We've been talking a lot in Tucson in the last six weeks
or so, since the horrible shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
and those other people.
And I'm thinking that my book is about civil discourse,
social discourse, and public discourse,
and it's about respect and it's about ethics
and it's about people caring about other people.
I guess I'm just an old hippie, but I
do believe that my brother's welfare is my concern.
Yeah.
While we're on our way to there, why not share?
Yeah.
"He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother?"
OK.
The second novel, The Sacred White Turkey,
came out from the University of Nebraska for us this summer.
This is told from the alternating perspectives
of a 12-year-old girl and her Lakota medicine grandmother.
I'm playing with the idea of what
is sacred, what is religion, what is faith,
and who decides each of these questions.
But I'm trying to do it with humor and grace.
And the second plotline has to do with a legal case called
Cobell versus Salazar.
How many people know about Cobell versus Salazar?
Yeah.
OK, good, good.
That case came about because over many years,
the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Department
of the Interior collected money from American Indians--
I mean, I'm sorry, from people leasing American Indian lands,
and that money was then supposed to be turned over
to the Indian landowners.
But most of it stuck to the fingers of people
along the way.
Cobell versus Salazar.
Ken Salazar, Secretary of Interior or the BIA
is part of that was meant to redress those wrongs.
And you might think, well, it probably
wasn't all that much money.
No.
it was billions of dollars.
Not millions, billions of money that
was stolen from Indian people.
And so I wanted to address that.
I wanted to write about that, but I
didn't want to make it sound like a documentary or another
ain't it awful story.
I wanted it to be a story first, and then
a possible way in which some of this money
could have been stolen.
So I wove those two ideas together,
the notion of stealing money from Indian landowners on lease
payments and this notion of sacred practice
and spiritual belief and so on.
So the sacred part, Turkey sets out
one possible way that some of the thievery
might have happened, and the first plotline
about the sacred turkey herself sets up
a way to stop the graph through religious retribution.
It's meant to be both serious and funny,
both irreverent and respectful, and it will probably
anger both those native people with traditional beliefs
and Christians who might think I'm being sacrilegious.
It's not my intention.
What if that's the way it comes out?
I have no control over the way people interpret what I write.
So this is The Sacred White Turkey,
it's told in alternating points of view.
The first one is Stella, the 12-year-old little girl.
On Easter Sunday in 1963, a white turkey
appeared on Hazel LaTour's doorstep, pecking at the door
as if demanding entrance.
The turkey set in motion a series
of events that would rock the community from end
to end, upset the established order
and make some of the most traditional among us
question our beliefs.
Had I'd not been there, I would not
have believed what was to come, and even
after all these years, I still doubt my own senses,
wonder about where that turkey came from,
why it came to my grandmother of all people, and where it went.
The white turkey was wakan, you know, and some of our people
say that word means holy.
And some say no, it just means something unexplainable,
and a lot of things can be unexplainable without being
holy.
Some people make jokes and say the BIA
is wakan because nothing that bureaucracy
does is ever explainable, and that
makes people who think the word means holy and sacred pretty
mad.
Disrespectful.
Sacrilegious, even, if you can apply that word to a belief
system that isn't Christian.
I believe the turkey was both holy and unexplainable.
I've tried 1,000 explanations over more than 40 years
for all of the things that happened and none of them
make sense.
I can't prove anything.
I only know what I saw, me, with my own two eyes,
and once you've heard the story you could believe it or not.
A gentle knocking more like a tapping
woke me from my dreams of candy eggs delivered by a pink bunny,
even though I was 12 years old and I knew better.
Hazel was a medicine woman, which
meant that people were likely to show up
at any hour of the day or night with a sick relative
or an injured animal asking for her help.
I thought sure that's what the tapping was.
It was early, the sun barely up, and I
knew Hazel would be down milking the cow,
but I could open the door and make a welcome.
I leaped out of the heavy comforters
into the crispness of the spring morning, ran to the door,
and there stood not a person but a white turkey.
Cocking its head from side to side,
and darting its beak at the cats that dared annoy it,
and pecking at the door.
I had heard that people brought their children colored chicks
for Easter, but Hazel would never
stoop to such foolishness, not when our own hens hatched
out perfectly lovely yellow babies every spring.
Nor was there likely to be a basket of candy eggs hidden
in the flower bin for me, and certainly she
would not have gotten me a turkey for Easter.
Hazel almost dropped the milk pail
she was carrying up from the shed
where the cow stood outside the battered wooden door, placidly
chewing her cud.
"What's this?" she said to me, and then to the turkey,
"And where did you come from?"
The turkey trotted over to her, sure the pails contained grain,
but Hazel pushed the turkey away with a rubber-booted foot.
It danced sideways, pecking at her boot.
"Hm," she said, with her brows lowered at me,
standing there shivering in my skivvies.
"Is this your doing, Stella?
I shook my head.
"Strange timing.
It's months and months until Thanksgiving,"
Hazel said as she opened the door
and deposited the pan of milk on the table.
Outside, the cats clawed at the screen,
yowling, demanding their share of the fresh steaming milk.
The white turkey pecked the cats and pecked the screen.
"Grandma," I started, but no sooner was
the word out of my mouth than her hand
shot out and slapped me across the mouth, hard enough
to sting.
"The name is Hazel," she said, "Even though I
am a grandmother, yours."
I did know better, but the appearance of the turkey
had addled my brain, made me want some comfort,
even if only naming her as my grandmother.
Quickly, she pulled me to her cow-sweat-smelling shirt
and hugged me so tight I could barely breathe.
"I love you more than life, little one," she said,
"but I don't like to be reminded of things."
She held me a moment more, then pushed me towards the door.
"Go get some oats for that turkey.
No, wait, you better get yourself dressed first."
I ran back to the bedroom and pulled on the knees-out jeans
I had shed on the floor the night before,
stomped my feet sockless into my old worn boots
while pulling on an old blue checkered shirt of Hazel's that
hung on me like a sack.
She was putting together the parts of the cream separator
when I came back to the kitchen, glancing through the screen
from time to time.
I hesitated.
"Hazel, is it special?"
"Is what special?"
"The turkey.
It's white.
I've never seen a white turkey before,
does that make it special?
And it came on Easter Sunday."
She was just sitting down on the bench
with the cream separator mounted on it, ready to turn the crank.
The corners of her mouth turned up in amusement.
"You mean some spiritual being?"
I nodded doubtfully, fiddling with a button
on the baggy shirt.
"Don't be silly.
It's just a turkey it probably escaped
from a truck went through on the highway
or wandered off from somebody's place around here."
"But I never heard of anybody around here raising turkeys."
"Doesn't mean somebody hasn't got a flock recently,"
she said, putting a steel bowl on top of the separator
and laying the clean filter cloth over at the top of that
and fastening it all with clean clothespins.
"And it's white," I said.
"Aren't turkeys always brown or black, like the ones we
color at school at Thanksgiving?
She shook her head.
"No, dear, these days turkey farmers breed for white ones.
They're easier to clean for the market.
Not so many pinfeathers."
Pinfeathers.
I knew about those.
Little feathers just emerging that
had to be picked out of the chicken skin
when we dressed them.
A tedious job, but not so nasty as having to kill the chickens,
and pull out the guts, saving back
the liver and the gizzard and the heart.
I heard the slow hum of the separator
as Hazel started turning the crank.
The turkey picked at the oats I had put out
for it as if it was starving.
It was a real creature, then.
It had to eat, couldn't live off air.
The chickens that we kept had dusty feathers
in spite of constant pruning and pecking
to rid themselves of mites, and there were always traces
of manure on their butts.
This turkey looked as if it had been bathed in bleach water
and polished with car wax.
It gleamed.
When it had finished all the oats I had scoured for it,
it strolled off as if taking a tour the place.
I followed it, half expecting it to speak to me.
But of course, it only uttered the usual turkey nonsense.
I thought that perhaps I had not the wisdom
to understand whatever message it had.
Maybe the message was not for me at all.
At the chicken house, it stopped and looked inside, strolled in
and promptly appropriated the end roost,
the one that the black rooster had claimed as his territory.
He did not object, but only gave a little dip of his head
as he moved aside.
In spite of Hazel's words, I believe
that turkey was sent for a purpose,
or was a spirit that had sent itself.
School still had some weeks to run
and I was glad, because all the students in the country school
lived so far apart that we didn't often
see each other in the summer.
I wanted to share my story of the white turkey,
but when I breathlessly told the Morris sisters and Avril
Lately, they only stared at me.
Finally, Teensy Morris said, "Oh,
you're just making up stories again."
"I'm not!
It's true!
It's big and it's white and it's a turkey."
Avril gave a snort of disgust.
"Turkeys don't come in white.
Everyone knows that."
"Yes, they do," I said, my hands on my hips
ready to slap them into believing me.
"Hazel said that farmers raised white ones because they're
easier to clean.
You don't know everything."
So it was that Teensy and Melva Morris and Avril
Lately walked home from school with me,
even though it was a mile in the wrong direction
from their homes, to see the white turkey.
And there it was, perched on the edge of the horse tank,
getting a drink.
I ran toward it in panic.
What if it fell in and drowned?
It happened to a chicken every now and then.
As I reached out to grab the turkey,
I slipped in the muddy overflow from the tank
and sprawled on my back, knocking the wind out
of myself.
As I lay there panting for breath,
the turkey jumped down, squished through the mud
and stood by my face, where it bent its head
to look at my eyes.
For one moment I thought it would peck my eyes out
for foolishly trying to grab it, but it only
made a garbled cluck, cocked its head at one side,
pecked at something in the mud beside my ear.
I sat up.
The Morris sisters and Avril stood staring at the turkey
and at me.
"See," I gasped out, "I told you we had a white turkey."
"Wow," said Avril, and then, "Where did it come from?"
"Is it-- is it wakan?"
Teensy asked in a soft, low voice.
There.
That was the word I've been searching for.
"Yes," I said, trying to look dignified and deserving
of a sacred white turkey standing there
in my muddy clothes.
"Stella," my grandmother's voice came
ominously from behind the kitchen screen
door, where I could barely see her for the glare of the sun.
I'd been caught out running my mouth.
Again.
Hazel opened the screen door and walked out
onto the stone step, a dish towel in her hand.
Her dark, gray shot hair gleamed in the setting sun,
illuminating her tall, slender figure held
erect in that posture I knew meant
she was less than happy with me.
"Stella, don't be filling people's heads
full of nonsense."
She sat down on the step, dish towel in her hand.
"Come here," she said, patting either side of her.
The Morris sisters and Avril went reluctantly,
Avril standing in front of her but well
out of her reach, Teensy and Melva gingerly
sitting as if the step was hot.
Hazel had a reputation, one I think she liked to perpetrate.
She was a healer and a good one.
Sometimes her cures were so immediate, so
long-lasting that people talked.
They said that anyone that effective
had to be in touch with more than just the good spirits.
It didn't help that Hazel still looked
young in her mid-forties, still beautiful,
still turned the heads of men, including the heads of those
who gossiped.
The biggest talker of all was not
a woman but a man, George Wanbli, a big-voiced medicine
man from up on Potato Creek.
He scoffed at everything good said about Hazel.
He was jealous of her, I know now.
Medicine men don't charge for their services, exactly,
but it is traditional of people seeking their help
to bring a gift along with the request for help.
Sometimes they bring money, but usually the gift
is something more tangible.
Always an offering of tobacco, but also
coffee, sugar, a case of soda or two, or something like that.
Medicine people are supposed to go into the profession
because they feel called to help others,
because they have a connection with the spirit world,
not because of what presents in money or goods
they can extract from people.
I don't know any rich medicine people,
but some have more than others.
George Wanbli had an active practice
with more people coming to see him than any other wicasa
wakan on the rez.
But he was a jealous man who didn't like--
who didn't want to be shown up by any other medicine person,
and especially not Hazel.
She was a woman, for one thing, and women wikasa wakan
were not usual among us Dakota.
Besides that, Hazel was gaining a reputation that
makes George feel threatened.
Medicine people may have better contacts with the spirits,
but they aren't always necessarily wise people
or even kind.
"Stella, you too," Hazel said.
I walked over beside her just as reluctantly as the other kids,
but not because I was afraid of Hazel's powers.
Not spiritual ones, anyway but the power of her right
hand to swat me for showing out.
"Listen to me," Hazel said.
"That turkey is just a bird.
It is not wakan.
An eagle may be holy, or a certain place on the Earth
where a wonderful thing happened."
She nodded toward the turkey, now pecking small stones
from the ground.
"Look at it.
It's a bird, a domesticated one at that.
Turkeys are stupid birds.
They say that in a rainstorm, turkeys
will drown because they don't have sense enough
to keep their heads down so water doesn't run up
their noses.
That's probably not true, but they can't be smart
or they wouldn't have gotten lulled
into eating what people give them,
sticking around until they're fat
and we chop their heads off and eat them
for Thanksgiving dinner.
See?"
Avril nodded, but his eyes kept returning to the turkey.
"See?
You hear what I say?"
Hazel looked from one Morris sister to the other.
They nodded their heads vigorously.
Hazel put her hands on the back of their necks
and pulled them up as she said, "It's just a turkey.
Now go home.
Your mamas will be wondering why you're so late."
She stood there, looking after them
as they walked back up the lane from our house
heading home, lunch pails bumping against their thighs.
"Bye!"
I yelled after them, but only Melva had nerve enough
to give me a waggle of her hand.
"Stella."
I didn't want to look up.
"You can't be starting rumors about a dumb barnyard animal
being a holy creature.
It's not.
You know that."
I didn't know any such a thing.
But I couldn't say that to Hazel,
so I didn't say anything.
"We'll have half the countryside out here
to see this damn turkey if rumors get started."
"I didn't start any rumors!"
I protested.
"Teensy is the one who said it was wakan!"
"Then you should have told her it wasn't wakan.
If it happens again, you know what to say?"
"Yes, Hazel.
It's just a turkey.
A dumb, domesticated bird."
"Right."
Half the countryside started showing up that very night.
After supper, a car drove into the yard and more than half
a dozen people stepped out.
Avril's parents, his grandmother who
lived with them, his three younger brothers, and older
sister Nancy, who always tormented me
in school before she graduated and went onto high school
this year.
Mrs. Lately had her arms full of bags.
"I brought some clothes of Nancy's that she's outgrown,"
Mrs. Lately said as Hazel came out to greet them.
"I thought Stella might get some good out of them.
I hate to throw out anything good."
Hazel took the bags with a smile and a thank you,
but I knew I would never wear any of those clothes.
Hazel said that Clara Lately let Nancy dress like a hooker,
and one of her skirts wouldn't make a good size dishrag.
"Come in," Hazel said.
"I've got coffee on the stove and half a batch
of cream puffs."
I wished Hazel hadn't said that.
I love cream puffs, but Hazel didn't make them very often.
She saved every ounce of cream to sell in town
to pay for coffee and sugar and flour
and occasional package of hamburger.
I knew there wouldn't be any cream
puff left after Hazel-- after Clara Lately and her family
left.
Clara was the joke of every gathering, funeral,
wedding ceremony, or whatever.
People said she always left with a donut stuck
on every one of her fingers, and it wasn't far from the truth.
She would displace a lot of water
if she could be fully submerged, a concept I
had just learned in school.
"Let's go see the turkey!"
Avril whispered.
"Yeah, let's!"
His youngest brother, Lester, insisted.
"I don't know," I said.
"Hazel's mad at me about showing off the turkey."
I turned and went to the house behind their father,
Ed, a skinny little man who looked like he
didn't get enough to eat.
They sat at the table while Clara Lately removed
every piece of clothing from the bags one at a time
and held them up to me.
I was six inches shorter than Nancy Lately.
Most of the pieces had seen better days,
with frayed hems and stains from who knows what.
One white sundress had grass stains on the back.
Grandmother Lately fingered the fabric of the various items
and remarked that they would have made good material
for the quilt she was making.
I was tired of the Latelys long before they
were ready to go home.
They lingered over a cup after cup of coffee,
and just one more of those cream puffs.
"You're such a good baker."
Finally, even Clara couldn't think of another thing to say,
so she just came out with it.
"Avril says you've got a turkey.
A white turkey."
Hazel shot me a look from her black eyes that said "You!"
I changed my mind.
The longer the Latelys stay, the more time Hazel
had to get over being mad at me for telling about the turkey.
"We had one wander in here on Sunday morning," she said.
"I'm going to put an ad in the paper about it.
It belongs to someone, that's sure.
It's been well-fed.
Clara licked the spot of cream off the back of her hand.
"We've never seen a live turkey before," Clara said.
"I can't imagine a white turkey."
Hazel shrugged.
"It's just an ordinary turkey, except it's white."
"Grandma," Clara said, poking the old lady awake.
"Grandma, have you ever seen a turkey before?"
The old lady's milky cataract eyes
stared at the corner of the ceiling.
"No.
I can't recall ever seeing one.
A live one, that is.
But I've cooked many more.
Did I tell you about--"
Clara smoothly interrupted.
"It would really be nice if we could see a real live turkey,"
Clara said.
"She's not getting any younger, you know."
I wondered how she could see the turkey anyway,
with her eyes half-blinded with cataracts.
"Avril saw the turkey!"
Avril's next-youngest brother, Melvin,
spoke up now from his position beside his grandmother,
where he had been silently pinching off
bites of the last cream puff, which she had in front of her
but couldn't seem to find with her gnarled, arthritic hands.
"It's just a turkey," Hazel said.
"A dumb animal."
The way she was looking at Clara,
I wondered who she thought was the dumb animal.
Mr. Lately spoke up.
"Are you sure it was a turkey, Avril?
It might have been a wild goose or--"
"It's a turkey," Hazel said.
"All right.
Everybody out.
We're going to go see the turkey."
She grabbed the flashlight from atop the refrigerator
and led the way out the front door to the kitchen coop--
chicken coop.
That'd be kind of cool, wouldn't it?
Sorry.
Clara rushed after, leaving her husband
to lead Grandma stumbling along behind as she tried
to shake off Mr. Lately's hand.
"I'm old and half-blind," she grumbled.
"I'm not a cripple."
The flashlight beam bounced along the weed-bordered path
as Hazel took long strides.
One of the kids tripped over a sleepy cat,
come to see what the fuss was about.
The cat yowled and ran off into the weeds.
Hazel waited until the entire Lately family clustered
to the chicken coop door, and then
she ceremoniously pulled out the stick
that went through the house to keep the door shut.
"Be quiet," she said.
"No use disturbing the hens."
The moon was just rising over the distant hills, a fat spring
moon that made the flashlight unnecessary for seeing outside
once your eyes got used to the semi-light.
Hazel opened the door and aimed the flashlight inside the coop,
motioning the Latelys one at a time to step up
and peek through.
Avril pushed his way to the front,
but Melvin jerked him back.
"Not you!
You already saw!"
Clara pushed them both aside and leaned over slightly
to peer through the low door.
"I see chickens," she said.
"Of course you do," Hazel said.
"It's a hen house."
"But where is the turkey?"
Clara's voice was muffled as she pushed her round
body through the shorter than normal door.
"Look at the end roost," Hazel said.
"I don't see--" Clara started to say.
A fluttering of heavy wings that erupted
during a loud sound that wasn't exactly a gobble,
wasn't exactly a squawk, wasn't anything human either.
It came from behind them, from the fence that
divided the chicken pen from the cow pen,
and all the Latelys pushed forward against each other,
shoving Clara to her knees in the mess on the floor
of the chicken coop.
I turned, and there with the moon
behind its head like a halo sat the white turkey,
with something around its head like a shiny crown of thorns.
Again came that sound, "Rrrr-ffrt."
I never heard a turkey make that sound before or since,
but there was no doubt it came from the turkey's beak,
directly from the turkey's beak, a pronouncement on the state
of affairs it observed.
Old Grandma Lately saw--
well, whatever it was that a half-blind old lady
could see, or thought she saw.
"Wakan!"
she exclaimed.
"It's holy!
Look, it has a halo, and a crown of thorns!
And it said, repent!"
It didn't sound like repent to me, sounded more
like it had a piece of corn caught in its craw.
"It's not wakan!"
Hazel yelled.
"It's just a goddamn turkey, for Christ's sake!"
Clara had backed out of the chicken house on all fours,
looked over her shoulder, and saw the turkey perched
on the fence with the halo of the moon behind it,
and immediately she rose to her knees
and began praying the Hail Mary.
But she couldn't remember the words past the first line,
so she only repeated it louder.
"Hail Mary, full of--
Hail Mary, full of--
Hail Mary, full of--," as she reached out
and pulled the old lady down to her knees too.
The rest of the family stood shocked,
staring back and forth between the turkey and the kneeling
woman.
Then Mr. Lately hollered, "It's a sign!
A sign from the spirits!"
and he began a prayer in Lakota.
"Tukashila--"
"Stop it!"
Hazel yelled, and began to laying about herself
with a flashlight, one blow catching Clara
alongside the head, after which she toppled
over moaning into the weeds.
Another near blow brought the turkey down
off the fence, where it gave a very normal turkey-sounding
"gobble, gobble," and walked sedately into the chicken coop.
It took half an hour to herd the hysterical Latelys back
to the house and another pot of coffee
and another hour of talking from Hazel before they seemed
calm enough to drive safely home,
Clara with a wet washcloth rested on the knot
on her forehead.
But Hazel was not able to convince them
that they had not seen something out of the ordinary.
After that, Hazel was too tired to take me to task for telling
Avril about the turkey.
We just went to bed.
And the next morning when I went out
to feed the chickens and the turkey,
I saw the turkey had gotten an old piece of barbed wire
wrapped around its head and neck that it couldn't get off,
or maybe didn't want to get off.
I pushed the turkey up in the corner of the henhouse
and pulled the wire off, leaving a few little drops of red
on the turkey's neck where the barbs had pierced.
I showed it to Hazel, and she just shook her head.
"Fools will believe anything," she said.
The very next day, she went to town
and put an ad in the Lost, Strayed, Stolen section
of the newspaper Want Ads.
It read, "Strayed into Hazel Latour's place,
one white turkey.
Will the owner please claim it?
No one did, but the ad sure stirred up conversation.
There were no turkey farmers within 500 miles or more,
no turkey processing plants any closer than Minnesota.
Highway 20 ran along just south of the state line,
but it wasn't the main route for trucks
to take when transporting turkeys to the slaughterhouse.
The railroad tracks paralleled the highway,
but the trains didn't transport poultry
either or not that anybody could swear to.
Speculation said that maybe a truck
had gotten off the main route and come
through on the highway, maybe the turkey escaped
from a cage that way.
But wouldn't the turkey have been
injured crawling out of a wire cage
and falling off a truck going about 50 miles an hour?
Then someone else wondered, how could that turkey
have made its way across 20 miles of prairie
with no water and nothing to eat,
and coyotes running around out there, not to mention
the occasional farm or ranch dog?
It might not be a holy turkey, but its appearance
was certainly strange and unexplainable.
Hazel decided to put another ad in the paper in the next town
over, but the results were the same, no results
except for more talk.
We can wait a little while longer, she decided,
and then we would have turkey for dinner.
Maybe for Memorial Day or 4th of July at the latest.
I begged her not to kill the turkey.
It might be bad luck, I said, but she laughed at me
and told me not to listen to idle talk.
In the end, it wasn't my begging that saved the turkey.
It was Hazel's own practical ways.
After the Latelys began spreading
the story of the turkey's miraculous appearance,
other people began showing up.
I think they were afraid of the turkey,
didn't necessarily want a visitation
of the spirit within it, but wanted
to satisfy some curiosity with a sighting from a distance.
In the daytime, of course.
People that used to take their troubles to George
Wanbli or one or the other wicasa wakan
started bringing their offerings of tobacco and money
and bags of sugar and three-pound cans of Folgers
to Hazel.
A car or a pickup would drive up,
people would get out with bags of goods.
They would observe the social graces of chatting over
a cup of coffee, and then present their tobacco and gifts
and ask Hazel if she could help them with their problems.
She would refuse, or she might agree,
but if it seemed a worthy cause, she agreed.
People rarely came to a medicine man with a foolish request.
They knew better.
Even if the medicine person agreed to take the case,
the spirits would likely be annoyed and give a bad outcome.
Hazel's supplicants were real, all right,
but while they were getting out of the car
and while they were presenting their case,
or while they were leaving, they were looking out
of the corners of their eyes for a glimpse of the white turkey.
I knew Hazel was annoyed, she talked to me about it,
but she also knew that most of the people
had a legitimate need for help.
So she wouldn't turn them down just
because they had some silly notion
that a turkey could be sacred.
A little cash money came in, but much more goods.
Our cabinets were full for the first time I could remember,
with more piled on top.
There were stacks of cans full of coffee,
cases of canned vegetables, fruit, soup, and bags of sugar
that Hazel finally had to put into a metal trashcan
with a tight lid to keep the ants out.
Our refrigerator had so much meat inside
that Hazel had to rent a cold storage locker in town
to preserve the meat that we couldn't eat up right away.
I never felt so full when I left that table, or so rich.
The house smelled, too.
Not just of cooking food but of the cedar and the sage
and the sweetgrass that Hazel burned as part of the ceremony
she performed for her clients.
It worked, too, almost every time and that
brought those people back when they
had other problems, brought other people who
heard of Hazel's success.
It was a prosperous time and Hazel
knew it was because of the white turkey.
One day coming back from a trip to deposit yet
more meat in the cold storage locker in town,
she brought up the subject of the turkey dinner.
"I don't want you to get the wrong idea," she began,
"Because that turkey is not wakan.
It's just a turkey, a bird.
It's true that it's because of the turkey
that we have more now than we ever had before,
but it's just circumstances.
Because silly people choose to believe in something
even sillier than themselves.
There's a logical explanation for where
that turkey came, even if we don't know
what it is, you understand?"
I did understand.
I knew she was feeling guilty about using
the turkey as a drawing card for her medicine practice.
"We're going to eat that turkey,"
she said, "Just not yet."
"OK," I said, and pulled back as she reached out and tugged
on my ponytail.
Hazel was wrong about the sacredness of the white turkey,
but I couldn't tell her why.
She would never believe me.
The white turkey was wakan, not because of some piece
of barbed wire wrapped around its head,
not because some people thought it spoke to them.
On the night the turkey it appeared on the fence
for the Latelys, I had put it up for the night
with the chickens.
The turkey was inside on the end roost
where the black rooster used to sit.
I saw it there, gleaming in the muted light as I shut the door
and put the wooden pin through the hasp on the door.
That chicken coop was animal-proof.
Hazel had made it so after losing too many chickens
to winter hungry coyotes, and I had helped her nail strips
of boards over every crack.
That turkey could not have escaped
to sit on that fence in the moonlight
under any ordinary circumstances,
but it had, and that was the first miracle
of the sacred white turkey.
There would be many more.