Letters to Tom Yodi: December 24, 1975

Green River State Penitenary
Bismark North Dakota, Christmas Eve, 1975

Grandfather,

You asked me to remember things. You told me once that to remember is to live again, is to live a hundred lives, all of our former selves, together again, speaking in one voice that will set us free, that will give us the answers we need...

You told me that we already know every answer to every question we will ever have about ourselves. But there is one that bothers me. One question that keeps gnawing at me. Why does a man keep repeating the same mistakes over and over when he knows that what he is doing is wrong?

The only part of the outside world that comes to me now, in this place of steel and stone, is the sound of distant ravens. I can hear them. Far away. They sound like human voices, calling to each other and sometimes I mistake that sound for men. It is a sound that brings back many things. The voices of the ravens, the crows, the corvines - they are the first sounds I can remember other than that of human voices...

For as long as I can remember, my father, the man who I thought was my father, kept dogs. I lived my life surrounded by dogs. These were Heelers mostly, cattle dogs, fierce in spirit and squat in stature. They were mostly feral, for he never did feed them anything but scraps from the table and the discarded entrails of poached deer. He treated those dogs harshly. But they loved him no less for it. Those dogs would lie at his feet for hours if he'd let them and they'd nuzzle his hand, even when he cuffed them back. They killed for him. The first man I ever saw die was a fool who thought he could steal from my father. No matter what anyone tells you, there is no worse way to die than by the mouths of dogs doing only what God meant them to do. They are marvelous in their ways. They are terrible. I know now why man and dog have come to live together in such harmony. They are so much alike. When the dogs would kill the ravens would come. The ravens always seemed to know before the dogs did, they could feel the kill coming on. And of course they'd kill each other, the dogs. That's how they survived on such meager food and that's how my father protected his business. He never left that house in the later years. His customers came to him. No man could get close to him. He was the only dealer around that could keep himself alive. Only someone from the inside could get to him. Someone he trusted and would never suspect. Someone who the dogs also loved....that night, after I did it, seconds after he fell, it wasn't the blood that scared me. It wasn't his head crakcked open and his eyes aglaze that I remember so much as what happaned to the dogs, who suddenly became very quiet, who in unison, laid down at my feet with their ears pinned back, cowering, and they would not look at me, only whimpering, only the sound of those whining dogs is what I heard and what I remember. They were mine. And for one shining moment in my life, I was Lord...