It Bites Into You

Abstract

It Bites Into You Gretchen Potter (bio) 1 Marlon is being banished from his home. In the old language, home can be said in a simple way that means “my standing house, my home.” A different word for home expresses the hold it has on you, how a person can be so connected that separation makes you homesick. Home sinks its teeth into you and is a part of you, you a part of it. That way of saying home is “it bites on my mind.” He’s walking down the most central road on the reservation, ushered away from his cabin by women wielding branches. It’s 8:30 a.m. He hasn’t slept for two days, and the women are lashing him from behind with red willow sticks. His terrycloth bathrobe does little to dull the pain. It’s like a last review, but he isn’t sure if he’s the one reviewing or being reviewed, if he’s the one in the coffin, or whether the scenes that slide by on either side of the road represent the dead. To the right is his mother Lenora’s brown and white house with the disparate, jutting angles of ill-planned additions, perched on a hill overlooking the shale-bottomed creek for which the tribe is named: Barren Creek. The creek is hardly barren; it’s a solid little river that swells in the spring and yields great runs of salmon and steelhead trout, as well as lesser but still significant runs of browns and rainbows. Marlon doesn’t stare at the house too long, and he isn’t allowed to stop. He’s lashed again. The house of his childhood, he won’t be allowed to see it again. A few days earlier, Marlon had stopped by. “My birds,” his mother had said, shaking her head. Behind the house, in view of the window from which Lenora did dishes, was a platform feeder heaped with bird seed and kitchen crumbs. Sparrows had been flying into the glass for the past week. Never before in 50 years had they mistaken her dusty window for clear sky, and Lenora was certain it was a sign. Some birds survived, but most hadn’t. Lenora worried as much, if not more, about her birds as she did about the suspected doom-to-come. “And you with your political nonsense,” Lenora had said, jabbing at Marlon’s chest with one bony finger. “Better be careful.” “No need to worry about me, Ma.” Lenora pouted out her lips and looked out the window, “My poor birds.” [End Page 83] 2 Marlon and the women are crossing the bridge over the creek. They’ve now passed the house of Marlon’s childhood. As a young boy, he hid toast in his sock drawer for those nights when Lenora left for the bars. He was afraid he’d end up like those boys in the legend, whose mother refused to give them so much as a small cake of corn bread. In that story, though, the mother wasn’t negligent; she just didn’t want them to leave on a war party. No provisions, she figured, then no sons can go off to war. The brothers danced to change her mind, but she still wouldn’t give them food for the journey. No bread, no war, thought the mother, who was trying to protect her sons. In protest, the brothers changed the beat of their water drum and danced a different dance. Their dance took them up into the skies, where they turned into stars. Even into Marlon’s adulthood, on the outer edges of his mind, he has felt like a small, hungry boy, vulnerable to the magic beat of a water drum. In a way, he had been sent up into the wide, open sky; he spent years as an ironworker, working 12-hour shifts six days a week, erecting tall buildings and bunking nights with other Indian ironworkers in a tenement flat in some city—New York or Philadelphia or Detroit. The cities, the jobs were all a blur of sameness. The few hours between work and sleep were donated to...