Louise Erdrich

For Angela The Windigo is a flesh-eating, wintry demon with a man buried deep inside of it. In some Chippewa stories, a young girl vanquishes this monster by forcing boiling lard down its throat, thereby releasing the human at the core of ice. You knew I was coming for you, little one, when the kettle jumped into the fire. Towels flapped on the hooks, and the dog crept off, groaning, to the deepest part of the woods. In the hackles of dry brush a thin laughter started up. Mother scolded the food warm and smooth in the pot and called you to eat. But I spoke in the cold trees: New one, I have come for you, child hide and lie still. The sumac pushed sour red cones through the air. Copper burned in the raw wood. You saw me drag toward you. Oh touch me, I murmured, and licked the soles of your feet. You dug your hands into my pale, melting fur. I stole you off, a huge thing in my bristling armor. Steam rolled from my wintry arms, each leaf shivered from the bushes we passed until they stood, naked, spread like the cleaned spines of fish. Then your warm hands hummed over and shoveled themselves full of the ice and the snow. I would darken and spill all night running, until at last morning broke the cold earth and I carried you home, a river shaking in the sun.

For Pat Gourneau, my grandfather The heron makes a cross flying low over the marsh. Its heart is an old compass pointing off in four directions. It drags the world along, the world it becomes. My face surfaces in the green beveled glass above the washstand. My handprint in thick black powder on the bedroom shade. Home I could drink like thin fire that gathers like lead in my veins, heart’s armor, the coffee stains. In the dust of the double hollyhock, Theresa, one frail flame eating wind. One slim candle that snaps in the dry grass. Ascending tall ladders that walk to the edge of dusk. Riding a blue cricket through the tumult of the falling dawn. At dusk the gray owl walks the length of the roof, sharpening its talons on the shingles. Grandpa leans back between spoonfuls of canned soup and repeats to himself a word that belongs to a world no one else can remember. The day has not come when from sloughs, the great salamander lumbers through snow, salt, and fire to be with him, throws the hatchet of its head through the door of the three-room house and eats the blue roses that are peeling off the walls. Uncle Ray, drunk for three days behind the jagged window of a new government box, drapes himself in fallen curtains, and dreams that the odd beast seen near Cannonball, North Dakota, crouches moaning at the door to his body. The latch is the small hook and eye. of religion. Twenty nuns fall through clouds to park their butts on the metal hasp. Surely that would be considered miraculous almost anyplace, but here in the Turtle Mountains it is no more than common fact. Raymond wakes, but he can’t shrug them off. He is looking up dark tunnels of their sleeves, and into their frozen armpits, or is it heaven? He counts the points of their hairs like stars. One by one they blink out, and Theresa comes forth clothed in the lovely hair she has been washing all day. She smells like a hayfield, drifting pollen of birch trees. Her hair steals across her shoulders like a postcard sunset. All the boys tonight, goaded from below, will approach her in The Blazer, The Tomahawk, The White Roach Bar where everyone gets up to cut the rug, wagging everything they got, as the one bass drum of The Holy Greaseballs lights a depth charge through the smoke. Grandpa leans closer to the bingo. The small fortune his heart pumps for is hidden in the stained, dancing numbers. The Ping-Pong balls rise through colored lights, brief as sparrows God is in the sleight of the woman’s hand. He walks from Saint Ann’s, limp and crazy as the loon that calls its children across the lake in its broke, knowing laughter. Hitchhiking home from the Mission, if he sings, it is a loud, rasping wail that saws through the spine of Ira Comes Last, at the wheel. Drawn up through the neck ropes, drawn out of his stomach by the spirit of the stones that line the road and speak to him only in their old agreement. Ira knows the old man is nuts. Lets him out at the road that leads up over stars and the skulls of white cranes. And through the soft explosions of cattail and the scattering of seeds on still water, walks Grandpa, all the time that there is in his hands that have grown to be the twisted doubles of the burrows of mole and badger, that have come to be the absence of birds in a nest. Hands of earth, of this clay I’m also made from.

Butch once remarked to me how sinister it was alone, after hours, in the dark of the shop to find me there hunched over two weeks’ accounts probably smoked like a bacon from all those Pall-Malls. Odd comfort when the light goes, the case lights left on and the rings of baloney, the herring, the parsley, arranged in the strict, familiar ways. Whatever intactness holds animals up has been carefully taken, what’s left are the parts. Just look in the cases, all counted and stacked. Step-and-a-Half Waleski used to come to the shop and ask for the cheap cut, she would thump, sniff, and finger. This one too old. This one here for my supper. Two days and you do notice change in the texture. I have seen them the day before slaughter. Knowing the outcome from the moment they enter the chute, the eye rolls, blood is smeared on the lintel. Mallet or bullet they lunge toward their darkness. But something queer happens when the heart is delivered. When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger. You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there. That is the knowledge in the hand of a butcher that adds to its weight. Otto Kröger could fell a dray horse with one well-placed punch to the jaw, and yet it is well known how thorough he was. He never sat down without washing his hands, and he was a maker, his sausage was echt so that even Waleski had little complaint. Butch once remarked there was no one so deft as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves. How we cling to the bones. Each joint is a web of small tendons and fibers. He knew what I meant when I told him I felt something pull from the left, and how often it clouded the day before slaughter. Something queer happens when the heart is delivered.

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads. —Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows transcribed and edited by Frank Linderman (1932) All night I am the doe, breathing his name in a frozen field, the small mist of the word drifting always before me. And again he has heard it and I have gone burning to meet him, the jacklight fills my eyes with blue fire; the heart in my chest explodes like a hot stone. Then slung like a sack in the back of his pickup, I wipe the death scum from my mouth, sit up laughing and shriek in my speeding grave. Safely shut in the garage, when he sharpens his knife and thinks to have me, like that, I come toward him, a lean gray witch through the bullets that enter and dissolve. I sit in his house drinking coffee till dawn and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps, crawling back into my shadowy body. All day, asleep in clean grasses, I dream of the one who could really wound me. Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look. Not even with his goodness. If a man was never to lie to me.Never lie me. I swear I would never leave him.

It is said that playing cards were invented in 1392 to cure the French king, Charles VI, of madness. The suits in some of the first card packs consisted of Doves, Peacocks, Ravens, and Owls. They say I am excitable! How could I not scream? The Swiss monk’s tonsure spun till it blurred yet his eyes were still. I snapped my gaiter, hard, to stuff back my mirth. Lords, he then began to speak. Indus catarum, he said,presenting the game of cards in which the state of the world is excellent described and figured.

Home’s the place we head for in our sleep. Boxcars stumbling north in dreams don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run. The rails, old lacerations that we love, shoot parallel across the face and break just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross. The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts to be here, cold in regulation clothes. We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun to take us back. His car is dumb and warm. The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts of ancient punishments lead back and forth. All runaways wear dresses, long green ones, the color you would think shame was. We scrub the sidewalks down because it's shameful work. Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark face before it hardened, pale, remembering delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.

We watched from the house as the river grew, helpless and terrible in its unfamiliar body. Wrestling everything into it, the water wrapped around trees until their life-hold was broken. They went down, one by one, and the river dragged off their covering. Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones, snags of soaked bark on the shoreline: a whole forest pulled through the teeth of the spillway. Trees surfacing singly, where the river poured off into arteries for fields below the reservation. When at last it was over, the long removal, they had all become the same dry wood. We walked among them, the branches whitening in the raw sun. Above us drifted herons, alone, hoarse-voiced, broken, settling their beaks among the hollows. Grandpa said,These are the ghosts of the tree people moving among us, unable to take their rest.

This is Tarsus, one place like anyplace else. And this is my circuit, the rodeo, fair. The farmboys blow through here in pickups, wild as horses in their oat sacks. The women wear spurs. In the trailers the cattle are pounding for air. My room is the same as last year. They always give me end of the corridor, left, the top floor. Privacy. Why not. I’ve been through here before. I’m the town’s best customer. A minor attraction. I buy from their stores. Remember this bureau— battered wood, the fake drawer and split mirror? And even the glass marks, ring within ring of spilled drinks. When I sit here the widest warped links have a center. Strung out they’re a year’s worth of slack, a tether that swings around the spine’s dark pole and swings back. Each time I return something’s different, although there’s a few I can always expect. The cracks in the mirror: always more, never less. The stains in the bedspread have spread. And the rip in the window shade lets through more light, strange light, since I come here to be in the dark. Should be taped. A few things can be saved anyhow. But I don’t want to get into that. I set up my pictures. Mother and Father, stiffer, more blurred every year. I turn them to the walls when there’s customers, that is the least I can do. What mending there is occurs in small acts, and after the fact of the damage, when nothing is ever enough. There is always the scar to remind me that things were once perfect, at least they were new. I first came here when I was a girl. It surprised me, the things that two people could do left alone in a room. Not long and I learned. I learned what the selves are a man can disown till he lets them to life in a room. It’s the region’s hard winters, snowed in with the snow half the year. I’d expect them to think up a few. But nothing surprises me, not anymore. The plumbing can only get worse with the cold. It’s true, even summers the water is foul and flows slowly, a thin brown trickle by noon. Heat pours in the west, freak waves of dry lightning soak the whole town in a feverish light. Beneath me, the tables of water have dropped to unheard-of levels. It’s been a long drought. I bend my whole arm to the handle, the valve yawns open but nothing comes out. What else should I expect. Wrung cloth. The body washing in dust.

Ray’s third new car in half as many years. Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer as I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud. All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again. Somewhere in the bush near Saint John there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities. One week Ray is crocked. We’ve been through this before. Even, as a little girl, hands in my dress, Ah punka, you’s my Debby, come and ki me. Then the road ends in a yard full of dogs. Them’s Indian dogs, Ray says, lookit how they know me. And they do seem to know him, like I do. His odor— rank beef of fierce turtle pulled dripping from Metagoshe, and the inflammable mansmell: hair tonic, ashes, alcohol. Ray dances an old woman up in his arms. Fiddles reel in the phonograph and I sink apart in a corner, start knocking the Blue Ribbons down. Four generations of people live here. No one remembers Raymond Twobears. So what. The walls shiver, the old house caulked with mud sails back into the middle of Metagoshe. A three-foot-long snapper is hooked on a fishline, so mean that we do not dare wrestle him in but tow him to shore, heavy as an old engine. Then somehow Ray pries the beak open and shoves down a cherry bomb. Lights the string tongue. Headless and clenched in its armor, the snapper is lugged home in the trunk for tomorrow’s soup. Ray rolls it beneath a bush in the backyard and goes in to sleep his own head off. Tomorrow I find that the animal has dragged itself off. I follow torn tracks up a slight hill and over into a small stream that deepens and widens into a marsh. Ray finds his way back through the room into his arms. When the phonograph stops, he slumps hard in his hands and the boys and their old man fold him into the car where he curls around his bad heart, hearing how it knocks and rattles at the bars of his ribs to break out. Somehow we find our way back. Uncle Ray sings an old song to the body that pulls him toward home. The gray fins that his hands have become screw their bones in the dashboard. His face has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived for a long time underwater. And the angels come lowering their slings and litters.

He (my captor) gave me a bisquit, which I put in my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fearing he had put something in it to make me love him. —From the narrative of the captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who was taken prisoner by the Wampanoag when Lancaster, Massachusetts, was destroyed, in the year 1676 The stream was swift, and so cold I thought I would be sliced in two. But he dragged me from the flood by the ends of my hair. I had grown to recognize his face. I could distinguish it from the others. There were times I feared I understood his language, which was not human, and I knelt to pray for strength. We were pursued by God’s agents or pitch devils, I did not know. Only that we must march. Their guns were loaded with swan shot. I could not suckle and my child’s wail put them in danger. He had a woman with teeth black and glittering. She fed the child milk of acorns. The forest closed, the light deepened. I told myself that I would starve before I took food from his hands but I did not starve. One night he killed a deer with a young one in her and gave me to eat of the fawn. It was so tender, the bones like the stems of flowers, that I followed where he took me. The night was thick. He cut the cord that bound me to the tree. After that the birds mocked. Shadows gaped and roared and the trees flung down their sharpened lashes. He did not notice God’s wrath. God blasted fire from half-buried stumps. I hid my face in my dress, fearing He would burn us all but this, too, passed. Rescued, I see no truth in things. My husband drives a thick wedge through the earth, still it shuts to him year after year. My child is fed of the first wheat. I lay myself to sleep on a Holland-laced pillowbeer. I lay to sleep. And in the dark I see myself as I was outside their circle. They knelt on deerskins, some with sticks, and he led his company in the noise until I could no longer bear the thought of how I was. I stripped a branch and struck the earth, in time, begging it to open to admit me as he was and feed me honey from the rock.