Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

How They Don’t Let Potchikoo into Heaven

After Old Man Potchikoo died, the people had a funeral for his poor, crushed body, and everyone felt sorry for the things they had said while he was alive. Josette went home and set some bread by the door for him to take on his journey to the next world. Then she began to can a bucket of plums she’d bought cheap, because they were overripe.

As she canned, she thought how it was. Now she’d have to give away these sweet plums since they had been her husband’s favorites. She didn’t like plums. Her tastes ran sour. Everything about her did. As she worked, she cried vinegar tears into the jars before she sealed them. People would later remark on her ingenuity. No one else on the reservation pickled plums.

Now, as night fell, Potchikoo got out of his body, and climbed up through the dirt. He took the frybread Josette had left in a towel, his provisions. He looked in the window, saw she was sleeping alone, and he was satisfied. Of course, since he never could hold himself back, he immediately ate the bread as he walked the long road, a mistake. Two days later, he was terribly hungry, and there was no end in sight. He came to the huge luscious berry he knew he shouldn’t eat if he wanted to enter the heaven all the priests and nuns described. He took a little bite, and told himself he’d not touch the rest. But it tasted so good tears came to his eyes. It took a minute, hardly that, for him to stuff the whole berry by handfuls into his mouth.

He didn’t know what would happen now, but the road was still there. He kept walking, but he’d become so fat from his greed that when he came to the log bridge, a test for good souls, he couldn’t balance to cross it, fell in repeatedly, and went on cold and shivering. But he was dry again, and warmer, by the time he reached the pearly gates.

Saint Peter was standing there, dressed in a long, brown robe, just as the nuns and priests had always said he would be. He examined Potchikoo back and front for berry stains, but they had luckily washed away when Potchikoo fell off the bridge.

“What’s your name?” Saint Peter asked.

Potchikoo told him, and then Saint Peter pulled a huge book out from under his robe. As the saint’s finger traveled down the lists, Potchikoo became frightened to think how many awful deeds would be recorded after his name. But as it happened, there was only one word there. The word Indian.

“Ah,” Saint Peter said. “You’ll have to keep walking.”