Walk Two Moons

For the most part, Gram and Gramps sit quietly and listen to Sal’s story about Phoebe. But when Sal tells them about the message “Everyone has his own agenda,” Gramps says that’s so true: everyone is concerned with their own worries and expects everyone else to worry about the same things.

Later, when Sal talks about Ben asking after Momma, Gram and Gramps give each other a look. Gramps says that once, his father ran away for six months—and when Gramps’s best friend asked about it, Gramps punched his friend. Then, when Sal mentions flinching at Ben’s touch, Gram turns around and kisses Sal’s hand. Gram also regularly remarks that Phoebe is just like her old friend Gloria.

Not long before they hit the South Dakota border, Gramps heads north toward the Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. Gramps insists this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but Sal just wants to keep going. Pipestone is in a dark forest that smells like Bybanks. It feels a lot like Bybanks, too. At the monument, Sal asks one man if he’s a Native American. The man explains that he’s a person—an American Indian person. Sal says she is, too.

Sal, Gram, and Gramps watch “American Indian persons” making pipes out of stone. Outside of a museum, there’s a man smoking a peace pipe. He gladly passes the pipe to Gramps, who takes a puff and passes it to Gram. Gram passes it to Sal. Sal kisses the stem, since that’s what it looked like Gram and Gramps did. The smoke makes her feel foggy. As she lets it out of her mouth, her brain says, “There goes your mother.” Gramps buys two pipes in the gift shop, one for him and one for Sal.

Gramps gets them a room at Injun Joe’s Peace Palace Motel for the night. By now, Sal is used to Gram and Gramps’s bedtime routine. Every night, after they climb into bed, Gramps says, “Well, this ain’t our marriage bed, but it will do.” This is because Gramps’s most precious belonging is his marriage bed, back home in Bybanks. All of Gramps’s brothers were born in that bed, as well as all of his children.

The story of the marriage bed starts when Gramps is 17. He met Gram that summer. Gram was young and wild, and Gramps followed her for a full three weeks. He finally asked Gram’s father to marry her—and Gram’s father said he could, if he could get Gram to stand still. When Gramps asked Gram to marry him, she asked if he had a dog. She wanted to know where the dog slept and how the dog greeted Gramps when he got home at the end of the day. Gramps admitted to singing his dog a song sometimes while he held her. At this, Gram said she’d marry Gramps: if he’d treat a dog that well, he’d treat her even better.

Three months later, Gram and Gramps got married. During those three months, Gramps, his father, and his brothers built a house in a meadow. It didn’t have furniture by the time the wedding rolled around, but that didn’t bother Gramps. After the wedding, during the supper, Gramps noticed that his father and brothers were absent. He figured they were planning to kidnap Gramps to drink whiskey—but instead, when Gramps later carried Gram into their new home, he discovered the marriage bed. His father and brothers had moved it during the supper. Sal wonders if she’ll ever have a marriage bed like her grandparents.