My grandfather once said, in response to my father, “We all live on reservations, some of us just don’t know it yet.” And though I didn’t understand that then, I was pretty sure—as I stood over my friends’ graves and watched the house go up in flames—that I did now; for he’d been talking about our limitations and the fact of our own mortality (trying to tell me, I think, as I got ready to leave for Los Angeles more than 30 years ago, that if I were going there to escape I was in for a disappointment). All I know for certain is that as I stood there over the crude markers—one for Essie and one for Kesabe—I felt smaller and less significant than ever before (and I’d felt pretty small and insignificant since the Flashback), to the point that I questioned going on at all, north or otherwise. B
