The Antelope Wife

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The niizhoodenhyag are very old when they decide to sew this world into being. One twin uses light and the other dark. The first twin’s beads are cut-glass whites and pales, and the other twin’s beads are glittering deep red and blue-black indigo. One twin uses an awl made of an otter’s sharpened penis bone, the other uses that of a bear. They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each woman trying to set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world.

Chapter 1. Father’s Milk

Scranton Roy

Deep in the past during a spectacular cruel raid upon an isolated Ojibwe village mistaken for hostile during the scare over the starving Dakota, a dog bearing upon its back a frame-board dikinaagan enclosing a child in moss, velvet, embroideries of beads, was frightened into the vast carcass of the world west of the Otter Tail River. A cavalry soldier, spurred to human response by the sight of the dog, the strapped-on child, vanishing into the distance, followed and did not return.

What happened to him lives on, though fading in the larger memory, and I relate it here in order that it not be lost.

Private Scranton Teodorus Roy was the youngest son of a Quaker father and a reclusive poet mother who established a small Pennsylvania community based on intelligent conversation. One day into his view a member of a traveling drama troupe appeared. Unmasked, the woman’s stage glance broke across Roy like fire. She was tall, fatefully slender, pale, and paler haired, resolute in her character, and simple in her amused scorn of Roy — so young, bright faced, obedient. To prove himself, he made a rendezvous promise and then took his way west following her glare. An icicle, it drove into his heart and melted there, leaving a trail of cold water and blood. The way was long. She glided like a snake beneath his footsteps in fevered dreams. When he finally got to the place they had agreed upon, she was not there, of course. Angry and at odds, he went against the radiant ways of his father. He enlisted in the army and was sent to join the cavalry at Fort Snelling on the banks of the Mississippi in St. Paul, Minnesota.

There, he was trained to the rifle, learned to darn his socks using a wooden egg, ate many an ill-cooked bean, and polished his officers’ harness leather until one day, in a state of uneasy resignation, he put on the dark blue uniform, fixed his bayonet, set off marching due west.

The village his company encountered was peaceful, then not.

In chaos of groaning horses, dogs screaming, rifle and pistol reports, and the smoke of errant cooking fires, Scranton Roy was most disturbed not by the death yells of old men and the few warriors shocked naked from their robes, but by the feral quiet of the children. And the sudden contempt he felt for them all. Unexpected, the frigid hate. The pleasure in raising, aiming. They ran fleet as their mothers, heading for a brush-thick gully and a slough of grass beyond. Two fell. Roy whirled, not knowing whom to shoot next. Eager, he bayoneted an old woman who set upon him with no other weapon but a stone picked from the ground.

She was built like the broken sacks of hay he’d used for practice, but her body closed fast around the instrument. He braced himself against her to pull free, set his boot between her legs to tug the blade from her stomach, and as he did so tried to avoid her eyes but did not manage. His glare was drawn into hers and he sank with it into the dark unaccompanied moment before his birth. She broke his gaze. In a groan of heat and blood she cried a word that would reverberate in his mind until the last moment of his life. He yanked the bayonet out with a huge cry, and began to run.

That was when he saw the dog, a loping dirt-brown cur, circle the camp twice with the child on its back and set off into open space. As much to escape the evil confusion of this village and his own dark act as out of any sympathy for the baby, though he glimpsed its face — mystified and calm — Scranton Roy started running after the two. Within moments, the ruckus of death was behind him. The farther away the village got, the farther behind he wanted it. He kept on, running, walking, managing to keep the dog in view only because it was spring and the new grass, after a burn of lightning, was just beginning its thrust, which would take it to well over a full-grown man’s height.

From time to time, as the day went on, the dog paused to rest, stretched patient beneath its burden. Grinning and panting, it allowed Roy to approach, just so far. A necklace of blue beads hung from the brow guard of the cradle board. It swayed, clattered lightly. The child’s hands were bound in the wrappings. She could not reach for the beads but stared at them, mesmerized. The sun grew razor-hot. Tiny blackflies settled at the corners of her eyes. Sipped moisture from along her lids until, toward late afternoon, the heat died. A cold wind boomed against Scranton Roy in a steady rush. Still, into the emptiness, the three infinitesimally pushed.

The world darkened. Afraid of losing the trail, Roy gave his utmost. As night fixed upon them, man and dog were close enough to hear each other breathing and so, in that rhythm, both slept. Next morning, the dog stayed near, grinning for scraps. Afraid to frighten it with a rifle shot, Roy hadn’t brought down game although he’d seen plenty. He managed to snare a rabbit. Then, with his tinderbox and steel, he started a fire and began to roast it, at which smell the dog dragged itself belly-down through the dirt, edging close. The baby made its first sound, a murmuring whimper. Accepting tidbits and bones, the dog was alert, suspicious. Roy could not touch it until he thought to wash himself all over and approach naked to diminish his whiteman’s scent.

So he was able at last to remove the child from its wrappings and bathe it, a girl, and to hold her. He’d never done such a thing before. First he tried to feed her a tiny piece of the rabbit. She was too young to manage. He dripped water into her mouth, made sure it trickled down, but was perplexed at what to feed her, then alarmed when, after a night of deprivation, her tiny face crumpled in need. She peered at him in expectation and, at last, violently squalled. Her cries filled a vastness that nothing else could. They resounded, took over everything, and brought his heart clean to the surface. Scranton Roy cradled the baby, sang lewd camp tunes, then stalwart hymns, and at last remembered his own mother’s lullabies. Nothing helped. It seemed, when he held her close upon his heart as women did, that the child grew angry with longing and desperately clung, rooted with her mouth, roared in frustration, until at last, moved to near insanity, Roy opened his shirt and put her to his nipple.

She seized him. Inhaled him. Her suck was fierce. His whole body was astonished, most of all the inoffensive nipple he’d never appreciated until, in spite of the pain, it served to gain him peace. As he sat there, the child holding part of him in her mouth, he looked around just in case there should be any witness to this act which seemed to him strange as anything that had happened in this sky-filled land. Of course, there was only the dog. Contented, freed, it lolled appreciatively near. So the evening passed and then the night. Scranton Roy was obliged to change nipples, the first one hurt so, and he fell asleep with the baby tucked beside him on his useless teat.

She was still there in the morning, stuck, though he pulled her off to slingshot a partridge, roasted that too, and smeared its grease on his two sore spots. That made her wild for him. He couldn’t remove her then and commenced to walk, holding her, attached, toward a stand of cottonwood that wavered in the distance. A river. A place to camp. He’d settle there for a day or two, he thought, and try to teach the baby to eat something, for he feared she’d starve to death — although she seemed, except for the times he removed her from his chest, surprisingly contented.

He slung the blue beads around the baby’s neck. Tied the cradle board onto his own back. Then the man, the child, and the dog struck farther into the wilderness. They reached hills of sand, oak covered, shelter. Nearby, sod he cut painstakingly with the length of his bayonet and piled into a square, lightless but secure, and warm. Hoarding his shots, he managed to bring down a buffalo bull fat-loaded with the new grass. He fleshed the hide, dried the meat, seared the brains, stored the pounded fat and berries in the gut, made use of every bone and scrap of flesh even to the horns, carved into spoons, and the eyeballs, tossed to the dog. The tongue, cooked tender and mashed in his own mouth, he coaxed the baby to accept. She still much preferred him. As he was now past civilized judgment, her loyalty filled him with a foolish, tender joy.

He bathed each morning at the river. Once, he killed a beaver and greased himself all over against mosquitoes with its fat. The baby continued to nurse and he made a sling for her from his shirt. He lounged in the doorway of his sod hut, dreaming and exhausted, fearing that a fever was coming upon him. The situation was confusing. He did not know what course to take, how to start back, wondered if there’d be a party sent to search for him and then realized if they did find him he’d be court-martialed, if not hanged for desertion. The baby kept nursing and refused to stop. His nipples toughened. Pity scorched him, she sucked so blindly, so forcefully, and with such immense faith. It occurred to him one slow dusk as he looked down at her, upon his breast, that she was teaching him something.

This notion seemed absurd when he first considered it, and then, as insights do when we have the solitude to absorb them, he eventually grew used to the idea and paid attention to the lesson. The word faith hooked him. She had it in such pure supply. She nursed with utter simplicity and trust, as though the act itself would produce her wish. Half asleep one early morning, her beside him, he felt a slight warmth, then a rush in one side of his chest, a pleasurable burning. He thought it was an odd dream and fell asleep again only to wake to a huge burp from the baby, whose lips curled back from her dark gums in bliss, whose tiny fists were unclenched in sleep for the first time, who looked, impossibly, well fed.

Ask and ye shall receive. Ask and ye shall receive. The words ran through him like a clear stream. He put his hand to his chest and then tasted a thin blue drop of his own watery, appalling, God-given milk.

Miss Peace McKnight

Family duty was deeply planted in Miss Peace McKnight, also the knowledge that if she did not nobody else would — do the duty, that is, of seeing to the future of the McKnights. Her father’s Aberdeen button-cart business failed after he ran out of dead sheep — his own, whose bones he cleverly thought to use after a spring disaster. He sawed buttons with an instrument devised of soldered steel, ground them to a luster with a polisher of fine sand glued to cloth, made holes with a bore and punch that he had self-invented. It was the absence, then, of sheep carcasses in Scotland that forced his daughter to do battle with the spirit of ignorance.

Peace McKnight. She was sturdily made as a captain’s chair, yet drew water with graceful wrists and ran dancing across the rutted road on curved white ankles. Hale, Scots, full-breasted as a pouter pigeon, and dusted all over like an egg with freckles, wavy light brown hair secured with her father’s gift — three pins of carved bone — she came to the Great Plains with enough education to apply for and win a teaching certificate.

Her class was piddling at first, all near grown, too. Three consumptive Swedish sisters not long for life, one boy abrupt and full of anger. A German. Even though she spoke plainly and as slow as humanly possible, her students fixed her with stares of tongueless suspicion and were incapable of following a single direction. She had to start from the beginning, teach the alphabet, the numbers, and had just reached the letter v, the word cat, subtraction, which they were naturally better at than addition, when she noticed someone standing at the back of her classroom. Quietly alert, observant, she had been there for some time. The girl stepped forward from the darkness.

She had roan coppery skin and wore a necklace of bright indigo beads. She was slender, with a pliable long waist, a graceful neck, and she was about six years old.

Miss McKnight blushed pink-gold with interest. She was charmed, first by the confidence of the child’s smile and next by her immediate assumption of a place to sit, study, organize herself, and at last by her listening intelligence. The girl, though silent, had a hungry, curious quality. Miss McKnight had a teaching gift to match it. Although they were fourteen years apart, they became, inevitably, friends.

Then sisters. Until fall, Miss McKnight slept in the school cloakroom and bathed in the river nearby. Once the river iced over at the edges, an argument developed among the few and far-between homesteads as to which had enough room and who could afford her. No one. Matilda Roy stepped in and pestered her father, known as a strange and reclusive fellow, until he gave in and agreed that the new teacher could share the small trunk bed he had made for his daughter, so long as she helped with the poultry.

Mainly, they raised guinea fowl from keets that Scranton Roy had bought from a Polish widow. The speckled purple-black vulturine birds were half wild, clever. Matilda’s task was to spy on, hunt down, and follow the hens to their hidden nests. The girls, for Peace McKnight was half girl around Matilda, laughed at the birds’ tricks and hid to catch them. Fat, speckled, furious with shrill guinea pride, they acted as house watchdogs and scolded in the oak trees. Then from the pole shed where they wintered. In lard from a neighbor’s pig, Scranton Roy fried strips of late squash, dried sand-dune morels, inky caps, field and oyster mushrooms, crushed twice-boiled acorns, the guinea eggs. He baked sweet bannock, dribbled on it wild aster honey aged in the bole of an oak, dark and pungent as mead.

The small sod and plank house was whitewashed inside and the deep sills of small bold windows held geraniums and started seeds. At night, the kerosene lamplight in trembling rings and halos, Miss Peace McKnight felt the eyes of Scranton Roy carve her in space. His gaze was a heat running up and down her throat, pausing elsewhere with the effect of a soft blow.

Scranton Roy

He is peculiar the way his mother was peculiar — writing poetry on the margins of bits of newspaper, tatters of cloth. His mother burned her life work and died a few years after the black-bordered message from the President arrived. She was comforted by the ashes of her words yet still in mourning for her son, who never did make his survival known but named his daughter for her. Matilda. One poem survived. A fragment. It goes like this: Come to me, thou dark inviolate. Scranton Roy prays to an unparticular god, communes with the spirit headlong each morning in a rush of ardor that carries him through each difficult day. He is lithe, nearly brown as his daughter, bearded, driven. He owns more than one dozen books and subscribes to periodicals that he lends to Miss McKnight.

He wants to be delivered of the burden of his solitude. A wife would help.

Peace tosses her sandy hair, feels the eyes of Scranton Roy upon her, appreciates their fire, and smiles into the eyes of his daughter. Technically, Miss McKnight soon becomes a stepmother. Whatever the term, the two women behave as though they’ve always known this closeness. Holding hands, they walk to school, kick dust, and tickle each other’s necks with long stems of grama grass. They cook for Scranton Roy but also roll their eyes from time to time at him and break into fits of suppressed and impolite laughter.

Matilda Roy

Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

When he rocks her, Matilda remembers the taste of his milk — hot and bitter as dandelion juice. Once, he holds her foot in the cradle of his palm and with the adept point of his hunting knife painlessly delivers a splinter, long and pale and bloody. Teaches her to round her c’s and put tiny teakettle handles on her a’s. Crooks stray hairs behind her ears. Washes her face with the rough palm of his hand, but gently, scrubbing at her smooth chin.

He is a man, though he nourished her. Sometimes across the room, at night, in his sleep, her father gasps as though stabbed, dies into himself. She is jolted awake, frightened, and thinks to check his breath with her hand, but then his ragged snore lulls her. In the fresh daylight, staring up at the patches of mildew on the ceiling, Matilda watches him proudly from the corners of her eyes as he cracks the ice in the washing pail, feeds a spurt of hidden stove flame, talks to himself. She loves him like nothing else. He is her father, her human. Still, sometimes, afflicted by an anxious sorrow, she holds her breath to see what will happen, if he will save her. Heat flows up the sides of her face and she opens her lips but before her mouth can form a word she sees yellow, passes out, and is flooded by blueness, sheer blueness, intimate and cool, the color of her necklace of beads.

Kiss

Have you ever fallen from a severe height and had your wind knocked forth so that, in the strict jolt’s sway, you did experience stopped time? Matilda Roy did when she saw her father kiss the teacher. The world halted. There sounded a great gong made of sky. A gasp. Silence. Then the leaves ticked again, the guineas scornfully gossiped, the burly black hound that had whelped of the Indian dog pawed a cool ditch in the sand for itself. Sliding back from the window to the bench behind the house where she sat afternoons to shell peas, shuck corn, peel dinner’s potatoes, pluck guinea hens, and dream, Matilda Roy looked at the gold-brown skin on her arms, turned her arms over, turned them back, flexed her pretty, agile hands.

The kiss had been long, slow, and of growing interest and intensity, more educational than any lesson yet given her by Miss Peace McKnight. Matilda shut her eyes. Within herself at all times a silent darkness sifted up and down. A pure emptiness fizzing and gliding. Now, along with the puzzling development between her friend and her father, something else. It took a long concentration on her stillness to grasp the elusive new sensation of freedom, of relief.

Ozhaawashkmashkodikwe / Blue Prairie Woman

The child lost in the raid was still nameless, still a half spirit, yet her mother mourned her for a solid year’s time and nearly died of the sorrow. A haunting uncertainty dragged the time out. Ozhaawashkmashkodiwe might be picking blueberries and she feared she would come across her daughter’s bones. In the wind at night, she heard her baby wailing, a black twig skeleton. As she stirred the fire, a cleft of flame recalled the evil day itself, the massed piles of meat put to the torch, their robes and blankets smoldering, the stinking singe of hair, and the hot iron of the rifle barrels. At night, for the first month after that day, her breasts grew pale and hard and her milk impacted, spoiling in her, leaking out under her burnt clothes so that she smelled of sour milk and fire. An old midwife gave her a new puppy and she put it to her breasts. Holding to her nipple the tiny wet muzzle, cradling the needy bit of fur, she cried. All that night the tiny dog mercifully drew off the shooting pains in her breasts and at dawn, drowsy and comfortable, she finally cuddled the sweet-fleshed puppy to her, breathed its salty odor, and slept.

Wet ash when the puppy weaned itself. Blood. Her moons began and nothing she pressed between her legs could stop the rush of life. Her body wanting to get rid of itself. She ate white clay, scratched herself with bull thorns for relief, cut her hair, grew it long, cut it short again, scored her arms to the bone, tied the bundle of a pretend baby to her chest, and for six moons ate nothing but dirt and leaves. It must have been a rich dirt, said her grandmother, for although she slept little and looked tired, Blue Prairie Woman was healthy as a buffalo cow. When Shawano the younger returned from his family’s wild rice beds, she gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale wiindigoog with aching eyes, tongues of flame.

Twins are born of such immoderation.

By the time her husband left again with his sled of traps, she was pregnant and calm. During that winter, life turned more brutal. The tribe’s stores had been burned by order, and many times in starving sleep Blue Prairie Woman dreamed the memory of buffalo fat running in rivulets across the ground, soaking into the earth, fat gold from piles of burning meat. She still dreamed, too, with wide-eyed clarity of the young, fleet brown dog, the cradle board bound to its body. Even carrying two, she dreamed of her first baby bewildered, then howling, then at last riding black as leather, mouth stretched wide underneath a waterless sky. She dreamed its bones rattled in the careful stitching of black velvet, clacked in the moss padding, grown thin. She heard their rhythm and saw the dog, the small skeleton flying. She howled and scratched herself half blind and at last so viciously took leave of her mind that the old ones got together and decided to change her name.

On a cool day in spring in the maple-sap-running moon the elders held a pitiful feast — only nothing seems pitiful to survivors. In weak sunlight they chewed spring-risen mud-turtle meat, roasted waabooz, the remaining sweet grains of manoomin, acorns, puckoons from a squirrel’s cache, and the fresh spears of dandelion. Blue Prairie Woman’s name was covered with blood, singed with fire. Her name was old and exquisite and had belonged to many powerful mothers. Yet the woman who had fit inside of it had walked off. She couldn’t stop following the child and the dog. Someone else had taken her place. Who, as yet, was unclear. But the old ones agreed that the wrong name would kill what was in there and it had to go — like a husk dried off and scattered. Like a shell to a nut. Hair grown long and sacrificed to sorrow. They had to give her another name if they wanted her to return to the living.

The name they gave her had to be unused. New. Oshki. They asked the strongest of the namers, the one who dreamed original names. This namer was nameless and was neither a man nor a woman, and so took power from the in-between. This namer had long, thick braids and a sweet shy smile, charming ways but arms tough with roped muscle. The namer walked like a woman, spoke in a man’s deep voice. Hid coy behind a fan and yet agreed to dream a name to fit the new thing inside Blue Prairie Woman. But what name would help a woman who could be calmed only by gazing into the arrowing distance? The namer went away, starved and sang and dreamed, until it was clear that the only name that made any sense at all was the name of the place where the old Blue Prairie Woman had gone to fetch back her child.

Other Side of the Earth

Once she was named for the place toward which she traveled, the young mother was able to be in both places at once — she was following her child into the sun and also pounding the wiiyaas between rocks to dried scruffs of pemmican. She was searching the thick underbrush of her own mind. She was punching holes to sew tough new soles on old makizinan and also sew new ones, tiny, the soles pierced before she beaded the tops. She starved and wandered, tracking the faint marks the dog left as she passed into the blue distance. At the same time, she knocked rice. She parched and stored the grains. Killed birds. Tamed horses. Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.

The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

In the deep quiet of her blood the two babies were forming, creating themselves just as the first twin gods did at the beginning. As yet, no one had asked what might happen next. What would happen to the woman called Other Side of the Earth when Blue Prairie Woman found Matilda Roy?

A Dog Named Sorrow

The dog nursed on human milk grew up coyote gray and clever, a light-boned, loping bitch who followed Blue Prairie Woman everywhere. Became her second thought, lay outside the door when she slept, just within the outer flap when it rained, though not in. Not ever actually inside a human dwelling. Huge with pups or thin from feeding them, teats dragging, the dog still followed. Close and quiet as her shadow, it lived within touch of her, although they never did touch after the dog drew from Blue Prairie Woman’s soaked and swollen nipples the heat, the night milk, the overpowering sorrow.

Always there, jumping up at the approach of a stranger, guarding her in the dusk, alert for a handout, living patiently on bits of hide, guts, offal, the dog waited. And was ready when Blue Prairie Woman set down her babies with their grandmother and started walking west, following at long last the endless invisible trail of her daughter’s flight.

She walked for hours, she walked for years. She walked until she heard about them. The man. The young girl and the blue beads she wore. Where they were living. She heard the story. The twins, two girls, she left behind to the chances of baptism. They were named Mary, of course, for the good blue-robed woman, and Josephette, for the good husband. Only the Ojibwe tongue made Zosie of the latter name. Zosie. Mary. Their relatives, who had survived the blue-coat massacre, would raise them as their own.

When she reached the place, Blue Prairie Woman settled on a nearby rise, the dog near. From that distance, the two watched the house — small, immaculate, scent of a hearth fire made of crackling oak twigs. Illness. There was sickness in the house, she could sense it — the silence, then the flurries of motion. Rags hung out. Water to haul. One shrill cry. Silence again. All day in thin grass, the dog, the woman, sunlight moving across them, breathed each other’s air, slept by turns, waited.

Matilda Roy

She heard the gentle approach that night, the scrawl of leaves, the sighing resonance of discovery. She sat up in her crazy quilt, knowing. Next to her, held in the hot vise of fever, Peace muttered endlessly of buttons and sheep bones. Sounds — a slight tap. The clatter of her beads. In the morning, there was no Matilda Roy in the trunk bed. There was only a note, folded twice, penned in the same exquisite, though feminized, handwriting of her father.

She came for me. I went with her.

Scranton Roy

Peace McKnight was never devout, so there was no intimacy of prayer between the newlyweds. Their physical passion suffered, as well, because of the shortness of his bed. There was, after all, very little space inside the sod house. Scranton Roy had slept in a tiny berth on one side of the room, his daughter on the other. Both slept curled like snails, like babies in the wombs of their mothers. More difficult with an extra person in the bedding. It wasn’t long before, in order to get any rest at all, Peace slipped outside to sleep with the guineas, took up nightly residence apart from her husband.

Still, there were evenings when Scranton was inflicted with ardor and arranged them both, before she could leave, in the cramped and absurd postures of love. If only he had imagined how to use the armless rocking chair before the fire! Peace’s mind flashed on the possibility, but she was too stubborn to mention it. Even the floor, packed dirt covered with skins, would have been preferable. Again, she didn’t care to introduce that possibility into his mind. Anyway, as it happened she had every right to turn her back when the tiny knock of new life began in the cradle of her hip bones. As he retreated, missed the rasp of her breath, wondered about Matilda, and imagined the new life to come all at once, Scranton Roy prayed. Wrote poems in his head. Come to me, thou dark inviolate.

After her deliverance from the mottled-skin sickness, the gasping and fever that made her bones ache, Peace was in her weakness even warier of her new husband. For the rest of her pregnancy, she made him sleep alone. Her labor began on a snowy morning. Scranton Roy set out for the Swedish housewife’s in a swallowing blizzard that would have cost him his life but for his good sense in turning back. He reached the door. Smote, rattled, fell into the heat of a bloody scene in which Peace McKnight implored her neglected God in begging futility. For two days, then three, her labor shook her in its jaws. Her howls were louder than the wind. Hoarser. Then her voice was lost, a scrape of bone. A whisper. Her face bloated, dark red, then white, then gray. Her eyes rolled back to the whites, so she stared mystified with agony into her own thoughts when at last the child tore its way from her. A boy, plump and dead blue. Marked with cloudy spots like her earlier disease. There was no pulse in the birth cord but Scranton Roy thought to puff his own air into the baby’s lungs. It answered with a startled bawl.

Augustus. She had already named her baby. Known that it would be a boy.

Scranton wrapped the baby in a rabbit fur blanket and kissed the smoothed, ravaged temples of Peace with tender horror at her pains, at the pains of his own mother, and of all mothers, and of the unfair limitations of our bodies, of the hopeless settlement of our life tasks, and finally, of the boundless iniquity of the God to whom she had so uselessly shrieked. Look at her, he called the unseen witness. And perhaps God did or Peace McKnight’s mind, pitilessly wracked, finally came out of hiding and told her heart to beat twice more. A stab of fainting gold heeled through a scrap of window. Peace saw the wanton gleam, breathed out, gazed out. And then, as she stepped from her ripped body into the utter calm of her new soul, Peace McKnight saw her husband put his son to his breast.

Blue Prairie Woman

All that’s in a name is a puff of sound, a lungful of wind, and yet it is an airy enclosure. How is it that the gist, the spirit, the complicated web of bone, hair, brain, gets stuffed into a syllable or two? How do you shrink the genie of human complexity? How the personality? Unless, that is, your mother gives you her name, Other Side of the Earth.

Who came from nowhere and from lucky chance. Whose mother bore her in shit and fire. She is huge as half the sky. In the milk from her rescuer’s breasts she has tasted his disconcerting hatred of her kind and also protection, so that when she falls into the fever, she doesn’t suffer of it the way Peace did. Although they stop, make camp, and Blue Prairie Woman speaks to her in worried susurrations, the child is in no real danger.

The two camp on the trail of a river cart. The sky opens brilliantly and the grass is hemmed, rife with berries. Blue Prairie Woman picks with swift grace and fills a new-made makak. She dries the berries on sheaves of bark, in the sun, so they’ll be easy to carry. Lying with her head on her mother’s lap, before the fire, Matilda asks what her name was as a little baby. The two talk on and on, mainly by signs.

Does the older woman understand the question? Her face burns. As she sinks dizzily onto the earth beside her daughter, she feels compelled to give her the name that brought her back. Other Side of the Earth, she says, teeth tapping. Hotter, hotter, first confused and then dreadfully clear when she sees, opening before her, the western door.

She must act at once if her daughter is to survive her.

The clouds are pure stratus. The sky is a raft of milk. The coyote gray dog sits patiently near.

Blue Prairie Woman, sick to death and knowing it, reaches swiftly to her left and sets her grip without looking on the nape of the dog’s neck. First time she has touched the dog since it drank from her the milk of sorrow. She drags the dog to her. Soft bones, soft muzzle then. Tough old thing now. Blue Prairie Woman holds the dog close underneath one arm and then, knife in hand, draws her clever blade across the beating throat. Slices its stiff moan in half and collects in the berry-filled makak its gurgle of dark blood. Blue Prairie Woman then stretches the dog out, skins and guts it, cuts off her head, and lowers the chopped carcass into a deep birch-bark container. She heats stones red-hot, lowers them into the water with a pair of antlers. Tending the fire carefully, weakening, she boils the dog.

When it is done, the meat softened, shredding off the bones, she tips the gray meat, brown meat, onto a birch tray. Steam rises, the fragrance of the meat is faintly sweet. Quietly, she gestures to her daughter. Prods the cracked oval pads off the cooked paws. Offers them to her.

IT TAKES SIXTEEN hours for Blue Prairie Woman to contract the fever and only eight more to die of it. All that time, as she is dying, she sings. Her song is wistful, peculiar, soft, questing. It doesn’t sound like a death song; rather, there is in it the tenderness and intimacy of seduction addressed to the blue distance.

Never exposed, healthy, defenseless, her body is an eager receptacle for the virus. She seizes, her skin goes purple, she vomits a brilliant flash of blood. Passionate, surprised, she dies when her chest fills, kicking and drumming her heels on the hollow earth. At last she is still, gazing west. That is the direction her daughter sits facing all the next day and the next. She sings her mother’s song, holding her mother’s hand in one hand and seriously, absently, eating the dog with the other hand — until in that spinning cloud light and across rich level earth, pale reddish curious creatures, slashed with white on the chest and face, deep-eyed, curious, pause in passing.

The antelope emerge from the band of the light at the world’s edge.

A small herd of sixteen or twenty flickers into view. Fascinated, they poise to watch the girl’s hand in its white sleeve dip. Feed herself. Dip. They step closer. Hooves of polished metal. Ears like tuning forks. Black prongs and velvet. They watch Matilda. Blue Prairie Woman’s daughter. Other Side of the Earth. Nameless.

She is ten years old, tough from chasing poultry and lean from the fever. She doesn’t know what they are, the beings, dreamlike, summoned by her mother’s song, her dipping hand. They come closer, closer, grazing near, folding their legs under them to warily rest. The young nurse from their mothers on the run or stare at the girl in fascinated hilarity, springing off if she catches their wheeling flirtation. In the morning when she wakens, still holding her mother’s hand, they are standing all around. They bend to her, huff in excitement when she rises and stands among them quiet and wondering. Easy with their dainty precision, she wanders along in their company. Always on the move. At night she makes herself a nest of willow. Sleeps there. Moves on. Eats bird’s eggs. A snared rabbit. Roots. She remembers fire and cooks a handful of grouse chicks. The herd flows in steps and spurting gallops deeper into the west. When they walk, she walks, following, dried berries in a sack made of her dress. When they run, she runs with them. Naked, graceful, the blue beads around her neck.

Chapter 2. Wiindigoo Story

The Cracker Tin

Scranton Roy touched the dirty brown hair of his beautiful son, Augustus, and said, “I am tired of my numb heart.”

Augustus looked down at his feet, knowing he would hear more.

“I thought when I loved your mother my heart had come to life, but then her death killed my heart again. Even watching you grow hasn’t brought it back. I have been reading the ancients.”

Augustus looked at the pile of books. He was twenty-three years old and had read most of them with his father, who admired the Greek philosophers. Anaximander viewed time as a judge, and Scranton Roy had meditated on this concept until its truth came clear. Time had judged and sentenced him in the form of an unforgettable word.

“As a young man I committed a crime in the fever of war. Although I have tried to absolve myself repeatedly — I even took up self-scourging for a year — I still see the old woman’s face and hear her say that word. The word wakes me up at night. It is written in my brain. As you know, it is carved into my arm.”

Augustus looked at his father’s arm, the white scars, the letters carefully blocked and scored. The word was a long word. The word reached up past his elbow.

“I still see the children who fell,” his father continued. “Especially them. I still taste on my tongue the smoke, powder, blood, and burning fat.”

Augustus had grown up in the shadow of his father’s ever more complex grief, and although he had few other adults to compare him with, he did think his father was lost. His father wandered in the dark. But Augustus himself grew up in wind and sun. He loved perpetual change and was glad it was the law of the universe. Heracleitus had also declared there to be a balance of opposites, and so Augustus was the balance of his wracked father, a happy child who ran boundless, hunting prairie chickens, stealing the blue eggs of robins, caring for descendants of the agile guinea hens his mother had laughed at. He walked overland to attend the same school, set in the center of the township, where his mother had taught.

At home, he read with his father, and both agreed with Pythagoras that the essence of things was to be found in numbers. At school, Augustus’s best subject was math. He collected numbers until they made him dizzy. He counted everything around him and totaled it up with other countings and subtracted or divided those countings just to have the numbers in his head. Each number had a color and some had a sound or taste.

“We are going to search out the people I wronged and give them the cracker tin,” said Scranton Roy.

Augustus knew the tin well. Once very light, it had contained Christmas crackers sealed against moisture. Now the cracker tin was very heavy and contained gold and silver money. Exactly $438.13. A bright purple number. A noble number, scraped of sacrifice. When Scranton Roy felt the sad heat come on him, he put a bit of money in the tin and it helped to ease his burden. When Augustus Roy felt slightly morose, he took some money from the tin and it helped to ease his burden. It was hard caring for a father who raved of smoke and blood and carved into his arm the letters of a word he did not understand.

I hope I don’t have to carry the cracker tin, thought Augustus. But of course he did, and it made his back sore, or his arms when he hefted it before him. Sometimes he made a pillow of his shirt and carried the tin on his head. As they walked on and on, Augustus was increasingly grateful that he had lightened the tin and he smiled to think how he’d spent the money — on home-brew fire. As he walked toward the place where his father had killed the woman and perhaps the children, too, Augustus counted the clouds until they blended together and there was just one gloomy sky. He counted trees until they turned into a crowded woodland. Where were they going? They were going backward, out of the good simple world he’d lived in so far and into complex rolling prairie. Every so often the land dipped and the trees stood thick. Sometimes they towered in lightless stands.

The sloughs turned to shallow lakes and then the lakes deepened. Abruptly there began vast lumbered areas of rotting pine stumps surrounded by springy popple. He feared his father didn’t know where he was going and had forgotten where he’d murdered the harmless old woman.

“Here is the place,” said his father at last. He put down the cracker tin. “Here is where I betrayed the silent light in which I was raised. Here is what desire made of me, and foolishness, and an irresistible and bloody impulse.”

Scranton lay down in some poison ivy.

“Cut my throat, please,” he said to Augustus, and handed his son the whetted knife he kept in his belt.

Augustus kept the knife and spoke gently to his father. “Let time do its work,” he said. “Perhaps you will be pardoned.” Eventually he convinced Scranton that they must travel to the place where the Indians had fled.

“Where did they go?” he asked.

His father pointed in all directions. Augustus chose north, and again picked up the cracker tin.

The Ones

Inevitably, they crossed paths with Indians.

“Are these the ones?” asked Augustus.

His father looked carefully at the people, but shook his head and said no, that the people he’d killed were beautifully dressed in calico, buckskins, beads and strips of velvet. They’d been strong and well fed. These two people were skinny and ragged and they walked with a discouraged air. The man frowned and the woman glared suspiciously at the two white men.

“I think these are the ones,” said Augustus, who longed to put down the cracker tin. “I think these are the children who survived, all grown up. Look what you did to them, father!”

“My Lord,” said Scranton Roy.

He took the tin of money from his son. As the people edged away from the two, he held it out with an awful smile and pressed it forward.

“That’s all right,” said the woman. “We don’t need crackers.”

Scranton’s sleeve was rolled up and she looked at his arm, then nudged her husband, who craned his head sideways and carefully mouthed the letters of the word.

“All right,” said the Indian man, startled. “You can follow us. We don’t have much to eat, but we’ll shoot something. We live over there.”

He pointed at a place that seemed empty. Augustus, sensing that he’d soon be relieved of the tin, followed eagerly so that his father was forced to stumble along behind.

Old Shawano

The man who read the word scored into Scranton Roy’s arm was named for the southern wind, just like his father and grandfather. Shawano. His wife was Victoria Muskrat. They knew about the old woman who was slaughtered and they knew about the woman’s great-nieces. Shawano had taken them after their mother disappeared. They were pretty girls but something was not right about them. Victoria thought they were coldhearted liars. Shawano said he pitied them, but did not trust them. The two white men and the Indians now ached to be delivered of different burdens. Both of the old people hurried along, sensing that they soon might be relieved of the girls’ disquieting presence.

The Number Blue

When the number two in any of its permutations entered Augustus Roy’s thoughts a limpid blue atmosphere surrounded it. The color darkened, tinged with indigo, as it climbed into the solid sky of twoness. Entering the tar-paper and scrap-board house of the people to whom he was determined to give the cracker tin, he saw the spectrum of blue that went with the number when he saw the twins. Zosie and Mary were identical. They dressed alike in flour-sacking frocks, gray with white piping, and they both wore their hair pulled back in long braids. Their eyes were cool and watchful. Their hands moved constantly at endless tasks that they took up and put down without seeming to notice. Augustus was too shy to look at them straight on, but he was moved by their uncanny harmony.

His father seemed dazzled, struck dumb. His clothes had grown huge around him and he sat in a puddle of cloth, itching already from the leaves he’d lain in, and smiling. Idiotically, Augustus thought, with weary concern. He brought the cracker tin to a wooden table, the only piece of furniture besides the one chair Augustus occupied. He set the tin down with a solid metallic clunking jingle that could only be the sound of money. The heads of the twins turned with a jerk and their eyes fixed on the tin.

“It is money,” said Augustus Roy. “It is for you. Many years ago my father killed an old lady of your tribe and he wants forgiveness. He has been saving up.”

The old people and the girls were absolutely silent for some time. Then one or another of the twins spoke.

“You’ve come to the right place.”

AFTER THE OJIBWE PEOPLE accepted the money and told Scranton Roy that he was forgiven, his eyes shed water. He was not exactly weeping because his teeth showed in a broad and grateful smile. He was scratching madly now. Water trickled down the angular creases at either side of his mouth and collected against the curb of his collarbone.

“My father wants to sleep,” said Augustus.

Victoria Muskrat pointed to a heap of blankets on the floor, in the corner, and said that he could lie down there and sleep as long as he wanted. Scranton thanked her, lay down in the corner, and pulled a blanket over himself. Old Shawano indicated a place on another blanket and Augustus sat. His eyes itched drowsily but he did not sleep. He read the walls, which were covered with catalog, magazine, and newspaper pages neatly pasted around the window frames. Land! the pages shouted. Rich, cheap, fertile, easy title! Indian Land for Sale! The wood slats were from broken-up cracker crates, probably salvaged from lumber camps. The slats were stamped with accidental word puzzles based on the word cracker. No wonder they didn’t want more crackers, Augustus thought. The family busied themselves, went in and went out. After a while Augustus roused himself. He noticed that his foot was getting wet, looked down, and saw that a trickle of blood was flowing from beneath his father’s blanket. Augustus reached for the knife his father had offered him, knowing it was gone. All four of the Ojibwe people entered. They studied the flow of blood and bowed their heads. For a long while, nobody spoke. The unmistakable still form in the corner dominated the room. At last one or the other of the twins turned to Augustus and said, “We will bury him in our own way. We will wrap him in that blanket and make him a fire. We will stand watch and help his spirit onto the road to the next life. We will feed his spirit and sing for him.”

“Thank you,” said Augustus.

He continued to sit on the floor. When everyone moved outdoors, he followed and sat down. Other people came with water drums, pipes, feathers, food, whiskey, more blankets. His father’s body was removed from the house through a window. The fire was lit for his spirit to follow. Sometimes Augustus lay on the ground near the fire. Sometimes he ate. The days came and went and in the flow of singing and drumming he seemed to pass into another life along with his father. At last, they told him that his father was safe on the other side. They showed him the small grave house, which was carefully made of boards, roofed, painted red, and placed over the spot where his father was buried. They waited for him to leave.

Niizhoodenhyag

Augustus Roy did not leave. The family spoke English with him, wrote in a finer script than he did, and used better grammar. They had been whipped into shape by the government. They’d been to boarding school. He got a job. Every day he walked to a bank in the nearest town, four miles each way. The work involved the essence of things as defined by number, and counting, his favorite pastime. His days were filled with color because of the pleasurable flow in numbers. He also enjoyed walking back and forth, especially after one or the other of the twins began to meet him on the way home. They walked along silently at first, not even holding hands. He was thrilled by each young woman’s singularity and by the game of trying to figure out whether she was Zosie or Mary. Sometimes both women came to meet him. Then the twoness, the blueness, flowed over him. He was lost in its choreography. Their voices and their movements were mirrors within mirrors. He decided they defined eternity although they lied and mocked him. They grew sly and bold. Spied on him, poked him, threw twigs at him. Kissed him. He was never certain. He would not be sure which one he married the Indian way. He would not be sure which one he slept with on whatever was their wedding night. Which one he got pregnant.

Love and the Dawes Act

Augustus built a cabin of thin logs and clay. He bought real shingles for the roof. The twins lived next door with the old people who had sheltered them. The twins also lived with him. He had tossed a coin and asked Mary to be his wife, but sometimes he was sure that Zosie took her place. Augustus put in a bedstead with a saggy mattress, and the twins curtained off another room. He built a kitchen table where the women sat at night. They made moccasins from the deerskin they’d tanned with the deer’s own brains. They sat in the lamplight, talking softly in their own language. In the cracker tin, empty now of money, they kept their quills and beads. At all times, as they talked or laughed, their needles moved in and out of the soft deerhide, complicating the design.

Because of the Dawes Act, reservation land was parceled out to individuals instead of remaining in tribal trust possession. Land was the only thing that hungry people owned, and it started to disappear with astounding haste. At the bank, Augustus assisted every day with transferring money from white hands into Ojibwe hands. He then witnessed the signing of a land deed by Ojibwe hands and saw it transferred into white hands, which then placed the land deed in a safe-deposit box. Invariably, he begged the person with the money to open a savings account. That rarely happened. The money usually flung itself around the town.

Augustus knew an Ojibwe man and woman named Whiteheart Beads who were persuaded to buy a grand piano with their land payment, and now their whole family slept beneath it just beside the road. Fancy clothing, rifles, liquor, pink and yellow and aqua shawls, and shiny buttoned boots appeared. Barrels of salted doves and sacks of white flour, dairy butter and tinned peaches, went out into the bush. People still lived on the margins of the land they had owned. But the land was gone, gone, gone and subject to the plow and No Trespassing. People milled about their old houses like ghosts and were driven off, bewildered. Augustus railed and threatened. He beat a speculator, nearly lost his job. Shrieked when his calm advice was ignored. He sprinted home every night and told his family not to sell their land.

The twins answered that Old Shawano and Victoria and the two of them were not stupid like the others. They drank very little whiskey, not like the others. They were in addition apt to think in the old ways, not like the others. They had Augustus, too, not like the others. Augustus, who brought home provisions when the hunting failed and the garden was resting. They had no reason to sell their land, even though, and here one twin paused and looked down at her belly, there was going to be a baby.

The other twin sucked in her breath ferociously and said, “Yes, it is I who will have the baby.”

Augustus looked from one to the other, terrified.

AFTER THAT ANNOUNCEMENT he got no sleep. One twin and then the other crawled into his bed. Or was it twice and the same woman? Their ways devoured him. Mornings, they glared at each other and then at him, and did not speak. He thought of running away before they wore him out, but could not because he was helpless before the nights, cold nights, northern and slow. And although he knew he’d be called to superhuman effort later on, he loved to watch them, just rest his eyes on them at their work every evening.

The lamp shone a peach golden circle at the table where Mary and Zosie arranged their saucers of beads — white for the background, Hungarian cut glass, delicate size 13, tiny loops of old greasy yellows and blues, a hank of mauves, a collection of glossy whiteheart reds. Mary worked on moccasins already bought and half paid for by a missionary chimookomaan lady who would get them in the mail. Zosie worked on tiny slippers for the baby who was growing in one, the other, or perhaps both of them. As they worked, the two grew calmer. Augustus did not move. They were spooky as cats, but he could tell that his presence soothed them.

They breathed in the tobacco scent of Augustus’s once-a-week cigar, and the very slight undertone of whiskey. Augustus had begun to take a shot with Shawano, who liked him and decided to adopt him. He was glad to have a son with a quick smile and a friendly outlook — these things seemed surprising in a whiteman. Augustus was glad to have as a father a man who quietly went about the business of life, and taught him how to dream the whereabouts of animals and to follow their tracks and use the wind to catch them. Old Shawano taught Augustus how to pick wild rice, weave nets, tap maples, and ignore the doings of women. Augustus became adept at all but the last thing. As the twins worked, they breathed the smoked hide and touched the rabbit fur and tasted the duck grease of the birds the two men shot together. They breathed Augustus’s clean sweat, for he bathed in the lake each morning, even breaking the ice sheaves once November came around. He had learned from Shawano an old-time Indian’s habits. But also like Shawano, he wore suspenders and read aloud from the newspapers. Augustus acted like an akiwenzii although he was very young. This confused the twins’ rivalry and dulled their glares. Protected by his books and pens and envelopes and bills, Augustus tried to remain oblivious. But their feelings for him were a long thread. The two sisters had licked, threaded, and waxed either end. They began to sew with it, adding to their own peculiar pattern bead by bead until, one night, the thread pulled taut, the space shortened, Zosie’s and Mary’s needles halted, and they looked each other in the eye.

Fried Robins

Although the twins enjoyed flummoxing people, especially Augustus, with their sameness, they were in truth very different. Zosie liked sweet things and Mary preferred sour and salty. Mary hated to eat birds, eggs, and any roots that came out of the ground. Zosie liked those foods but rejected green cabbage and complained that if any maple sugar was added to her meat she was likely to get the runs. Mary was good at small things and Zosie was good at large. For instance, Mary could mend a sock to perfection while Zosie could help Augustus split new shingles for the roof. Zosie could also cook for many people at once while Mary was better at more intricate food tasks, although she cried while plucking birds. Zosie liked to snare birds although Mary called her heartless. Zosie was frying up six robins one day when she decided that she was tired of sharing her sister with Augustus. A husband was all right to have, as long as he could be controlled. But you couldn’t get along without your twin. If he ever learned their differences, he might tell one from the other and choose. So that night, as they looked at each other over their beadwork, Zosie put her hand on her head and twirled the crown of her hair. Mary put down her needle and did the same. “The robins are sacred,” said Mary. “If you ever eat one again, you will choke on its tiny breastbone.” “I will give them up,” said Zosie. Then they both laughed so hard, blowing and snorting with relief, that they didn’t stop until they felt drunk.

The Hidden Knot

A woman used to deception knows how to hide her stitches. The twins’ beadwork was tight and true. No visible beginning or end to the design. Impossible to find the starting knot, the final tie. Unseeable the place where the needle went in or out. Their maple leaf or prairie rose or vines twisting skeletal on black velvet were done with invisible thread. They used those threads on Augustus. He never saw the stitch work that kept him sewed to their side. He never saw the fabric upon which their passion was marked out in chalk. Or the inlay, one bead to the next, the remarkable interpenetration of colors.

There was one secret way to tell the twins apart. Victoria had pity on Augustus one day and told him to check the whirlwinds at the crown of their heads. One swirled to the left, the other swirled to the right.

Augustus had fallen in love with the enigma of duplication, and the hold had deepened. The confusion of sameness between the twins made him tremble like an animal caught in a field of tension. Sitting at the table, he’d feel the current of their likeness. Things even they did not notice. Mary pricked herself. Zosie muttered owey! Zosie started a legging and Mary, without even trying to copy, constructed another of an identical design. They got hungry at exactly the same time. Started humming one tune suddenly, no sign having passed between them.

When making love, there was barely anything one did differently from the other. He could tell them apart only with the greatest difficulty, even in their nakedness beneath his hands, but this exploration, rather than daunting, excited him. He could always make certain which was which by touching the whirlwinds at the crowns of their heads — that is, until suddenly it seemed they started combing their hair in new ways. This way, that. Messing with his one sure proof.

After they messed up the hair on their whirlwinds, he searched and searched for another way to identify them. Soon one of them would show her pregnancy. He had to know which one or he would be lost. For a time, as they beaded, he surreptitiously examined their fingers. Curled around the needles, each nail was just that slightest bit different from the next. He marked out the degree of growth, fixed in his mind a nick or a tatter.

He was driven to noticing the tiniest things. Became a devotee of pricks and scratches. Sometimes, in his desperation, he tried placing a mark on one of them himself.

You could say he started what happened next.

The accident occurred as a stroke of luck. Augustus knocked a hot fry pan over and grease splattered Zosie’s wrist. Mary was so upset that she gasped out Zosie’s name. For several weeks Augustus had a certain sign of Zosie’s identity and this quieted him. He even gained a few pounds, for anxiety had thinned him terribly. But Zosie’s scar was fading. Just before it disappeared, he tipped the hot fry pan over once again, this time onto Mary, whose painfully burned foot had to be bandaged and unbandaged twice a day. Yet she, too, recovered and her skin stayed unmarred.

How to leave a more permanent mark? He took a knife one day. Cutting a rope, he sliced through the air and nearly took off the tip of Mary’s right ear. She ducked in time, but it gave him an idea and that night when Zosie came to him he worked himself into a heat and climaxed with the lobe of her ear between his teeth.

FOR THE REST of the pregnancy, he slept alone. The twins both feared he had gone wiindigoo. The child was born, but even Victoria was confused. The baby had two whorls of hair, clockwise, counterclockwise, on the crown of its head.

“An unusual situation,” said Augustus, holding his little daughter, who clutched his finger and stared up at him in focused intensity. “I am your father, but we may never know the exact identity of your mother. Even if one tells us, she may be lying. I give up.”

Augustus accepted that he was lost. That his predicament was insoluble now. Time was marked both ways on the crown of his daughter’s head. Time was moving forward with the clock, time was moving backward, against the clock. Time had judged his father. But perhaps time does not recognize the particulars of human identity, thought Augustus, and keeps track only of the magnitude of crime. If there were those yet living affected by his father’s murder of the old woman, then it stood to reason that punishment would also be carried out upon his father’s descendant.

I am the one, Augustus concluded. The one who will answer.

Chapter 3. Answers

WHEN SCRANTON ROY had explained his cracker tin dilemma so long ago, one of the twins had answered, You’ve come to the right place. Augustus thought the answer was a typically quick-witted response to the jingle of money. But he was wrong. That answer was the truth. Over time, he discovered that the women he loved were great-nieces of the old woman eagerly slaughtered by his father. The old woman who died had been high-spirited, a tease, always ready to laugh. She had suffered three days before she died of the wound. Raving, she had cried out exactly what was carved into Scranton’s arm. Augustus covered his face and breathed deeply when he learned what it meant. He also learned the name Blue Prairie Woman and understood that she was the mother of the women he loved.

Zosie and Mary were the twins created of immoderation in the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. Perhaps, as they owed their origins to that haunting and ironic laughter, they tended to take their jokes too far. Augustus thought so. But just as he finally accepted that he would never tell one from the other, his child, their child, a daughter he named Peace, began to speak. She spoke Ojibwe, but eventually Augustus came to the exciting conclusion that she consistently called Zosie Nimaamaa, and Mary Inninoshenh. My mother and my auntie.

The spell was broken. Augustus was astonished he’d ever thought them so exactly alike. One had a slightly crooked nose! The other’s eyes were wider apart. Mary even had a tiny permanent dimple in her chin. This entire realization presented a new problem.

Knowing that Zosie was the mother of his child, he felt he should marry her correctly in the eyes of the law and the state of Minnesota. And if he married Zosie, then he could not, of course, sleep with Mary. He watched them with grief in his heart. They had sewn themselves new wash dresses out of the lengths of green flowered fabric he’d given them. They were combing out their long, wet, dark masses of hair. Sometimes they wore simple braids; other times pinned up their hair in charmingly untidy arrangements. He loved their smooth skin, handsome faces, their fine thin noses, and even their lips, cruel but perfectly formed. Their teeth were very white and sharp. Both were vain about their smiles and showed them off broadly when he bought them fancy boar-bristle toothbrushes and whitening tooth powder. He had softened them with his attention, he thought. For they treated Peace with utmost tenderness. He didn’t want to give either one of them up. Not only that, but it would cause such unthinkable discord.

So Augustus spent the rest of his life pretending that he could not distinguish between them, even though as they grew older they also grew even more unlike. When Mary bore him a son, Augustus rejoiced and named him Charles. When Zosie bore him another son he rejoiced and tried to name the baby Arthur, but nobody would call the willful, cheerful ball of boy Arthur. They called him Booch. The last son came along the same year Old Shawano passed over to the spirit world, so that baby was named Shawano and the family was complete.

The Train Station

Peace, Charlie, Booch, and Shawano were all as fine-looking as their mothers, tall with clear features and thoughtful eyes. They were each a year or two apart in age and played together in isolation. The allotment land fiercely protected by Shawano, Victoria, the twins, and Augustus was prime lakeshore property. By the time Peace was five years old, all the land around them was lumbered to stumps. By the time Charlie was five, the lakeshore was filled with white people’s cabins. By the time Booch and young Shawano were five, the Indian agent came while Augustus was at work and their mothers out picking medicines. Only old Victoria was there.

The agent, Hiram Talp, believed that he was doing the best for all concerned except the children. He had received a letter from a government boarding-school superintendent informing him that in order to meet a certain quota at his school, he was willing to pay Talp good money for his assistance in persuading students from his reservation to attend. Talp collected the children by assuring Victoria that he was going to show them the newly built train station. It was the talk of the town.

At the train station, the agent showed Victoria the fancy ladies’ restroom. He encouraged her to step inside. When she did, he locked the door. Then he tried to herd the children onto the train. When Peace saw that he’d locked their grandmother in the bathroom she took Charlie’s hand and they backed slowly away from the agent. Booch and Shawano slipped behind their sister and brother. This was the way they had been taught to treat a bear. They backed toward the ladies’ restroom door, which had a frosted glass window. A blurred version of their grandmother jumped up and down behind the window, screaming in an eerie tremolo. People gathered. Sound of the commotion reached the bank. Augustus walked across the street toward the familiar tone of distress. The children were silent. Victoria tore a piece of framing from a mirror and began to beat at the window. Still, Hiram Talp persisted, talking soothingly to the children and explaining the situation to the people who surrounded the scene. He tried to take Peace’s hand and she bit him. He tried to take Charlie’s hand and she kicked him hard enough to make him double over. When Talp staggered up she put a finger in his eye. She was not her mothers’ daughter for nothing.

Augustus waded into the shocked little crowd surrounding Talp, who had doubled over in pain again. The people murmured warily at Peace, who did not look fierce at all in her neat blue dress, trimmed with a yellow collar, cuffs, and even a yellow ruffle. It was made by the screaming grandma in the frosted window, and lent to all of the children an air of respectability even though, well, they were clearly Indians.

Augustus registered the crowd’s comments without surprise. Once they saw that the children belonged to him, the people hushed.

“Give me the key,” said Augustus to the stationmaster, who pointed mutely at the agent. Augustus said to Hiram, again, “The key.” A woman looked at Hiram’s eye and declared he deserved to be blinded. Everyone was now on the children’s side. Hiram pointed at his shirt pocket. Augustus removed the key and released Victoria.

As the children and their grandmother walked away with Augustus, the Indian agent called out, warning everyone that the children would now grow up to be illiterate and violent drunks. Augustus stopped in the door of the train station.

“Hiram Talp,” he called, “what is six plus its additive inverse?”

Hiram glowered out of one eye. His hand was still clapped over the other.

“Zero,” said Peace.

“What is the sum of 20,862, 39, 459, 66, and 7,088?” asked Augustus. He saw the answer spiral from soft yellow to a scorched orange, but Peace saw the sum as violently green. As she answered, they kept walking, adding and subtracting numbers as they went along. It was a game they played. Augustus looked at his daughter and noticed that the freckles just beneath her skin stood out like flecks of iron.

The Storyteller

After what Old Shawano and Victoria had told him about their days in boarding school, Augustus was determined to educate his children at home. He understood that the loneliness the elders had suffered in those schools remained forever within them unsolved. In the evenings, by kerosene lantern light, the children worked regularly at their lessons. During the days, their mothers educated their children in all that was Ojibwe, all that they needed to survive. In this way, the family escaped many of the harms around them. They kept to themselves, rarely walked into town. They spent their time together and made themselves mute around others so as not to draw unnecessary attention. Augustus was anxious also to preserve his privacy from any who might guess that he was not legally married to either one of the women he lived with. He feared that his standing at the bank would suffer. But since no white people ever visited, nobody really understood that Mary and Zosie were different people. The two of them never appeared in the town together.

Occasionally, people did try to visit them. Old Shawano had placed his tar-paper house with a view to the small winding road that led up to it. Augustus had added a small white frame house to the same site, and so the family often had time to vanish before a visitor arrived to stand before their silent door. For a few people, though, the family stayed put. One visitor was a bachelor named Asin, Stone, and another was Bagakaapi, Sees Clear. They came originally to visit Old Shawano, but continued even after he entered the spirit world. They came for the remarkable bannocks and jellies that Victoria set before them, and they came because the children were curious and asked them questions, which they were only too happy to answer.

Questions

“What were we?” asked Charles. “Before this?”

He looked down at his overalls and bare feet. Asin knew just what the boy was asking. It was summer. They sat behind the house, which did not face the lake the way white people’s houses did, but sat sideways to catch the calmer breeze and protection of the woods. There was a low bluff at the side of the lake and a path that led through it to a broad velvety beach, which today was hot and windy. The women had cut leafy poles to make a cooling arbor and an outdoor kitchen. Augustus had pegged together a plank table. The children could hear the waves from where they sat, and the searching cries of gulls.

Zosie paddled out to an island and gathered two baskets of gull eggs. Now the eggs were boiling gently in a black iron kettle hung from a tripod on an iron hook. Zosie kept the fire low and even. Mary told her that the gulls would peck her eyes out when she was dead. Zosie shrugged and poured cups of tea.

Asin repeated the question, with a nod significant of its complexity. Then he cried out.

“What were we? We were warriors! The women too!”

Zosie smiled. Asin went on. “We hunted and trapped for the fur companies. However, we understood they were trapping us the way we trapped the animals. They were using their goods as bait. They used their rum too. Rum cut with pepper, water, tobacco. One swig would make you crazy. We knew most of those traders were against us at heart, but of course we needed more territory to hunt animals. We fought our way out here from the east and encountered the powerful Bwaanag. We fought them hard and never would have beat them except the whites attacked them, too, from all sides. They had good warriors, those Bwaanag. We made a mistake not to band up with them to extinct the whiteman. Now like us they are forced to hide their eagle feathers. And it is no use to make any war parties against the Bwaanag for land, because the now the whiteman has our land and their land too.”

Asin slapped at the cloth of his frayed pants. He looked down at his knees. “You know what we call these trousers? Giboodiyegwaazonag. Sewed up the butt. Sewed up the butt! We had freedom once!”

“Freedom of the butt?” asked Booch, and the children rolled with laughter, the women too. Asin and Bagakaapi laughed, repeated Booch’s question, then variations of the question, and laughed again until they laughed all afternoon and it was time to go.

Sugar Point

Asin showed his ten fingers twice and told the boys only that long ago their people, the Anishinaabe, had turned back a horde of soldiers. Nobody intended for the fight to get so out of hand. But it had! It had! Asin twisted his fingers together. How he wished he were a Pillager!

Those warriors of the Pillager hid among the trees when the soldiers marched in to take their leaders prisoner.

Nobody intended it to start, they say. A boy stacked their rifles. One went off!

Asin made an explosive sound and raised an imaginary Winchester. He shot and shot, pulling back at each recoil.

One soldier down, another two. A wound to their head man and then another. He is killed. We don’t attack them — just kill the ones who stick their heads up. We could have killed them all! Asin’s face worked. We could have killed them all. But because we showed our power, they brought us food and blankets. They made us more promises. We were not punished because they knew we were in the right. On that day, the only day we shot the whiteman, we won. We should do it again.

Warriors

The boys did every chore after that as warriors. If they were sent out to net fish, they worked as army scouts. The fish were the enemy. They netted and killed as many of the warrior fish as they could. The boys carried on their victory celebration far out on the lake, then came to shore and gutted all their enemies and put them up on drying racks.

They snared rabbits, hunted muskrats, gophers, any animal, with ferocity of purpose. They pestered Asin and Bagakaapi about warrior ways, learned that a war party was signaled to assemble by a deadly symbolic red glove. They carefully sewed one of tanned deerhide, dyed it with mashed cranberries, stuffed it with sage and stolen pipe tobacco. They kept it hidden in their blankets. Each brother kept the red glove until he wanted to declare a war party, then it was sent to the others in turn and the time was set for them to convene. Sometimes they attacked fallen timber, reduced their enemy to stove lengths and kindling. Surprised, their mothers praised them. They gloated proudly. Peace, the only one of the children who had ever actually waged war on a whiteman, thought her brothers were ridiculous.

Peace Roy

She had authority, though she was shy. Her eyes quickened with understanding, and she moved with deliberation. She was meticulous. Her smile flashed ironically, her eyebrows lifted in amusement, but she rarely spoke. She was guarded because, like her father, she was emotional. She was precious because she was the only daughter. Her hands liked to stack, smooth, fold, and slice. Her brain counted everything her hands touched. Again, like her father. Her grandmother and namesake had given Peace a few of her freckles. A shade darker than her skin, they dusted her nose and cheekbones. They were truly visible only when she was angry or upset. When she laughed, as she often did at the absurd things her brothers did, her laugh was soft and breathy. Her brothers felt like they were being tickled with a brushy wand of grass.

Peace was the first Indian to work in a bank. She cleaned the floors.

Later, much later, she became a teller and then a manager. Indian people came to the bank just to look at her and see for themselves that one of them knew how to handle the whiteman’s white metal, zhooniyaa. It was this stuff, this material of no possible use, that their parents and grandparents had been forced to admit into their lives. Americans seemed glad to perish over pitiless coin and paper, which now controlled their destinies but seemed, still, in its essence a symptom of madness.

Peace began cleaning floors at the bank when she was twelve. She got out the mop and bucket after everyone but her father had left the building. When she was done, Augustus taught her how the bank worked. When they went home, she was supposed to pass this knowledge on to her brothers. But although money and all that it represented in the world — territory, goods, religion — was the basis of war, they had no feel for it. They could write and calculate, those boys, but it was war stories that they fed upon.

Despairing of their attention, Augustus read The Iliad out loud every night after they were finished with mathematics. That the translation was ornate and repetitive was so much the better — the boys sank into the drama and made their father read it many times. It became the only book that mattered. They chased one another around the house brandishing long sticks for spears; as either Hector or Achilles, they destroyed and mutilated each other over and over. Shawano, the youngest, got the hardest treatment. They pretended to burn him on a funeral pyre or even chopped him up with their hands to feed him, raw, to the dogs. He had to lie still and not laugh while he was gorged upon by vultures. Although Augustus had been careful to teach them the realities of carnage — even to the point of telling them about their own family tragedy — the boys gloried in Asin’s narratives, and in the glamour of the Trojan War, and they lamented that these conflicts were long finished. So it was with tremendous excitement that they learned, through reading their father’s newspaper, that a fresh, new war was being waged in France, against Germany. Real bloodshed, real valor, real killing, real heroes. Moreover, they were thrilled to find out they could join this war. There was also a recruitment notice in the newspaper.

One day, without telling anybody but Asin, whose clouded eyes lit with supreme joy, the brothers went to the town hall, where the recruiter sat waiting in a corner, at a wooden desk. They signed up to become soldiers and were delighted to learn they would be given uniforms with round hats and pants with legs that puffed at the hips. They would also have tailored jackets, but only after they’d passed certain tests. Once they were trained, they would also be given new guns. After that they would be transported to the war.

“How soon can we get there?” asked Charlie.

ZOSIE AND MARY could not bear for their sons to leave. Both mothers threatened to cut their hair and slash their arms, but in the end they seethingly wept and packed lunches for their boys to eat on the train. They said good-bye in the road and told Augustus that their hearts were too full to go along. Actually their hearts were full of rage. Once their sons were out of sight, they took the path to old Asin’s house, where they drew their razor-keen fish knives and assured him that if any harm came to their sons they would carve him up and dry him on a rack.

They had said nothing to Augustus the night before, however, for it was obvious that he was stricken when he threw the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad into the outdoor cooking fire. He intended to stamp the ashes of the book into the earth, but to his surprise Zosie plucked the book out before the cover was more than scorched.

“I listen too,” she said. “We’re just like those people, never knowing what the gods or the government is going to do to us next.”

AUGUSTUS AND PEACE walked into the train station with the young men. The freckles appeared on Peace’s face, dark points of distress. It appeared to Augustus that he had spent his life in error. He had protected his sons from the train station by educating them as best he could — still they chose the same inscrutably violent path as Scranton Roy. The boys already had their tickets, so Augustus and Peace sat down with them on a long bench. Silently, they waited. The floor of the train station was polished terrazzo based on a singular slate-green crushed marble. The walls were paneled with ancient oak worked into scenes of progress. There were wagons, valiant pioneers, oxen, plows, trains of course. As the Americans advanced counterclockwise around the great waiting room, Indians melted away before them, looking sadly back over their shoulders or turning their backs entirely as if to walk straight into the wood, which was carved into a simulacra of its origin as an unrepeatable forest. It is unnerving, thought Peace, to see my ancestors swallowed into the exact same wood that was stolen from us. She tried to divert her thoughts from her brothers living and breathing beside her not in fear but silent exaltation. She had to try and think of something other than the monstrous crack she sensed was developing in her father’s heart.

The train arrived. The boys left. Peace and her father watched the train disappear and then watched the place into which it had disappeared. Augustus gestured with his open hands and dropped them to his sides. Time, he thought, has most certainly been a ruthless judge. He turned with Peace and they walked through the town, greeting and shaking hands with people, gravely, as they passed. People had found out that the three brothers had joined the war. When they got onto the road and began their walk home, Augustus felt the feeling that was too large for him. He dropped to his knees as though a great hand had struck him down. Peace helped him up and when he rose he held her arm, tottered forward, suddenly feeble. They began to sob. The road became a path and the surrounding half-grown scrub, rotting stumps, vigorous new popple and maple kindly closed over the two of them. They walked slowly, weeping. From time to time they held each other, or braced themselves against small saplings. Each had a handkerchief. They wiped their faces. But still their fears flowed down their throats and wet their collars and dampened their shoulders.

“Please take care of them,” Augustus prayed to ruthless Time.

“Bring them home, please protect them,” prayed Peace to the spirits of her ancestors who had peered over their shoulders at her in the train station.

Chapter 4. The Blitzkuchen

1918. END OF THE WAR. So many spirits out, wandering, including Augustus Roy, who looked down into the sum of money he was counting one day and saw a shade of blue he had never seen before roar open marvelously into another life. And so he died. His wives mourned him, but not as deeply as Peace, who really did cut most of her hair off and slash her arms before she felt any better. It helped when she found out all three of her brothers would return.

When the youngest, Shawano, came home from the land of the frog people he was half spirit, too. But that is often how warriors are when they return. Booch had served in the supply lines and come down with the Spanish flu. Charlie had spent the war in an army kitchen. Only young Shawano got decorated with a medal and a ribbon. Only he felt crazy. Ogichidaa, they called him, now, warrior. Ogichidaa had lost his best buddy, who in the warrior’s blood relation was more like another self and could not be adequately revenged.

“Sa tayaa,” he cried suddenly. They were sitting at Asin’s house. “I tried. I made his mark on every German soldier that I killed!”

“Was it a deep mark?” hissed wrinkled-up Asin. The old man had become so violent in his thoughts he seemed unhinged to most people. For instance his opinion was that the Americans should make all the Germans into slaves. Ship the whole country full of people here and teach them to be humble. That’s how they would have done it in the old days. He couldn’t get over how he had heard our government gave back most of their territory. Bagakaabi, whose name implied that he saw clearly, was more reasonable and said everyone was humbled by this war. He had heard it took a wheelbarrow full of money there to buy a loaf of bread.

“They get to eat bread?” cried Asin. “While the Indians must eat bannock?”

Bagakaabi shrugged. He loved bannock.

Ogichidaa was a slim and handsome boy when he left, but his look when he returned was reeling and deathly. His face was puffed up and his eyes were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare.

“My buddy, he took a stomach wound,” said Ogichidaa. “I had to stuff his guts in loops back into his body, and all the time he kept his eyes on me. He couldn’t look down. When I had them back in, his teeth were clicking together and he got these words out. ‘You sure you got them back in the right order?’ I said I did my best. ‘Because I don’t wanna be pissing out my ears,’ he said. His voice was real serious and I answered, ‘I checked. Your pisser made it. No damage, brother.’ He seemed real happy with that statement. The ground shook around us. Close one landed. I lost my hold and they all poured out of him again.”

Ogichidaa was exhausted and his brothers urged him to sleep. Before he slept, though, he gave Asin a funny look and repeated himself, “Old man, I did what you told me. I sent as many as I could with him after that to be his slaves in the land of spirits. It didn’t help.”

Old Asin looked at him long, deeply, watching.

“Maybe,” said Asin at last, “you need to do the next thing.”

“Which is what?”

Asin hunched into his gnarled body and then tapped a leathery bone finger on the pocket of his shirt just over his heart.

“Replace your war brother with a slave brother.”

The Capture

Ogichidaa mulled the idea over, took it in slowly. It was not a bad idea, he thought, a way to kill the rage that soured his heart and woke him in the night. A way to erase the picture of those guts. But he could hardly go all the way back to Germany, and the idea of taking revenge on a German immigrant who’d been turned into an American citizen seemed an act of weakness. In the morning he asked Asin where he could get a German.

“Oh, they’re all over the place here,” Asin said, sweeping at the air side to side with the flat of his hand. “All over here like frogs. Perhaps they are called Omakakii-wininiwag because they popped out of nowhere,” said the old man. “In the beginning, there were whole village tribes of them, we heard, shipped over here to tear up our land. They took it over. They killed it. Most of the land is now half dead. Plowed up.

“There is also a whole bunch of defeated soldiers who shipped over because of that money problem. They want to stay in this country now. They moved up north and work the timber, two on a cross-end saw. Ditch timber roads. Learn only swear English. Walk along piercing the earth with pointed iron bars, tamping in seedlings with their shoes.”

Asin smiled. “You could take one of those.”

ON A MOONLESS NIGHT then, Ogichidaa sneaked into the lumber camp.

The men were summoned the next morning to his house.

“I stole the German at night,” said Ogichidaa. “I crept right up to the barracks without detection.”

“Without detection.” Asin gloated. He was excited by this ancient working out of the old-way vengeance, pleased young Ogichidaa had taken his advice. He nodded at Booch and Charlie, grinning. The old man’s teeth were little black stubs — all except for a gold one. That tooth glinted with a mad sheen.

“I dropped the gunnysack over the Kraut’s head when he came outside to take a leak,” Ogichidaa went on. “Bound his arms behind him. Got him right back through the fence and from there, here.”

Silent, they looked at the figure sitting bound in the corner. Barefooted. Wearing a baggy shirt and pants of no particular color. The man, his head covered by the gunnysack, was quiet with a peculiar stillness that was not exactly fear. Nor was it sleep. He was awake in there. The men could feel him straining to see through the loose weave over his face.

Bagakaabi got spooked by the way the German composed himself, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it. He went over and ripped away the gunnysack hood. Maybe some expected to see a crazy eagle — how they stare mad into the air from their warrior hearts of ice — but they did not see an eagle. Instead, blinking out at them from spike tufts of hair, a chubby boy face, round-cheeked, warm and sparkling brown eyes. The men all reared back at the unexpected sense of warmth and goodwill from the German’s pleasant smile.

“Hay’, ” they exclaimed. Expectation was something more impressive than a porcupine man! His hands were chubby, his skin almost as brown as theirs. Around his circle eyes his stubby hair poked out like a quill headdress. His smell — that came off him too now — was a raw and fearful odor like the ripe armpit stink of porcupine. He moved slowly like that creature, his deep eyes shining with tears. He took them all in one by one and then cast his eyes down, bashful, as though he would rather be under the porch or inside his own burrow.

“Babagiwayaaneshkimod atoon imaa oshtigwaaning ji-gaajigaadenig omaji-dengway,” said Asin hurriedly.

“No,” said Ogichidaa, hurt and surprised at the meekness of his catch.

“Grüsse!” The prisoner bowed. His voice was pie sweet and calm as toast. “Was ist los? Wo sind wir?”

Nobody answered his words even though he next made known by signs — an imaginary scoop to his mouth, a washing motion on his rounded stomach — his meaning.

“Haben Sie Hunger?” he asked hopefully. “Ich bin ein sehr guter Küchenchef.”

“Gego bizindawaaken waa-miigaanik!” Asin’s attitude was close to panic. The kitchen window shed frail light on an old wooden table, the stove in the background of the room, the prisoner blinking.

Shawano picked up the gunnysack uncertainly, ready to lower it back onto the porcupine man’s head.

“Nishi! Aapijinazh! Nishwanaaji’ a’aw maji-ayi’aawish ji-minonawe’angwaa gigichi-Anishinaabeminaanig gaa-onjigiyang.” Asin now spoke in a low and threatful tone. At his command, everyone fell silent. The old man was behaving in a way that did not befit an elder. Yet the younger men had been taught to respect him.

“Why should we do that?” asked Bagakaabi. “He can’t be a slave if he is dead.”

“It is the only way to satisfy the ghosts,” Asin answered.

“Haben Sie alle hunger, bitte? Wenn Sie hunger haben, werde ich für sie einen Kuchen machen. Versuches mal, bitte.” The prisoner offered to bake for them. He spoke modestly and pleasantly, though he seemed now in his wary poise to have understood the gravity of Asin’s behavior. He seemed, in fact, to know that his life might hang in the balance. Although Asin had spoken his cruel command in the old language, his ferocity was easily translated. With a burst of enormous energy, the German tried to make good on his offer using peppy eating motions and rubbing his middle with more vigor.

Booch, always eager for food, finally nodded. He knew the word kuchen. “Why not let him prepare his offering? We will test it and see if his sweet cake can save his life.”

He said this jokingly, but Asin’s gleam and nod told that he took the baking test seriously and looked forward to the German’s failure.

The First Metaphorical Cake

The porcupine man drew a tiny diagram or symbol for each thing he needed. Little oval eggs, flour in a flour sack, nuts of a rumpled shape, strawberries, sugar, and so on. By now, even though the men had no money extra, they had to go along and so they all dug deep into their hands, socks, the liners of their shoes, and the rabbit fur inside their moccasins. They sent Charlie to the traders’ for these things and he returned with his lower lip stuck out and fire in his eyes. He thought this whole plan was wrong and yet he was curious about the cooking aspect, the baking, which would in time become his passion.

The stove. The German seemed to have a problem with that. He fiddled and poked it and tried to figure out its quirks. The brothers picked red berries for him, though, ode’iminan, heart berries, from the clearings. So fresh and dewy and tender. The sweet red melted in your mouth. Charlie gave the prisoner a makak full of the berries, and was surprised by the emotional way he accepted the offering. The German lifted the container in his hand, inhaled the fragrance of the berries. His dark round eyes filled again and this time spilled over with tears.

“Erdbeeren,” he said, softly, with mistaken and genuine sincerity. “I fuck you thank you. Klaus. Klaus.” He pointed at his chest.

The men stood there in the kitchen before the stove and looked down at their feet, at the floor. Charlie reached out and shook the German’s hand, or paw, which he saw with a certain fear had fur on the back.

“Gaawiin niminwendanziinan omaamiishininjiin misawaa-go minode’ed,” he said.

Charlie’s kindness was tinder to Asin’s low fury. Asin flared up, insisted that Klaus had just delivered a most clever insult veiled in ignorance, fixed Klaus with a crushing stare. Asin bared his black teeth and gave a startling snarl. Booch and Shawano stepped out the door. Klaus waved Asin and Bagakaapi away from the smoking woodstove abruptly and began his efforts. Charlie stayed.

From inside the kitchen, then, where Charlie had stubbornly placed himself, the others got as much of the story as they could, or maybe as anyone was ever supposed to know.

First, the prisoner pounded almonds to a fine paste between two lake rocks. Took the eggs, just the yellows in a little tin cup. He found a long piece of wire and cleverly twisted it into a beater of some sort. He began to work things over, the ingredients. Using the bottom of an iron skillet, he ground pods and beans and spices into the nuts. He added the sugar spoon by spoon.

When he was finished, he took the thick syrupy batter and poured it as though it contained, as it did for him, the very secret of life. He made dark pools in four round baking pans. He bore them ceremonially toward the oven, which yawned, perfectly stoked beneath with coals glowing in the firebox. Bending with maternal care, he placed the pans within the dark aperture. Closed with a toweled hand the oven door. For a moment Charlie, mesmerized by the calm music of the German’s efforts, regarded the words set in raised letters upon the oven door. The Range Eternal. He backed slowly away from the stove and sat down. He offered Klaus a cigarette.

Outside, the other men sat smoking and thinking. They paid respect to the east. In their thoughts, in their prayers. They respected the manito who guards the south. They regarded with humble pleading the direction of our dead, the west. North was last.

After a while Charlie went out and sat near them. He sat alone. He sat in a fugue trying to remember each action, each movement, each ingredient. Mary, Zosie, and Peace came into the yard.

“Don’t go in there,” said Asin.

“We are waiting for something to bake,” said Charlie.

The women did not wait, of course. What woman sits waiting for something to cook in the oven? Disgusted by the male mystery and presence in the kitchen, they bustled ostentatiously. Made a lot of noise coming, going. Banged washing boards and banged pots. Banged anything they could, including the chairs of the men, who jumped. Once, but just once, Zosie banged the stove. At which point Klaus leaped high and with a scream that unnerved them all, grabbed her by the apron strings and swung her toward the door. She flew as though shot from a bow. Limber as a wildcat, Klaus poised, light on the balls of his feet, and motioned one and all to hush.

Everyone crept near, caught in the grip of what the prisoner sensed happening behind the blue enamel of the oven door.

Light in the window turned subtly more golden. Klaus set pans of water in the oven like offerings. A breeze sprang up. Leaves tapped. Nobody said a thing. Asin’s eyes grew bloody. His hands trembled and the air whistled between his teeth. They sat until finally Klaus rose. Like a groom pacing tranced toward his bride, he approached the oven. At the lip of the door he closed his eyes, cocked his head to the side, listening. Slowly and pliantly Klaus bent, hands wrapped in two thick rags. With firm control he pulled the handle on the door until it opened. Then, just for a moment, the waiting men lost their bearings as the scent of the toasted nuts, honey, vanilla, wild strawberries, sugar, and subtly united oils and flours escaped the oven box. The scent trembled in the air.

More than delicious. Impossible. Perhaps an Anishinaabe vision-word comes close. Perhaps there is no way to describe what they all experienced as Klaus tenderly drew the pan along the rack until it rested secure between his thick, furry, rag-protected paws.

More sitting while the brown cake cooled. Eyes of Asin sunk, blackening. He made everyone uneasy now with his scratchy breathing. As the creation cooled, the watchers remembered things they’d rather have forgotten: how Asin had suffered from time to time with nameless rages, pointless furies. These angers had assumed a name and form in the person of the porcupine man, Klaus.

Air poured in the screen door, cooling and healing. Dusk air. Pure air. Moved onto Ogichidaa. Bagakaabi took his fan, the wing of an eagle, and with immense care he swept the air toward Asin, whose face now worked in and out like a poisoned mud puppy’s, and who said, fixing everyone with eyes crossed:

“Let us deliver him to the west. We are Ojibwe men — the name has a warrior’s meaning. We roast our enemies until they pucker! Once, we were feared. Our men brought sorrow. Mii-go iw keyaa gaa-izhi-mashkawigaabawiyang mewinzha. What have we here? Chimookomaanag? Women? Our enemy is in our hands and we do not make him suffer to console the spirits of our brothers. We let him cook our food. It is this… Klaus”—he scoured the name off his tongue—“whom we should burn to death!”

In the space of quiet that followed on his words, then, everyone realized the old man’s bitter ghost was talking.

“Oooo, ishte, niiji,” Bagakaabi said, drawing the wing of the eagle through the air in a soothing and powerful fashion. “Good thing you’ve told us this.” Looking at the rest of the men meaningfully, he said to Asin in a calm tone, “We respect your wishes, brother. However”—and now Bagakaabi held the wing of the eagle stiffly pointed toward the cake—“would we be honorable men if we did not keep our promise even to our enemy? Before we roast the prisoner, let us try his offering.”

Klaus, whose intuition of their meaning just barely kept him horrified, then took from his pile of ingredients a tiny packet of white sweet powder and, with a gravity equal to Bagakaabi’s, coated the top of the cake with the magical dust. Klaus then motioned to everyone to cup their hands, Asin, too. He cut the cake into pieces and served them out. When they all had the cake in hand, they looked at it hungrily and waited for the elder to taste. Asin, however, was too slow and Charlie the future baker too tempted. Charlie bit into the cake. Before he chewed, he gave a startled and extraordinary squeak and his eyes went wide. It was too much for the rest. They all bit. Or nibbled. Tasted. And everyone emitted some particular and undiluted sound of pleasure. There was not a one who’d ever tasted the taste of this cake. It was a quiet and complex sensation on the tongue.

We are people of simple food straight from the earth, thought Charlie. Food from the lakes and from the woods. Manoomin. Wiiyaas. Baloney. A little maple sugar now and then. Suddenly this: a powerful sweetness that opened the ear to sound. Embrace of roasted nut-meats. A tickling sensation of grief. A berry tartness. Joy. Klaus had inserted jam in thin-spread layers. And pockets of spices that have no origin in our language. So, too, there was no explanation for what happened next.

Together, they sat, swallowed the last crumbs, pressed up the powdery sweetness with their fingers. When they had licked every grain into themselves, they sat numb with pleasant feelings. Then, over the group, there stole a tender poignance. Some saw in the lowering light the shadows of loved ones, whose spirits they had fed, as well as they could, food of the dead. Curious, they doubled back. Others heard the sharp violin string played in the woods, the song of the white-throated sparrow. Mary and Zosie spoke lovingly to each other. Booch saw the face of his favorite nurse in the hospital. Bagakaapi tasted on his face the hot sun. He breathed warm thick berry odor and the low heat of the dancing white grass that grows along the road to the other world.

They breathed together. They thought like one person. They had for a long unbending moment the same heartbeat, the same blood in their veins, the same taste in their mouth. How, when they were all one being, kill the German? How, in sharing this sweet intensity of life, deny its substance in even their enemies?

When there is an end of things, and when we fade into the random scheme and design, thought Charlie, I believe we will taste the same taste, mercy on the tongue. And we will laugh the way we are laughing now in surprise and at the same sweet joke, even old Asin.

Ogichidaa rose with his hand out, then embraced Klaus like a brother. It was the first of many times he would imagine his pain was solved.

More and more often, as the years went on, Ogichidaa saw his pain vanish at the golden bottom of a whiskey bottle. He would find his way down to the Cities and there, late in age, still gripped by shell shock before there was PTSD, he would father a son. He would name the baby Klaus, remembering the taste of mercy. His brother Charlie would bake a cake for the occasion and feed it also to his own little grandson, Frank, then watch the toddler’s face for a reaction. Booch would eat two pieces of the cake to make sure, but then he would place his fork on the plate with a sigh.

Ogichidaa would shake his head.

Hope would sink down Charlie’s face and add a few molecules to his baker’s belly.

It was a good cake, there was even poignance and sweet intensity. But always, always, there was something missing.