The Last of the Raccoon

I hit the raccoon on the road. Three decades ago I was driving home alone late at night in an old couch-like Buick or Pontiac or Oldsmobile, trying to make it to the off-reservation house where I had recently ended my marriage. We'd created a mutual myth—he was my primal man, I his white goddess. Lennie is a Seneca Indian of the Iroquois Nation and I am a white Presbyterian minister's daughter. Neither of us had any idea who the other was or what we were doing. The marriage didn't work, nor could it have. When I saw that, I left him.

Ending us is still one of the hardest things I've ever done. I was very young, and marriage to an Indian man had been part of my lifeplan for almost a quarter of that life. Through intermarriage I thought I was fighting old racist traditions in both our families. My family had been appalled that I was crossing lines of race and culture. His family didn't like it any better—our child brought whiteness into the family bloodline—but my half-blood, two-heart baby was the only son in that generation, and once we were actually married, my Indian in-laws fell in love with him. Marrying into the family was something they could eventually accept, but never my divorcing out of it.

My husband's grandmother Elida was a reservation wise-woman, a canny combination of old ways and new, half protector of Seneca tradition, half bingo queen. Elida and her family were members of the Turtle Clan, so the turtle was their totem animal. Elida placed a curse on me for divorcing her grandson. She called me on the phone—on the phone—and shook turtle rattles through the lines, chanting in Seneca, then translating so I'd know what she'd done. Her curse was that I'd never be happy after leaving her grandson. Bad luck would follow me in everything I did, she said, but especially in love. I laughed and hung up on her, half charmed by her AT&T curse. Within an hour I had a flat tire.

I didn't believe in her curse, I claimed, but car trouble and love trouble came to me in the years after that. Somehow I wrecked the Pontiac my car-racer boyfriend gave me. My financial marital problems years before had begun with the purchase of another Pontiac, with its Indian chief profile on the blue high-beam button. That boyfriend accused me of cheating on him (I wasn't) and chased me around the house. I had to wall myself up in the bedroom and call the police, who had to call in their dogs, he was that crazy. Animals can help people. The turtles helped Elida curse me, and dogs saved me from that crazy man. Twenty years later my beloved collie died while trying to save my failed second marriage—we got back together for awhile when Alfie was ill, strewed roses on his grave together. But our problem with each other was too big even for Alfie.

Once, in the decade after Elida's call, I quietly asked an Indian friend if his own grandmother could take off the curse, which did seem to be working. She'd never liked Elida anyway—those reservation wise-women can get pretty competitive—so she lifted the curse with a counter-curse, but I don't think it worked. Elida had strong Love Medicine, stronger Hate Medicine.

Somewhere along in there, I hit a raccoon on the road, a woman driving home alone at night, always afraid that the old car would break down in the dark, almost smelling home in the far distance around an S-curve snaking through the reservation that was famous for killing drunk people in their cars at night. I was sober. Black eyes gleamed back at my car-eyes and then came that terrible thump, more like hitting a dog than a raccoon. I turned the car around to see how badly it was hurt...