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Nicole Ducheneaux Sioux/Flathead Picking Indian Tea In her jeep, through the bowing canopy of ponderosa pines, we lurch, we three. She wears her hair in that bottle-black French twist, though she is tall and has felled any number of elk in long melted winter snow. And even though those hands are crooked at the joint now, swirling lopsidedly in husky gesticulation, she’ll be there again when we are home for the fall and the Mission Mountains sigh with their spreading whiteness. So we ride, I in the makeshift back seat, swinging my Velcro sneaker feet, and she tells the story of the chewed-up rosary and old Resurrection Sam, who rose from the dead once in the Mission church to the sound of sobbing laughter. “Oh, yes. Old Resurrection Sam, I remember him,” my mother says. And honeyed flashes of leafy light spray down on us as we ride, we three, up the north fork of the Jocko. And, yes, there’s a story about him too. Who knows how far up into the sky we have rattled yet in my clumsy dream of walking through the gray blanket of a cloud, but the sun is shining today. So with the low shrubs on either side we stoop, we three, touch the tender leaves and pluck them like precious emeralds from the stalk. “These are best for Indian tea,” holding up a silky one, says she. 26 And when we’ve filled our shopping bags up to their hiccupping tops, we follow her into the trees to search for huskusk root— a delicate task. The plant, hung with veiny tattered lace, hides in the arms of a deadly twin—the philosopher’s end and the bitter cure. “You gotta’ be careful what you pick.” And she pulls it up out of the earth, the thirsty hairs dripping soil like sweat. We take it home, over the road, into the valley. I rest in the afternoon, in the coffee air, just me, reading seven tattered generations of Redbook and McCall’s, and washing my hands for a thick stew dinner. I never drink the tea. It sits in a musty bag still, next to some yellow casserole dishes. But I chew the root when I’m learning how to divide and multiply in a wide ruled book. I swallow and sniff my thoughts into a mountain fog I’ve never known. And the root is gone now, though its scents the house in Tenelytown. I wear your gloves, holding my own red hand, stitched with your name, Lucille. 27 ...

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