Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Kent Nerburn
I had hoped. He was a thinker, pure and simple, who had looked long and hard at the world around him.
His work wasn’t polished. It wasn’t even finished. Pages were filled with disconnected observations and long unpunctuated paragraphs. Thoughts were scrawled on hunks of napkins and the backs of envelopes.
But beneath the fragmentary disorder lay a level of insight that was as deep and as clear as a mountain lake.
“I’d be honored to help you with this,” I said.
“Good. I want it all fixed. I want things to sound right.”
“It sounds good now,” I told him.
“No, not the way I want. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. There are things you white people need to hear. I want them to sound good so people don’t say, ‘Oh, that’s just an old Indian talking.’”
“Well,” I laughed, “You are an old Indian talking.”
Instantly I could feel I had made a mistake. He turned and looked away from me. Without looking back at me he spoke very slowly. “White people have always tried to make us into animals. They want us to be like animals in a zoo. If I don’t sound good, like a white person thinks sounds good, you just make me into another animal in the zoo.” He got up and walked to the sink. He kept his back toward me. “I’m tired now. I’m going to bed.”
My cheeks burned. I knew I had offended him.
Once more I had been a white person who had talked before I had thought. But I had seen enough of his writing to believe that it was more important than my feelings, or even his.
I tried one more time.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”
“I’m going to bed,” he said without turning around. He padded into the bedroom and shut the door.
I sat there in silence, listening to the erratic buzzing of the fluorescent light over my head. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of writing him a note, but that seemed stupid. I got up and turned off some of the lights. Then I put the tattered pages of the old man’s writing under my arm, and went out the door.
I got almost no sleep that night. The motel bed was lumpy and the trucks roaring by on the highway outside shook the walls. But it was my own anguish that kept me awake.
I had never before done anything like taking those pages. The old man hadn’t offered them to me. It was a gift for him to even show them to me. Then I had gone and stolen them. I felt like the worst white man who had ever lived, gaining the trust of an Indian then using it to my advantage.
But I kept telling myself there was more to my action than that. I wanted to show the old man that I could be trusted, and the only way I could do it was to take a chance on his trust.
All night I pored over the writing. I rearranged paragraphs and corrected grammar. I tried to link up themes and organize chapters around ideas. Then I tried to write it in a way that sounded like the old man’s voice. By 4:30 I had created one chapter that felt right. I wrote it out in longhand and fell asleep just as the sun was beginning to color the edges of the curtains.
I awoke around 7:30. I was afraid the old man would be up and find the manuscript gone. I washed and got dressed and made my way out to the house without stopping to eat.
There was another car parked next to the house.
I waited by my car until someone came to the door. It was a younger woman — the old man’s granddaughter. She gestured me in.
I went up the steps and found the old man sitting at the table. He was eating oatmeal and bacon. I immediately put the tattered pages down beside him. He didn’t look at me.
“I tried to make a chapter sound like he might want it to,” I said to the woman. With every fiber of my being I wanted to keep talking — to explain myself and justify myself. Most of all I wanted some kind of response from them. But I knew I had to keep quiet.
“Read it, Wenonah,” the old man said.
I sat there in silence while she read my words in her soft, lilting voice. They sounded stilted to me — not good at all.
When she had finished the old man tapped the table with his crippled finger. “Have some coffee,” he said.
I could barely suppress a smile. I knew I had passed some kind of test, but I didn’t know how or why.
She poured me a cup from the big enamel pot.
“That’s what I wanted you to do,” he said. “Make it sound like that. Make it sound like I graduated from Haskell.”
CHAPTER TWO
BURNT OFFERINGS
It was several months before I was able to make the drive back out to the old man’s reservation. I had gone home with a pile of tattered notebook sheets and several shoe boxes of notes scribbled on everything from napkins to cash register slips. One of the boxes had contained a selection of clippings from newspapers that the old man had collected over the years. Some of them were obituaries of friends. Others were articles on subjects ranging from Indian affairs to politics. There were several Ann Landers columns and a few advertisements. I had been unable to discern any pattern to them, or to divine any reason why he had chosen to collect them in a shoe box, much less to send them home with me.
But I had not asked questions.
In the months that had passed I had spent many hours laying out pieces of paper and cobbling phrases and notations together into thematic unities. As I drove up the pathway to his house, I was excited but apprehensive. I had crafted a few good chapters, or so I thought. But still, it seemed artificial and vaguely unsatisfying, as if it were more my work than his. I was anxious to see how he would receive it.
Fatback was lying in her usual place on the stoop. She barked once, then scuttled off into the dirt hollow she had dug beneath the junk car. I could hear laughing inside the house.
Soon the old man appeared at the door. He gestured me in with a flap of his wrist. “Haven’t been around for a while,” was all he said. For all his surprise and sense of ceremony, I might have been gone only fifteen minutes.
Three men were sitting around a table, playing cards. They were all old, but none so old as the old man himself. The house was filled with cigarette smoke. The TV was blaring in the corner.
One of the men looked up and said, “Who’s that? Grizzly Adams?” It was said with good humor and directed at the old man, as if he, not I, were responsible for explaining my presence. The other men laughed a bit and nodded, then turned back to their cards. Other than that, no one paid any attention to me. The old man didn’t introduce me or offer me a place to sit.
One of the men threw three cards on the table. “Son of a bitch,” said another, and they all burst into laughter. I had my packet of Prince Albert to offer the old man, but it seemed strange and inappropriate. I stood silently, holding my computer printouts and listening to the buzz of the fluorescent light over my head.
“Wasichu play cards?” one of the men said to the old man. I recognized the Lakota term for “white man.”
“Don’t know,” he answered. He pointed toward me with the ash of his cigarette. “Hey, Nerburn. You play cards?”
“No,” I answered. “I never really learned.”
One of the men grunted. I was no longer significant. He began dealing a new hand while I stood awkwardly in the doorway, disregarded and forgotten.
Suddenly, as if he had been waiting, the old man said, “Well, read one.” The others