My mother once told me the word for “forgiveness” in Sioux is “woakiktunze.”
My mother, who taught me that to be Native was to be trapped. Lonely.
Woakiktunze, she said.
We weren’t churchgoers, but notions of contrition and penance, she knew them from the missionaries who tolerated the South Dakota winters because the savages had to be tamed. Because young Native women had to be domesticated before they were taken to Long Island to live among the whites.
Woakiktunze doesn’t come from God, she told me. It comes from the person you wronged.
My mother, who never met a stranger she didn’t like.
Anyway, Bertrand, my best friend, showed me there was more to being Native. That you could be free to drink cosmos and dance until dawn, could stride into a piano bar in Greenwich Village or bathhouse in Midtown and reject the advances of every man suddenly interested. Could sleep with none of them, or sleep with all.
Bertrand, the first friend I made after moving to the city, and the only Native I’d ever known besides my mother, showed me this. Showed me this and I encouraged it. Cheered him on. Asked him to show me more.
Now he was sick, and somehow, this was about my mother and her Sioux words. It was about forgiveness.
Despite a T-cell counting dipping perilously below 200, Bertrand bounced back from his first immune system crash, recovering from a bout of meningitis that in early 90’s usually meant it was the beginning of the beginning of the end. But he was well again–well enough, at least, to meet me at a downstairs bar called East of Eighth.
“The IHS didn’t kill me!” he said, and like most of his res Indian references, he had to explain what Indian Health Services was to white-raised me, explain how Natives who went in for care never came home. I still didn’t get the joke—he’d gone to St. Vincent’s here in the city—but I laughed anyway, because I loved him.
He was still striking, still handsome, and his eyes were the color of the brush that concealed wily rabbits. I was sure if I stared long enough, a rabbit might even hop out and scamper away.
I told him he looked great, surprise in my voice. We embraced, and when the moment came for us to pull apart, we did so only halfway, still gripping each other’s arms as we talked.
“I feel fine,” he said. “Fabulous, even.”
In the evening light, the shoes of sidewalk passersby could be seen in the windows, some heading west towards Chelsea Cinemas and Eighth Avenue, some east towards the Chelsea Hotel and Seventh Avenue. Around us, older gentlemen, career homosexuals who knew exactly what they were, sipping vodka and tonics while the Bucketheads sang about these sounds falling into my mind but with the volume low, a subdued cultural reminder instead of the loud gay bar anthem it would be somewhere else.
The bartender replaced Bertrand’s dwindling cocktail without being asked, said, “This one’s on me.”
Bertrand pulled away, reached for it, and took a sip. “I think my status gives me street cred,” he said. “Cheers to that!”
I asked if he was taking things easy.
He shook his head. “My carefree days are over.” He took another sip. “I can only be careless. And, oh sweetie, am I ever careless.”
He regaled me with tales of picking up strangers in bars. He said he no longer had to fear catching anything, and that the pills and condoms he’d been given went untouched—a point of pride, it seemed. I only shook my head, though whatever displeasure I might have been conveying was tempered by warmth, so much warmth. There was comfort in the fact that he was alive, that though there wasn’t much of a future, at least there was a now.
Around us, the older men now had younger men to buy drinks for. It was the Pet Shop Boys’ turn to sing about how it was a sin.
There was no beating around the bush with us, so I came out and said it: him getting sick was my fault, and I wanted to make it right.
“You want forgiveness,” he said solemnly.
We were quiet.
After a while, he held up a finger, as if suddenly realizing what I could do for him. “There’s a Lakota tradition, a special soup—sunka soup. It’s got healing qualities.”
I could make a soup. During the week I was a college student, but on the weekends, I worked in a kitchen.
“I’m not saying I believe in everything my unci said, but…,” and his voice trailed off.
I begged him to tell me how to make it.
The rabbit sprang out from behind his eyes and made a break for it. “Sunka means dog, so you have to get a puppy that’s black and white—no brown fur. You have to cook it in water with carrots, celery and potatoes. And have some with me.”
I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out. From his laughter, my expression must have been hysterical.
“I just want to help,” I said.
He shook his head. “My darling, kola,” he said, and he took another sip from his cocktail. “I am beyond help.”
Bertrand, whose year in the city before me made him the wise elder to my innocent, young brave. Who, at my urging, led by example.
Bertrand, who never met a stranger he didn’t like.
“I am beyond help and I will never forgive you,” he said. “Because you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Around us, the city and the scene Bertrand had introduced me to. I loved it as much as I loved him.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
My mother once told me the word for “forgiveness” in Sioux is woakiktunze.
And “ithunsni” was the word for liar.
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