Sherman Alexie - War Dances

CD burners, iPods, and iTunes

Have taken the place

Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon

Enough, clever introverts will create

Quicker point-and-click ways to declare

One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.

But I miss the labor

Of making old-school mix tapes — the midair

Acrobatics of recording one song

At a time. It sometimes took days

To play, choose, pause,

Ponder, record, replay, erase,

And replace. But there was no magic wand.

It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape

Was sculpture designed to seduce

And let the hounds loose.

A great mix tape was a three-chord parade

Led by the first song, something bold and brave,

A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”

Or “Let’s Get It On,” by Marvin Gaye.

The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”

or something by Hank. But O, the last track

Was the vessel that contained

The most devotion and pain

And made promises that you couldn’t take back.

Humans

In 1985, while attending Gonzaga University — a Jesuit institution — students shared the dining hall with fifty or sixty nuns who lived in a dormitory-turned-convent. We students didn’t think positively or negatively about this situation. We barely had any interaction with the holy women, though a few of us took to shouting, “Get thee to a nunnery!” at one another — but never at the nuns — after we took a Shakespeare class. I’m sure the nuns must have heard us shouting Hamlet’s curse at one another, but being a rather scholarly bunch, they were probably more amused than insulted.

Nature

The brown recluse spider is not an aggressive spider and attacks only when hurt or threatened. Its bite, however, contains a very aggressive poison that can form a necrotizing ulcer that destroys soft tissue and sometimes bone. So this six-eyed spider is passive and dangerous. And it’s strangely beautiful. It often has markings on its stomach and back that resemble violins. Yes, this spider could be thought of as a tattooed musician.

Collision

While waiting in the lunch line behind a nun, I noticed a brown recluse spider perched on her shoulder. I reflexively slapped the arachnid to the floor. The nun must have thought I’d slapped her in jest or cruelty because she turned and glared at me. But then I pointed at the brown recluse spider scuttling across the floor away from us. At first, the nun stepped back, but then she took two huge steps forward and crushed the spider underfoot. The nun gasped; I gasped. Mortified, she looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.” And then she looked down at the mutilated spider and said, “You, too.”

On October 5, 1877, in Montana’s Bear Paw Mountains, the starved and exhausted Nez Perce ended their two-thousand-mile flight and surrendered to General Oliver Howard and his Ninth Cavalry. When the legendary Nez Perce leader, Chief Joseph, stood and said, “My heart is sick

And

Sad.

From

Where

The

Sun

Now

Stands,

I

Will

Fight

No

More

Forever”

he thought they were his final words. He had no idea that he would live for another twenty-seven years. First, he watched hundreds of his people die of exile in Oklahoma. Then Joseph and his fellow survivors were allowed to move back to the Pacific Northwest but were forced to live on the Colville Indian Reservation, hundreds of miles away from their tribe’s ancestral home in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley. Exiled twice, Joseph still led his tribe into the twentieth century, though he eventually died of depression. But my grandmother, who was born on the Colville Indian Reservation, always said she remembered Joseph as a kind and peaceful man. She always said that Chief Joseph was her favorite babysitter.

Yes,

He

Would

Sit

In

His

Rocking

Chair

And

Braid

My

Grandmother’s

Epic

Hair.

I WROTE THE OBITUARY for the OBITUARIES editor. Her name was Lois Andrews. Breast cancer. She was only forty-five. One in eight women get breast cancer, an epidemic. Lois’s parents had died years earlier. Dad’s cigarettes kept their promises. Mom’s Parkinson’s shook her into the ground. Lois had no siblings and had never been married. No kids. No significant other at present. No significant others in recent memory. Nobody remembered meeting one of her others. Some wondered if there had been any others. Perhaps Lois had been that rarest of holy people, the secular and chaste nun. So, yes, her sexuality was a mystery often discussed but never solved. She had many friends. All of them worked at the paper.

I wasn’t her friend, not really. I was only eighteen, a summer intern at the newspaper, moving from department to department as need and boredom required, and had only spent a few days working with Lois. But she’d left a note, a handwritten will and testament, with the editor in chief, and she’d named me as the person she wanted to write her obituary.

“Why me?” I asked the chief. He was a bucket of pizza and beer tied to a broomstick.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s what she wanted.”

“I didn’t even know her.”

“She was a strange duck,” he said.

I wanted to ask him how to tell the difference between strange and typical ducks. But he was a humorless white man with power, and I was a reservation Indian boy intern. I was to be admired for my ethnic tenacity but barely tolerated because of my callow youth.

“I’ve never written an obituary by myself,” I said. During my hours at her desk, Lois had carefully supervised my work.

“It may seem bureaucratic and formal,” she’d said. “But we have to be perfect. This is a sacred thing. We have to do this perfectly.”

“Come on,” the chief said. “What did you do when you were working with her? She taught you how to write one, didn’t she?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Just do your best,” he said and handed me her note. It was short, rather brutal, and witty. She didn’t want any ceremony. She didn’t want a moment of silence. Or a moment of indistinct noise, either. And she didn’t want anybody to gather at a local bar and tell drunken stories about her because those stories would inevitably be romantic and false. And she’d rather be forgotten than inaccurately remembered. And she wanted me to write the obituary.

It was an honor, I guess. It would have been difficult, maybe impossible, to write a good obituary about a woman I didn’t know. But she made it easy. She insisted in her letter that I use the standard fill-in-the-blanks form.

“If it was good enough for others,” she’d written, “it is good enough for me.”

A pragmatic and lonely woman, sure. And serious about her work. But, trust me, she was able to tell jokes without insulting the dead. At least, not directly.

That June, a few days before she went on the medical leave that she’d never return from, Lois had typed surveyed instead of survived in the obituary for a locally famous banker. That error made it past the copy editors and was printed: Mr. X is surveyed by his family and friends.

Mr. X’s widow called Lois to ask about the odd word choice.

“I’m sorry,” Lois said. She was mortified. It was the only serious typo of her career. “It was my error. It’s entirely my fault. I apologize. I will correct it for tomorrow’s issue.”

“Oh, no, please don’t,” the widow said. “My husband would have loved it. He was a poet. Never published or anything like that. But he loved poems. And that word, survey— well, it might be accidental, but it’s poetry, I think. I mean, my husband would have been delighted to know that his family and friends were surveying him at the funeral.”