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By Root 271 0

pieces out of red willow. This passed his time between the great troughs and crests of his diminished life. If he prayed, it was for the numb peace that gave his hands the steadiness to work with those tools without one hand cutting off the other hand. He was, yes, tempted. Sometimes hating what his own hands had done he imagined taking the saw to them. But which hand would cut the other off? Which would die, which be saved, which would he choose? Sometimes he favored cutting off the right, for the right hand had certainly done the most damage. But then the sly hand would remain, the hand that pretended to be weaker and clumsier, but really wasn’t. He would be left with the fist that sucker punched, the hand of deceit, the fingers that should have reached out to gather back his daughter when she left him lying in stubborn grief, and went out to join her mother on the wagon.

“That was it,” he said one afternoon in the middle of one of his hand-hating reveries. He looked at his hands and flexed his fingers, broad palms, thick square fingers cushioned with calluses from his work, and saw them suddenly as innocent. Why should they suffer when they’d only done as Shaawano himself commanded? He thought immediately, with some relief, to put a bullet through his brain and send off the real culprit.

“That was it,” he said again. The brain, the brain had commanded all of Shaawano, had told him to let his wife go off one winter day to live with Pillager. Maybe if Shaawano’s brain had only willed his wife to stay, Anaquot would have, and then that wrong-hearted passion would have gone spent, she would eventually have accepted her place on this side of the lake, and his little girl, his baby sweetheart, would have grown up beside him. Instead, his daughter’s graceful bones were picked clean by ravens. He had gathered them up, his tears freezing into an ice mask across his face, and put them in a place that only he knew about.

Now he dropped his chin to his chest and squeezed his head in his hands, but even as he put on the pressure until his eyes burned, he knew it wasn’t really his brain but his heart that had made the decision to let Anaquot go. The heart with its pride, the heart that couldn’t bear his wife’s heart to have turned away. Shaawano’s heart had refused to be patient and instead behaved with an impetuous, despairing fury. His heart had fought itself and lost. His heart had bested the brain with all its reasons. Yes, it was his own stubborn heart that failed. A knife would cut his heart out fine. Just fine. He would throw his offending heart to the ravens, yelling, “Here, have that too!”

And so it went with my grandfather. He put first one part of his body and then another on trial. Each was found guilty at first but then pointed to another culprit. He judged his limbs, his eyes, his ears, his bones, his blood. He weighed the evidence against each but always, in the end, could not think how to mete out proper justice and so had to admit, having gone over his whole body from hair to fingernail, that the criminal was not within him but outside of him. The culprit was made up of some force or intangible extra self he could only call his spirit.

Kill that! he urged himself then, but knew even as he cried out that he had already done so. He’d tried to poison his spirit, drowned it methodically, savagely, choked it off. Alcohol had been the tool. He thought back to when he took the first drink of his first real dirty drunk and remembered how he’d wept into the amber flame deep in the cup and how his sorrow had been answered with a spreading warmth and a forgetting.

“That was it,” he said one more time. The pain in his life had started because he needed to forget. Now, with no part of himself left to blame, and in the ruin of his spirit, my grandfather remembered.

He remembered how his daughter had curled in the crook of his arm when he sat with her listening to the old people talk around the fire during berry-picking time. He never brushed away his little girl, even when she clung to his pant leg. Instead, he crouched at