Beadwork: A Personal Essay

© Kay Marie Porterfield

Vermillion Literary Project 2001

I have pulled the blue plastic chair close enough to my father’s bed so that when he awakens and searches for me with his eyes, I can reach out to touch his arm, read to him from his Bible, or summon a few words that I hope are reassuring. He does not respond except with his eyes. When their near-transparent lids close again, I pick up my number thirteen needle, and, shoving aside the tiny cardboard spool of nylon thread, dip it into the square plastic container balanced on my lap. Fishing about for the proper color, I aim the needle’s sharp tip through the hole of a red, yellow, orange, or blue cut bead, and affix it to the hatband I am making.

In time a pattern emerges beneath my fingers. This task is a tedious one, requiring great patience, but not as much patience as my father’s work. Breath by faint breath, he waits for death. I pick up a white bead and slide it down the thread, thinking that time must be a thin length of filament like the one I hold in my hands, capable of holding only so many bright and dark moments before it is too full for even one more.

For the most part the nursing home staff lets us be. They know there is nothing to be done for him except to turn him every few hours in order to prevent pressure sores and to check his vital signs. He has not eaten for two days and sleeps more than he is awake. “Your father has a strong heart,” the nurse tells me as she gently places his arm on the on the bed after taking his pulse. That arm is so fragile, it appears weightless, as though the bones are hollow – like bird bones, like beads.

When she leaves, head bowed, I continue to slide the beads down the thread, sustaining myself in this dim room with their brilliant color. Their regular shape is soothing to the touch, like I imagine rosary beads might be to me if I were Catholic.

I was bedridden with chronic bronchitis when my father shyly entered my sickroom and handed me the Genuine Indian Beading Kit forty-five years ago.

“I got these at the store we’re re-wiring,” he said. “They were marked down half price.” That justification was necessary in a home where presents were a luxury allowed only on Christmas and birthdays. He stood silently, waiting for my response.

Giving the battered red and yellow box a cursory glance, I said nothing. I did not want or need a beading kit. I wanted him to remove the burden of sickness that had kept me confined to my bed for most of two years. “I thought it would give you something to take your mind off your troubles,” he finally said.

Stubbornly, I kept my silence. How would I know what to do with a genuine Indian beading kit? The closest I had ever been to a genuine Indian was on the cover of my Big Chief Tablet or watching Tonto and Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring trapped behind the thick glass screen of the television set we had purchased the year before. I longed to go to school again, to make snow angels like other children, to eat meals again with the rest of the family. He was my father; he owed me that much.

I shoved aside the box, adding ungratefulness to the long list of sins I had already accumulated in my short life. Disappointment marking his face, he strode from the room to wash up for supper.

Mama made a brief appearance to bring my supper on a tray. As I picked at the bits of chicken and over cooked rice, I heard her and my father laughing in the kitchen, the click of silverware on thick china plates, my baby brother and banging his spoon on his high chair. Bored and filled with self-pity, I lifted the lid of the box with the smashed corners and ripped cellophane wrapper. Atop the wire bead loom lay a tangle of fine string and a sheet of instructions written in tiny print far beyond my second grade reading level.

The glass vials filled with colorful beads captured my interest, though. I worked the small cork loose from the top of one of them sending an avalanche of beads down the slopes of my bedcovers. When I reached to pick them up, the landscape of my bed changed, sending the beads to the floor. When they hit the warped floorboards, they made a sound like tiny hailstones. I lay back on the pillows listening to my parents’ voices, now interwoven with the voices from the TV set and for Mama’s certain tongue lashing about the mess I’d made.

Every night for a week when my father came home from his day job as an electrician, he would stop in my room to ask me if I’d made a belt yet on the bead loom. Each time, I shook my head, knowing I had failed him. Even though I felt irredeemably flawed, I took a curious pleasure in it. If he wouldn’t save me from the betrayal of my own immune system, I would not even attempt to string his damnable beads. Eventually the box and its contents found its way into the big wooden wardrobe that served as my closet.

I spent most of my life avoiding beading, until many years after my father’s gift, an Indian friend, desperate to finish a traditional dance outfit in time for a Veteran’s day pow wow, asked me to help him finish it. In exchange he would teaching me to bead on a loom. Out of curiosity, I agreed to give it a try. I hated it.

The beads skittered across the table with a life of their own. No matter how carefully I studied the graph paper pattern or how precisely I strung the beads, they mysteriously changed places on my needle and threw the intricate pattern off. Either that or the thread broke. Or I tipped over my tray of beads. After every inch or so of completed beadwork, my needle either bent so badly that it was ruined or broke all together. When the latter happened, I invariably managed to stab my finger in the process, my blood staining the taut warp threads, it had taken me hours to string. As I had done when I was an invalid child, I gave up, hiding the loom in the back of my closet.

Months afterward my father, widowed by then, suffered a stroke that destroyed his short-term memory and much of his capacity for logic. I begged him to allow me to move him to South Dakota to live with me, but he refused, insisting on remaining in Arizona where he had retired sixteen years before. He could no longer live on his own. I was unable to find a live-in caretaker. And so he began living in a nursing home where he frequently forgot not only where he was, but who he was as well.

I pulled out my beads and tried one more project. Finding a hat like the caps he had worn every working day of his life, I began to decorate it. With each clumsy stitch I prayed for the return of his mind. When I had finished the edging, I wrote his first name across the front, carefully tracing it with white beads. My bargaining was futile. He did not get better. The hat, however, became his most prized possession.

I began receiving calls from the charge nurse at the home complaining that he insisted on wearing it to bed each night and refused to remove it when they bathed him. A few weeks later, she called to report that he had taken to wandering in the hallway outside his room wearing nothing but the beaded hat. There were more calls. He had fallen. He had fallen again. He was oppositional. “We can’t do anything with him,” the nurse told me. “We’re going to have to use restraints.” Thus began weeks of fierce, long distance fighting and flights to Arizona in order to make certain he was treated with the dignity he deserved.

In the midst of this turmoil, night after night I dreamt that I was beading, always peyote stitch, an even more exacting method than the ones I’d tried and failed. Adding bead upon bead, my hands moved effortlessly, building spirals of color that flowed into intricate patterns. Each night, I began beading in my sleep as soon as I closed my eyes. I did not stop until the alarm went off the next morning. No, I did not choose beading. The beads chose me.

After many nights of these dreams, once more I pulled my beads from my closet. I threaded the needle and sat waiting to see what would happen. My hands began a rhythm I did not will. The beadwork seemed to shape itself, demanding its own form and design. I did not know why I made bracelets and necklaces, key chains and earrings – all perfect and without planning – only that I must. When I bought smaller beads, the patterns became more complex. As I worked it came to me what I must do about my father.

For a few weeks he stayed in my home. Agitated and driven by dementia, he paced for hours on end both day and night. Only when I began to bead would he stop to sit at the kitchen table to watch me, mesmerized by the rhythm of my hands. “Those beads are very small,” he would repeat every few minutes. “You do good work.” Soon he began referring to it as his beadwork and would tell everyone who listened how he had made the key chains. “Those are very small beads,” he told visitors. “I do good work.”

One morning I awoke to commotion coming from the kitchen, only to find my father bent over the sink spitting something into the basin. Afraid he was sick or having another stroke, I asked what was wrong. He held aloft the cake of beeswax I used to keep my thread from tangling. A chunk was missing. “You aren’t very good at baking,” he complained, picking wax from his teeth. “These cookies taste like crap if you ask me.”

The cookies weren’t the worst of it. He wandered away from home in the middle of the night and physically fought me when I stopped him. He had to go to work, he said. I was making him late. The home health care workers I hired to watch him while I went grocery shopping or tried to catch an occasional nap, refused to come back because of his temper.

After weeks of searching, I found a nursing home where he would be safe. There he settled into a routine. I settled into one as well, visiting him three times a week. Miserable that his mind did not work like he expected, for most of two years he had little to say to me except for the same string of cuss words I’d heard him utter years before when he’d gouged himself with a screwdriver or hammered a finger while driving nails. As a way to survive, I carried my beadwork with me, focusing on it while he stared out the window, working on it when he cursed at me.

During the three and a half years he lived there he wore out four more hats after the first one I made, each more elaborately beaded than the last had been. The nursing home workers complimented him on his headgear. Their praise was one of the few things that lifted him from anger and confusion and made him smile.

One day a nurse’s aide stopped me at the end of my visit. “What tribe are you?” she asked.

“I’m not Indian,” I responded.

“But your father is.” She looked puzzled.

I’m sure I looked equally puzzled as I shook me head.

“I noticed his hat,” she said. “When I asked him, he said that, yes, he’s sure he’s an Indian, but he forgot what kind.”

After that exchange the Indian women who worked at the home began lavishing him with kindnesses that extended far beyond humoring this member of a lost tribe. Some called him Grandpa and others Ate, father. They stopped in his room on their breaks, spending a few minutes to talk to South Dakota’s oldest wannabe, to tease him and make him smile.

There is no smiling now in this overheated, stuffy room. with curtains tightly drawn against the glare of snow outside. Covered by a sheet, my father’s gaunt frame lies propped against a row of pillows. The only sounds are his soft breathing and the rhythmic whoosh of the oxygen machine he has lived with for five years. He told me several days ago, when he could still speak, that there is nothing left for him, that he is no longer afraid.

Nothing has prepared me for this. I am afraid, but my hand with a will all its own moves in time to the steady pumping of the machine. My racing thoughts slow. Pick a bead up on the needle. Raise the hand. Push the needle through the bead of the row below. Pull it tight. Pick up another bead. Circling round and round, I cover a piece of cord to decorate cap that I know my father will not live to wear. I do not miss a beat.

I do not want to lose him. I wish I could take apart the bad patches between us, work backwards and dismantle my ungratefulness, his angry words and the knotted emotions that marked many years of our relationship. I cannot. I remember my childish insistence so long ago, that he was obligated to take the burden of my illness from me and I wonder if he felt as heartbroken by his helplessness then as I do now about my own.

He sleeps more now, refusing water now, in addition to food. Already I feel a foreboding dark emptiness waiting in the corner to pounce on me when he takes his final breath. Two yellow beads, one light orange, one dark orange, then red and blue, red again, dark orange -- my fingers work their way past the valley of the shadow to the light part of the pattern, then set it off with the rows of blue as dark as midnight sky. I draw the thread tight, stitch back and forth between the beads, and then cut it, finished. In the hallway outside his room, Sunday school children sing Christmas carols. After a time, two nurses stop in to admire the hatband.

That night at home I gather up all the key chains and earrings and bracelets I’ve made during the years of sitting beside him at the nursing home, the years of sitting for hours on my living room sofa recovering from the wrenching sadness of those visits. The next morning, I begin giving them away to the orderlies, the secretaries, the cooks, the housekeepers, the nurses and aides. “Merry Christmas from my father,” I tell them then hold out the shoebox so that they can choose what they want to remember him by. “These are beautiful,” they tell me. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” I say. “Thank my dad. They’re from him.” Without that bead loom so many years ago, without the nursing home vigil, without the desperate need to keep myself from going crazy from the sadness, the box would be empty.

When the nursing director tries to stop me by telling me that company policy forbids gifts, I am insistent. We compromise. I leave the box in the break room and make a sign reading, “Merry Christmas. Help Yourself.”

The nursing home workers slip into his room to hug him, to kiss his forehead, hot with fever, and to hold his hand as thank you for his beadwork. A few even tell him they love him. He is so weak now, he cannot move his arms, but he looks up at the people who stand at his bedside and smiles, eyes brimming with love and tears. They cry. Finally I cry too.

Three days later, he quietly dies.

Although the hospice nurse, who arrives minutes afterward says that she will ready his body for the funeral home, the nursing home aides gathered around his bed and I politely refuse. She persists. “He is our relative,” an Indian woman tells her and slowly closes the door, leaving her to stand in the hallway.

We four women set to work, each dipping a washcloth into the basin of warm soapy water that one of them has brought. We clean him gently as we would a baby, lifting his arms, turning him so that every inch of his flesh, still hot from the fever, smells of soap instead of sickness. As our white and brown hands move across his soft, wrinkled, skin, I am overwhelmed, not by darkness, but with gratitude at this pattern of women he has woven into family. His heart was strong and he did good work.