We went every summer to The Voyageur Rendezvous, a festival put on at the community college celebrating the union of the French fur traders and Indians. It was held in a clearing at the edge of the woods in mid-July, when the air was stickiest. The fatter men lumbered around the campground in furs and leather, faces soaked through like sponges, swigging water from the plastic canteens that swung at their belts. The skinny men played the shirtless Indians. They wore elegant feathered headdresses and hosted bracelet-making workshops in teepees constructed from sticks and white bed sheets. 

All summer my sister and I looked forward to the rendezvous, where we beaded strips of leather and tied them around our wrists, crouched over fire pits and cracked flint to make white-hot, winking sparks. We collected arrowheads from the Chief in Tent Three, a pale teenager whose cheeks were streaked green and blue and kept a cell phone clipped to his leather skirt. When it purred, his fingers skittered like spiders to his hip. We followed our mother into the museum, which was actually the college’s cafeteria with a few folding tables set up, displaying pictures of white men with dramatic beards atop horses, looking triumphant. The pictures made my mother’s face pucker, go sour.  She clutched her throat. “It’s just horrible what we did to them,” she said, ‘them’ being the Indians. She dreamed of struggle and her own involvement in it as evenings she spread out in bed, after dinner had been eaten and the dishes washed, reading a history book and making strained noises in her throat. We were the ones at fault, the white men. We had kicked the Indians out of their homes, driven them from nature and onto reservations, where they were made to settle. What was wrong with wildness, she wanted to know.

My father never came with us to the festival. “Buncha half-naked kooks running around,” he said when my mother, sister and I returned from the college, ankles coated in a fine gravelly dust, our skin the golden-brown crisp of roasted corn on the cob. He was seated at the head of the kitchen table, waiting for his dinner, but my mother had that stunned look in her eyes, the one that meant she was traveling. Only I knew about her special ability to slip in and out of her body, something she had been doing more frequently, leaving its shell behind to trick others into thinking she was still present in their world. She fingered her new earring, a feathered turquoise leaf that grazed her jaw line. In the sunlight spilling through the blinds, the colors pulsed, seeped like paint into her skin. She was still in the world of the festival, where there were no dishes to worry over, and we ate with our bare hands instead of with the forks neatly arranged at our places. 

Even after the festival had ended, the campfires snuffed out and the cardboard tables folded into dark storage closets, my sister and I kept its spirit alive. We smeared our cheeks with black watercolor paint and streaked through the backyard, slamming our hands against our mouths. Wahwahwahwah! we cried, fierce in our sundresses. Our father scooped us into his arms and carried us through a night dotted with fireflies, upstairs to bed. “The natives are restless,” he teased, as we battled the covers.

Our mother was restless, too. She left dishes piled in the sink and rumpled jeans on top of the dryer, still damp. She traded her history books for fashion magazines and began writing in a red leather journal about rendezvous of a different sort. A year later our father moved out, shortly after the July festival ended. A man with a curly white beard took his place in our home. My mother hung a dream catcher above my bed to catch all the bad ones, but there was nothing keeping me awake, no more battles left to fight, so I surrendered to sleep. My head fell hard onto the pillow. 

Amy Bernhard is an MFA student in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. Her work appears in damselfly press, Palooka Literary Journal, and Toasted Cheese Literary Journal.