The Painted Drum (12 page)

I do know that some get out of it, like my brother and sister living quiet. And myself to some degree, though my wife has moved to Fargo and I miss her, and miss my children between their visits. Before my father died, he found a woman to live with him. I think he had several happy years, and during that time he talked to me. Once, when he brought up the old days, and again we went over the story, I said to him at last two things I had been thinking.

First, I told him that to keep his sister’s shawl was wrong. Because we never keep the clothing of the dead, which he knew. Now’s the time to burn it, I said, send it off to cloak her spirit. So he agreed.

The other thing I said to him was in the form of a question. Have you ever considered, I asked him, given how your sister was so tenderhearted and brave, that she looked at the whole situation? She saw the wolves were only hungry, she saw their need was only need. She knew you were back there, alone in the snow. She saw the baby she loved would not live without a mother, and only the uncle knew the way. She saw clearly that one person on the wagon had to offer themself, or they all would die. And in that moment of knowledge, don’t you think being who she was, of the old sort of Anishinaabeg who thinks of the good of the people first, she jumped, my father, n’deydey, brother to that little girl, don’t you think she lifted her shawl and flew?

My father is a Shaawano and I’ve grown up in the range of those wolves, though I didn’t understand for a long while, of course, how it was that they related to our family. In summer that pack disappears on the far mainland where the shore is still wild and never was developed. I hardly ever hear them then. But in winter they come out onto the ice of the lake and hunt the islands. Then their howls travel through the frozen space and to hear them brings back all the tumult of my heart in younger days. I don’t know why their cries do that to me; perhaps it is because I’ve always had that longing, that need, to pierce through my existence. I am a boundary to something else, but I don’t know what. Mostly I have made my peace with never knowing, but when I hear the wolves that falls away. Unrest grips me. I have to leave my house and go out walking in the night, hungry to know what I cannot know and desperate to see what will always be hidden.

There was an old man once who wanted to be with the wolves and know their thoughts. He went out on the ice and sang to them and asked them to sink their teeth into his heart. I guess the singing kept him warm enough so he lived out there for three days and nights. On the fourth day, the wolves finally came to him, or rather, he realized that all along he had been looking straight at them and only when they were ready had they let themselves be seen. I know about this man because I sat with him in the hospital just a few years ago, and I talked to him while I was on night duty. I pulled a chair up next to his bed.

“Those wolves were curious,” he said, “just like anyone would be. What in the heck’s this young man—I was young then—sitting out here on the ice for? They came up to find out if I was dangerous or crazy or good to eat. Even then I was tough and stringy, so I guess they decided crazy. They sat and watched me for several hours to see if I would do anything and after a while they went away.”

I asked the old man if he’d learned what he needed to learn from them, if he’d found anything out at all.

“Oh sure,” he said. “I found out they think like us. They were watching me, but I was watching them, too. I was hungrier than they were. They had just eaten. They were full. One yawned. Another started playing hockey with a piece of ice.”

I couldn’t believe that.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “They play with things. They like to play with those big black birds, those ravens. Sometimes the ravens get the wolves to hunt for them. I’ve seen it where the ravens come back and tell the wolves where there is something to kill and eat. I thought if the raven and the wolf can get along, perhaps the man and the wolf can get along, too. But I couldn’t stay out there long enough to test that out.”

“Their thoughts. Did you know their thoughts,” I asked. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

The old man knew I was trying to pin him down and I could tell he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell me something. He was silent, turning things over in his mind, but at last he must have decided to take a chance and tell me. There was one wolf in particular, a gray wolf, he said, who came back several times and sat before him. Suddenly that wolf was staring at him with a human’s eyes in the face of a wolf. The old man did not know when it was he looked at the wolf and found he was staring back at it, but at some point he was aware that he and this particular wolf were holding each other’s gazes and had been doing so for some time. The wolf was asking him a question, he realized, and he knew after some more staring what that question was. The old man stopped.

“Well, what was it?” I was impatient to know.

“Oh.” His thoughts came back to me. “A standard question. He was asking me, ‘Do you want to die?’ But that is just wolf practice, asking that. I wanted to get past that and into something else. So I formed a question of my own in my mind and without ceasing my direct stare I spoke to the wolf, asking my own question: Wolf, I said, your people are hunted from the air and poisoned from the earth and killed on sight and you are outbred and stuffed in cages and almost wiped out. How is it that you go on living with such sorrow? How do you go on without turning around and destroying yourselves, as so many of us Anishinaabeg have done under similar circumstances?

“And the wolf answered, not in words, but with a continuation of that stare. ‘We live because we live.’ He did not ask questions. He did not give reasons. And I understood him then. The wolves accept the life they are given. They do not look around them and wish for a different life, or shorten their lives resenting the humans, or even fear them any more than is appropriate. They are efficient. They deal with what they encounter and then go on. Minute by minute. One day to the next. And so, my friend, I did learn what I had come there to find out. I’ll tell you now: I wanted to know how not to kill myself. For that very thing was my intention and had been so for weeks, I could see no way around it. I knew what chaos and everlasting questions such a death brings down upon the living. But I was past caring about that. Since I was resigned to killing myself, you could say my life was nothing, my life was cheap. So before I went through with it, I decided I would sit with the wolves.”

“You never killed yourself, obviously,” I said, “but did you perhaps try?”

The old man didn’t answer directly. He sat up. “Open the tie on this bare-ass dress,” he said, “and look.”

When I opened his shirt I saw across his back and shoulders the regular, deep, violet-brown scars of a sundancer who pulled buffalo skulls.

“That’s what I did instead.”

Sometimes I think that is the way to go. That old man made sense to me. I remember him always when I go out on cold nights and stand on the ice and listen to the wolves. Those wolves will tend their sick and their old; they’ll bring them food. Sometimes they will even adopt a human baby as their own, I’ve heard, though I’ve never known that to be true. They are usually just hungry, as they were when Anaquot fled. The baby who was saved that day grew up and lived a long life, and as a young man I went to sit with her sometimes. Her name was Fleur Pillager. From this old Pillager lady, I learned the next part of what I’m going to tell you. She told me things in detail, as though they happened directly to her, and in a way she had experienced them, too, even though she was tiny, and helpless, and wrapped in her mother’s shawl.

When a love burns too hot, it scorches everyone it touches. We old women know it is a curse to love like that. So my mother was cursed. Anaquot was numb when her lover’s uncle dropped her at the turnoff to the house, and she was uncertain. The uncle gave her no directions, and seemed anxious to get rid of her, perhaps, she thought, because he needed to forget what had happened with the wolves…though his back had been turned. He really didn’t know. He hadn’t seen it happen. As for Anaquot, it was easy for her to forget. She had already forgotten. Only, the story did not forget her. When her baby peered up at her from the warmth of its fur bag, she knew the baby remembered. The knowledge was there, in the tiny black eyes sharp as bitter stars.

She stood in the snowy clearing of her lover’s house with her baby, and watched the smoke curl from a small stovepipe chimney. A woman opened the door. Her face was pleasant, but worried, and she had the strong features of people on that side of the lake. In youth the women tended to be plain and as they matured their features gained a solid and attractive clarity. They grew beautiful. The woman’s smile seemed kind, though there was something too knowledgeable about it. She wore a flowered dress and a neat bib apron tied over her breasts and hips. She exuded the rich smell of cooking meat, or the house did, as she simultaneously brushed her children back and signaled Anaquot to enter. Stepping gratefully into the warm cabin, Anaquot felt a hand pluck at her shoulder, as though to draw her back, to warn her, but when she glanced behind her there was no one, only the empty snow of the yard where her tracks led to the house.

Had she imagined, later, another set of tracks beside hers? A set of careful, small, regular steps? It always seemed when she recalled entering the house that she had noticed she was accompanied there through the fresh snow of the empty yard. But then the drama of arrival took over. She was brought into the warmth. The woman—her man’s sister or sister-cousin, she assumed—showed her own children off to Anaquot. There were three. There was a bewildered-looking boy just out of the tikinagaan and starting to walk. An older daughter whose mouth curled hard and greedy, and who stared at Anaquot’s baby with the cold interest of a snake. There was a sturdy older brother just starting to get his growth, whose soft eyes reminded Anaquot of the eyes of the man she loved.

And where, anyway, was he?

Somehow, she didn’t want to ask. She thought she’d pick the clues up. Maybe he’d be back that night. She looked around for his things, perhaps the beaded ogichidaa vest that she remembered, or a pair of summer makizinan, a pipe, tobacco. But she saw nothing to indicate the presence of a grown man except the rifle gleaming on the white bone antlers set in the wall. And that could have been the woman’s gun. She didn’t know.

“Namadabin!” The woman gestured for her to sit, and Anaquot carefully wiped her hands clean on a white cloth before she smoothed back the fur of the bag that held the baby, and looked into her face. The new one was sleeping now, her mouth tipped open in trust to show delicate, dented gums. The rose brown cheeks were plump with mother’s milk, the perfectly formed head and face still wobbly on the stalklike neck. With her eyes shut in curved slant lines the baby was the picture of peace. But then the eyes opened and a little fire shot into the room. The baby was, after all, the child of an act of perfidy and thrilling joy.

What pain there had been in bearing the baby, Anaquot had welcomed. It had eclipsed her heart’s agonized dissatisfactions. Now, as she tried to get her bearings in the situation, she remembered that she’d been near death when she’d bled after the birth and it hadn’t mattered to her. That’s how deep she’d sunk into this. That thought strengthened her. Her heart surged when she realized she’d soon see her lover and her hands traced the rim of a tin tea mug before she set her lips to it. Had his own lips touched there too? Drinking tea that morning? Was this a kind of kiss?

“Aaniin izhinikaazoyan?” she asked the woman in a pleasant voice. By any measure of hospitality, the woman should have offered her name first, but perhaps in the intrigue of seeing such a young baby she had forgotten. Even now, the woman didn’t answer, as though she hadn’t heard or was distracted by a child’s request at the same time. She bustled, took some bannock from a cloth that had kept it warm; she gave Anaquot the bread, a bit of clear grease to dip it into, and also a small bowl of stew. Then the woman hastened to the corner to set out some blankets and make a place for Anaquot to rest with the baby. As she did this, Anaquot felt a prickling sensation along the side of her face, then at her back right between her shoulder blades, and she knew the girl child was staring at her. She turned around of course and sure enough those eyes opaque as mud slid away. Anaquot gave herself a little shake and tried not to feel the crawl of hatred that came so clearly from the girl.

“I don’t need to take the girl’s sleeping place,” said Anaquot. “I don’t need to use her blankets. I have my own.”

“Save your blankets,” said the girl’s mother.

And a voice, a little whisper, echoed her, out of the air.

Save yourself
.

The voice was just a thread of sound.

“Awegonen?” said Anaquot, looking around for the source.

The woman helped her from the chair and brought her to the corner. As Anaquot sank back into the blankets, covered herself, and began in that secret darkness to nurse her baby, she realized that she was tired, swimmingly exhausted, and the baby was still so little that the cold made it dangerously drowsy. She held it inside her shirt to warm it with her own skin, and the baby gradually relaxed. But as Anaquot drifted deeper toward unawareness, she experienced a sharp stab of lucidity. In that clear moment, she realized that she was more than tired. She was lost. The story had her by the throat. Frightened, she curled around her child as though to protect it, but sleep hurled them both to darkness and scattered them across the ice.

Her sleep was so profound that she forgot where she was and also who she was. She forgot she had a baby or was in love. She forgot her old life, her daughter, the son and husband she had left behind, and the uncle. All she could remember was the face of the woman who had greeted her at the door of this house. So she smiled when by lamplight that face appeared before her, strong and brown, the straight eyebrows concerned and her teeth gleaming in a smile. Yes, marveled Anaquot, those teeth were very white, and then she sank into a deeper obliteration and did not wake until dawn, when the people in the cabin all around her began to stir.

Although awake, she was so uncertain of her surroundings that she didn’t open her eyes, but stayed hidden in the blankets with her baby pressed to her, nursing again; had it nursed all night? The hungry rhythm of its pull comforted her, made all of this seem real again. She had the distinct sensation that, outside of the blankets that covered her completely, a huge leave-taking was occurring. Many people were stumbling out, saying their good-byes in low voices so as not to wake her. Perhaps her lover had returned, she thought, with an entire hunting party. Perhaps they all had spent the night upon the floor, each curled in blankets they now carried off over their shoulders or rolled and strapped to their backs. Listening, she could see each in her mind’s eye as he or she departed, and when the cabin was quiet she smiled. Her lover, she thought, had sent them all away! Soon, he would come to her. She would feel the weight of his hand on the blanket. He would slip underneath the heavy wool, the quilt, and he would curl behind her. He would bury his face in the hair flung across her shoulder. She took a deep breath. The baby stirred. Nothing happened. Slowly, she drew the blanket down, away from her face, and looked out. He wasn’t there, but that same woman was. She sat in a pool of light from the window quietly sewing beads onto a swatch of velvet.