Claims to be Christian - Yeah, right.

Wilson went to stay with Misty. Well, that would be that. Shirley, remarried, had recently left her husband and was homeless as well. Not only were she and Joy living there, but Cheri, her little girls and Junior too. Wilson would be under the same roof with his ex-wife and all their kids and grandkids. A remarkable situation; they were one big happy family again. He wouldn’t need my babies and me. Also, with the amount of drinking and smoking going on there, it wouldn’t be long before he got started and that would be the end of his talk about sobriety and Christianity.

Wilson not only stayed sober but he kept coming around. I started letting him watch our kids while I was at work. For two weeks he courted me. One night he picked me up from work and took me to our old restaurant - just like we used to. When he dropped me off and drove away, I felt as though I’d been on my very first date ever with him.

One day I called home from work. "Wilson, I forgot my medication this morning. I just don’t feel like I can cope. Could you bring me my medicine?”
“Sure, I’ll be right over.”
But the medication didn’t help. It was my life I hated. How could a drug change that?

After just two months, I left ‘bitter’ BetterLife and went back to the family-run nursing home where I had felt more comfortable.

“Shirley is going back to live with her husband in Detroit and Joy wants to move in with me,” Wilson said one day.
I sat down. How could Joy “move in” with Wilson? He didn’t have a place. I knew I was asking for trouble again, but I really did love Joy. “Well, I guess you both could come here.”
Joy and Wilson moved back in with me on March 16. I explained to Steph that I had to do it for Joy’s sake, but she didn’t believe it. We argued and Steph moved out. Troy also went back to Salmon Lake and stayed there.

I enrolled both Joy and Andrew in swimming lessons at the YMCA. While they were in class and Haley was in the nursery, I worked out in the weight room. I was there partly to get back into shape after having a baby, partly to build myself up in case of another attack by Shirley.

Joy reported that the family from the Rez rolls joints on their coffee table. Four- year-old Andrew joined in, “I stole some cigarettes from 7-11 for them. They wanted me to smoke one.”
“And Mom,” he confided, “Rose is Louis’ girlfriend. They were in the garage and she told him to put his hand in her pants.”
I felt sick. Rose and Louis were both nine-years-old.
Standing on our sidewalk with Andrew, I pointed from one house to another.
“I don’t want you to play over there or that house either. They do bad things over there. You are not to go inside the house across from them, or play with the kids over at the red house. And stay out of that green house, too.”
“But Mom,” Andrew objected, “then there’s nobody left to play with!”

Elmer and Marcia came to visit relatives in Salmon Lake, then came down to the city to spend a couple nights with us. Having them physically in front of me was reassurance that they really existed. Seeing them was like nourishment.
“Why don’t you move on out to west?” Elmer cajoled.
“I’m buying this place. Where would we live out there?”
“There’s plenty of places.”
“Well, if we did go Wilson would have to find us a nice house first.”
“Well, don’t be so high on the horse. Sometimes you have to accept something not so good for awhile if you want to make a better life. You might have to accept living in a trailer or something.”
Later, I spoke to Marcia. ‘What happens if I quit my job, drop this house, go all the way out there and then Wilson starts drinking again?”
“He really is a Christian now. I know; I saw him crying on his knees on my living room floor. I was there.”

I still didn’t think I loved Wilson and didn’t trust that he was really going to stay sober. And I most definitely didn’t believe he was really a Christian. But I knew I wasn’t happy being a single mom trying to buy a house I didn’t like in a neighborhood I hated. I also knew I’d have to be evening charge nurse for awhile. When Andrew started school in the fall, I’d never see him.

I also knew I was an angry, bitter woman and if I kept going that way - my heart filled to the brim with hate - I’d end up like some of the bitter, old women I had worked with in the nursing homes. I decided moving couldn’t be worse than living here.

We sat around the dinner table with Mickey, Joy and my kids. We made a commitment to each other that we were going to stick together and move as a family. Grandma and Grandpa were having their 50th wedding anniversary and later that summer was my class reunion, so we decided to wait and move in late August, before school started. I’d have to prepare the house for sale and hire a realtor.

Crime: A Family Tradition

.
Cheri spent the spring at a detention center after having stolen a car. When we visited, she proudly bragged about her popularity among the other kids at the center.

________________________________________________

Shirley called to tell us Misty had been picked up for stealing at Butler Drug store. The police had taken her downtown. Would we go get her?

We arrived at the courthouse. The officer spoke briefly to Wilson and then released Misty to his care. Outside on the street, Wilson and Misty laughed together. Disgusted that he wasn’t mad at her, I walked a few feet ahead of them. Behind me, Wilson asked Misty, "Why did you take those cookies?"

"I was hungry!" she said, as if Wilson were stupid for asking, and then laughed.

Too mad to keep my mouth closed any longer, I turned and spat out, "Well why didn't you just walk the four blocks to our house and get something to eat then!"

Wilson and Misty looked at each other and started laughing. I turned and kept walking.

______________________________________________

Wilson had been sober in the six months since his release. If you included his time in the workhouse, he'd been sober almost a year. In April, we began making plans for a June wedding. Wilson bought me a wedding dress, and we had a portrait taken of Wilson, Andrew and me together. After the pictures were taken, we stopped at Dairy Queen for some cones, then at a park next to the river. Wilson took Andrew, on a short walk while I waited upstream. The weather was warm, the trickling water peaceful and the trees just beginning to bud. Wilson showed Andrew the ducks, then turned and came back. We each took one of Andrew's chubby hands and swung him as we walked back to the car.

It felt like we were a family.

Wilson Began Using Again -

Wilson began using marijuana again after about two years. I joined him. He always knew where to go to get it. Sometimes he got it from Shirley. Most of the time he went to the tribal housing project. I usually waited in the car, watching him as he disappeared between the white buildings for fifteen minutes or so while he went into one apartment or another. I never followed him into the projects, but occasionally I went with him into the house of one of his other dealers and stood just inside the door while Wilson, laughing and talking, did business with his friends.

One place, the home of a young man and wife, was always dark inside. Children were sitting on the couch, amid blankets and clothing, sucking their thumbs and watching TV. The guy would be bagging the weed on a kitchen table cluttered with beer cans and ashtrays. When he was finished, he'd weigh the bag on the small scale. We wouldn't stay long and I never remembered their names.

The weed wasn't important to me at first. I joined Wilson just for something to do. I was working jobs that lasted a month or two at a time. (Well, I either walked away from the jobs or was fired.) Sometimes Wilson worked too, along with visiting the blood bank twice a week. He was also still trying to go to school. But primarily he and his family taught me how to use the welfare system. We made use of food stamps, General Assistance, fuel assistance, and picked up free cheese and butter once a month when the government offered it. In addition we picked up free food and clothing at various churches. With each program, we told the staff whatever we had to in order to get what we wanted.

"If you want to get anything, you have to lie about it," Wilson’s family told me.

I was willing to use other people’s resources rather than my own whenever possible, but when I did have a job it bothered me that only my money was used to buy groceries. Wilson frequently saved his plasma money for a bag of marijuana. But as time went on, I began to want Wilson to take his blood money for that purpose. I also knew I was getting extremely lazy. The marijuana made Wilson lazy too. He dropped out of school. It bothered me that we were getting that way. It felt ugly, and only fed the loathing I already had for myself. Off and on, I quit smoking with him.

Our relationship was getting stormier and stormier. Wilson was quick to temper and I felt as though I was walking on eggs all the time. He wasn't physical with me, but he could get very hostile, giving me the silent treatment for up to a week if I made him angry. I never felt that I had any freedom to say "no" to him or his family.

Many of our arguments had to do with his two older girls. I was missing things and suspected the girls had taken them. At one point, I found my mother's engagement ring, which had been stored safely in my jewelry box, hidden in the dirt of a houseplant. But Wilson wouldn't admit there was a problem, preferring to blame me for the missing items.

The weekends with the kids began to take a toll. For the most part they just refused to listen to me. After I scolded little Joy for jumping on the bed, she ran to her dad screaming and crying,

"Beth beat me up!"

Later, in the car, this same innocent child with big brown eyes leaned over to me and whispered,
"my Ma's going to kick your ass...."

When Misty was given a prescription lotion to apply before bed, I told her to bathe first, then use it.

She immediately went to her dad, "Do I have to take a bath? Beth said I had to!"

"Nah, you don't have to take no bath!"


And despite asking the girls to clean their area before leaving on Sunday evening, I inevitably spent that evening picking up toys from all around the apartment, sweeping up the kind of dirt four children always leave behind, and restraightening the spare room.

March, 1980. Meeting Wilson

I hurried down the long hallway of the treatment center toward a patient's room. As I quickly walked, two men ambled up the hall toward me. One was a staff member, the other a new patient on crutches. The new patient was a Native American with classic features. He eyed me closely as he walked by, making me feel extremely uncomfortable. I didn't like being stared at.

That Indian better stay away from me, I thought as he passed.

BetterLife Treatment Center, on the seventh floor of Sunshine Park Nursing Home, was an alcohol detox and treatment center specializing in geriatric nursing care. Because of BetterLife's ability to provide specialized nursing along with alcoholism treatment, the program occasionally accepted younger people with physical needs other alcohol centers couldn't cope with.

I learned that the Indian man had been hit by a car after leaving Arthur's Bar six weeks earlier. Late to meet a girlfriend at another bar, he was struck by a fast moving Buick while crossing the street and sustained a fractured leg. He had spent the last month and a half in traction at the county medical center. He was at BetterLife because of the medications and physical therapy he still needed for his recovery.

BetterLife was focused around the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program. As a Nursing Treatment Assistant, I worked with patients on a daily basis with both their physical and alcohol treatment. Doing the first step with people was always one of my favorite duties. Reviewing their past in an attempt to bring out the problems related to alcohol and their powerlessness over it, I heard their stories and got a chance to know them personally.

Although most caregivers involved with emotionally vulnerable patients are able to remain objective and detached, it's not uncommon for a nurse to occasionally develop a close relationship with a patient. Unfortunately, I had a tendency to get attached to one or two patients at a time. Doing step work with patients only amplified my tendency in that direction.
I became attached to a seventy-year-old woman when she broke down and cried over the murder of her three-year-old daughter at the hands of her husband fifty years earlier.
I fell in love with an eighty-year-old Florida transplant when she swore at me for trying to explain that those were elm trees outside her window, not palm trees.

But having grown up without a good relationship with my father, my biggest danger was that I had an overwhelming need to be protected and wanted. In February of 1980, Bruce Gates was the resident I was most fond of. A war veteran, he was fifty-ish with white hair and a fatherly appearance. I wasn't assigned to Bruce's first step, but I'd met him in group session and found him to be smart, warm-hearted and funny. Although I didn't go out of my way to find time to speak to him, I enjoyed his teasing when we were around each other. We developed a warm friendship.

At the same time Bruce was also developing a friendship with the new patient, Wilson, the Indian man. Whenever I ran into Bruce, Wilson was with him. Together they would tease me good-naturedly.

Wilson also began hanging around the nurse's desk more.
He was kind of a nice person after all, I decided.


I wasn't assigned to help Wilson with his first step either, but he wasn't comfortable with the person who was and asked me to help instead. There was nothing in his first step that struck me emotionally. In fact, my initial impression was that Wilson was skimming the surface, not totally forthright in his story. But through the open door of this first step work, Wilson began to tell me details of his life.

He was 100 percent Chippewa from the Fish Lake Reservation. Wilson's generation was the last of primarily full bloods on that Reservation and until he was five-years-old, he spoke only Ojibwe. As a baby he lived near the lake with his family in a small house without plumbing. When his mother remarried after his father died, he stayed with his grandpa, Way-zhow-ush-quah-je-wabe, in the woods near Leech Lake. The rest of his five or so siblings stayed with his mother and stepfather, Walter, who were drinking heavily. I say five children or so because the number varied. Both adults entered the marriage with five children each, but some of the older ones were already married and others moved in and out. Five more children came after Wilson.

The drinking wasn't the reason Wilson went to stay with his grandfather. Grandpa drank too, although not as often as his daughter. Grandpa needed Wilson to help him around and be a companion. But the relationship was reciprocal; Wilson cherished the help and companionship his grandpa gave him in return. Spending much of their time alone together, they grew very close.

Of Wilson’s early childhood he spoke fondly, "We used to camp by the lake in large groups," he said, describing traditional events such as powwows and ricing. "Gathering wild rice every year was our time to be together and see friends and family. We looked forward to it, just like Christmas to you guys. Other times in the woods was when we gathered maple or went trapping and fishing."

Wilson stayed with his grandfather until he was five and it was time to begin school. When the time came to leave, Wilson hated to go. He adored his grandfather. But his parents still spent time with his grandfather at the gatherings in the woods. There, Wilson continued to learn from both his parents and Grandpa the traditional way of life and food gathering. However, Wilson's mother and stepfather were also Christians now. As Christians, they were determined to raise their children to be sober and love the Lord.

"They had all of us kids sit at the table after dinner for Bible study," Wilson remembered.

Nevertheless, after his Grandpa’s death six years later, Wilson began drinking. His parents, who had no problem with spanking him when he was younger, now backed away.

"You make your choices. Just don't come crying to us when you get in trouble," his mother said.

Wilson took to running away from home and getting into trouble with the law. Finally, he was sent to a foster home and then to a boy’s reformatory.After graduation from the reformatory he attended Haskell Institute, an Indian college in Kansas. There he trained as an architect. He enjoyed the work; creative design appealed to him. He worked as an architect for a couple of years before, according to Wilson, he'd dated the Sheriff's daughter once too often.

Wrestling with his jailers as he was being thrown into a cell, he grabbed the doorjamb with his left hand to keep from being pushed in and they slammed the heavy door right on it.
The next morning, the doctor worked to save most of his hand. Although the doctor was successful and he lost only half his thumb, he was unable to use that hand for a long time and so was unable to continue as an architect.

Wilson was in and out of jobs for the next few years. His life alternated between trying to pull himself together in alcohol treatment and being drunk. His life fluctuated from honest workman to social outcast and back again. BetterLife wasn't his first time in treatment; it was his fourth, and he now had a wife and four kids. He hadn't lived with his wife for the last six months, though, and he didn't see much chance of returning to his marriage. According to Wilson, she was always critical of him and mean with the kids.
"Anyway, my wife won't like me sober," he said.

Most days, I began my shift in the afternoon and inevitably found Wilson and Bruce leaning against the wall in the hallway. Wilson, swinging his cane in his hand, was always nicely groomed. His clothes, including his jeans, were always pressed, and the cuffs of his sleeves carefully and perfectly rolled under twice. The two of them talked quietly to each other as they watched people pass. They always had a big smile and hello when I approached.

When I had the opportunity to take a group of residents for a walk, Wilson joined me. It was spring, and another aide and I guided the group along the parkway toward the University. The river sparkled below us. Wilson and I, while at the same time speaking and laughing with the group and enjoying the sunshine, walked together and talked.

In the late evening, Wilson and Bruce were the only ones still in the smoking room watching TV long after the older residents had retired. With the shift almost over and the work all done, I took the time to sit down and unwind.

I couldn't imagine myself relaxing at night with the Indian I was sure to steer clear of earlier. Funny, now I looked forward to it.