
Indian Way, the Neige Courante Way, because she was my toothless grandmother and her hair fell in two frayed plaits beside
her face and she sometimes wore a buckskin dress that smelled of wood smoke and, on occasion, of the living thing that had
once been in it. So I will never forget the moment I realized what Our Way
really
meant; the afternoon’s shame is still vivid in my mind, though it shames me no more. Now I am quite fond of my boyhood embarrassment,
because it is one of the few things I have from the time when Maw-Maw was the only world I knew.
I was seven years old. There were two boys who lived two houses down, with their own grandmother. This other grandmother was
powerful on our reservation. This other grandmother was beautiful and well dressed. She had all her own teeth. Her hair was
cut short and styled well, and her grandsons wore ironed shirts and brand-new Converse sneakers. I wanted to impress these
grandsons. They were older than I. They had been to the Pendleton rodeo and showed cattle at the county fair. They could really
play some basketball. I thought if I showed off for them by singing
the tribal song Maw-Maw had taught me, then perhaps they would invite me to play with them. A game of Horse maybe, or Twenty-one.
Nothing elaborate. “That will only be the beginning,” I told myself, staring up at my ceiling in the quiet night. “Once we
play together, they’ll love me. They’ll invite me into their world of vacuums and penny candy and blue-black Levi’s. Before
I know it, we’ll be like brothers.”
So I sang, and the whole time I thought, “I am borrowing Maw-Maw’s voice.” I had to imagine I was borrowing her voice to get
the notes right, and to remember what I was supposed to say.
The quality of mercy is not strange, hey-eh, hey-eh.
It falleth as a gentle rain from hea-ven.
Those boys started laughing at me right away. “Does that sound like an Indi’n song to you? Do those sound like Indi’n words?”
And then they laughed until they cried. When they were still catching their breath, one said, “That’s a loony old woman you
live with. Better watch out you don’t catch her crazy bugs,” and they ran off and left me alone, yearning after them. I tried
to take my pride in hand. I tried to quell my anger. I went inside and found Maw-Maw in the kitchen, humming to herself. I
asked her for the first time in my life, “Maw-Maw, is Our Way the Indi’n Way? Or is it the Indian Way? Or is it the Traditional
Way? Or is it the Neige Courante Way?” And
she
looked at me and laughed. The laugh she had that showed her gums and rattled her so deep, it felt like she might die right
there. The laugh that scared me because I could not reach her when she was caught in it.
“All you need to know,” she said when her breath had settled, “is Our Way is My Way. There
is
no Indian Way, fool. ‘Indi’n’ is just another way of saying you’re Indian yourself. That has nothing to do with Our Way.
Maybe there is a Neige Courante Way. Maybe there is a Lakota Way. A Crow Way. A Hopi Way. But there is also a Chinese Way.
An Irish Way. A million other Ways. Really, My Way is to learn the Human Way. Maybe that’s Traditional.
But that’s not important. This is: you are a human living under my roof. You eat my food. You will live by My Way, which is
Our Way. The Human Way. Understand?” I nodded, because I was often a little scared of how much she knew, but really, I didn’t
understand at all.
I have only, in these last few days, realized that you may be the only person in the world who understands what this story
says about my deepest truth: I do not often understand until it is too late.
W
HEN THAT SAME
Maw-Maw set to dying, it was the summer I turned twelve. Two weeks into her bed rest, she had me crawl on my hands and knees
and root around on the dusty floor underneath her bed. I knew her under-the-bed place was where she kept her most powerful,
precious things, and so, when she asked me to do this task for her, I was afraid. It meant, for sure, she was dying.
In my search for what she wanted, I had to touch a yellowed cloth diaper, neatly folded into fourths; a bone necklace that
once held powerful magic; and one silver earring tied in an embroidered handkerchief. Every time I came up for air, she prodded
me with the end of her cane. “That isn’t it! Keep looking!” She didn’t tell me what she was looking for until I had it in
my hands.
She wanted her books. The first one was quite old, at least in my mind, because it was from a decade I had never before imagined.
The copyright page read 1932. The book was called
Red Mother.
It looked very boring to me, because it was the story of a Crow woman named Pretty-shield who had been a girl on the plains
when there were buffalo and ancient laws and no reservations. My grandmother said this book told a tiny piece of the Crow
Way, but only one woman’s point of view, and that I should not forget this, that one voice alone could do only so much telling.
She leaned so close to me I could smell her peanut breath. “Did you know my husband came and got me? Took me from my mother’s
home. Up in Montana. Did you know that I was born a Montana Crow? Your grandfather made me an Oregon Neige
Courante. I didn’t know his country. I came from big-sky country. My people rode horses. I wanted to go with him. But I cried
like a girl every day. I was crying for the horse I had to leave behind. I am an old woman now. I understand I was crying
for my mother and my sisters. I did not know life without them.
“My husband let me cry. He knew I would come to love this place. He saw I was stubborn. I come from proud people. Fierce people.
People full of fighting. He knew the only way to make a Crow love something is give her time to love it herself.” Her cataracts
were like clouds passing between us, but I believe she saw me sharply when she said, “You’re a Crow. Like me, you have war
in you. A warrior. The Neige Courante? They fish. They gather. The Crow fight. Never be ashamed. Your fighting ways come from
my blood. Be proud of that.” And then she lay back and closed her eyes.
The next day, when Maw-Maw’s breathing was even shallower, she made me go under her bed again. This time I knew what I was
looking for: I brought up the only other book I could find. There was no date in this second book, but it was also old and
heavy. I opened it and squinted at the tiny columns of letters, all that dense language piled up on top of itself like in
the Bible. Maw-Maw did not keep a Bible under her bed. It was not one of her most precious things. But though it was no Bible,
I recognized the book under her bed as a holy thing. I recognized it from childhood afternoons spent perched on Maw-Maw’s
lap. Later in my life, I would read “The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” and
laugh at the thought of my Maw-Maw hearing “strain’d” as “strange,” and then I would cry to think of how merciful she was,
strange herself, and strain’d too, by what the world had asked of her. The book was a beat-up copy
of Shakespeare’s Collected Works.
I have no idea who gave it to her (at the age of twelve, I did not know to ask such things), but the inscription reads,
November 18th, 1956. To Daisy: With undying affection for the Brave New World you’ve shown me, R.
In my twelfth summer, that summer of Maw-Maw’s death, her breath grated in her chest. Women were in and out of that house,
and they shooed me from her bedroom door. I was not to see her suffering. It would be too hard for me—who did not have a mother
worth mentioning or a father who’d acknowledge me—to see the only person who ever loved me ravaged by sickness. But Maw-Maw
and I were sneaky. I would tiptoe into her room in the moments when the house lay silent, when the sky was dark and her caretakers
were sleeping. She would say to me the most beautiful things: “Tell me my story, boy. I’m in a fog, lost. Wilderness is all
around me. Your voice can be my guide. Give me my life. I want to hear it.”
“But I don’t know your life. You’ve never told me. I didn’t even know you were a Crow until you gave me that
Red Mother
book, Maw-Maw.”
Her face made a laugh, but no sound came. “Foolish boy. I told you my life every day. It is my doings. It is my thinkings.
Tell me My Way. Tell me Our Way. But tell it like I am a character in the story. Do not let me know the story is about myself.
Tell me about Daisy. Her grandson Cal. Their doings. Their story will help me find my way out of this fog. Let me get the
rest my bones need.”
And so I would sit in the darkness and watch the Oregon moonlight shimmy across my Maw-Maw’s face and tell her what I could
remember of our times together. Everything we had ever done. The smell of fresh ginger cake, the taste of an alpine spring
in summertime, the day I ran away from her in the grocery store, the long walks we’d taken up the meadows of Mount Jefferson.
When the moon was bright enough, I sneaked in with her Shakespeare and read her that. I read her
National Geographic.
I read her
Red Mother.
I sang the songs we loved from the radio. I gave her the world. What I knew of it, at least. And when it was her time, she
died.