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went on in a detached tone, but I felt the urgency behind it. “When I think of you, when I dream you, when I speak your name, you are with me. Far things are just as near. Didn’t you ever feel this?”
    â€œNo. Either someone is here with me, or they’re not.”
    â€œA namer is never far.”
    â€œYou were. To other people you brought religion and all that, but there was nothing for me. And you can’t start now, I won’t let you.” I was angry to find I was crying.
    He went on as though I hadn’t said anything, “You must remember who you are. You must learn to be joyful.”
    â€œYou haven’t the right to expect anything of me. Go take your good works somewhere else.” I turned and ran. The joyfulness he tried to force on me seemed dreadful. At school I’m not accepted—it doesn’t matter, be joyful. At work I serve sundaes I can’t afford to eat—be joyful. My papa, whom I love more than anything in the world, dies—be joyful.
    We didn’t speak again. I was glad when he left.

T wo
    AFTER PAPA’S DEATH, we tried to be a normal family. We couldn’t talk about Papa at first. We had to and yet we couldn’t. It was Jonathan Forquet Mama Kathy told me about. I didn’t want to listen because I knew I’d been unfair to him. But I couldn’t stop Mama.
    â€œWhen Oh-Be-Joyful died, he didn’t know what to do. He went wild, gambled, made himself ill, almost died. Then he turned to religion, but he didn’t find what he needed, not completely. Not until he read the teachings of Handsome Lake.”
    â€œIs Handsome Lake a person?”
    â€œHe was a Seneca prophet. Before that, like Jonathan, he was a drunk. This brought him close to death, and he experienced a vision in which it is said he was shown the braiding of all things. When he recovered, he wove the wisdom of the Seneca into the wisdom of the Christian Bible. That was in 1799. It is to this man’s teachings your father has brought new life. Every second year in the longhouses a ceremony is held recounting the story of Handsome Lake through dance and recitations. Your father leads this.”
    And I had flared out at him, telling off the great man. Well, I didn’t care how great or important he was, or what religions he resurrected. He was still an absentee father.
    WHEN MAMA WAS finally able to retell the old stories, I felt better. I think she did too.
    She told me how primitive and isolated the Northwest Territory was in the days when she fell in love with a handsome Mountie whose “eyes were so blue you could swim in them.” He was about to be posted into wild, untamed country, and he considered her too young to make up her mind properly. So instead of proposing to her, he proposed to her uncle. “The storm still raging, and me standing there, my feet in a basin of hot water.” There were tears behind our laughter, and we held each other and cried them.
    â€œYour papa reached out to people in a remarkable way. For instance, Jonathan.” Papa, she said, couldn’t make Jonathan out. His traplines had been plundered and winter furs—fox, ocelot, and martin—stolen. Then the man Jonathan accused of the theft was murdered. In spite of the fact that it was done with Jonathan’s knife, Papa did not believe him capable of cold-blooded killing. “I remember Mike telling him if he’d give his word he didn’t do it, he’d release him. Do you think Jonathan would do this? No. We had to know, all of us, Mike and me—and especially Oh-Be-Joyful—that he wouldn’t murder an unarmed man. He spent the summer in that sweltering, mosquito-ridden jail because, as he put it, he couldn’t read his innocence in our eyes. . . . Yes,” she pondered, “Papa was exasperated by him, but in a way he loved him.”
    I began to know Jonathan Forquet. I began to consider what he had said to me on