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"Umm& when?" Rose asked.
Tyler darted his tongue in her ear, drawing a little gasp from her, and replied, "I don't know." He
moved to her neck again.
"Don't do that," Rose said.
"You don't like it?"
"I& don't know. But just because I'm responding to you doesn't mean this should continue."
"Do you want me to leave?"
"Yes& well, maybe not," Rose replied, "but if you stay, it will have to be because you honestly
want to learn about my culture, which happens to be your culture too, even though you've chosen to
disregard your Indian ancestry, other than to spend ten minutes on the internet learning about
plankhouses."
Tyler looked at her soberly. "Is it that important to you for me to learn about someone who died a
half a century ago?"
"It is if you want to build a relationship," Rose said. "Is that really what you want?"
"I think I answered that when I invited you into the pasture to meet my mares, and nothing's
changed," Tyler replied.
"Yes, something has changed," Rose said, clasping her hands together in her lap. "When I was in
the pasture with you and your mares I thought you'd only be chipping into the rock with a hammer and
chisel, and when I let you kiss me it was because I didn't think those simple tools could do any
damage, and then later I walked into the cavern to find you drilling into the rock with a jackhammer,
and you're planning to go back and continue, and as long as you find nothing wrong with what you're
doing, we'll remain miles apart in the things that are the most important in any relationship, and that's
core beliefs."
Tyler covered her clasped hands with his, and said, "Like I told you before, I'm not very good at
this, but I'm working on it." Bending around he kissed her tightened lips, and when she refused to kiss
him back, he said, "Okay I get the picture for now. Meanwhile I've got a garden fence to mend and
mares to feed and exercise, but we'll work on this later."
Once outside, and finding himself at the proverbial fork in the road follow Rose up a path that
took him to a world of animals guides and archaic beliefs in spirits, or remain in his uncomplicated
world with his mares he decided it was time to do something he'd put off most of his life.
***
Tyler stood on the doorstep of his grandmother's house, not completely comfortable with what he
was about to do, but anxious to know how she'd respond, so he brushed his uneasiness aside and
knocked. When she answered the door, she didn't look surprised to see him, which she affirmed by
saying, "Come on in. I thought you might be stopping by about now."
Tyler looked at her, puzzled. "You did? Why?"
"Call it grandmother's intuition."
While still mulling that over, Tyler removed his boots, as was expected, padded inside in his
socks, and sat at the kitchen table. His grandmother went to the stove, and after pouring a mug of
coffee and setting it in front of him, and pouring another for herself, she sat across the table from him
and waited for the reason he was there. It wasn't as if he never saw her, but she and Howard
frequently walked up to his place to watch him work his mares, and he visited with them there.
He took a long sip of coffee and let it settle in, mainly to give himself time to organize his
thoughts in a logical way before starting into a subject that his grandmother never talked about. When
the silence became awkward, and still his grandmother waited, he said, "Dad always told us we had
Indian blood in us, and to ask you about it if we were curious, but I guess I never was, and all the time
I was growing up you never talked about your Indian background and I'm wondering why."
After an extended period of silence, his grandmother replied, "You have to understand how it
was back then and even as late as the 1970s. The Bureau of Indian Affairs founded Indian boarding
schools based on a policy of assimilation where children were taken from their families and
immersed in European-American culture, which meant cutting the boys' long hair, making children
wear white-man's clothing, replacing traditional Indian names with European-American ones, and
forbidding them to speak their native language, even to each other."
"Then you know nothing about your Nez Perce background?" Tyler asked.
"Only what I pieced together over the years when I was growing up, which wasn't much,"
Maureen replied. "My mother had some white blood in her and she could pass easily as white, and
that's the way she wanted it for herself and her children. She wanted us fully assimilated. Other
families gave the impression of accepting assimilation then behind closed doors held onto their way
of life, passing on tribal traditions and legends and religious beliefs to their children, but my mother
didn't want us caught between two worlds, so we were raised in my father's world, and that was
that."
"What about spirits?" Tyler asked. "Did your mother ever talk about them?"
Maureen looked at him with curiosity, then her expression changed to awareness, and he
suspected she'd figured out what was behind his sudden interest in his Indian background.
She took another sip of coffee, and after a few moments, she said, "That's an area, looking back,
where I could connect my mother with her Indian roots. There would be times, maybe when my father
would be working with a particularly difficult horse, when my mother would say to me, 'The spirits
are working against him.' She also never gave up her knowledge of medicinal herbs that she'd
learned from her mother, though she didn't talk about that either. But when I was sick, she'd prepare
something for me to drink, and when I'd ask what it was she'd say it was a mixture of herbs that
worked better than what the druggist prepared."
"Does it bother you being part Indian?" Tyler asked.
"Heaven's no," Maureen replied. "We are what we are. But you have a purpose behind all these
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