Geronimo's Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me - Hardcover

Nasdijj

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345453913 ISBN 13: 9780345453914

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2004

Synopsis

In Geronimo’s Bones, award-winning author Nasdijj has written a love song to his brother, Tso—short for The Smarter One—and the powerful bond that sustained the two of them through the grim reality of their childhood. Filled with poetic intensity and unfiltered emotion, Geronimo’s Bones is a visceral reading experience.

Born to migrant parents—his father a self proclaimed “cowboy” and his Navajo mother, tender-hearted and flawed—Nasdijj knew little of the conformity spreading across America in the 1950s. He was busy surviving the migrant camps in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, where despair and death were familiar faces. Nasdijj and Tso were boys racing trains and demons, whispering tales about Spider Woman, Sa, Geromino, and Coyote, the stories of their mother’s people that they had heard at bedtime. Nasdijj writes: “Geronimo is a voice who comes to me at night, when all the other creatures are asleep and the universe belongs to us.”

After their mother’s tragic death from alcohol, the young brothers were left in the care of their sometimes indifferent, often abusive, and occasionally loving father. Nasdijj and Tso rarely attended school, but they picked cotton, tomatoes, potatoes, apples, peaches, beans, and artichokes. To escape this indentured servitude, Nasdijj and Tso eventually stole a car and ran away.

Told in brilliant flashes of poetry, narrative, and song, Geronimo’s Bones reveals a world that to this day remains hidden from most Americans. But Nasdijj’s work derives its special power from his ability to capture the universal emotions that we all share: hate and love, loss and remembrance.

About this title

About the Author

Nasdijj was born in the American Southwest in 1950. His grew up partly on the reservation—his mother was Navajo—and partly in migrant camps around the country. He has been writing for decades, making ends meet by reporting for small-town papers, teaching, and migrant labor. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoirs The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping and The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and winner of the Salon Book Award. “Nasdijj” is Athabaskan for “to become again.” He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

And a Tin Can of Worms

In the beginning we were two scruffy boys who owned nothing more than a couple of cane poles, some fishing line, two hooks, two bobbers, two sinkers, and a tin can of worms.

My brother is the real fisherman.

His formal name is Shawnee, but we hardly ever call him that. We call him by his Indian nickname, Tso. Mama said if Anglos can have nicknames, then Indians can have them, too. She would then proceed to suck on her bottle of whiskey, joking with the men, slapping her knees that outrageous way she carried on when she told stories, and she’d laugh her big hyena laugh. You could hear Mama laughing up and down the extinct volcano she grew up on with her goats and sheep. I loved that part of her. The part of her that demanded there be some music in her life.

She would sit in her rocker and she would squeeze my brother on her lap like she would never let him go although in time she would allow all of us to go, and, in fact, Mama was the one who left us. Worn to a shadow, she disappeared into a lost vortex of existence, and there was no one and nothing that could save her. There are some people who can fit perfectly into the quiet, eternal life of the sheep camp. Mama was not one of these people. She wanted more. She did not know what more meant, but she was willing to find out what the rest of the world looked like. So she took off with the man who was our father, and the two of them saw that world they sought, as migrant workers who lived in a state of perpetual movement. That hard life took its toll on Mama and on Daddy even if he was one tough, mad, cold son-of-a-bitch, and that life just about turned my brother into a lunatic who would have to live in institutions the rest of his life. But no.

It was up to me, Mama, to turn things around, and I did that, Mama, I did that. Every cold-breath morning when my winter’s bones were in my beloved New Mexico, I would turn my eyes to gaze back at the volcano that was always there. Always waiting with its sheep camps, and quiet, dignified people. The people who walk the surface of the earth. There are no other people quite like them, the Navajo. The volcano waits, and the volcano watches. The minutiae and the vastness of our individual existences, our inconsolable sorrows, and the deep canyons with their rivers of memory running as they do into the sea.

I have forgiven her for that. Her leaving us. Mama, I forgive you. Mama, I understand. I know what it was you wanted. She would hold me in her lap like she had held my brother, and squeeze me like a rock as well. You had to value the part of her that would compress just about any situation to see if she could put her hands around it, and drip the humor out. As if we boys were her morning grapefruit. As if a laugh might be a pound of gold.

It was often like squeezing blood from stones: finding the humor in what was more likely tragedy. But we learned a lot from our darkly mysterious mother, and one of the things we learned was that, depending on your point of view, the humor in a thing could outweigh the tragedy two for one. Humor, she was apt to point out, was harder to locate, so therefore it stood to reason that humor was the more valuable property. “It will save you, too,” she’d claim. Humor saved each and every one of us, if at different times. If we had not been able to laugh at ourselves, putting tongue in cheek, literally, we would not have survived the migrant life we lived. The life we lived made it just about impossible to form lasting, intimate relationships with anyone. It was no accident that my brother and I grew up as close as we did. Now that we are men, there is some distance between us, and that is good, and healthy. We are still able to laugh about it, and us. Mama liked nothing more than a good, old-fashioned, head-tilted-back belly laugh. We called it her whiskey laugh and then she’d throw the bottle at us. We were not supposed to draw attention to her drinking. We’d run. Laughing. She called him T-S-O.

“Stands for The Smarter One,” she’d say.

“Why do we need so many names,” I asked her.

You had your white name. You had your Indian name. You had your nicknames. “And,” Mama would point out as was her way, “if you were born a Chiricahua, you could name yourself!”

Now, there was a radical idea. After passing the many tests of manhood the Apaches put their males through, an Apache male might name himself. I asked my brother, Tso, who he would be if he were a Chiricahua. He thought carefully. As a warrior might. Your name was important.

“I would be Stands in Middle of the River.”

Now, there’s a name. A good one. I liked it.

“I would be . . .” I had to squeeze my eyes some to think about it. “. . . Geronimo,” I said.

My brother scoffed. “You’re a little late ain’tcha? Somebody already got that name.” Eyes to the sky.

I didn’t care. When you are five years old, you can be whoever you want. I wanted to be like Geronimo because Geronimo was brave and resolutely able to see into the deserts of his dreams. Geronimo was more than a childhood fixation. Speaking as he did of wisdoms and secrets, he was the only voice I knew who had the strength to chase the other voices in my head away. When Geronimo was with me, the cacophony of other voices, everyone telling me what to do, would disappear like smoke drifting out of the hogan and up through the smoke hole, where it mingles with the stars.

I had seen it with my eyes when Geronimo had come to me at night like the Trickster that he was. The cooking smoke would disappear and the voices would recede.

My brother was the only one who knew.

About the voices.

Tso, cool in the middle of the turbulent river. The rivers push, demand, and mandate. Seeking dominace as is their way, having cut through canyons and worn away the rocks. My brother, steadfast in the middle of some ice-mountain river.

My brother is the real fisherman.

I prefer soaking up the warmth of the rock. As a fisherman, I am usually faking it. I will even break the stupid rules and speak while men are fishing.

Fifteen thousand men in three thousand four hundred and sixty-two boats all trolling off the coast of Santa Cruz got on their radios and angrily shusssshhhhhed me—ssssshhhhh—quiet, don’t you know the fish can hear?

Not really. Okay. Okay. The fish can hear. I am always amused by the fishermen who claim that fish can hear you talking. Do they really think the seventy-five-horsepower Johnson engine that got them there was silent on the way?

My brother is the better (decidedly more quiet) fisherman. If he asks me to go fishing with him, I always go. No one else especially wants to fish with me and I can’t say I blame them. At least Tso knows it will be hard for me to keep my mouth shut all the time.

Odd. The two of us have always liked the same things. Even if we are very different. Football in the fall. The volcano our grandmother lived on. Coors before it went east. A Navajo Yehbechai (a sing). A well-drifted nymph (fish bait) on a brand-new line flowing slowly toward the ocean just south of Ukiah, California, as the sun burns the earth again in a rush of blue and radioactive red. Thunder in the distance like a call to arms. Fishing anywhere in Idaho. Fixing truck engines (especially early-model F-150s). Swimming. Girls. Worms. Tying our own fishing flies. Not working. Writing. Reading with flashlights under the Navajo quilts our ancient grandmother made long before her grandsons were due to arrive.

They were due. Those boys. They were overdue. They arrived.

We arrived one one year, and two, the next year, and to an infinity of hands to catch us, and arms to wrap themselves around us, screaming and crying, kicking and fussing, and making sure that the family of singers whose arms we had arrived into knew in no uncertain terms that we were here. All of it was so much bigger than we were.

We were.

That was a story in and of itself.

We were. Singers, too. Singing in Navajoland is not what singing is in the land of the bilagaana (white person). A sing in Navajoland would be seen as dancing or dancing the dances of celebration in Anglo culture. To be alive was to dance.

To be alive was to sing with color and light. To be alive was to embrace the night.

Now that we are men, and capable of looking back at those times when we only were, we are able, too, to see new paths through that deep and wild-with-clover woods. Where we landed into the arms of the People Who Tended to Their Sheep. These were my mother’s People. The Navajo refer to Themselves as: the people who walk the surface of the earth.

Those words are the way my brother and I have lived our lives. We have walked in beauty all over the surface of the planet. We have never had a fight. Not a real one. Plenty of pretend ones. Plenty of pushing and shoving and rolling in the grass. We share everything.

Books. We wonder, too, if books have saved our lives. As men, we are always sharing books. We often make our own books. Tso is always sending me stuff he wrote, and I am always sending him stuff I’ve tried, anyway, to write. I have learned the hard way not to let Other People see that writing.

Daddy always said, “Nasdijj, you learn the hard way.” He would shake his head. Then he’d turn me upside down and shake me to listen for the loose screws. At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. I do now though. I am always learning. The hard way.

There is nothing I can write or paint that shakes my brother. He is always kind. He is always steadfast in his love for me. His loyalty never wavers. He is always fun to make things with. My brother is the better writer (and the better painter) but he would be far too shy to put any of it into a public context. The good stuff, he claims, writ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0345453913
• ISBN 13: 9780345453914
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320