Beulah Land by Krista McGruder

My grandmother has many good stories and she writes them freely as she fills each page of her life, recording hours that belong exclusively to her now my grandfather is gone. She writes in an enormous, leather-bound volume that begins with a page devoted solely to her name. A luxury. Every other page contains rows of tiny writing that I can only describe as spidery, though that term is antiquated. Of course keeping a journal is antiquated, but I do not attempt to convince her that words will fail her as surely as human flesh. That words can appease, amuse and sadden but are quickly forgotten.

She believes differently. Nelly Slimfeather uses words to trace deep paths in towering black peaks topped by sparse needle trees. She creates tales where men and women of similar blood summon benevolent spirits from boulders, cliffs and water. Tales in which people meet death because they acted with greed or malice. She scorches paths into her hillsides with the energy of her burning blood, marking her way as clearly as if she had anchored bright, flowing flags.

When we speak together, she professes that stories have comforted her people for centuries. That death is only a marker on the path traveled under the shadow of a long spear.

I do not trust in her paths and do not seek comfort in her habit of stories. My native blood is drying and leaving me, like a snakeskin shed in the sun, its former inhabitant slithered and disappeared into the woods, under the rocks or perhaps, into the water, with only a diamond-cut head and a hissing, stinging pink tongue visible. Waiting to grow a protective new skin and seek refuge under the shadow of a large and unmoving mountain.

There are lies people tell because they know someone will disapprove and lies people tell because they hope someone will disapprove. I tell lies to my friends, stories about men I've known, or if I'm really on a spree, women. I tell lies to my colleagues, exaggerating how much I drink or how much I gamble or how rudely I behave toward women pushing baby strollers on the wrong side of the sidewalk. There is the thrill of watching their eyes widen, listening for even tones and the practiced quenching of judgment. There is something in me, they must think, so much raw, native blood of the kind that could kill and be killed with stoicism, native blood that forbids women to cry out in childbirth.

Do they believe me? When have they seen me careen out of bars, man on one arm and woman on the other and when have they seen me push pregnant women out of my way or miss my mortgage payment because I spent the day at the track? I wonder when my grandmother speaks of her own life that in this, our blood runs the same. I wonder if her tales are meant to push her listeners and bind their spirits with misgivings. Setting her free, I suppose, to laugh at all of them, even at me. Say what you will, I imagine her singing and flying above the ground, drifting in and out of the cover of cloud banks, you never will know me.

"I dated a man from the Indian Bureau," my grandmother tells me, sitting hunched and still in the red chair with the small brown pillow on the seat, to cushion the pressure on her old bones. I wonder about her bones, how sturdy their composition, how long they can hold out before they snap.

"Grandpa's problem?" I have attempted to pry this story from her, demanded it of her. I do not care whether it hurts her to speak of it. So I ask it of her again, testing for softness that should reside in old women. I am many glasses into my wine and my cheeks flush. I can feel it. I need no mirror to indicate my blood is rising.

"Yes. He didn't know what else to do about the problem with the Bureau."

I understood. The agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs distributed Congressional money. Making sure, however, to include fees for themselves. The representatives were usually natives with wives, children and in-laws who became dependent on the bribes, an accepted method of redistributing the white man's money.

My grandmother motions and I comply. I lift the silver tongs, pluck three cubes from the sterling silver ice bucket and deposit them in her glass. The serving set is a relic of my mother's. She enjoyed expensive objects and could, thanks to my grandmother, afford them easily. My mother and I-also beneficiaries of redistributed white man's money.

"What happened to that man?" I ask, hoping she will slip, hoping the alcohol will overcome her age and prudence.

"You know I don't know." Nelly Slimfeather is not ashamed of her crime. But she does not want to be caught. Even now, when gossip about her capital offense would be dismissed as the type of romanticizing about ancestors that I endure at blue-blood parties, she is cautious. Cautious about what might happen to her money, my money, if someone knew or suspected. Blackmail is never out of the question-as she understands-and so she is circumspect about who gains access to the home she has been allotted and the words she guards in her journal.

"When did you date him? Before or after you were married?" I ask, though I already know the answer. She has told me this story before, whispered it to me the night my mother was killed with a bullet to her head. I do not know if my grandmother remembers sitting in the darkened kitchen with me, drinking whiskey while my grandfather sobbed loudly in his upstairs bedroom. Yes, she whispered facts to me that night, but because of her drunkenness, her grief, and at the end of that cold night in late spring, her body's rejection of the day's ingestion of alcohol, I do not believe she remembers. I held her over the toilet, scared that she, too, might die but curious about the long-past affair, curious if my own mother had known. I am curious still.

"After." She reaches for the crackers, the only food she eats now. The crackers were my discovery, soft baked bread that does not hurt her teeth. She has not softened in her old age but perhaps this will not serve her well and she will break. I watch for signs that she is breaking. "What do you mean by dated?" I am being crude, but hearing these related facts is like taking relief in a familiar lover. I feel sated during the caress of the words but want them to last longer. To last so long I grow tired of them and leave them behind.

"What do you think I mean?"
"Do you think Grandpa knew when you did it?"
"Probably not. I've always told myself he didn't. It wouldn't have helped him to know."
"What would he have done?"
"You know as much as I do."
"I really don't know what he would have done." This is true. I never knew much about my dead grandfather with the slight frame and the emphysema. He was kind to me, but he was not a life force, only the man who disappeared for days at a time to deliver pigs feet and other products. I was at the hospital when his lungs collapsed and he smiled at me while he suffocated, drowning in pulmonary fluid. He seemed content to leave the dusty cinderblock medical facility allocated to him as a naturalized tribal member, content to leave his life as the husband of a blood native. "I don't know enough about him. Maybe he would have killed you both." I am guessing, pushing, and feel I'm swimming through a river that runs along a white man's buffalo hunt; the animal blood is pooling, thickening the surface, hampering my progress. The alcohol, one of the great plagues of my ancestors, is hampering my progress. I am a shadow; my healthy, gym-trained flesh is dissolving into a flowing stream of stories, only my spirit hovers over the dry flesh of an old lady. My shadow is watching my body being swept away.
"Then you know as much as I do."

My grandmother signals for three more ice cubes. We sit and stare, searching each other's eyes for clues about secrets we reveal to one another in the hope that our greater, more dangerous secrets will stay with us.