Our mother had dreams. She had dreams so intense, we all believed them, dreams so intense we didn’t realize we were only characters in them. And so, when Mother said, this is home, we believed. Because before she found it, she’d seen it in dreams.
Home that summer: an abandoned trailer surrounded by trees. Home: two broken headlights for eyes and a rusted fender for a mouth. A “wigwam,” she called it as we crawled inside and chose our sleeping spots. And that wigwam was ours. License plate KPD929, our permanent address. No shelter warden to divvy up our space or tell us how to live. No one to question Mother’s absences, which meant nothing to us because we still had faith and clothes to cover ourselves, and, with our wigwam, we had a home.
In the forest, we had no need for shoes, only food, which Mother brought us. Bags of chips she’d tear open with shivering fingers. Enormous cups of frozen lemonade that melted to sweet syrup before she got home. After dark, she’d light the oil lamp we’d stolen from the church altar (and for which we got our only beating). Sharing its flickering light, we’d tell her our dreams. She awarded us prizes: pennies for imagination, wildflowers for details.
Afternoons while she slept, we’d head for the creek, spring fed with water that ran clear over stones. Until that summer, we’d never been so clean. With clay from the banks, we made plates and cups and spoons, objects more elegant than we’d ever owned. But like dreams, they too crumbled to ruin after they dried. So, like dreams, we buried them in flowers.
I don’t know which of us first saw that arrowhead lying on the creek bed. “Real Indian made,” I said because I’d seen one in school. Such perfect shape and symmetry, a promise from God we decided. And because things from God require rules (like don’t steal oil lamps from altars), we created rules for our arrowhead.
We said, whoever held it had to remain silent.
And, no fighting was allowed in its presence.
We carried our arrowhead back to our wigwam, excited to share that promise we’d found. But Mother didn’t come that night or the next. Waiting, we didn’t fight in the arrowhead’s presence. Waiting, we all went silent. And it was only hunger that drove us back into town carrying those pennies we’d earned. People laughed when we told them about our wigwam, when we said KPD929 was our permanent address.
We felt sorry for those people who laughed. They couldn’t see that we were so clean we had no need for shoes. They couldn’t see the beauty of our details. They didn’t know to offer us flowers. They didn’t have faith. They didn’t know like we did that Mother would come back because we’d planted that arrowhead beneath the door of our wigwam. And, in dreams she’d see it: a promise forever pointing us toward home.