'74 & Sunny Read Free

would pulverize dried yarrow leaves and combine them withmild tobacco, bearberry, and red-willow leaves to be smoked in a pipe.
    â€œIt was most important that I got bobea, wild snowball, and mountain sweet into the doctor’s system first,” the chief said. “I felt the pain leave us from our lungs first and next the very blood running throughout our bodies.”
    â€œMom, you have no idea how cool all this is,” I shouted into the other room.
    The chief laughed. “Usually I mix a tea with root bark and goldenseal each night before bed for your uncle,” he said. “But I don’t think he will need it tonight.”
    â€œWhat’s that tea for?”
    â€œDespondency and melancholy.” He smiled. “I know he feels happy that you are here, because I feel happy that you are here.”
    I thanked the chief for all he told me about helping my uncle by shaking his hand and hugging him hard around his back. It seemed out of place and very ordinary for all the mystical and otherworldly stuff he had just shared with me. When I walked back into the den, it was obvious from their expressions that Uncle Larry had shared some special things with my mom, perhaps more accurate things, concerning his health.
    My uncle called out to me. “I was just telling your mother, A.J., how much that summer of 1974 meant to me and your aunt Geneva.”
    â€œSummer of ’74,” I said. “Yeah, that was a great movie.”
    â€œDon’t be a smart-ass,” my mother snapped. “That was the summer we watched Gino for a few months while Aunt Geneva recuperated from her surgery.”
    â€œI know, I know. I’m just breaking balls,” I said. “Yeah, that was one helluva summer I had with my little cousin tailing me. I know I’ll never forget it.”
    â€œMy family was just here the other day talking about it,” Uncle Larry recalled. “All the girls and their kids. Robin, Susan, Geneva, it was just wonderful. Gino and Glen were here too. So happy, my son is. So handsome! I don’t know why I ever worried.”
    â€œSpitting image of his old man,” I said.
    â€œBut you’ll never know how much that summer meant to me as a man,” Uncle Larry knowingly said to me. “One day, you’ll be a father yourself. And you’ll never expect that there’ll come a day when it’s not enough to be the only man in your little boy’s life.”
    His eyes were welling up a little, so I tried to shake us back to reality. “Ah, come on, Uncle Larry. Ain’t there a tea Chief, here, can make to get us to quit getting so sad?”
    But my uncle Larry would rather live in the moment, however uncomfortably beautiful it was. “Look at me,” he said, running his hand down his torso. “I used to hold my health in an iron fist and say things like, ‘That’s not what I imagined would happen to me.’ Well, the grip has loosened now, so I can let it just be what it is.”
    I looked over at my mother, who was working a tissuelike she knew she wouldn’t be seeing her brother-in-law too much longer. “I told Uncle Larry how it sometimes bothers you that we signed a paper for the doctors not to resuscitate your father,” she said. “He wants to say something to you.”
    â€œAh, Ma, not that again . . .”
    â€œNo, no, no. Listen to me, A.J.,” Uncle Larry said with a soft smile. “He’s not up there upset that you guys did what you did. He was counting on it. My brother and I talked. And I hope my son does the same thing if it comes to that.”
    â€œNow you’re talking crazy, Uncle Larry.”
    â€œNo, A.J. You know what’s crazy? Crazy is an Indian chief in your kitchen.”

2

    TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS
    I thought of my father as old all my life. Not the type of old that would indicate any kind of fragility. The type of old that suggested a lack