My Name Is Not Easy - By Debby Dahl Edwardson Page 0,45
feel, following Mullen down the dimly lit halls, knowing they managed to pick the wrong time and the wrong window. Knowing it’s a mistake that’s going to cost them. Big-time.
And now Father is standing there in his offi ce, telling them
that evil has consumed them, spawns of Satan. His words seem to vibrate in the air around them, like a deadly swarm of black mosquitoes. Father is so angry that whole sentences are rattling in his throat, just waiting to get out. Like wasps.
Th
e sound is so terrible, all they can do is stand there, in the middle of it, watching the way Father fondles that two-by-134
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T H E M E A N E S T H E A T H E N S / S o n n y a n d A m i q four in the buzzing darkness. Swinging it from one hand to the other like an animal playing with its prey.
“Spare the rod . . .” Father rattles, swinging hard.
It stings like hell, that two-by-four, swinging back and forth, fi rst to Amiq, then to Sonny, burning hot with every crack. Neither of them makes a sound, though—even when it feels like it’s crushing bone—because it’s the words Father says that sting worse than the blows. It’s the sound of Father Mullen’s voice, rasping like bees as he tells them both that they’re nothing more than dirty little savages and there’s no way in Hell either one of them could ever— ever—get into Heaven.
Nobody cares what happens to them except for Father, he hisses, because their people, their Native People, are as loose as rabbits with their kids.
Father is swinging that two-by-four back and forth like it’s a hammer, and the pain bites harder with each swing as he sinks his words—sharp as nails—right into them. All of them are doomed to Hell, he says, nearly out of breath— all of them: Sonny and his uneducated heathen mother along with Amiq and his no-good, drunken dad.
Amiq’s got a hard look on his face, and you can tell he’s shut Father out and gone someplace else, someplace mean and angry. You can tell he’s decided he wouldn’t go to Heaven even if they gave him a gold pass for the place.
Sonny’s thinking about his mom, who wouldn’t be at all proud to see him now. His mother, sewing slippers for the general’s wife, slippers with those tiny designs that make her eyes sting in the smoky light of the kerosene lamp. Sewing 135
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
just to keep the general’s wife’s feet warm so the general can go about his business of giving numbered juice to the kids at Sacred Heart School. Sewing just so both boys can stand there in front of Father to fi nd out there’s no possible way Father will ever forgive them for being heathens, even if there were some reason they wanted Father’s forgiveness, which right now, they do not.
Right now both Sonny and Amiq are determined as hell to be the meanest heathens ever, burrowing down into their own dark hides.
Waiting for their time to come.
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PART III
When the Time Comes
1962–1963
Giant chunks of blue green ice drift in the water around us, alive with icy breath.
Along the shore, patches of gray green tundra fl oat off into the mist, as distant as dreams.
When the fl ash of light comes, it’s sharp as a punch, brighter than any sun we’ve ever seen.
And then it’s gone,
and it’s just us, skimming across the smooth black sea, silent as spirits,
pitching our tent in the midnight sun and eating duck soup until our bellies get warm and we dare to ask:
“What about that light?”
Uncle looks down, his face lit like a dark sun in the glow of the fi re.
“Light?”
And all we ever know about that light is that it’s something we aren’t supposed
to talk about, aren’t supposed to remember, but we do.
Maybe it was part of an old story, a story that starts with a nuclear fl ash too bright to believe, a fl ash that changes
everything.
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Coupons and Bomb Shelters
DECEMBER 1962
CHICKIE
—
If somebody presses the button, the world is going to blow up,