Walk Two Moons

10 HUZZA, HUZZA

I had just finished telling Gram and Gramps about the mysterious message when Gramps pulled off the freeway. He said he was tired of chewing up the road, and the white lines down the middle of the highway were starting to wiggle. As he drove into Madison, Wisconsin, Gram said, “I feel a little sorry for Mrs. Winterbottom. She doesn’t sound very happy.”

“They all sound screwy, if you ask me,” Gramps said.

“Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four—or more—chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over—empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.”

“Well, it sure ain’t a cinch being a father, either,” Gramps said.

Gram touched his arm. “Horsefeathers,” she said.

Round and round we drove until Gramps saw a parking space. Another car saw it too, but Gramps was fast and pulled in, and when the man in the other car waved his fist, Gramps said, “I’m a veteran. See this leg? Shrapnel from German guns. I saved our country!”

We did not have the correct change for the parking meter, so Gramps wrote a long note about how he was a visitor from Bybanks, Kentucky, and he was a World War II veteran with German shrapnel in his leg, and he kindly appreciated the members of the fair city of Madison allowing him to park in this space even though he did not have the correct change for the meter. He put this note on the dashboard.

“Do you really have German shrapnel in your leg?” I asked.

Gramps looked up at the sky. “Mighty nice day,” he said.

The shrapnel was imaginary. Sometimes I am a little slow to figure these things out. My father once said I was as gullible as a fish. I thought he said edible. I thought he meant I was tasty.

The city of Madison sprawls between two lakes, Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, and dribbling out of these are other piddly lakes. It seemed as if the whole city was on vacation, with people riding around on their bikes and walking along the lakes and feeding the ducks and eating and canoeing and windsurfing. I’d never seen anything like it. Gram kept saying, “Huzza, huzza!”

There’s a part of the city where no cars can go, and thousands of people stroll around eating ice cream. We went into Ella’s Kosher Deli and Ice Cream Parlor and ate pastrami sandwiches and kosher dill pickles, followed by raspberry ice cream. After we walked around some more, we were hungry again, and so we had lemon tea and blueberry muffins at the Steep and Brew.

All the while, I heard the whispers: rush, hurry, rush. Gram and Gramps moved so slowly. “Shouldn’t we go now?” I kept asking, but Gram would say, “Huzza, huzza!” and Gramps would say, “We’ll go soon, chickabiddy, soon.”

“Don’t you want to send any postcards?” Gram asked.

“No, I do not.”

“Not even to your daddy?”

“No.” There was a good reason for this. All along her trip, my mother had sent me postcards. She wrote, “Here I am in the Badlands, missing you terribly,” and “This is Mount Rushmore, but I don’t see any presidents’ faces, I only see yours.” The last postcard arrived two days after we found out she wasn’t coming back. It was from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. On the front was a picture of a beautiful blue lake surrounded by tall evergreens. On the back she had written, “Tomorrow I’ll be in Lewiston. I love you, my Salamanca Tree.”

At last, Gramps said, “I sure hate to get back on the road, but time’s a-wastin’!”

Yes, I thought, yes, yes, yes!

Gram settled back for a nap while I said a few thousand more prayers. The next thing I knew, Gramps was pulling off the road again. “Lookee here,” he said. “The Wisconsin Dells.” He drove into a vast parking area and said, “Why don’t you two go look around? I’m going to get a little shut-eye.”

Gram and I poked our noses into an old fort, and then sat on the grass watching a group of Native Americans dance and beat drums. My mother had not liked the term Native Americans. She thought it sounded primitive and stiff. She said, “My great-grandmother was a Seneca Indian, and I’m proud of it. She wasn’t a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds much more brave and elegant.” In school, our teacher told us we had to say Native American, but I agreed with my mother. Indian sounded much better. My mother and I liked this Indian-ness in our background. She said it made us appreciate the gifts of nature; it made us closer to the land.

I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the drums beat rush-rush-rush and the dancers chant hurry-hurry-hurry. Someone was jingling bells, too, and for a moment I thought of Christmas and sleigh bells. When I opened my eyes again, Gram was gone.

I glanced around, trying to remember where we had parked the car. I looked through the crowd, back at the trees, over at the concession stand. “They’ve gone,” I thought. “They’ve left me.” I pushed through the people.

The crowd was clapping, the drums were beating. I was all turned around and could not remember which way we had come. There were three signs indicating different parking areas. The drums thundered. I pushed further into the crowd of people, who were now clapping louder, in time with the drums.

The Indians had formed two circles, one inside the other, and were hopping up and down. The men danced in the outer circle and wore feather head-dresses and short leather aprons. On their feet were moccasins, and I thought again about Phoebe’s message: Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.

Inside the circle of men, the women in long dresses and ropes of beads had joined arms and were dancing around one older woman who was wearing a regular cotton dress. On her head was an enormous headdress, which had slipped down over her forehead.

I looked closer. The woman in the center was hopping up and down. On her feet were flat, white shoes. In the space between drum beats, I heard her say, “Huzza, huzza.”