This affecting story collection takes an unflinching look at the lives of characters–Indigenous people in Oklahoma–who are all too familiar with difficulty and yet try to keep going, even in the face of uncertainty. Together, the stories create a moving portrait of resilience.
Like the best of wakes and funerals, the title story, “Rites,” makes a dead person vividly present. In this case, the deceased is Papa Tushka, the grandfather of the main character, twelve-year-old Treena. After Papa’s unexpected death in a truck accident, Treena and other family members gather for his funeral, which is beyond their means, leaving them to bury him in a plastic casket.
Throughout the funeral and reception, Papa remains present through the stories shared about him: about his days of brawling and bronco riding. In the words of Treena’s Uncle Jake, Papa was “kind of an asshole” yet nonetheless loved–in at least part, it seems, because of his difficult behavior. Running through the stories about Papa are Treena’s feelings about his death: for one thing, an anger that she tries to keep to herself. At one point, she asks her uncle:
Uncle Jake chuckled. “That’d be about right, huh?” I let out a little cry, and he straightened up. “Nah, nah, I’m just kidding. Don’t let any of that hell shit get under your skin.” … He looked out through the open garage door and waved his arm across the sky. “See those stars? I like to think that’s the spirit of the Tushkas.”
At the end of the story, Treena takes us back to a moment after her grandfather’s casket had been lowered into the ground, and after the funeral director had urged the mourners to clear the gravesite. At Uncle Jake’s urging, Treena and a handful of others hold their ground for a tribute (from Uncle Jake) that seems more fitting for Papa, given what we’ve learned about him, than any officiator’s words could have. The moment feels transcendent and true.
The story “Sparrows” portrays one man’s difficulty in adjusting to life post-incarceration. After serving a nine-year term for the “crime” of marijuana possession, Mike Shaw is released from prison and finds himself in a changed world. To give just one example, while drinking at a local bar, he finds a lot of unfamiliar faces:
It takes Mike some time to contact his ex-wife and two daughters, the delay owing to anxiety, it seems. One source of the anxiety is that he barely knows his daughters, who at the time of his incarceration, hadn’t left toddlerhood. When Mike finally starts spending time with them, the older daughter doesn’t seem pleased to see him, and even as the distance between the two of them closes some, it’s clear that a challenging road lies ahead for their relationship.
The story builds to a powerful conclusion that brings home all of the stresses that Mike is experiencing in his new life, leaving him both overwhelmed and isolated.
One of the most heart-wrenching stories in the collection, to my mind, also features a fraught father-daughter relationship. But this story, “Joyride,” is told from the point of view of the daughter, eight-year-old AJ. At the start of the story, her father decides that the middle of a rainy night is just the time for her to learn to drive, though it feels like the mission is driven by his own mysterious needs. The fact that he’s drunk when she takes the wheel makes the situation especially terrifying. So does the fact that for most of the trip, she has no idea where he’s leading them.
Despite the danger he’s putting her in, AJ feels a bond with him, partly rooted in the secrets she’s agreed to keep for him, the latest one being this drive in the dark. (As he says to AJ, “Don’t go telling your mom about this, yeah?”)
He ends up taking her down a dirt road that’s becoming overrun with rainwater. “I used to take you out here on nights you were crying,” he says, later adding, “[Y]a used to love it here.” Despite the deepening water and her fear, he urges her to keep going. From here, the story takes more unsettling turns, and it suggests that only more uncertainty lies ahead for AJ. And like certain other characters in the collection, she’s made to confront a situation that might be impossible to come to terms with.
Uncertainty also factors into the darkly beautiful story “Hold Tight,” which explores the transience of life, happiness, and security.
At the start of the story, the main character, Deidre, and her children have just been kicked out of her mother’s place, after what seems to have been another conflict in the women’s long-troubled relationship. After Deidre returns to her car (and children) with some groceries, her oldest child, Josie, asks, “where are we going?,” and he seems to be referring to a more permanent destination than Deidre has in mind. She wants to take the kids to the park across the street from where their old trailer had once been, a trailer they’d lived in in better times, before Deidre’s husband died in a mill accident.
Early in the story, she reflects on how the family had once had “the prettiest yard on the block.” But when she and the kids arrive at the site of their former home, they find the lot “empty and overgrown.” And as the story progresses, and as Deidre tries (unsuccessfully) to get the children to enjoy a picnic in the park, it’s clear that their happier past is so far behind them as to seem unreachable, even as a comforting memory. For his part, Josie, the most attuned and sensitive of the kids, seems laser-focused on the future. At one point he asks Deidre:
“I can’t tell the future.” Deidre lit a cigarette and flicked the first ash onto the bench.
“That’s not what I mean,” he said.
As the story moves toward its conclusion, Deidre is pulled further back into the past, even as the future keeps calling for her, in the form of her children. Emotionally, she seems to arrive at a place that is as essential as it is difficult, and it appears that neither hope nor resilience–much less a more promising future–can be found without a journey through it. Johnston’s depiction of this emotional state is powerful and poignant.
A final word: Certain characters, or mentions of them (at times, in the past tense), turn up in more than one story, giving Rites a sense of connections across time, even as the collection explores various forms of loneliness and isolation. In a larger sense, the characters in Rites are connected by the hard realities they face, even though they may bear their burdens privately. I’m going to be thinking about all of them for a long time.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Stories about confronting difficulty
￭ Stories with a strong sense of place
￭ Stories about Indigenous people and their struggles
