Jumping Read online

  Granny pushes the bag of flour away as if it now weighs more than she can lift. She dusts her hands on the towel on her shoulder and comes around the table to sit in the over-stuffed chair across from me—the only other piece of furniture in the living room. Her hands sit open in her lap, bereft of anything to hold.

  “Yes, the elders have always known more than they ever say. I think they don't understand it all themselves, so how can they unravel its story? And maybe they're ashamed of it,” she says as she looks thoughtfully at the little fire.

  “Ashamed?”

  “Most of the Tribe has always considered the Void a place of ceremony, and we were comfortable doing that—vision quests, dream interpretation, naming ceremonies, that kind of thing—for as long as anyone could remember. We considered it a doorway to Great Mystery and made many offerings there. But I think the elders have secretly seen the Void as a place that accepts the Tribe's failures, because they see jumping as a failure—a failure to manage life. So they attach shame to the Void. And a jump happens in too public a way—a way that's harder to hide.”

  She stops a moment. “I think we feel every failure as our own, too, and we're afraid they weaken us, weaken our ability to succeed at life.”

  “But why did the Void allow suicide jumps?”

  “They weren't suicide jumps, Carrie Jean. If they're allowed to jump, we just don't have the complete story. The Void doesn't make mistakes. The Tribe forgets this.”

  This direct, intense attention from her humbles me. She was always so busy, focused on several tasks at once, herding my brother and me into helping her. Sitting quietly like this, she almost seems like another person.

  “Of course, rumors sprang up around it—people had only an incomplete story. They thought it was a story about a woman who jumped, but that wasn't true. The woman had just disappeared. It was a child who jumped.”

  “A child?” I croak, unable to catch a full breath.

  She continues to look at me, unblinking. “It stunned everybody. No one knew what else to do but keep it secret, which was always the Tribe's way for most things. The child—a girl—belonged to the woman everyone thought had jumped.”

  After a moment, she says, “Your mother.”

  “Your daughter,” I whisper. “My sister jumped?”

  Granny nods. “My granddaughter.” She pulls her eyes away from me and looks off again into the space in front of her.

  “She was a fierce little thing. I thought she was an incarnation of my younger self. I was so proud of her. She was so smart. She comprehended things before I could put them together. I'd see the realization in her eyes and know she had already gone somewhere else, ahead of me.” She looks back at me. “A child jumped, but she did it for the adults.”

  “Wait a minute. What happened? How did such a thing happen?”

  “Let me get some water,” Granny says, rising stiffly from her chair, as if she's been sitting for hours. It's only been a few minutes.

  “Let's make some tea.” I feel in need of some sustenance, something to warm the coldness that's now inside me. I'm weary from this day, but I rise, too, moving to the kitchen, glad for something to do. It's too much to sit with.

  Granny lights the fire under the kettle on the stove. The kettle always has water in it—that's a habit from the old days, too, when you had to travel to the source to get it. I get the tin of loose tea leaves from the shelf above the sink. I bring it to the kitchen table where Granny has already set out two mugs and the old, chipped Fiestaware tea pot, which is a cheerful yellow. I use the tea ball to scoop tea from the tin, then close the ball and hook it onto the rim of the tea pot. We settle into chairs at the table to wait for the watched pot to boil. The bread makings are still there, unused, which never happens in this kitchen.

  “I wish I still used tobacco,” Granny says, surprising me. I hadn't known she ever had. “Or drank alcohol,” she adds, looking at me with a smile. “Though I never really did.”

  I find myself smiling back. Why should I be surprised to see that I still love her? Because, she and her secrets have tormented me and my brother for years, leaving us to live with gaps in knowing that made us unable to direct our own lives. Did it cost Jimmy Lynn his life? How much of the responsibility for that belongs to her? I'm unable to ask her that, still wondering how much it might have been my fault. How do any of us hold ourselves blameless?

  The kettle whistles, and Granny gets it, turns off the fire, and brings it to the table to fill the pot. “We'll let it steep for a few minutes, to build its strength,” she says.

  We wait, and as we do, she takes my hands in hers, studying them. This action is so uncommon that it speaks volumes to me—she still wishes she could spare me this telling of the truth, but she knows she can't. It's time—I'm old enough.

  We will be equal now, two grown women, moving forward together, no longer separated by age. Girls don't become women when the Tribe celebrates their first menstrual cycle. They become women when life's events make them so.

  “Rebecca,” she says, “that was her name. She was eight years old. You and Jimmy Lynn would have been three. She had a different father than you two did. His name was Robert. He was what we used to call a half-breed. One of his parents had been white, and he showed it.”

  She looks at me. “That means he could often pass for white, which he did. He had come down from Canada, looking for work, he said. Probably looking for more than that. He parked cars at the country club. Sometimes he would drive for some of the members when they came out our way to hunt. They always needed a driver because they really came out to party, just like they do nowadays. And those men liked him. He seemed almost one of them—he had some education, manners, charm. They picked him often as a driver, and some of them came out our way for more than just hunting.” She stops and pours tea into both our mugs, looking up at me, and I nod to let her know, yes, I get what she's talking about.

  “When he was with us, he seemed like one of us. He'd come out by himself and hang out at the Tribal store, meeting people, talking. He spoke native in a way that let you know he'd learned it at home. He was funny. We liked him.

  “To this day, I don't know how or when he and your mother met. All I know is that he started pulling up outside the house in his old Buick, and she'd go out to meet him. She was still in high school, but I couldn't do anything with her, short of wrestling her to the ground, which I'd tried a time or two, I can tell you. But I knew it did no good. I will say that I think he was smitten with her, too.”

  She looks directly at me again, reading me. “Yeah, it's an old story.” She shakes her head. “Why do you suppose it keeps happening?”

  “It's new to the people it's happening to?” It's all I can think of to say. It's not hard to imagine it happening to me. Don't we want it to happen to us? To have a great, all-consuming love that nothing can stop? Isn't that true of all of us, no matter our origins? Isn't it true of Granny? I look at her and think maybe it is, or at least was, but that's not a story she tells, either.

  Granny sips her tea and then says, as if she's heard my thoughts again, “I suppose you're right. I suppose that's how it looks to us when we're caught in it—something not to be denied, something that comes before anything else, something that takes the place of food and water and sleep. We just don't know that it won't stay that way.”

  She gets up and goes to the breadbox by the stove. She pulls out her secret stash of Girl Scout cookies—her one real weakness. She buys boxes of them by the dozen when the selling season rolls around, and she freezes them for later, so that she'll never be without. The Samoas are her favorite, though they're not called that any more except by her, and she usually hates to share them. Now she puts a few on a plate and puts the plate in the center of the table, near both of us, so I know I'm allowed to have some.

  “The rest of it is an old story, too. I bet you could guess it. Girl gets pregnant, boy gets scared and runs. Girl's heart is broken. Boy can't stay away.” She nibbl
es a cookie, though I don't think they're providing much comfort. “Natalie Wood and James Dean—that's who they reminded me of—always battling the grown-up world. Do you remember them?”

  I nod, sipping my tea, remembering Rebel Without a Cause and all those old movies that would come on just after I got home from school. Maybe my mother used to watch them, too. “Maybe that's how we get brainwashed into trying to make their stories our stories, even if their stories are tragedies,” I say.

  “This back-and-forth continues until Rebecca is born. Then they decide to settle down. He's working at the feed store, parking cars at night, so they can afford to rent a little two-room house over off Crawford,” she says, referring to a two-block street not far from here. “But I don't think settling down is in his nature, or at least it wasn't then. It's a fight he's having with himself, but she's the only visible opponent, so it's with her he fights. There's not much satisfaction in that, and it just drives him to drink.” She pauses to add more tea to her mug and then takes the tea ball from the pot and puts it in the sink. She comes back to sit in her chair, picks up her mug and stares into the space in front of her again.

  I can't imagine what all these memories dredge up for her. That's another reason these stories don't get told.

  “Time passes before the settling-down thing really disagrees with him. It's hard for him to come home every night to the same thing. No adventure. So he starts taking little trips, into the city, sometimes north, sometimes who knows where. What we do know is that he's home less and less, and when he is, they're fighting more and more. Finally he tells her he's taken a job up north. He'll try to make some money and then come back. Of course he'll be back, he says. Meanwhile, she and Rebecca move in with me.” She looks at me again. “I love having them here, but the spark has gone out of her.”

  “She still loves him.”

  “She still loves him,” Granny agrees.

  “What happens next?” I ask, feeling as if the story is coming to a close.

  “She hears from him less and less—an occasional late-night, drunken love call; occasional checks in the mail and sometimes they bounce. Soon it's been months, and life begins to move on without him. They had never married, so there is no pledge to hold them together. Rebecca is four, in pre-school, though I think she could have taught it, she was that bright. Your mom is waitressing. We've settled into our own routines and life is peaceful.

  “Suddenly your dad, Benny, is now part of the picture. Brought in by a car—isn't that the way? Girls riding in cars. He gives her rides home from work, where he is a waiter, too. And he lives right here with the Tribe. He's one of us. I have hopes. I like him. They're good together. They come in after their shifts and take over my kitchen. They cook, they serve, they even clean up. And it's good. Little Rebecca laughs like I've never heard her laugh. She's enchanted with him and him with her. They've become a family.

  “Soon, once again, your mom is pregnant—with you and your brother. Your mom and dad decide to marry, without telling us. They go to a justice of the peace in the city and come home married. Then they go to live with his parents, who have more room than I do, so I don't see them so much, though I hear things, because their business is more out in the community now. His parents drink and are on welfare, but their hearts seem to be in the right place, and they're peaceful drunks, gradually falling asleep as they drink, hurting no one, except maybe by neglect. They sponsor a traditional ceremony for your parents, and things are done right for the beginning of their lives together. You two are born and again ceremonies are held, to welcome you two and give you your first names and celebrate your first laughs. Rebecca seems right at home with it all, and you two worship her from the start. She has found her place in the world, which is the big sister in the middle of your world, seeing the two of you get raised right. Some time passes. And then what do you think happens?”

  “Robert comes back,” I say with conviction, knowing it must be so.

  “Apparently things didn't go so well for him up north, so he comes back down here, a little the worse for wear, expecting to pick up where he left off. He doesn't like what he finds. And I think he's hardly ever sober now. So, it only takes one night for it all to go to pieces. I can tell you what I heard from others and what I know because I saw it myself. What I heard was that she agreed to meet him, out at the Void, apparently an old favorite place of theirs. I don't know if she agreed to meet him because she still loves him or just to placate him.

  “I don't feel good about this and know that I must go out there, too. Benny apparently felt the same way, because he goes out there, before the appointed meeting time. What none of us knew was that Rebecca stowed away in the back of Benny's truck, apparently worried about it all and determined to do her part to preserve the family. Also, this is her father who has come to town, and she must be having some feelings about that, too. She's only eight. What could she be doing with this adult-world melodrama?

  “I go out in the morning, doing ceremony at the Void. I go to pray and to seek guidance, offering tobacco, corn, and other things in gratitude for the help I knew would be forthcoming. I had visions during the day and knew someone was going to jump into the Void. I knew I wasn't meant to stop it. I was there to witness so I could be of support to others. I can't think of anything harder—not to try to save the people you care most about, but it's not the first time I've been asked to do this.

  “Before I know it, night has come, and I'm sitting in the dark at the edge of the Void. There's a half moon up, and its glow pales the clearing, making it hard to see where things begin and end. I hear a car coming up the dirt road and I move back into the trees, making myself small and invisible. I'm quiet, knowing things are at work here over which I have no control. I pray.

  “Robert is out of the car, and I hear him moving through the grass up to the Void. He stands at the edge, and the wind from the Void moves his hair. He pulls a flask from his jacket pocket and takes a deep drink. He puts the flask away and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. Then he turns abruptly and walks back towards his car. As he does so, I see the lights of your mother's car coming up the road. He's there to meet her when she pulls off the road. She gets out of the car and I can hear them exchanging words that I can't make out. She won't let him touch her. I continue to pray, working to surround them with prayer. Soon they're closer to me, between me and the Void. I can hear them clearly now.

  “I'm married!” she says. “And that means something to me! There's no place for you in that. It was never what you wanted anyway.”

  “I always wanted you,” he tells her. “That hasn't changed.”

  “It has for me,” she says. “That's what I'm saying.”

  “I don't believe you,” he says and moves to kiss her.

  “She's wrestling with him, though I think he gets a kiss or two in. I'll never know if that's what she wanted. All of a sudden, a form comes out of the dark and lands on them. It's your father, Benny, who must have parked down the road and snuck up on them. He's trying to fight Robert, and your mother is caught in the middle of it. The three of them fall to the ground, scuffling.

  “Then we all hear a high-pitched scream, a child's scream, and everything stops. It's Rebecca, who has found her way to them. All three of them start to disentangle themselves and get up, to move towards her. Before they can do so, she has moved to the edge of the Void. She stops for a moment and looks back over her shoulder at them. I can't read her expression. By then I've moved out of the woods.

  “‘Rebecca!’” your mother screams, a terrible sound, and then Rebecca jumps. She's gone. There's only dark at the edge of the Void.

  “The shock of it stops even the world for a moment. I feel the trees recoil, and sound and movement in the forest stops. I think of Rebecca falling into the dark of that sacred space. I have a relationship with the Void, built over many ceremonies, many prayers, many talks. Every loss I ever had was shared and healed there. I can't think of it as a bad place to fall. But I know
it's bad for those who watched it happen. And I, too, want her back. That was the first time I had ever seen anyone jump.

  “Then we start to move. Your mother half crawls, half runs to the Void's edge, and I think would have hurtled herself in after her daughter if both men hadn't stopped her. Robert is making unintelligible sounds or sobs. He and your father look at each other, if they can see each other in the dark, and Robert lets go of your mother. He turns and stumbles back to his car and drives off. He leaves what's left of his spirit there. I never see him again. It was rumored that he drank his way back up north and then finished the job of obliterating his memories and himself when he got there.

  “Your father wants to get your mother away from the Void, hoping that will get her away from the worst of her pain, so she can begin to return to herself. Of course she doesn't want to leave. I come out of the woods to help them. I find the old comforting words, and I chant them. These words are unintelligible to them, just sounds, but on a deeper level, I know they hear them. Your mother just collapses. Your father lifts her and takes her to her car. He tells me to take his truck. He realizes I must have walked over there. I follow him, and he brings her here and we put her to bed.” She pauses to settle her emotions, taking a sip of her now-cold tea. She looks back up at me, checking. She continues.

  “Her life went on after that, but she never returned to inhabit it. She just went through the motions. You and your brother stayed out with your father and his parents. I don't know how Benny managed. I hardly saw him. It seemed his heart had been broken twice. Soon he left, too, supposedly to find work, but I think because he just couldn't bear to live that close to the source of his pain. He believed your mother loved Robert, that that's why she had gone out there that night. She never said otherwise. She never said anything.