The Painted Drum

1 The Visitors Bernard Shaawano

I’ve got a big truck, first of all, so with it comes the responsibility to haul drunks from ditches and boats hung up on shore and to make deliveries of emergency wood. Next there’s the fact that I work in the hospital, which makes people think, I do not know why, that the medical profession has rubbed off on me. Like maybe I picked it up from watching how the doctors and nurses take care of people. Then there is the idea that I supposedly have so much extra time to kill, living alone as I do, that it is a favor to me to ask a favor of me. So people kindly fill up the boredom of my hours by getting me to do all sorts of boring things for them.

There is a person who asks a lot of me, a woman for whom everything goes wrong. She has tired out everyone else on this reservation. I think I am the only one who doesn’t find a dire excuse of their own to get rid of her before she makes a request. So this woman, Chook she is called because of her crackling thin hair and how she always wears a hat, this Chook must think everybody on this whole reservation except me is in a state of continual emergency. People tempt fate, even, when Chook calls them up, by inventing really awful things that nobody wants to happen.

“Mary Sunday’s stove blew up, so she can’t drive me into town,” says Chook. Or even, “Teddy Eagle has something called yellow fever that could turn into smallpox if he’s not real careful.”

She laughs. As she is no dummy she knows a stupid excuse when she hears one. But I just take it at face value.

“That’s tough luck,” I say, resigned. I wait to hear what she’s got in mind for me to do. I really don’t know why I always end up helping her out. She’s a hard person to feel sorry for because she has more pity for herself than another person could possibly muster, but perhaps I do these things because I know in spite of everything that Chook is a good mother. Her irritating requests and desperations end up benefiting her children and the grandchildren she is raising—the oldest two grown sons, Morris and John, and the two much younger, a boy and a girl, who, unlike Chook, are always well dressed and with whom she is strict. From being around them I know they get good grades, and are not allowed to drink soda pop or watch too much television or ride around on other kids’ ATVs without a helmet. Plus she is kind of hysterical about seat belts, which, really, a mother should be. Still, that doesn’t make her less annoying or cause my eyes not to roll up to the ceiling when I answer the phone and it is her.

One day she calls, my day off, of course, and has a peculiar mission for me to go on. Sometimes I think she steals a look at my schedule in the back room on the hospital wall. I’m yawning. I thought for once I’d sleep in. But Chook has other uses for me.

“Bernard,” she says, “have you got a pickax?”

Many of her requests begin like that. She’s got most of my tools and garden equipment at her house now.

“Yeah,” I say, “I still have my pickax. You haven’t got that yet.”

She gives a soft, sad little laugh. “When Mike died, he took all his tools with him, eh?”

Mike was her husband, whom I sometimes think died so he wouldn’t get pestered by Chook anymore. He needed the peace and quiet. He went easily, no fuss. Drove himself to the emergency room and was dead of a heart attack five minutes after he got there. In the ground three days later. With all of his tools, according to Chook. I don’t even want to know what she is talking about. But she tells me.

“He borrowed from everybody else, so they come here for the funeral supper and they end up taking whatever they lent my husband and more, too, I think, besides. Once that night was up I look around me and I don’t see half what we used to have. But I was too broke up to say anything about it, eh? Me, I never said nothing. Just let it go.”

“I’ve got quite a lot of business going on today, Chook, so if you—”

“Oh, Bernard? There’s something I gotta ask you!”

I shut my eyes, weary already, already anticipating one of her usual requests. “Let’s hear it.” But instead of a ride to the bank during which I will hear the state of her meager bank account, or a plumbing disaster where I’ll be confronted with a tangle of plugged pipes, she asks me something I can’t register at first. She asks me to come and help her dig up her husband’s body. She has to repeat it three times before I realize she’s serious.

“I can’t do that! I mean, I would never do that. Anyway, I think you have to get some kind of permit, or go through the church.”

“No,” she says, “I don’t have to do that. Remember, he had himself buried on the ridge with the traditionals.”

Well, I did remember that, for all it was worth; to me it didn’t matter if he was buried underneath my front steps. I certainly was not going to dig him up.

“And you know what Mike had buried with him, you remember that, don’t you?” Chook was going to needle at me until I did something.

“His own pickax.”

“No, haha! You’re funny, Bernard. No!”

“Then what was it?” She was going to tell me no matter what.

“He had the tobacco box, even the scrolls of all the songs that went along with that drum your grandfather made, the one that took the sickness out of people. Mike had that drum’s belongings, you recall, because his father was on that drum and one of its keepers. Mike never thought that the drum would come back here.”

“So what do you want the things for?” I said, not even then understanding.

“Because it has.”

I hung the phone right up on her. I’d never done anything like that before. My hand had done it for me, refusing to have anything to do with something so alarming as the drum still existing, even much less returning. She called back.

“We got cut off!”

“Yeah.” I was troubled. There was so much more to this, more than ever had been admitted to those not directly involved way back then. Many people were affected by this drum. Many people know part of the story. But I know all or most of the history of this drum. I know because my father talked once he got sober, talked like his own father had, endlessly, hoping to be redeemed by the story. And he was only one of those who could not forget. Once his mind cleared he had to contend, of course, with the shame of all he had done when he was boozed up. So he talked to try and wear down the edges of that shame. And I was the one who listened.

“So would you help me dig Mike up?”

“Chook, let me…let me figure out something else.”

“Okay, Bernard. It’s not like we have to do it today. Tomorrow maybe.”

“You said the drum came back.”

“The judge’s got it at his house.”

“Well, that’s the first good thing.”

“They brought it to the right person, eh?”

“Who’s this ‘they’?”

“Two ladies from out east. Those women had come across that drum, I don’t know how. It had to do with some old man. Geraldine has been trying to get ahold of you. Me, I am getting my boy to drive me.”

I knew I had to be there, right then, at the drum’s return. If Chook actually got a ride from someone else, this was a big event. And I had to be there not only for my own reasons, but to neutralize her presence. I said good-bye and got ready to go over to the judge’s house.

The judge lives on his uncle’s old land pretty much right where Nanapush’s old shack caved in one harsh winter. I don’t even know if the judge ever met his uncle or if old Nanapush, of whom my father told me stories, realized that he had a nephew, anyway, drifting along through the tribal records and the off-reservation families, and those who moved to Canada, like the judge’s people, who came here to powwow and felt back at home. People come and people stay. There is a strong pull. You return for one funeral after another and all of a sudden you don’t leave and you are picking up where someone else left off. So with those women who traveled cross-country with the drum. My phone rings again half a minute after I hang up with Chook. I hear from the judge’s wife that these women are a mother and a daughter. She says she thinks that they are connected to an old branch of the Pillagers through a girl who escaped the sicknesses here by going to that eastern school, Carlisle, where they took so many of us at one time.

The judge’s house is a pleasant, modest little prefab construction, brand-new, that has a full basement garage as it sits on a little hill. From that hill, I’m told, old Nanapush used to watch all who passed and to anticipate all that would happen. The judge could look out his picture window and do the same, I suppose, but he probably sees even more than his old uncle by sitting on the courtroom bench. A little driveway curves up to the house and makes a U so that a person can easily turn around and go back out. That’s a nice feature of the house. There’s a lot to like about it. Geraldine, his wife, the new Mrs. Nanapush, has hung about six bird feeders outside the double glass doors on her deck and when I drive up a flock of tiny gray birds starts up, silent, and disappears. It’s a good time of the year—most of the ticks gone, air cool, leaves just turning, school started but the kids still playing outside, exposed but not down with the viruses that will get them once they’re inside coughing on one another all day, which will then fill the hospital—a nice time of year.

“Piindegen! Come in!” Geraldine is such a pleasant woman, wavy black hair and fair skin, her brown eyes secret and quiet, her smile a delicate curve. I always wish I’d asked her out when we were younger. Who could have known when she was gawky and her ears stuck out and she hid behind strings of hair, that she’d turn out like this?

I’m nervous as I walk into the house, and I concentrate on wiping my shoes even though they are perfectly clean. I am relieved to see that they have kept the drum covered in the middle of the room, so I don’t have to look on it quite yet. I am not easy in a social setting so it is not a simple thing for me to introduce myself, and I am glad Geraldine steps in and gets me acquainted with Elsie Travers and her daughter Faye. I sit down in a chair that matches the couch. The two women are sitting on that couch. Talking requires an effort. Both of the women have long hair, the mother’s in a twist and the daughter’s clipped back in a tail. They are slim, and dressed in combinations of black and cream white with very plain metal jewelry—heavy chains, stoneless rings, round stud earrings. They don’t go in for patterns or any sort of trim on their clothes, I see, and their shoes are very simple with no bows or tassels or fancy heels, either. The effect of them is somehow classily monklike, or undertakerish. They seem very different from people here. The younger woman speaks out like a lawyer in a hard, suspicious, accentless voice. I think her features, sharp and definite, her eyes with a Chippewa slant to them, though, are very striking or even beautiful. From one side that is, but then just ordinary from another. And the older one, too, looks different from moment to moment. First she is all excitable and anxious, then she turns right off and sits back watching everyone else like a little gray sparrow hawk ready to strike. As Geraldine says, these women who found the drum are somehow related to the Pillagers, who have mainly died out, so it is quite interesting that they’ve surfaced. Geraldine, especially, who is always collecting and compiling tribal history, shoots questions at them in her pleasant, friendly, interested way. If they stop talking for a minute, she fills up their tea mugs and asks them something else.

“What made you bring back the drum?”

“I kept it for a time,” says the younger woman, thoughtful, “then I thought I should pass it on.”

I nod as she explains about keeping tobacco near it and taking care of it. She did things just the way they are supposed to be done.

Right then Chook and her son, John, the handsome one, drive up to the house. We fall quiet, not wanting for her to miss anything important. John walks her up the steps and she enters. Chook is round as a turnip and today she is wearing a hot pink rayon top with Japanese-like patterns of black flowers. Her skirt ripples all around her like a bush, and when I bend to focus my eyes I see it’s embroidered all over with tiny yellow roses and rust red twigs. She has her hair tied back in a blue headband and she is smoking a cigarette, which she puts out halfway and drops into her purse.

“They don’t taste so good anymore,” she says to the room of people watching her. “I think it’s because of this blood-thinner medicine that they got me on. So there it is, that drum which my husband helped out with at one time.”

Chook stands looking at the drum, then reaches into her big canvas purse. She takes out a package of cookies and a pair of scissors, then neatly cuts open the cellophane on the cookies. Then she pulls the plastic tray halfway out of the clear package and sets it in the center of Geraldine’s coffee table, pushing aside a fresh coffee cake that Geraldine has cut in squares. I’m glad we are at Geraldine’s, for to drink tea at Chook’s house is almost dangerous. She scours her mugs with Comet cleanser and there is always a faint, gritty taste of the stuff. Now Geraldine pours a fresh cup of tea for Chook and she talks, addressing the two women from the east.

“That old drum, it had a reputation. You can’t mess around—once you do keep that drum, you gotta keep it with respect.” She looks at us all with little blinking round eyes, and nods at the cookies she brought, which happen to be the kind of deadly, sweet, pink, waffle-wafers that I am forbidden to touch by my doctor.

“Bernard here,” she says, “he’s the one to tell you about this drum. He knows it well, too well. When that drum passed out of their family, people forgot about them. They got no attention. But you see, that is sometimes how things heal up. Now, I think, he don’t want that drum to resurrect old sorrows for him, eh?”

She looks at me with a searching expression, but I say nothing.

“We all got sorrows,” Chook hunches her shoulders and holds up her bony hands. “We got sorrows or if we don’t work them down, then our sorrows got us.” She rattles the cookie package at me, but I resist.

“What does that have to do with the drum?” says the older of the two Pillager ladies. She is polite and yet nobody to mess with, I see. But Chook is up to dealing with her.

“Take me for instance,” says Chook. “That old Mr. Bush sent John’s brother here off to the Desert Storm, and he breathed something that upset his system and now it’s maybe killing him. But he never yet got a medal for that. Anyway, what I’m telling you is you wear down these sorrows using what you have, what comes to hand. You talk them over, you live them through, you don’t let them sit inside. See, that’s what the drum was good for. Letting those sorrows out, into the open, where those songs could bear them away.”

She drinks her tea, blinking all around the room.

“Drums get their power from how they are treated, though,” Chook goes on. “You got to keep them protected. If someone comes in where the drum is, uses bad language, you got to put them out. As for getting the drum in the first place, if you get the right guidance you can make a drum. But otherwise a drum must be given to you. Someone must give that drum freely. You cannot buy the drum. You cannot steal the drum.”

She stops right then and stares at the younger woman and says, “So you bought the drum from an old man?”

The younger woman gathers herself, sips her tea, doesn’t meet anybody’s eyes. “His name was Jewett Parker Tatro,” she says.

Geraldine sits back on the hard chair she has brought from the kitchen. The judge, with his round cheeks and intelligent face, sits near to her. He touches his stringy little Indian mustache.

“I think that was the name of the Indian agent at one time. His name has come up on some old probate documents.”

I know who this Tatro was, of course, as he figured in the shameful episodes that my father needed to confess. Tatro had gone from being an unscrupulous Indian agent, when his job was phased out, to owning a bar. The reservation, which had been dry for many years, decided to allow alcohol in order to keep liquor revenue within its borders. But the bulk of that money passed into Tatro’s hands, anyway, since he was the first to open his doors, and later, made some exclusive deal with the area supplier. At any rate, Tatro was or became a collector by default—when the need is on, some people they will sell their own grandmas. Or her old moccasins or the cradle board she beaded for a grandchild or a jingle dress. At one time, the wall of Tatro’s bar was full of these things—some beautiful and sacred, like the drum.

“That’s all we know about it,” says the younger one.

“Where it ended up,” her mother adds. “Of what brought that drum into the hands of Tatro, and what it was before, who kept it and so on…”

She trails off. All of a sudden I can feel Chook’s amused waiting. I can feel Geraldine’s eyes on me and I know she knows, she’s known from the beginning, why I am here. She knows enough about things generally to know where the drum came from, but she doesn’t completely know its origin or kinship; she doesn’t know how it is tied into my family or why my grandfather brought it into being. I look at the two women sitting in the judge’s living room—so prim and intense. Their hands are folded in their laps, but I can tell they have long fingers. Their feet are tucked away from sight, but they probably have big narrow feet with long second toes. Those two don’t know who they are, what it means that they are Pillagers. They don’t know that they came from Simon Jack and they don’t know what he did to Anaquot, my grandmother, or to my aunt whose name is never spoken, or to himself. They don’t know what the drum did to him, either, what the drum knows, or what it contains. They don’t know why my father sold it in spite of the many persons it healed. They don’t know the whole story, but I do know it. So I tell them.

2 The Shawl

Among the Anishinaabeg on the road where I live, it is told how a woman loved a man other than her husband, and went off into the bush and bore his child. Her name was Anaquot, and like her namesake the cloud she was changeable, moody and sullen one moment, threatening, her lower lip jutting and eyes flashing, filled with storms. The next moment she would shake her hair over her face, blow it out straight in front of her, and make her children scream with laughter. For she had two children by her husband, Shaawano, one a yearning boy of five years and the other a capable daughter of nine.

When she brought the baby out of the trees late that autumn, so long ago, the girl was like a second mother, even waking in the night to clean the baby and nudge it to her mother’s breast. Anaquot slept through its cries, hardly woke. It wasn’t that Anaquot didn’t love her baby, no it was quite the opposite—she loved it too much, the way she loved its father, not her husband. This passion ate away at her and her feelings were unbearable. If she could have thrown that love off, she would have, but the thought of the man who lived across the lake was with her always. She became a gray sky, stared monotonously at the walls, sometimes wept into her hands for hours at a time. At last, she couldn’t rise to cook or keep the cabin neat, and it was too much for the girl child, who curled up each night exhausted in her brown and red plaid shawl, and slept and slept, so that the husband had to wake the girl to wake her mother, for he was afraid of Anaquot’s bad temper, and it was he who roused her into anger by the sheer fact that he was himself, and not the other.

At last, even though he loved Anaquot, the husband found their life together was no good anymore. So it was he who sent word to the other man’s camp. Now in those days our people lived widely scattered, along the shores and in the islands, even out in the plains. There were hardly roads yet, just trails, though we had horses and wagons and for the winter, sleds. And it was very hard when the other man’s uncle came round, in his wagon fitted out with sled runners, to fetch Anaquot, for she and her husband had argued right up to the last about the children, argued fiercely until the husband finally gave in, turned his face to the wall, and did not move to see the daughter, whom he treasured, wrap herself in her plaid robe alongside the mother in the wagon bed. They left soon after, with their bundles and sacks, not even heating up the stones to warm their feet. The father had stopped his ears, so he did not hear the cry when his son understood all of a sudden that he was the one who would be left behind.

As the uncle slapped the reins and the horse lurched forward, the boy tried to jump into the wagon, but his mother pried his hands off the boards, crying gego, gego, and he fell down hard. There was something in him that would not let her leave him, though. He jumped up and although he was wearing only light clothing, he ran behind the wagon, over the packed drifts. The horses picked up speed. His chest scorched with pain, and yet he pushed himself on. He’d never run so fast, so hard and furious, but he was determined and in that determination it was impossible for him to believe that the distance that soon increased between himself and the wagon was real. He kept running and pretended they would stop, wait for him; he kept going until his throat closed, he saw red, and in the ice of air his lungs shut. Then, he said as he fell onto the board-hard snow, he raised his head. Still watching the tiny back of the wagon and the figures of his mother and sister, something went out of him. Something failed in him. He could feel some interior something break. And at that moment, he truly did not care if he was alive or he was dead. So when he saw the gray shapes, the shadows, bound lightly from the trees to either side of the trail, far ahead, he was not afraid.

The next the boy knew, his father was shaking him, already had him wrapped in a blanket and was carrying him home. Shaawano’s chest was broad and although he already spat tubercular blood that would tell the end of his story, he was still a strong man. It would take him many years to die. In those years, he would tell the boy, who had forgotten this part entirely, that at first when he talked about the shadows he thought his son was visited by manidoog. But then as the boy described the shapes, his father felt very uneasy in his mind and decided to take his gun out there. So he built up the fire in the cabin, and settled his boy near, and went back out into the snow. Perhaps the story spread all through our settlements because the father had to tell what he saw, again and again, in order to get rid of it. Perhaps like all frightful dreams, amanisowin, he had to say it to divide its power, though in this case it would not stop being real.

The tracks of the shadows were wolves, and in those times when our guns had taken all their food for furs and hides to sell, wolves were bold and had abandoned the old agreement between themselves and the first humans. For a time, until we understood and let the game increase, they hunted us. Shaawano bounded forward when he saw the tracks. He could see where the pack, desperate, had tried to slash the tendons of the horses’ legs. Next, where they’d leapt for the back of the wagon, and he hurried on to where the trail gave out onto the broad empty ice of the lake. There, he saw what he saw, scattered, and the ravens only, attending to the bitter small leavings of the wolves.

For a time, the boy had no understanding of what had happened. His father kept what he knew to himself, at least that first year, and when his son asked about his sister’s brown plaid shawl, torn in pieces, why it was kept in the house, his father said nothing. But he wept if the boy asked if she was cold. It was only after Shaawano was weakened by the disease that he began to tell it far too often, and always the same. How when the wolves closed in, Anaquot threw her daughter to them.

When his father said those words, the boy went still in thought. What had his sister felt? What had thrust through her heart? Had something broken in her too, the way something broke like a stick inside of him? Even then, he knew this broken place would never be mended inside him, except by some terrible means. For he kept seeing his mother put the baby down and grip his sister around the waist, her arms still strong enough. Then he saw Anaquot swing the girl lightly out over the board sides of the wagon. He saw the brown shawl with the red lines flying open. He saw the wolves, the shadows, rush together quick and avid as the wagon with the sled runners disappeared into the distance, forever, for neither he nor his father ever saw Anaquot again.

When I was little, my own father terrified us with his drinking. That was after we lost our mother, because before that, the only time I was aware they touched the ishkode wabo was on an occasional weekend when they got home late, or sometimes during berry-picking gatherings, when we went out to the bush and camped with others. Not until she died did he start the heavy sort of drinking, the continual drinking where we were left in the house for days. And then, when he came home, we jumped out the window and hid in the woods while he barged around, shouting for us. We only went back when he fell dead asleep.

There were three of us, me the oldest at ten and my little sister and brother twins of only six years. I was surprisingly good at taking care of them, I think, and because we learned to survive together during those drinking years we always have been close. Their names are Doris and Raymond, and they married a brother and sister in turn. When we get together, which we do when we can, for they live in the Cities now, there come times in the talking and card playing, and maybe even in the light beer now and then, we will bring up those days. Most people understand how it was. Our story isn’t that uncommon. But for us, it helps to compare our points of view.

How could I know, for instance, that Raymond saw it the time I hid my father’s belt? I pulled it from around his waist while he was passed out and then buried it in the woods. I kept doing it every time after that. We laughed at how our father couldn’t understand how when he went to town drinking his belt was always stolen. He even accused his shkwebii buddies of the theft. I had good reasons. Not only was he embarrassed, after, to go out with pants held up with a rope, but he couldn’t snake that belt out in anger and snap the hooked buckle end in the air. He couldn’t hit us with it. Of course, being resourceful, he used other things. There was a board. A willow wand. And there was himself, his hands and fists and boots and things he could throw. He’d never remember. He’d be furious and wreck us, wreck things, and then he’d talk about our mother. But it got so easy to evade him, eventually, that after a while we never suffered a bruise or scratch. We had our own places in the woods, even a little campfire for the cold nights. And we’d take money from him every chance we got, slip it from his shoe where he thought it hidden. He became, for us, a thing to be exploited, avoided, outsmarted, and used. We survived off him like a capricious and dangerous line of work. I suppose we stopped thinking of him as a human being, certainly as a father, after only a couple years.

I got tired of it. When I was thirteen years old, I got my growth earlier than some boys, and one night when Doris and Raymond and me were sitting around wishing for something besides the oatmeal and commodity powdered milk which I had stashed so he couldn’t sell it, I heard him coming down the road. He never learned to shut up before he got to us. He never understood we lit out on him, I guess. So he was shouting and making noise all the way to the house, and Doris and Raymond looked at me and went for the back window. Then they stopped, because they saw I was not going. C’mon, ambe, get with it, they tried to pull me along. I shook them off and told them to get out, be quick, I was staying.

I think I can take him now, is what I said.

And I know they were scared, but their faces, oh their faces rose up toward me in this beautiful reveal all full of hope and belief. So when he came in the door, and I faced him, I was not afraid.

He was big though, he hadn’t wasted from the alcohol or the long disease yet. His nose had got pushed to one side in a fight, then slammed back on the other side, so now it was straight. His teeth were half gone and he smelled the way he had to smell, being five days drunk. When he came in the door, he paused for a moment, his eyes red and swollen to tiny slits. Then he saw I was waiting for him and he smiled in a bad way. He went for me. My first punch surprised him. I had been practicing this on a hay-stuffed bag, then a padded board, toughening my fists, and I’d gotten so quick I flickered like fire. But I wasn’t strong as he was, still, and he had a good twenty pounds on me. Yet, I’d do some damage, I was sure of it. I’d teach him not to mess with me. What I didn’t foresee was how the fight itself would get right into me.

There is a terrible thing about fighting your father, I never knew. It came on sudden, with the second blow, a frightful kind of joy. Suddenly a power surged up from the center of me and I danced at him, light and giddy, full of a heady rightness. Here is the thing. I wanted to waste him, waste him good. I wanted to smack the living shit out of him. Kill him if I must. If he died, so be it. If I died, well, I wouldn’t! A punch for Doris, a blow coming back I didn’t feel. A kick for Raymond. And all the while me silent, then screaming, then silent again, in this rage of happiness that filled me with a simultaneous despair so that, I guess you could say, I stood apart from myself.

He came at me, crashed over a chair that was already broke, then threw the pieces, but they easily bounced off and I grabbed a chair leg and whacked him on the ear so his head spun. I watched, like I say, stood apart. Struck again and again. I knew what I was doing while I was doing it, but not really, not in the ordinary sense. It was like I was standing calm, against the wall with my arms folded, pitying us both. I saw the boy, the chair leg, the man fold and fall, his hands held up in begging fashion. Then I also saw that now, for a while, the bigger man had not even bothered fighting back.

Suddenly, he was my father again, as he lay there in his blood. And when I kneeled down next to him, I was his son. I reached for the closest rag, and I picked up this piece of blanket that my father always kept for some reason next to the place he slept. And as I picked it up and wiped the blood off his face, I said to him, your nose is crooked again. Then he looked at me, steady and quizzical, clear, as though he had never drunk in his life. He kept looking at me as though I was unsolved, a new thing, and I wiped his face again with that frayed piece of blanket. Well, it really was a shawl, a light kind of old-fashioned woman’s blanket shawl. Once, maybe it was plaid. You could still see lines, some red, the background a faded brown. He watched intently as this rag went from his face and as my hand brought it near again. I was pretty sure, then, I’d clocked him too hard, that he’d now really lost it and there wasn’t a chance. I mean, a chance of what? I suppose a chance of getting a father back. A thing I hadn’t understood I wanted.

Gently though, he clasped one hand around my wrist. With the other hand he took that piece of shawl. He crumpled that and held it to the middle of his forehead. It was like he was praying, like he was having thoughts he wanted to collect in that scrap of cloth. For a while he lay like that and I, crouched over, let him be, hardly breathing. Something told me to sit there still. And then at last he said to me, in the sober new voice I would hear from then on out, did you know I had a sister once?

There was a time when the government moved everybody off the farther reaches of the reservation, onto roads, into towns, into housing. It looked good at first and then it all went sour. Shortly after, it seemed like anyone who was someone was either dead, drunk, killed, near suicide, or just had dusted themself. None of the old sorts were left, it seemed, the old kind of people. It was during that time that my mother died and my father hurt us, as I have said. But now, gradually, that term of despair has lifted somewhat and yielded up its survivors. We still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, those to handle besides our own, and cruelties lodged where we cannot forget. We have the need to forget. I don’t know if we stopped the fever of forgetting yet. We are always walking on oblivion’s edge.

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

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

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

3 The Wolves

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t believe that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s what I did instead.”

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

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

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

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

And where, anyway, was he?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save yourself.

The voice was just a thread of sound.

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

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

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

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

“Giwii minikwen anibishaabo ina?” The woman asked, without turning, whether Anaquot would like to drink some tea.

Anaquot crept from the blankets, still aching and tired as though she’d kept walking all night. She left the baby in the blankets and at once felt strangely light. It had been a day and a night and a morning that the baby had been in her arms. Along with her things, she had a big stack of cattail down to use when she needed to change the stuffing in its bag. Now she changed the fluff she’d pinned against the child in a scrap of bashkwegin. She put the baby back into the blanket, and burned the soiled down in the stove, which was fancy iron from the trader’s store and which filled Anaquot with pride for the wealth of her lover’s family. Then she poured herself a cup of tea. As she drank from the same tin cup she’d used the night before, she imagined the cup belonging to her lover. She looked around for the bag and saw that her things were neatly stacked beside the blankets she’d slept in. Her own baby’s carefully beaded tikinagaan, which she’d carried with her because it was too cold to put the baby in it as they traveled, was propped against the wall. She had tied her clothing and small possessions in the skirt of her summer dress and carried the round bundle by the knot. She also had a hand drum with a white line painted across it, and a beater she had made herself with a handle of red-barked alder. She kept the drum and beater in a handwoven drawstring sack. The drum was the most precious thing she owned, and she was glad to see it among the other things, because there was something missing. She was sure of it. But her head ached and she couldn’t think of just exactly what.

Anaquot carried her tea back to the blankets. Although the woman had smiled at her, she hadn’t invited Anaquot to sit with her in the light of the window. As Anaquot sipped the tea, she suddenly remembered what was missing. Her daughter had brought her skirt bundle of possessions, too. Where was it? As soon as she thought of the girl, she heard a slight rustle behind her and she put down her cup of tea in order to investigate. But she saw nothing. Across the floor, the little boy who had just begun to walk was sitting in the circle of warmth by the stove, playing with a pile of pinecone dolls. Perhaps one of them had rolled into her bedding, thought Anaquot. The older boy and girl were nowhere in sight. She put her hand down and retrieved the cup, took another sip, and rocked her baby. She watched the light move across the shoulders of the other woman as she beaded the velvet. As she worked, the woman sang. Her voice was husky, sweet, pleasing. The song had a melancholy lilt. Anaquot soon found that she was drifting, her thoughts were disconnecting, her entire body was loosening. The last thing she saw was the woman, close now and blocking out the light. She saw the woman bending over her, and then Anaquot felt the woman ease the baby from the loose basket of her arms.

Anaquot was not without her own resources. In spite of her changeable nature and her weakness when it came to love, she possessed an unusual toughness of mind when it came to protecting herself. In addition, she was to find, someone had come to help her. A being had walked beside her, making tracks only she could see. Now she could feel herself plunging through sleep as into a dark lake. As she fought to swim back to the surface, someone helped pull her up. As though treading water, desperate, she managed to stay just a breath above oblivion. She opened her eyes a slit, though her eyelids seemed made of stone, and she saw the shape of the woman move across the tamped-earth floor with the baby in her arms. And then she heard the woman’s song, which now had words.

This gall of the wolverine

I place beneath your tongue

To murder your mother’s desire.

Anaquot lunged forward, knocking the cup aside, spilling the rest of the tea across the floor. As though noticing her clumsiness, but kindly attempting not to draw attention to it, the woman brought the baby back and nestled it in the blankets. Then she wiped the tea off the blankets and asked Anaquot if she would like to eat.

There can be nothing in the bannock, which she shares, but you must dip the stew from the pot yourself, someone whispered in Anaquot’s ear. With a huge effort, she cleared her mind and rose to her feet, thanking the woman, pretending she hadn’t heard the song. The baby slept soundly now, its breath quick and shallow, as infants breathe. From time to time it whined or growled a little in its sleep, but that was nothing to worry about. Anaquot ate hungrily and watched as the woman continued to bead the velvet bag. At first, Anaquot thought it was for a baby, as it laced up the middle, but the top looked like the bottom and there was no place for the baby’s head to peep out on the world. Look more closely, said the little voice. If a baby was put inside there, Anaquot thought, it could only be sewn in for burial. As suddenly as she thought this, she imagined that she knew just exactly what the kindly-looking woman was doing. She had put the poison under the tongue of the baby so that, when it nursed, Anaquot would absorb the killing stuff through her breasts. And the poison would eventually kill the baby, too. The woman was looking forward to putting it in the ground.

I don’t know why, thought Anaquot; her heart beat crazily and her brain spun but she managed to shield her knowledge from the other woman. I don’t understand! As she pretended to busy herself with her child she thought hard, and harder yet, until the answer finally came in the shape of her lover’s eyes. She had seen those eyes on the older boy. His own son. Which would make the woman not his sister, aunt, or cousin, but his wife.

All that had happened now laid itself out very clearly before Anaquot. The woman had intercepted the message from Anaquot’s husband and found out everything. She had sent her own brother in the wagon across the ice. That was why the man she thought was her lover’s uncle had been so cold to her, so guarded. The woman had chosen a time when her husband, Anaquot’s love, was gone on the trapline. That way, she could kill Anaquot and the baby and have the bodies stiff outside the door when he returned with his load of furs. Closing her eyes in an effort to contain her fear and panicked anger, Anaquot saw the scene this woman planned: there was her lover returning through the snow, dragging his toboggan laden with bales of skins. How surprised was he to see that she was standing at his cabin door, holding their baby in her arms! How long did it take for him to notice, as he neared, her icy rigidity, her eyes staring blind and her mouth frozen open on a word? How many endless steps before his cry of greeting turned to a wail of horror? How long the quiet, how closed the smile, as his wife slowly opened the door?

I know that I have done a wrong thing, a bad thing, thought Anaquot. But I don’t deserve to die for it! The small whispering voice, which she now thought of as a helpful spirit, answered her somewhat mockingly. You don’t deserve to die? What about your little girl?

My little girl? thought Anaquot. Do you mean the baby in my arms?

The whispering laughter grew lighter and spoke. No, mother, don’t you remember? There was one who gave her life for you.

All of a sudden Anaquot let what happened on the way there flood into her—the ice, the wolves, her daughter. When she remembered, her mind cracked open. She knew that she loved that daughter more than anyone in her entire life. She loved her more than her little brother or her father, more than the baby in her arms and more, even, than her lover. She loved that daughter more than she loved herself. Her mind veered off. She knew if she absorbed the knowledge directly into her heart now, it would kill her. So she sat there humbly and let her mind be taken wherever it would be allowed to go. As she sat there, the voice returned and she grasped at its words with hope.

My things are inside of your things, my bundle is safe in yours, just like when I was inside of you, mother, when you carried me safely into life.

Anaquot busied herself among the few possessions she had brought, and while the woman continued to sew the burial shroud for her baby, she untied the bundle of her skirt. Sure enough, inside her rose red skirt there was her daughter’s smaller bundle of things, which she now took apart and examined.

There was the little hatchet that her father had made, a toy, but sharp and capable of chopping thin poles to make playhouses. There was a small bark box that contained three awls and three thorn-apple needles, a ball of waxed sinew, and a packet of thread. The bundle also contained a little sheaf of bird bones, bleached hollow, for making whistles, and a packet of medicines that Anaquot now remembered making up for her daughter and teaching her to use. When she saw these medicines, and held the bark packet in her hands and examined the powders and twines of roots, Anaquot realized that she had not always been such a bad mother to her older daughter. Not at all. Until her love burned out of control, destroying her perspective, she had been a careful and knowing mother. She had loved her daughter, taught her sewing skills, and provided her the medicines to cure all ills she could imagine. There was even, she saw, taking from a tiny feather pouch a bladder of oil, just enough to strengthen the baby to withstand the poison laid under its tongue. There was nothing else she could think of, however, to protect herself from its effect.

After she administered the medicine to her child, it stirred and became more eager, lifted its head, peered at her wailing to be fed. Its hunger grew uncontrollable after a while and it began to beg with small complaining noises and then to roar with despair. Anaquot could not bear it. Even though she believed the poison that the woman had given would harm her, Anaquot put the baby to her breast.

First, she knew the pleasure of solving its desperation. Next, with a deep sigh, they melted together as one. She closed her eyes and saw the two of them together as a dot of light and then they grew and grew until they had no edges at all and were the radiant center of an infinite wheel.

This vision frightened her with its strangeness, but when she opened her eyes they were still there in the ordinary afternoon. She realized her belief about the poison might be wrong; still, she couldn’t shake it from her mind. The winter sun had entered the window at a fierce angle and its red-gold light blazed across the blue cupboard in the corner, the table, the stove, the other piles of blankets and the pole bed and the chair where the woman sat counting the little boy’s fingers over and over with him. Bezhig. Niizh. Niswi. Niiwin. Naanan. This counting between a woman and a child had been happening since numbers began. The blazing light intensified. It burned a hole in her heart, as neat as a bullet hole, and then, just as the woman’s song meant to, it took away her desire.

She experienced her love’s absence as a gradual clarity. The light faded into the trees, the room grew cold. The woman set her little boy in the corner with a rind of deer meat to chew, and then set about perfecting the fire in the stove so that her bannock would cook evenly. By the way she did this, her movements careful and spare, Anaquot saw how many thousands of times she had made food for her family. She looked past the woman, saw the milk cans full of water in the corner, knew she’d hauled it from the river or melted fresh snow. So much work and care was apparent all through the little house. The logs were neatly tamped, the quilts clean and mended. The little boy wore a shirt of thick flannel and little pants sewn of deerhide. There was a rabbit-skin blanket laid over the bed the woman was now sharing with her daughter. Those blankets took long weaving, skill, as did the reed mats on the walls and the beaded vest that Anaquot now saw was set out for mending in the last light of the day.

It was this vest, exactly, that she remembered her lover wearing. She had traced the beaded flowers and the maple leaves, the curl of the vines, as she talked to him in the shadowy overhang of rich new leaves the previous summer. Now the sight of the vest filled her with a new feeling—not of longing, but of sorrow. How hard his wife had worked, placing each bead just so, and how many hopes she had sewn into the colorful centers of the roses! Even now, the woman bent above her stitching with a singular attention that revealed her love for the wearer of the vest. Anaquot saw that. In fact, once Anaquot began thinking this way and noticing everything around her, all the work the woman did, all that she needed to protect, Anaquot didn’t blame her for the poison.

“But you don’t have to poison my baby,” said Anaquot, clearly, to the woman. She rose from her blankets with energy. “I’m ready to do all that needs to be done.”

The woman put down her needle, folded her hands on the table, and frowned as Anaquot sat down across from her. This time, when Anaquot demanded her name, she told her that she was named for the spirit of the wolverine. Ziigwan’aage was indeed a poisoner, or rather, she was one who was entrusted with all of the most dangerous medicines and deep knowledge of them. She knew the properties of all the plants and how they interacted, especially mushrooms, the food of the dead. She knew which fish spines to strip for venom and twice a year she traveled west to trade for the milk of snakes. She had never used her medicines for a dark purpose until now, but she had reason.

“So you’ve awakened” was all she said.

“I have,” said Anaquot, “in every way.”

Ziigwan’aage waited calmly for her to go on.

“I see your love for him and for your children. I know why you brought me here. I understand it. We would not in fact be enemies were it not for him.”

For the first time, the woman seemed a little shaken. Perhaps it was Anaquot’s directness, or the hard confidence in her eyes, the smooth power of her movements. Or perhaps Ziigwan’aage hadn’t put the thoughts together in her mind like Anaquot did. Perhaps she’d laid all the blame on Anaquot and not on her husband because she loved him so, and wanted to believe him. Whatever the reason, Ziigwan’aage now found the things that Anaquot said were compelling to her. Ziigwan’aage could think of no reason that she shouldn’t continue to listen, and gestured for Anaquot to continue.

“He told me that he once had a wife, but he threw her away,” said Anaquot.

Ziigwan’aage’s eyes jumped to Anaquot’s face and her mouth squared when she saw it was true.

“He didn’t mention his children,” said Anaquot. “I never heard about them.”

At this, Ziigwan’aage’s body stiffened. She looked away from Anaquot and her stare scorched the air all around the two. For a long time they sat, in silence, until the light of the afternoon disappeared entirely. Then they got up at the same time and began to work, as one person, their movements smooth and spare as if they’d been sisters since they were born. Sisters who might hate each other at times, but who matched so well that the work almost did itself.

When the two older children returned from their day at school, they were cold and hungry, laughing. Banging their empty lunch pails they looked eagerly at the stove. They went silent when they saw the visiting woman at work, chopping gristle from frozen meat to add to their mother’s stew. Because something in their mother’s bearing had led them to believe, even before the visitor arrived, that she was a threat and not to be trusted, they were surprised to see that the two were speaking calmly and easily, working side by side.

The children knew in this way that something had changed; what it was they couldn’t tell. They had no way of knowing that a great change was being effected in the two women. As Anaquot and Ziigwan’aage worked, their hearts turned slowly, suspiciously, unevenly at times, toward each other and against the man they had both loved, whose name was Simon Jack.

He had a strict mind and a somewhat foolish heart. A contradictory person, he was known for his rigid memory of ritual and detail. He was the one they called upon for the sequence of songs, the order of creation, the accounting for of spirits. He had a love of little pleasures, like gambling, and he was vain of his looks, though he wasn’t even that handsome. His wife oiled and combed and cared for his long, stringy hair better than she cared for her own. He was picky about his shirts and trousers, and he wore a white shell earring. At the same time, he cared nothing for the things of this world and would spend days in the woods, fasting, humbling himself before the eternal mystery of existence. He was ten years older than his wife, and Anaquot was a few years younger than she. So he had seen enough of life to know that such love as he and Anaquot felt was sure to bring disaster. He had hoped that there would be no child of their intensity. By leaving his family for a time, living up on the trapline, making himself secret and scarce as his wife’s namesake, he thought he could weather the storm in his heart. He both hoped and feared that it would be the same with Anaquot. But when he came home, his blood still raged and it was all he could do to contain his black longings and hide the estrangement of his affections from his wife. She knew anyway, found out the details from other women, and sent him out again while she decided what to do with the situation.

As for Ziigwan’aage, she was by no means a simple woman either. She was born in spring, when the wolverine kits come from the den and proceed to sink their teeth into anything that moves. She grew up in the twilight time when her people, the Anishinaabeg, were battling great waves of disease. Those were the times when the entire force of a woman’s existence was focused on keeping her children alive. Ziigwan’aage kept her ear to the ground and took note of illnesses as they passed into the settlement. She kept her children home at the slightest hint of something dangerous and allowed no visitors. When they weakened, she made sure she had the plant medicines she needed, picked at the highest concentration of their power. Every morning, she checked her children’s eyes and tongues. She smelled their breath and sometimes even frowned over their stools to make certain that they were healthy enough to send out into the world. Her pharmacopoeia was the woods, and at the slightest hint of trouble—dulled gaze, white tongue, a sour heat in the lungs—she picked what she needed, rummaged in her stash for the ingredients to teas, burned a powder beneath their noses, or swabbed a tincture on their gums. There was no chink in her vigilance, no margin for error. She could not afford a distraction. So when her husband began to behave in a way she found all too familiar from other women’s reports of their husbands, she decided she would cut short this nonsense. She had no time for it. She wouldn’t tolerate it. Not when she had the lives of children on her hands.

Ziigwan’aage had deemed it most expeditious to get rid of the other woman, though she was still deciding whether to spare the baby and raise it as her own. But then Anaquot had startled her, and made her think. She had impressed Ziigwan’aage as a formidable opponent and, still better, as an invincible ally. Not that they’d actually decided what to do about Simon Jack. His fate was on a thread that they pulled between them, this way and that. Sometimes as they talked they laughed at his transparent ways and marveled, with deep irony, at the similarity of things he’d said to them both, promises he’d made, endearments even. They held nothing back in their dissection of his behavior; they continued on until both felt they had purged themselves of any pity or attraction. Of course, they both knew, they hadn’t any illusions—not loving Simon Jack in the abstract was much easier than not loving Simon Jack in the flesh.

In this regard, Ziigwan’aage had the advantage of living in the heart of her family. Her old mother and sisters, her aunts and uncles, and of course the brother she’d relied on, lived all around her and could be reached via endless networks of trails broken through the trees. These people were, in fact, the crowd of beings Anaquot had sensed leaving very early that morning, having already stayed the night. They had congregated in order to take a look at the woman who had tried to steal Simon Jack. While Anaquot slept in the grip of the sleeping medicine, they had gloated at her capture and admired her baby, then melted off into the blue morning air, leaving so little trace of themselves that Anaquot had wondered whether they were actually spirits. She found now that they were tremendously real.

They came back that night and sat quietly or talked of their own matters. One by one they took the baby in their arms and admired her, examined her fingers, exclaimed at the depth of her eyes and the bow of her mouth. They noted the curve of her ears and texture of her hair, even unwrapped her feet to see whether her toes were of a uniform length. As they went over the baby with great care, by means that were invisible to Anaquot, she herself went from being outside of them all and looking in, to being one gathered into their edges and absorbed. With imperceptible gestures Ziigwan’aage told them that in the end she had decided to adopt Anaquot instead of kill her, so that gradually they stopped treating the woman as one soon to be dead. Even though no word was addressed to her, Anaquot knew that she and her baby were now under the protection of these people with the severe and handsome faces, with the hair that waved about their shoulders, and the restless hands. She also understood, to her deep unease, that they would keep her no matter what. She would not be allowed to go. Now Anaquot saw that every one of them had brought along some object that they were making. Even while speaking their hands polished or beaded or wove or quilled or whittled. As she picked up her own beading to concentrate upon, she understood that if she was to be accepted by the Pillagers, for that is what the people of this band called themselves, she must keep silence, imitate their actions, and closely observe and take note of all that might assist in her survival.

Because she had seen the wife of Simon Jack sewing that bundle from which no child could peep its head, Anaquot was still extremely careful with the information she divulged, for information is power. She did not tell her baby’s name to Ziigwan’aage. Instead, she used a nickname she herself had been given by an old French trader. Fleur. So that baby was disguised before it had even spoken. Hidden by a lie. Watchful underneath. Too much had already happened to the baby, who hadn’t even crawled yet or clapped her hands or eaten from a spoon. Her sister gave her life for her. Her mother ran from one husband to another man’s intercepting wife. The baby was surrounded by sharp discord, jagged sorrows, and that cunning presence. Pain and truth. A spirit comes into the world and disrupts the flow of things. Changes the course of love. Takes lives. Challenges the order. So it was with this weak little baby, Anaquot saw, and she was more determined than ever to protect her. For it seemed the spirits had some great work in mind when they made the child.

As she sewed or cooked next to Simon Jack’s wife, this woman with the powerful name, Anaquot deliberately kept herself humble. To combine humility with the unyielding directness that had already saved her life was to protect her by also protecting Ziigwan’aage’s pride. Never, she promised herself, would she challenge Ziigwan’aage, especially in the presence of others, not ever when it came to Simon Jack. Anaquot would allow the family to snub her in subtle ways and when that happened she would pretend she hadn’t noticed. At crucial moments, she would stand her ground. Although there was some mutual decision among Ziigwan’aage’s people to tolerate Anaquot, she knew well that she was not among friends. Three of the women who came around were Simon Jack’s sisters. Long ago they had accepted Ziigwan’aage as one of their own. There was no hope for Anaquot there. Likewise, she could detect no crack of sympathy in the attitudes of the formidable grandmothers of Ziigwan’aage’s children. There were the uncles and a grandfather and even a great-grandfather, but Anaquot knew it was dangerous to align with men. Only one woman, Doosh, a blood sister to Ziigwan’aage, gave any sign of sympathy. Doosh was slow and somewhat vacant, but she treated Anaquot with neutral kindness. Anaquot made a great effort to remain calm and aware around these relatives, in addition to assorted cousins and clan members, and that was difficult even without Simon Jack to deepen the conflict and throw the whole mess into relief.

That the whole thing really was a mess and nearly out of control became clear when Simon Jack simply walked back into the house one day stinking of bait. He must have been prepared for Anaquot’s presence by one of the uncles, for he didn’t so much as glance at her, though when his snake-eyed daughter brought the baby over he cupped Fleur under her arms, held her at arms’ length, and looked her over very carefully, for a long time, before he instructed his daughter to bring the baby back to its mother. Did something pass between the two? Some heat of recognition? Some bounce of delight? Why did Simon Jack smile so broadly? He kissed the baby before he handed her away and got down to his food. Deep in the night, when Anaquot woke to hear him stirring around (she thought) in the other part of the cabin with his wife, the picture of that smile on Simon Jack’s face as he gobbled down food pierced her and she wept with degraded fury, making no sound. Then a thousand morbid sexual pictures went through her mind and she managed to calm herself and to slow the pounding of her heart only by conjuring up a strong rope in her thoughts and then, not without a mental struggle, tying up Simon Jack. When she had him tightly bound with those imaginary ropes, she hoisted him into a tree and let him dangle there. The gentle swaying of his cocoonlike shape lulled her. But the last image in her mind as blackness covered her was still Simon Jack’s broad and uncontainable grin when he saw his baby. He loved Fleur, at least, and couldn’t hide it, Anaquot was certain.

In the deep of her heart she was also certain of two other things: Simon Jack loved her, too. Or at least he would want to sleep with her. The way he ignored her was much too elaborate to be construed as anything other than his own weakness. In order to take advantage of a time he might slip, she must cultivate patience. The other thing was the girl cold with malice. She was a danger. Anaquot thought she’d better pursue a way of getting rid of her.

What there was about Simon Jack to attract two women to his bed was not apparent at first. The hair straggling down his back was prematurely gray, he was too lean in the chest and shoulders, also he was bandy-legged and he stooped a little when he walked so he looked much older than he was. Long thin wisps of mustache drooped to either side of his mouth, and he had a habit of glancing just above a person’s head when he talked and never meeting their eyes. But that, it turned out, was part of his way with people, a mannerism that gave him a hold over them. For when all of a sudden he did fix them with an unblinking gaze, a look remote, chilling, intimate, and immoderate, they were often startled into silence and submission.

That’s what had happened with Anaquot when she first met him. Simon Jack was known for many things, respected and a little feared, so the full force of his attention had been thrilling to Anaquot. She’d grown lovesick over him. It galled her now that she’d broken her marriage, abandoned her son, and allowed her older daughter to die, just so that she could be with Simon Jack. She’d thought she couldn’t live her life without the force of him pouring over and all around her. But as women have found since love began, she found she could live. And determined that she would. Seeing the wife and children about whom he’d misled her, and feeling his studied indifference to her presence as an insult so complete that it severed her dependence, Anaquot found a solid place in the swirl of pain and panic in her heart. Too much, too much, she had given too much. She discovered a rock to stand on, a jutting reef.

The next day she stepped onto that rock with her baby and allowed all that was unbearable to rush around her—Ziigwan’aage’s colliding outrages of love and hate, the daughter’s black, interior purpose, the little requests and petitions of visitors who needed something of Simon Jack, the younger son’s lively innocence, her own baby’s needs. She performed patternless, absorbing, hectic, trying tasks with steady calm. She slowed her movements, allowed her whole body to become a contained absence. She was so conscious of keeping a close check on herself that she did not notice that when she did this, her effect upon others was something like Simon Jack’s. Ziigwan’aage’s attention unwillingly turned toward her, as did the frozen spirit of her daughter. Simon Jack tried to hide his uneasy curiosity. But the presence of a woman who did not belong where she was and yet kept herself keenly occupied, displaying no hint of uneasiness, disturbed them. Anaquot neither desired to please nor seemed anxious not to offend, yet she did both. Nobody could tell how hard that was. Anaquot considered each act and weighed each word before she uttered it. She found within herself a deep reserve. She exercised control only over herself, and was unaware that to do so can often cause others to lose theirs.

Which is why Simon Jack tried to slip beneath her blanket one night. It was a rash act and Simon Jack had desperately resisted it. Anaquot had only imagined that he might come, but when she felt his hands on her, she did not what she wanted to do, but what would save her life.

“Get away from me! Go play with yourself! Leave me alone!” she hissed, pushing at him violently, waking the baby to cry and to wake the others. Rejecting Simon Jack was one of the most difficult things she had ever done, but it had the desired result. Ziigwan’aage, who was of course awake, stared up into the freezing black air of the cabin and allowed a slow smile to creep across her face. She had been tempted to kill Anaquot ever since her husband had returned. Simon Jack crept to the coldest corner of the cabin and curled in his blanket, alone. Then he chopped wood all the next day with a hard, specific fury. Ziigwan’aage sang as she cooked. When she served the food, Anaquot ate heartily and without fear for the first time since she’d come to the cabin.

The two women never discussed what they would do to take away their man’s power and divide it between the two of them. But after that night it began to happen that Simon Jack felt a little dizzy in the evenings and went to his blankets in the corner before they turned the lamps out, and fell asleep there while the women sat at the table working. They were beading something. They did not know what it was yet, what was taking shape beneath their hands. They placed each bead just so on the velvet and the beads turned into four-petaled flowers that told stories and held great meaning. These flowers lay along white vines that writhed like snakes across the velvet, and there were horns on the vines and leaves of impossible shapes springing off here and there. What they worked on had the most amazing vitality. It grew between them. And still they could not tell what it was until one day Simon Jack walked in and saw that they were making him a dance outfit, either that or an elaborate set of clothes to be buried in, but as the dance outfit was far the better option he mentioned it out loud.

“Oh yes,” said one of them—they could never remember which—“you will dance in these handsome clothes. You will dance your heart out, little husband.”

The last part was spoken beneath her breath, so he didn’t hear it, but the other woman smiled and their needles flashed, spearing beads and affixing them. And so the outfit took its shape. The horned white vine twisted like a snake down the two front pieces and coiled itself around the back. Sometimes they ran out of thread and continued to sew with grasses or wolf sinew or even with their own hair. It was only from necessity that they did this. They did not mean to bind him to them in an evil way. They did not mean any evil at all. They were only caught in what the story did to them. The story Simon Jack had set into motion. No, if anybody was responsible for the elegant armbands and wrist guards, the leggings, or the too ornate breech clout, it was Simon Jack. And if each woman beaded the bottom of one of his makizinan the way grieving widows bead the soles of their dead husband’s, it was only the fault of Simon Jack again. For it was he who played with Ziigwan’aage’s toothed and closely guarded heart. He who had raked his eyes down Anaquot’s breasts and kindled the heat that flowed up and licked through every sense until she couldn’t think and let things happen that shouldn’t ever have taken place. So although they didn’t understand where the outfit was going or what would happen to Simon Jack once he put it on, they sewed. And it could even be said that they enjoyed their work and found the doing of it an act of love, though not exactly love of Simon Jack.

The two women stitched each other still closer, became true sisters. Anaquot had left her family behind and was hungry for connection. And Ziigwan’aage, though surrounded by family, was set apart because of the nature of her fierce personality and knowledge of medicines. She began to appreciate and then rely on Anaquot, who was almost as smooth and efficient a worker as she. A deer carcass vanished between them in no time, for instance, reduced to its respective parts, as did any animals trapped. The skins were quickly removed and beautifully stretched on frames. Ziigwan’aage had more time to do things, even to enjoy herself. And so did Anaquot. They went to town, brought Doosh along. Bartered bitterly and happily. Anaquot always bought a ribbon or a string of licorice for Doosh. One day they met a mission teacher in the store. He told them he was taking students to a place where they would get educated better than white people. “Your daughter is intelligent” was all Anaquot said to Ziigwan’aage. But Doosh would not let up on the idea that the girl with the cold eyes, Niibin’aage, should go.

They went home. Between them they carved up a bear killed in its winter den. Soon its thick, perfectly tanned fur coat lay before the warm stove and the baby rolled and played on it and cooed with that engaging and astonished recognition that occurs halfway through a baby’s first year and makes everybody laugh. For it was spring now. Some days the snow dripped and melted and Ziigwan’aage let the children go without their daily bear-grease rubdown, and then without their heavy, scratchy, woolen underwear. The ice on the lake was dull gray, soft, and porous looking. They were not allowed to cross it anymore on the way to school, but had to go the long way around, through the woods. Ziigwan’aage walked with them. That was another reason that she valued Anaquot’s presence in the house—she could leave Anaquot with her own baby and Ziigwan’aage’s youngest, and Ziigwan’aage could walk with the children to make sure nothing happened to them. Anaquot observed that if the girl went to the boarding school, she, at least, would not have to face that walk every day. Spring weather could be treacherous, and the animals were gaunt and hungry. Ziigwan’aage always carried the gun.

One day, when Ziigwan’aage returned from walking the children to school, she was hauling a dead wolf behind her on a toboggan she’d improvised from tree bark and some vines. It was the biggest wolf either of the women had ever seen. The fur was a light glossy gray and the brush of its tail longer than a grown man’s arm. The creature’s face was calm and almost smiling. Anaquot placed tobacco on its throat and all four paws. It could well have been one of the wolves that killed her daughter. That pack was known here and it was mostly grays.

“How did you kill him?” she asked Ziigwan’aage.

“Around the bend, past that rock, he stood before us. So I shot him. It was a good shot.”

The bullet had drilled the heart. When Anaquot saw the wound she put her fingers into the blood and before she knew what she was doing she had put her fingers into her mouth. Some old women say that by tasting wolf blood you will know the shape of things, but Anaquot had never known that to be true. The blood tasted like any other blood, but sharper. They would probably eat the wolf, because they ate everything, but the meat would have to be boiled in seven waters and seasoned heavily. As the women worked on the wolf, skinning it, Anaquot thought she heard someone singing; then later on a small voice whispered in her ear.

This is the one who ate my heart, mother.

With a strange cry, Anaquot dropped the knife. Ziigwan’aage picked it up. But Anaquot’s hands were shaking and she could not continue to work.

“What is it?” asked Ziigwan’aage.

“My daughter speaks to me,” said Anaquot.

Ziigwan’aage knew immediately just whom she meant, and put down her knife and sat with Anaquot.

“I knew there was someone else with you when you came here,” she said. “She has been here all along.”

Anaquot nodded. “But she hasn’t spoken to me for almost two turns of the moon. I thought she’d left.”

“I don’t think she will ever leave,” said Ziigwan’aage.

They both stared at the carcass of the wolf. After a while, Anaquot said, “We will make hoods and mitts for the children, fur on the inside to keep them warm.” Without another word the two set to work, disposed of the wolf perfectly, and set its bones to boil on the stove. That night, they ate the creature, whose meat was bitter.

4 The Little Girl Drum

Now, let us not forget that Anaquot left behind a man grieving in the snow. The stricken husband, my grandfather, Old Shaawano. I knew the old man well because he’d keep me sometimes when my father and mother hit the bottle. When I was small, he tried to hold me close to him, and that’s when he taught me all about the drum. Still, there are many things I know from sources other than my grandfather. I was friends with the old men who were close to him, and the old ladies too. I was the kind of boy and then young man who always felt old, maybe because my father’s beatings made me old. I never wanted to be young because the young suffer. I always liked to listen to the old people. So it was through them that I know what it was like for my grandfather when Anaquot left him, and after he had picked up his daughter’s scattered bones.

During that time, a sick uneasiness of grief afflicted Old Shaawano and sent him wandering. Whenever the need to tell the sad events panicked him, starting with an ache like cold and spreading outward until it squeezed his heart and prickled in his throat, he left the house. He left my father, just a little boy, to fend for himself. He could not be still. Weeks or days of wandering and talking might go by before he returned, exhausted, and collapsed in his cabin. Then, absurdly, he was enraged to find his son gone. But he always fell into a sickness and forgot to look for the boy, but instead lay helpless, his brain on fire. At the merest touch he felt his hair crackle. He hated for the wind to graze him as it fanned the heat all through his body and caused a bloody coughing that would not stop for days. He stayed indoors, usually in bed, and waited in sick trembling for the cup of despair to pass.

At these times, during the days when he was alone, my grandfather often heard things or saw things that he definitely knew were not there. His low, dark house was only one room with a small window on three sides. It still stands in the bush behind my house, used for chickens, so I know it well. The door on the fourth side opened out where it shouldn’t have, west, where the dead go. From his cot, on good days, Shaawano could see out the door into the woods, but he usually kept the door shut to block the ghosts. Even so, some got by, squeezing underneath the sill or sliding through the cracks between the door and its casing. The ghosts were all strangers. He didn’t know why that should be. He kept asking for his little girl, but none of them paid attention. Many were from the other side of the lake, and he’d made it a point to avoid people from there ever since that demon Pillager had stolen away his wife. That these unknown ghosts came, rather than his daughter or his own relatives, was a disappointment. My grandfather told me that our family, my ancestors, were clever people, while these strangers didn’t seem very bright. He would have liked to see his grandparents, such generous, kind people, or his parents, who had died a few years before, disappointed that they couldn’t cure his grief. He was even sure they would provide him help. Only, they never came.

The ghosts who did come to visit him were tiny skeleton children who flitted and zipped across his ceiling like spidery bats. Or they were shadowy, dull figures who seemed content to sit in the corner or slowly rock in his chipped green rocking chair. They usually did nothing but sigh and mutter, low, so he could never distinguish their words. That he could not make out their conversation or their complaints or whatever they were trying to tell him on these visits was maddening. He assumed they were judging him, blaming him, for letting his daughter die and his son run away. Their eyes raked over him. They sneered in his face. When he could stand it no longer, Shaawano would lunge from his bed and strike out right and left, in a frenzy, using whatever came to hand—knife, stick, board, belt. Driving them out usually put an end to his groaning need and he would totter, blinking, to the outhouse, and then return to sit by his door in the weak sun. He always felt so much better, once these hellish episodes subsided, that he often wondered why he dreaded them in the first place. But likewise, when he was curled in his bed, heart pumping with terror and longing, he could never remember how it felt to be at peace and so believed that his torment would last forever.

When he’d emerged, and was sitting in the sun, Shaawano would feel a remorse and calm so thrilling that tears might fill his eyes. He missed his son. There was so much that he wanted to show him! My grandfather noticed everything—the way wild raspberries had taken root in his torn and idle fishing nets and how young trees had grown through his junked wagon and the piles of his traps. Their prickling fronds, wildly spurting out the wood of the wagon box and through the jaws and knots of things that catch and kill, were a glorious signal. A chickadee pausing with a tiny worm in its beak, the blessed gurgle of a red-winged blackbird, the waves sounding on the lakeshore—anything, everything, caused Shaawano a happiness almost as unbearable as his pain. In this way, too, it was difficult to be so weakened. To wildly celebrate would have once been the appropriate response to any small light or joy. Now, standing up to the beauty, being small in it, taking one breath of sweet air after the next, often produced its own form of panic. This, he named after some time, guilt.

My grandfather said himself that he had been an evil person in his first season of random pain. He had done many things that were beyond the limits of decency. Things he dreaded bringing to mind. The worst things, of course, pierced into his brain with illuminating power. Those things were not the fighting or brawling or fucking or the stupid thefts. The scenes that came back vivid and sharp-edged were the cruel moments when he’d felt a black satisfaction, even a surge of glee in his throat, when he hurt his own son. He’d left the boy hungry and even ridiculed his grief over the loss of his mother. He had tampered with his son’s spirit and now the boy was lost to him. Someone else had stepped in, taken the boy home, and barred Shaawano from visits. But the damage to the boy was done and some things cannot be undone. It was as though what happened with the wolves had set loose one long string of accidents that seemed like fate. And now the guilt. Shaawano couldn’t get what he’d done out of his mind. He began to hate himself so much that the only relief he could obtain was to picture himself going back and savagely attacking the man he had been. He killed himself over and over in his mind. But when his bloody fantasies were exhausted, Shaawano was always left with Shaawano. The man who could never take back a single blow.

So there he was. He had started making pine pole furniture to get a living, and he could carve out and put together rough chairs and tables or bend more intricate pieces out of red willow. This passed his time between the great troughs and crests of his diminished life. If he prayed, it was for the numb peace that gave his hands the steadiness to work with those tools without one hand cutting off the other hand. He was, yes, tempted. Sometimes hating what his own hands had done he imagined taking the saw to them. But which hand would cut the other off? Which would die, which be saved, which would he choose? Sometimes he favored cutting off the right, for the right hand had certainly done the most damage. But then the sly hand would remain, the hand that pretended to be weaker and clumsier, but really wasn’t. He would be left with the fist that sucker punched, the hand of deceit, the fingers that should have reached out to gather back his daughter when she left him lying in stubborn grief, and went out to join her mother on the wagon.

“That was it,” he said one afternoon in the middle of one of his hand-hating reveries. He looked at his hands and flexed his fingers, broad palms, thick square fingers cushioned with calluses from his work, and saw them suddenly as innocent. Why should they suffer when they’d only done as Shaawano himself commanded? He thought immediately, with some relief, to put a bullet through his brain and send off the real culprit.

“That was it,” he said again. The brain, the brain had commanded all of Shaawano, had told him to let his wife go off one winter day to live with Pillager. Maybe if Shaawano’s brain had only willed his wife to stay, Anaquot would have, and then that wrong-hearted passion would have gone spent, she would eventually have accepted her place on this side of the lake, and his little girl, his baby sweetheart, would have grown up beside him. Instead, his daughter’s graceful bones were picked clean by ravens. He had gathered them up, his tears freezing into an ice mask across his face, and put them in a place that only he knew about.

Now he dropped his chin to his chest and squeezed his head in his hands, but even as he put on the pressure until his eyes burned, he knew it wasn’t really his brain but his heart that had made the decision to let Anaquot go. The heart with its pride, the heart that couldn’t bear his wife’s heart to have turned away. Shaawano’s heart had refused to be patient and instead behaved with an impetuous, despairing fury. His heart had fought itself and lost. His heart had bested the brain with all its reasons. Yes, it was his own stubborn heart that failed. A knife would cut his heart out fine. Just fine. He would throw his offending heart to the ravens, yelling, “Here, have that too!”

And so it went with my grandfather. He put first one part of his body and then another on trial. Each was found guilty at first but then pointed to another culprit. He judged his limbs, his eyes, his ears, his bones, his blood. He weighed the evidence against each but always, in the end, could not think how to mete out proper justice and so had to admit, having gone over his whole body from hair to fingernail, that the criminal was not within him but outside of him. The culprit was made up of some force or intangible extra self he could only call his spirit.

Kill that! he urged himself then, but knew even as he cried out that he had already done so. He’d tried to poison his spirit, drowned it methodically, savagely, choked it off. Alcohol had been the tool. He thought back to when he took the first drink of his first real dirty drunk and remembered how he’d wept into the amber flame deep in the cup and how his sorrow had been answered with a spreading warmth and a forgetting.

“That was it,” he said one more time. The pain in his life had started because he needed to forget. Now, with no part of himself left to blame, and in the ruin of his spirit, my grandfather remembered.

He remembered how his daughter had curled in the crook of his arm when he sat with her listening to the old people talk around the fire during berry-picking time. He never brushed away his little girl, even when she clung to his pant leg. Instead, he crouched at her level when she needed him and looked into her eyes before he picked her up. Always, when their eyes met, he felt that they exchanged a secret love. It was just between the two of them, his first-born, his daughter. Every time he lifted her to his chest, he experienced a fierce thump of emotion. He would protect her with his life! And so, how come he hadn’t? Over and over now, he remembered the actual events of the day she was killed and how he had failed at each crux of the unfolding decision to prevail over Anaquot with his arguments. And then the unbearable findings. At the memories of what the wolves in their innocence had done, the blood crushed around my grandfather’s heart and he had to gasp for breath. It was then, unable to unfreeze the pictures in his brain, that my grandfather fell into a weak faint and had a sort of dream.

He saw his little girl. She was alive and whole once again. She came into Shaawano’s house through the western door and stood before him in the fringed, brown plaid shawl. Her eyes, so beautifully slanted and dark, shone with a fervent love that seemed to flow straight into him. The painful terror frozen in his chest turned to water. Then she spoke.

“I know where they put the trees for the drum,” his daughter told him. “Many years ago they cut the logs and put them in the water down near Berry Point. A hundred years later they took them out to dry and set them up on a rock wash under a cliff. Now that wood is ready.”

“Ready for what?” said Shaawano.

“For making a drum.”

She stood there looking steadily at him for some time, and Shaawano knew she saw everything about him. She was wrapped in calm, reading the truth of his mean and shabby life. She nodded slowly as she discovered the sad things, the vicious, the cruel-hearted and even bizarre little crimes. A look of disbelieving sorrow passed over her face, but just when my grandfather thought that she would turn away from him, she stepped closer.

“We are waiting to sing with you,” she said in that gentle voice he had loved. He bent his head in grateful shame, and when he looked up she was gone.

Afterward, my grandfather lay on the rough boards of his floor, for how long he did not know. Tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes and ran down the sides of his face and puddled in his ears. His girl had visited from the other side of life, but though he wanted desperately to join her, he knew that her visit was meant expressly to give him a reason not to die yet. She had given him a task that was meant to keep him here upon the earth.

He didn’t start right away. He had to let the whole of what had happened sink into his mind. He remembered what he’d heard of great cedars set aside until generations should pass. This wood was being cured in a special place, where it would grow in strength and resonance. From each generation certain men and women had been chosen to look after the wood, to visit and talk to it, to catch it up on local history and smoke the pipe with it. Those who were chosen had always been the kindest and steadiest among the people, the ones everybody trusted. They were not sodden drunks, or mean, or anguished and sick to death, like my grandfather thought he was. They had not let their children die or be eaten by wolves or any other animal. They had not slept for weeks out in the woods because nobody wanted them in their house, as had happened to Shaawano. They had never lain in fear of what their brains would tell them to do next. They had never had no one to talk to but quarrelsome spirits. So Shaawano could not help but feel it impossible that he, out of everybody else in his generation, should be the one to use the wood that his people had cared for with such devotion, through time. He could not believe that he should be the one to make the drum.

He had to talk to someone. But all the people who had cared for the wood were dead. The people who had come to sit with his grandmother and grandfather were long gone into the world of spirits with his daughter. As for the ones closer to his age, he didn’t trust them. He had wandered too much and he knew things about them. He couldn’t think of a single person, though he ground his teeth and gulped swamp tea until his brain steamed. Then one day as he dragged himself to his woodpile, he thought of a woman who was not all that old, and who used to drag her leg. This woman had never married anyone, not because of her frozen leg, but for other reasons. It seemed she preferred not to talk to people, though she wasn’t unkind. There was something else about her, but my grandfather could not remember what it was. Then, oh yes, he recalled how she hid her face or turned away in agitation when she was spoken to and he knew what it was—she was very shy.

Too shy to ever marry anyone! That was it. Her name was Kakageeshikok. She was named for a very old woman who gave her name away when she grew too old to use it anymore. Kakageeshikok was named for the eternal sky, though she was just called Geeshik, sky. Like her name, she was always in the background of things and seemed a woman of endless patience. She lived alone. People didn’t bother her because she never bothered anyone and she was poor—there was nothing to steal. Yet though she didn’t talk to people, my grandfather remembered, she would always be seen just outside the circle when the old people talked. She was always in the lodge listening in silence to the teachings and absorbing all that happened. She was so forgettable, and yet she was always there. Geeshik never put herself forward. Shaawano now smiled at certain memories of her. Whenever an important person wanted to park his ass in her spot, Geeshik always gave way and moved. If there wasn’t enough food to go around, it was Geeshik whose bowl, of course, went empty. Children loved her—they played all over her, Shaawano remembered, until they reached a certain age. Then they forgot about her. She wasn’t even of enough substance for the bad ones to torment. Geeshik: the thought of her somehow gave him hope. Did she live yet? Was she even around?

Nobody knew at first, though she had never lived far off in a tangle of bush, but right out in the open on the east side of town, just off the main road. But her house was as forgettable as she was and blended into its surroundings in a quiet way. It was just a little whitewashed cabin with a yard of matted grass. Her door was a plain wooden plank with an antler for a handle. Nobody had seen her go in or out of that door, and nobody ever saw her walk anywhere either, yet she was present at all events of any note, sitting in the background against the wall, overlooked. She existed in such an invisible way that maybe, thought my grandfather, she did not really exist at all. Maybe she had died in her house. He would have to find out. He would have to go there. But in a way he dreaded this as much as he had ever dreaded anything. He could not get a certain idea out of his mind—the notion that he’d find her in her house, dried out, motionless, curled up like a dead gray spider. Only she would be alive. Her eyes black and liquid as tadpoles. She’d come toward him rattling like an old seedpod. She’d call him. She’d speak his name.

So as he rapped on her door and rattled the antler handle, he called her name out first. Geeshik! He waited. Stunted trees grew here and there around her cabin. Wind ticked in the leaves. He knocked again. Once more, he leaned toward the wood and called her name. Geeshik! He caught a whiff, as he did so, of mildew and cinnamon. Then a soft voice, a whispering voice, said out loud, “I am coming.”

And of course she was not frightful at all.

As she opened the door to let him in, for she knew him immediately, she knew his voice, my grandfather saw that she had grown into a fine-skinned, fragile, oddly young-looking woman. She was shadowy and small. Her eyes were not dark or wild, but open and blinking. He thought at once of a soft little owl. She fluttered a hand at his feet, and he slipped off his shoes. Her dirt floor was covered with skins and clean blankets. She had a real glass window. In her own house, she was bolder and more noticeable than she was in the world outside. She nodded in a surprisingly confident way and padded across the room. Her body had settled now so that the limp of her youth was only a rocking motion of her hips and back. She indicated a stump chair for him. She poured tea from a brown pottery brewing pot into a pretty white cup and set it before him. He put his hand on the cup. She sat across from him with her own cup. Then she waited. She didn’t say anything. My grandfather stared at the cup so hard he memorized it. There were flowers painted on it, pink and lavender. It was a white lady’s cup she’d probably got from the mission, not old or new, not big or small. It was the kind of cup a woman would keep special on a shelf and maybe never use, so he was touched she had given it to him. And the tea in it, he found when he sipped, was flavored with that cinnamon he’d smelled in the doorway. It had a very good taste and Shaawano remembered that tea wasn’t always bitter and hard to swallow the way he made his. He knew now that he would have to speak first. But he understood there was no hurry. She didn’t mind. From the way she treated him, my grandfather realized that he was not the only person to suddenly remember the existence of the little woman and seek her out. He understood that while he had grown up and lost his children and wife and started grieving, while he had become volatile and oblivious, she had continued to slowly and steadily remain herself. Things had changed on the reservation, but she had held her place. She was exactly who she always was. Her gift was to be unremarkable. She was a person who would always be there to answer her own door. There would always be tea in a flowered white cup. And there would be her silence, which was somehow so kind and restful that Shaawano had drunk two cups of tea, slowly and with pleasure, before he felt compelled to speak.

During that first visit, he told her everything. He went through it all from the day he first realized that his wife was pregnant with another man’s child, to the waste of anger that followed when he’d driven off his son, to the dreams or visions he had experienced so recently and his questions and his hesitations, his belief that he was not worthy to make the drum. When he’d finished with all of it, the sky had gone dim through that one real window. Again, there was that comforting silence and in it he realized that Geeshik had not spoken. So at last he asked her the question he meant to ask.

“Why me?”

Geeshik sat there so quietly that he began to wonder if she’d even been listening at all. Then she rustled a little in her chair. Her voice came out a whisper, but her words were clear.

“Do just as she tells you.”

“But I don’t know how to do these things.”

“Just do as she tells you. That’s all you can do.”

My grandfather looked at her with an appalled desperation. She blinked back at him, sipped her cup of tea. It was too overwhelming—the sacred old wood, the dream instructions. His father had made drums but that was a world ago. And not only that, but they were hand drums. My grandfather remembered his father splitting the ash and bending it after it had soaked, creating the circle, the hoop. He himself had helped stretch the rawhide on and shaped it, but those drums were different. One-person drums only, not the drum his daughter meant. No, the drum that was to be made of that special wood was a drum that would attract the spirits in a powerful communion that my grandfather could not, and didn’t want to, think about.

“I must let this pass,” he said to Geeshik, shaking his head. “I’m not the man for it.”

Geeshik smiled a nodding smile. A very little smile. The sun came slanting through the window and warmed the smooth old table. Far away, someone chopped wood. The ax made a rhythmic, high, knocking sound. My grandfather closed his eyes and could see the movements of the chopper, steady and practiced and resigned. Over and over, the wood split, dropping to either side of the stump. The chopper neatly lifted each half on the ax blade and split a stove length with one downward stroke.

“That’s how you’ll do it,” Geeshik said. “One stroke.” It was as though she could see what my grandfather saw in his mind’s eye. He went back over the timing of her words. It seemed that she was referring to the effortless fall of the ax and thoughtless grace of a good wood splitter. Maybe she was saying he had the same skill—in him, not evident, but ready to come out. Grandfather Shaawano made a groaning sound of bleak frustration. He lifted his hands and hung them in the air and put them down, an empty gesture. He didn’t even know how to start.

“Just do everything she tells you,” Geeshik said.

My grandfather thought of placing tobacco where his own father used to put his tobacco. At the side of the clearing around his cabin there was a birch tree stump. Over the years it had always worn a heap of tobacco. When my grandfather was little, his father used to hold tobacco every morning in his small hand with him and pray for a good life. When he grew older, Shaawano swiped some of the tobacco off the stump every now and then to roll his own cigarettes. But he had still had a good life, he thought now, up until he began to wreck it for himself.

“I’m not the man for it,” Shaawano said, then he laughed a little, feeling foolish.

“Come back sometime,” she said, standing up. A pretty clear signal that she wanted him to go.

My grandfather walked home and didn’t feel any better about things. He went to sleep and when he woke he stretched and felt no better and got up anyway and set about his day. First he fixed up a little iron woodstove that he’d traded with a farmer for two bedsteads. The nickel plating was chipped and ruined, but the stove still gave him a feeling of cheer on a cool morning. His water was boiling. He poured half the water into another pot for mush and dropped two handfuls of meal in and put it back on to boil. He’d thrown the leathery swamp-tea leaves into the first, dented tin pot when he remembered about the tobacco. With an ironwood stick, he stirred the mush, then wiped his hands on the pockets of his pants and took a bag of crumbled tobacco off the shelf by his door. He brought it out into the yard. There was nothing special about the day. A little cloudy. Light breeze. Grandfather Shaawano found the birch stump, which hadn’t rotted away like he imagined. He opened the bag and took some tobacco out and said to the twitching leaves of a popple tree or to anyone or nobody or to the Creator, “Thank you for my existence.”

He put the tobacco on the stump and waited for something to happen. A woodpecker tapped away, testingly, then paused, perhaps flew to another tree and began tapping, this time harder. The breeze was causing light waves to slap on shore. My grandfather forgot he was waiting for anything but his first taste of tea. He walked back into the house.

So it went like this, every day. The days began with putting out tobacco, then a breakfast of tea and mush. The day continued on and he cut poles or went to the sloughs for willow, and on yet some more as he worked on his chairs, and the tables, which he could now make because he’d bought a good hand plane. Late summer turned to fall and winter came and went and every day my grandfather put out tobacco. He picked up the tobacco and went outside half in a dream, but once he put his tobacco down and said his words he always noticed something—mouse tracks in the snow, impossibly delicate, the deep scent of wood smoke, clouds booming over the leafless trees. These sharp moments of seeing did not fill him with the wild joy that had been so frightening when he first quit wandering. He wasn’t swallowed up with fear or sadness, either, nor did he dream of the dead. If he was visited by spirits, they kept to themselves. For many hours, most of the day, he became lost in his work and forgot everything but what was before him—the feel of the tool in his hands, balance, the tension of fitting together his pieces, which he made with pegs and no nails, the critical shaving and adjusting that made his work stand level. He sold everything he made to a trader who came with a wagon to take it away, but he spent so much time on each that he never accumulated money. Sometimes he could afford oatmeal—zashi manoomin, slippery rice. He thought of tapping the stand of maple around him soon, in spring, so he could have pools of syrup in his gray bowlfuls of oatmeal. Then he found himself whittling the taps and spouts and making baskets or makakoog of birch bark with ash trim, to catch the sap. He surprised himself all the time. Where before he had talked endlessly of what he was going to do and never did it, now he only thought about things he was going to do and then found his actions carrying out his thoughts before he’d even given them words. One day in late spring, before the blackflies hatched and when the nights were still cold enough to kill off the mosquitoes, it occurred to my grandfather that he would go and see for himself whether that wood his daughter told him about in the dream was even in the place she described.

He found himself making his own lunch, first thing next morning.

These days, he bought a new substance called peanut butter and ate it instead of grease on his bannock. There was nothing in the world that tasted so good. He spread peanut butter on a slab of cold bannock, slapped another piece on top, and tucked it into his pocket. Then he began to walk, although he knew he could not get to the place he wanted to by walking. He would have to find someone with a boat to take him there, as it was far across the lake, where the people had lived in the old days, starting before the agents and missionaries, even fur traders, even rum, when life was no doubt hard and full of cruel tricks but at least the clans and families were together.

My grandfather went straight through the bush for a good while. It didn’t bother him. He had a hundred ways of getting places from his house. Ever since he was a boy, he had liked walking in the bush. No one could get him lost. Even when he was drunk, he had never once started off in the wrong direction or found himself somewhere and didn’t know how he got there. Most people are completely oblivious when blacked out, but my grandfather seemed to retain his sense of place even when the rest of him was howling crazy. So he knew just exactly at which cabin he would come out of the woods, and was there at the hour of the day when the fishermen who lived around there went out to set their nets.

Albert Ruse, Akiwenzi, Morton, Ningabianong—none would give him a ride in their jiimaanan or had an extra boat or canoe or old washtub for him to use. They knew what he was like, or thought they did, and assumed they would never see whatever scow they lent him in the same shape or maybe in this life. But then, just as they were all pulling away, Albert turned and yelled that he, Shaawano, was free to take and put back together an old wiigwaasi-jiimaan, his canoe made of birch bark, and to keep it if it hadn’t already disintegrated out in the bush behind his house.

All right, all right, thought my grandfather, if that’s the way you’re going to play it, I’m your man. Up surged his old belligerence and off he tramped to Albert’s house, where he located the broken hulk, hoisted it on his back, and without a word to Albert’s old lady or the gaping children trudged back off into the bush, where he didn’t let the damn thing down off his shoulders until he got home and eased it off into the patch of bright sun before his door.

“It’s not in that rough shape,” he muttered, running his hands over the perfectly bent cedar ribs that had somehow retained their old shape. Of course the jack-pine root lacing had popped in many places and the bark was split here and there. Quite a bit of work. My grandfather took an old makak and a hatchet, went off into the woods, and collected enough pitch to do a preliminary mending. From his ash pile he plucked chunks of charcoal, ground it to a powder, mixed the powder and the pitch. By the time it was too dark to see anymore, he had patched the burst seams and used sticks and baling twine to hold the sides in place. Tomorrow, he thought, stirring up a fresh batch of bannock for himself, I’ll dig more jack pine, cut some bark to patch with. That night, as a tonic for his blood, he drank cedar tea, just as his old grandmother had. He felt the benefit, after he banked the fire and laid under the quilt, of his blood washing in and out cleanly around his heart. And then, just before falling asleep, he chuckled out loud as he thought of Albert, who always liked a good joke, even on himself. My grandfather saw himself paddling with deep, even strokes past the men as they played out their nets. He would nod as Albert widened his eyes, and indicate with a hand movement that Albert could kiss his ass. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d just enjoy the man’s surprise and appreciation as he paddled by in the old wreck of the canoe, now beautiful and whole.

That canoe made my grandfather a little too famous, even before he’d gotten out to the far side of the lake. Albert heard about the first time he tried it out, and he came to see him, carrying his pipe. Grandfather Shaawano was daubing the seams yet again with pitch when Albert called out from the woods and then walked into the clearing. He had his son with him, a boy about fifteen years old, and when they saw the canoe they both grew excited with admiration for my grandfather’s perfecting touch. The bent ash gunwales were laced again with wet jack-pine root and lashed with strips of rawhide that had shrunk as they dried, so everything was strict and tight. My grandfather had restained the two deep vermilion circles into the prow. And then the patching and the cleaning. All of this in just a week. Albert exclaimed so loudly and was so happy that Shaawano grew nervous, imagining he would demand the canoe back now. But he did no such thing. Albert had never been a drunk. He provided well for his family and was faithful to his wife. He was a very good fisherman but not clever with his hands like my grandfather. He wanted to hear all about Old Shaawano’s work, every detail, to know where he had fetched the pitch and from what kind of tree and how he mixed it. My grandfather Shaawano found himself talking as he hadn’t talked in a long time, about the pieces of knowledge he’d picked up from his father and his uncles, and about how one thing had made sense after the next in fixing the canoe. They talked at length and finally, at last, Albert took out his pipe. He put it together and loaded it, then lighted and smoked it and handed it to his son, who smoked and handed it on to Shaawano, who did also. He handed the pipe back to Albert, who smoked it again before he asked, “What about the drum?”

It was then that my grandfather made the connection. Albert was a cousin to Kakageeshikok.

“Geeshik told you.”

“Who told me?”

That wasn’t it at all. The night after he’d jokingly pointed my grandfather toward the old canoe, a young girl had come to visit Albert in a dream. She came to thank him. She said she would do good things for him. Each time she spoke, a drum sounded. The drum grew louder until he woke. It had taken Albert some time to puzzle out the meaning of the dream. That had not come clear until he finally thought of the old canoe he’d given my grandfather earlier that day. Then he was sure that my grandfather, the drum, the canoe, and the girl must have some connection. Albert went still and let the smoke dwindle from the pipe, waiting for my grandfather to fill him in.

Shaawano cleared his throat. He was choked up. His daughter was so polite! Even in the spirit world she remembered her manners with elders, and had thanked Albert for his help.

“N’dawnis,” he said, nodding proudly and shaking his head. Then for the second time he told everything—the story Albert doubtless knew, about Anaquot, and the dull, long years of fury and wandering that followed, and at last, how his daughter had come to him in a dream and what she had asked of him.

“So I need the canoe to get to those old trees,” he concluded. “I was out that day looking for a way to get there.”

Albert started to chuckle at some private joke. He poked his son in the ribs and said, “You know, don’t you?”

“What?” His son rubbed his side. “Know what, n’deydey?”

“About the old man,” Albert laughed harder. “My grandfather.”

“What?” said old Shaawano.

“Friend,” said Albert, “you’ll like to hear this. The old man, my grandfather, the one who made that canoe in his age and cared for it until he died, he was the keeper of that wood. He smoked his pipe with it.” Albert lifted his pipe, which was long with a smooth okij, golden red. “This very pipe. This is the one he smoked with those everlasting trees.”

By the end of the evening it was settled. Albert and my grandfather and the boy—whom Albert had sent to the mission school, but who kept running home, so that Albert was educating him in the old ways as best he could—would go out together and visit the old cedar trees. Albert would tell Geeshik what was happening. She would nod, my grandfather imagined, blink her grave, wide, owlish eyes, and smile her hidden smile. She knew everything, she knew it anyway, said Albert, she had learned all there was to know by sitting quietly and humbly in the corner.

“She knew you were going to find your way toward this,” he told my grandfather. “This was the fourth generation, this is the time, and it was said that our drum would be brought to us by a little girl.”

“It is an honor,” said my grandfather, after a while. “Still, I would rather that my little girl was grown up and standing before me now in the fullness of her own life.”

Albert put his hand on my grandfather Shaawano’s shoulder and they stood together.

“Even this does not bring her back to you, I know. Still, it is something.”

“Yes, it is something,” said my grandfather.

The day that my grandfather, Albert, and his boy, whose nickname was Chickie, went out to visit the trees, new leaves were just unfurling. A light breeze gave no hindrance. There was warm sun, a clear sky. Best of all, no zagimeg and no biting flies. The three paddled all morning, ate their lunch of grease and bannock and tea on a flat gray rock, and continued on into the afternoon, until they reached the place where they thought the trees were. Albert had gone there with his grandfather when he was young, but his memory was a little off. My own grandfather’s ideas had been formed by the dream, but they, too, were faulty. The three tramped around in the bush until it grew too dark to see, then they made a fire for the night, boiled more tea and roasted a duck that Albert had plugged on the way there. After they had eaten, they talked of small matters and then rolled up in their blankets.

As they were falling asleep, my grandfather heard a far-off pack of wolves raise their howl. For a long time the wolves spoke of all they’d seen and felt and eaten that day. Shaawano stayed awake listening. He had never blamed the wolves for what they had done. He had never gone to war with them. The wolves had only acted according to their natures, after all. Only humans can choose to change what they are, and change is treacherous. Even now, the first drink that Shaawano had taken still haunted him, as did the other first drink in his life—the first drink he had refused. In the howls of the wolves, full and gurgling, he saw that full glass, the one he had mystically pushed away, and even in the holy dark somewhere near the great old trees, he dreamed that instead of pushing the drink away he reached for it and put it to his lips, and as its fire entered him, he sighed and began to weep.

Those great trees had been struck down by lightning, it was said. They never had been touched by a whiteman’s ax. In the morning the three walked out into the bush and after only minutes of walking a strange thing occurred. They burst into a clearing, or what seemed like one. As their eyes adjusted from the cool shade of the woods to a dazzling plain of light, they saw from the nakedness of ground that they had come upon an area of devastation. Trees had been snapped off like matchsticks and pulverized to splinters. Only a few of the toughest plants grew among the fragments of the trees. It was as if a giant had smashed its foot down and ground everything beneath his heel.

“What did this?” said the boy in awe.

“A whirlwind,” Albert told him.

“Do you think it smashed the drum trees?” asked my grandfather.

“It might be good to smoke the pipe here,” Albert said.

So they sat down in the glare of mild sun and Albert took out his grandfather’s pipe. My grandfather had never kept a pipe. He wasn’t the type to have been given one and he was glad now that by mistake he had never acquired one. If something had happened to a pipe of his during those bad years, he’d have that on his conscience along with everything else. It was good to smoke the pipe that Albert kept. All three soon felt their uneasiness lessen and a sense of admiring wonder take its place. Here was evidence of a casual, intentless power. It made and it destroyed. Grew trees and crushed them. Brought people to life and stood back as they made what they could of their time on earth. As my grandfather held the pipe in his hands, praying, his attention was drawn by a still patch of light behind and beyond Albert and Chickie. He looked at the patch of light for some time, as he spoke, before he made out its shape. A wolf was watching from the leaves, huge and gray. Its yellow eyes burned with an ancient calm but its tongue stuck out sideways between its teeth, as a dog’s sometimes will, so that along with inscrutable menace it also looked just plain goofy. My grandfather laughed. The others turned to see what he had laughed at but the wolf was gone, only a few disturbed leaves quivered. Through these leaves my grandfather Shaawano saw where they must go.

“The trees are around the bottom of that cliff,” said my grandfather, pointing as people pointed, silently kissing at an upwash of rock beyond the wolf and the crushed circle of trees. “We have to walk around the base until we stumble over them.”

“Giin igo,” said Albert, blowing the ash from his pipe. “I don’t mind what we do.”

“I’m ready,” said the boy.

The three walked halfway around the base of the cliff and saw nothing. Discouraged, Grandfather Shaawano rubbed his hands across his face. When he opened his eyes and squinted straight up before him, he saw that just past a tangle of willow, higher than he’d imagined, the logs were lying on a rock shelf, a stone bed where nothing would take root. The three climbed a tumble of washed-down, split boulders and edged out along a broken path that widened to the shelf. There were the cedars, four of them lying together in a row. My grandfather sat down next to one of the great logs and leaned against the curve of the wood. He could see far across the bay into the opening of the channel and through that to an island so far, blue, and cloudy that it seemed almost a mirage. Yet it was very real and Shaawano remembered it well. He and Anaquot had run away to that island from their camp, and there they had made their daughter in the first sweetness of their love. They had wanted to be alone together, just the two of them, feeding each other berries and touching whenever they wanted, in the open, underneath a limitless sky.

Perhaps the great trees had seen their fumbling, human, all too brief happiness and taken pity. Perhaps the trees knew all along. Perhaps the trees had decided to do what they could for the childish lovers, and for their daughter. The body of a drum is a container for the spirit, just as if it were flesh and bone. And although love between a man and woman can change and fail, overreach itself, fall prey to suspicions, yet the drum lives on. The drum waits with the patience of unliving things and yet it heals with life itself.

5 The Ornamental Man

I was years away from my existence when my grandfather began the making of the drum sitting here before us in this room. As for the wife who had left him, and Ziigwan’aage, who had befriended her, they had long collaborated in the leisurely destruction of Simon Jack. During the making of the drum, my father was free to go wherever he willed. He sat with my grandfather, when he could sit still, and tried as best he could to be a son to the man who had left him in a cold house. But some things are only undone by the cruelest means. The ishkode wabo already had its hooks in my father’s gut. Every so often, he left my grandfather and got drunk. Still, he saw the making of the drum, or much of it. When there was something that he could do, he helped. At the same time, on his drunks, he learned all there was to know, and then some, about the goings-on of people near and far, even those across the lake. He learned about his mother, Anaquot, and the wife of the man she’d gone to, and about his half sister, the one they called Fleur, whom he’d hated for her innocent part in the killing of his older sister. All these things he told me at one time or another, or I heard them from other people closely involved, like old Albert. For the making of this drum, as you can imagine, given the caretaking of the wood and the advent of dreams and the tragic incidents and surprising redemptions surrounding its origins, made Anishinaabeg from miles all around both hopeful and curious. They came to visit my grandfather. Soon he had more help than he could manage, and more advice than he could trust.

My grandfather packed his tools into his canoe and outfitted himself to camp alongside those trees for as long as it would take. After he got to the place and set up his camp, he examined each tree for rot, chose one, and cut away branches from the smoothest and most symmetrical part of the trunk. He carefully marked the trunk all around and used ax, saw, and wedge to remove a section that would make the body of the drum. Once he had that section, he rolled it to his camp, where he would hollow it out. He already had a pile of smooth rocks heating in a blaze and he kept that fire going, feeding it hotter and hotter until the rocks glowed red when he rolled them from the fire with a piece of ironwood. He used a pair of antlers to place each rock exactly where he wanted it—on the heart of the wood. The stone burned itself in, leaving a shallow, charred hole. Once the stone cooled he replaced it with another, and so it went, a tedious, exacting process. The time it took seemed endless, but my grandfather needed that time now, because the drum could not be made with a wholly conscious plan. Parts of its making had to be dreamed.

When my grandfather fell asleep at night he looked forward to the possibility that something of the drum’s construction and character might be revealed. Wrapped snug in a woolen blanket, face covered with a light cloth, he drifted off in a state of comfort. He’d never rested so well. Spirits came to him, but not to torment; they were curious as their people, the Anishinaabeg, and wanted to know what Old Shaawano was doing and how the drum was progressing. Half-conscious, my grandfather heard murmuring and low arguments, tinkling bells and footsteps. Where before these sounds had frightened him, now he was lulled. He felt secure as a child snuggled up in the corner of the cabin while the grown-ups talk low and laugh around the stove.

When my grandfather had finished with the main body of the drum, he lashed it into his canoe and started paddling for home. His vision of how he would dress the drum was still incomplete—the colors, symbols, and type of ornament the drum required still evaded his dreams. He couldn’t get a picture in his mind. But on the way back, something happened that he was to describe many times after in his life. He reached the smooth waters of the bay across which stood his cabin, just as the sun threw red light off, going down. A great cloud had come up behind him and lowered a blue shadow across the water. Just where that cloud stopped and the clear red sky began, there was a line of brilliant space. A yellow line glowed across the earth and the lake with a startling radiance. As my grandfather paddled into that dazzling moment then, he heard a little girl’s voice calling from shore. From the south there was a clap of thunder. From the west a stiff breeze blew. My grandfather put his hand up to test the wind and the sun struck his hand a bright, startling red. He thought of the wolves and of the one that had watched him. He saw pictures. There they were. Little girl. Hand. Wolf. The bowl of reflecting water cut in half by the yellow strip of light would be the design on the head of the drum. All was still in the four directions. He saw the whole thing in his mind.

Chickie came up with the moose when he was out picking berries. It so happened that he was sitting on a flat rock and eating a sandwich. There were two buckets of berries at his feet, and his little sister was teasing crayfish near the water’s edge, trying to get them to grasp onto a weed so she could yank them out. She was very quiet. Chickie was too. There was only the drone of big horseflies to bother him—an unusual number of big flies—and he remembered his great-aunt telling his uncle to go and fetch a gun because of the flies, for with big flies a moose must be about. Chickie had brought a gun to the berry-picking flats in case of bears. He put his sandwich in his pocket and picked up his gun. Just then, two moose broke cover. Deranged by the flies, they made a mad, shambling dash for water. Usually, moose are shy, almost paranoid. But not when chased by flies. Which is how Chickie got his animal. He got his bead on the hulking bull. After Chickie and Albert dressed the meat and dragged it home, they soaked and soured the hide to loosen the hair, scraped the hide clean, then brain-tanned it. From that hide my grandfather cut two circles for the drumheads, top and bottom. He would have lashed the skins tightly on right away, except that the night before he meant to do it his little daughter visited. She stood before him in a bell-shaped dress and said, “I’ll tune the drum. Put me inside, Deydey. There, I’ll be content.”

My grandfather was mystified by this, and yet her visit was so precious to him that he didn’t mention it to anyone else. He was stingy with these visions. He liked to save them to think about. Still, the meaning did elude him. Put me inside the drum. What did she mean by that? A small bell was often hung within a drum to sweeten its sound. Other things were put inside, too. Grandfather Shaawano had known the bones of seagulls to be used, suspended across the center of the interior. His little girl had loved ribbons. He decided that he would trim the drum’s skirt with ribbons.

But that was not all of it because it seemed that she had wanted to be the drum itself. He decided at last that he would go talk to her, as best he could. He would go to the place he’d hidden her bones. So that next morning he made his fire in the little stove that vented straight up through the roof and he boiled water in the dinged-up kettle he had thrown many times against the wall in old rages, but always hammered back into shape when he came to earth. He poured water over a few leaves and balsam needles in another pot and let it steep, poured the tea into a cup. He brought the cup outside, where he could drink it looking into the woods. He was, perhaps, fortifying his spirit.

The path that the wagon had taken through the woods and then down to the lake was grown over. There was a copse of birch trees located maybe twenty feet into the woods. When several birch trees grow from one stump they form a central hollow that collects leaves and pine needles. In this place, so beautiful and calm, my grandfather had long ago placed his daughter’s bones. He’d chiseled into the wood and then capped the hollow with a round flat stone so that the bones would not be disturbed. He had hoped that the birch trees might grow together and surround his daughter, might encompass her. But the hollow had stayed a hollow and the four trees still grew from the central core, though they held the stone in tightly. He put tobacco on the stone and then he sat down in the sticks, duff, and leaves. An old song came to him. He shut his eyes and sang it. Then he sang a lullaby, the one Anaquot had always sung. As my grandfather sang the lullaby, he felt his throat closing with tears, but they melted down inside him instead of flowing out and after a while he felt better. He had brought some pretty cloth and a stick of hard candy. He put those on the rock.

Grandfather Shaawano had also brought along a sandwich and a jug of water. He spilled a little water on the stone and tore off a bit of his sandwich and put it there too. He thought about the drum and about all that had happened. It seemed to him that since his daughter’s first dream visit he had been driven from one question to the next question. He’d worked hard on putting the drum together, piece by piece. He’d enjoyed the exhaustion and he had needed the concentration. The life force, the restlessness, the need to move and think and accomplish things that had grown in him since he stopped wandering, were all directed into the making of the drum. It felt good now to sit in the woods doing nothing. Letting his thoughts range free. Enjoying each bite of the bannock with the salted and peppered venison grease spread inside. There were puckoons growing in the woods, mushrooms, berries. He thought he might spend the day hunting and picking them. But he heard, behind his head, which was pillowed against the birch, a small rustling and whispering. He heard the bones click. Then he turned and saw that two long, graceful, curved bones had crawled from the nest.

Well, maybe an animal had pushed them out, he thought, but he was sure he hadn’t seen them before. He picked the bones up, cradled them in his hands. Then he knew what his daughter meant and why she’d visited. He knew what to do.

So that is why the drum that now sits in this room was made with the little girl’s bones. They are strung inside on a piece of sinew anchored to the east and west, for the drum has its directions and should always be aligned as the judge has done. That little girl’s bones gave the drum its voice. Everything else about the drum, all you see, was long considered, and the meanings debated by all of those who would learn its songs and take care of it. But the bones were my grandfather’s secret. He didn’t even speak of them to his son. It was me he told, long after the last time the drum was used.

I was born many years after the drum began its life, but my grandfather and eventually my father talked about it so much that it seems part of my first memories. When my mother was with my father, she made sure that whenever the drum came out for a ceremony, he was there too. My grandfather had my father sit at the drum just behind the other men, tapping a stick on his knee, learning the songs. My grandfather started taking him along with him even when it became clear that he was lost to the bottle. Even if my father was sleeping off a drunk, my grandfather kept him near the drum, hoping that the songs would do their work. I think it might have been, no I’m sure it was, those early years with the drum that protected him later on once my grandfather died and even, perhaps, protected me. Maybe those songs helped me to survive my father’s drinking rage. For in the rare times he was sober he sang those songs and made me learn them too. And later, I never did search out oblivion in order to forget my father’s harm. Something steadied me. Something gave me rightness in my mind. Something gave me an inside calm.

This drum was powerful. People searched it out. This drum was so kind that it cured people of every variety of ill. Because our family kept this drum, people came to us. All of the people who lived close to the drum and dreamed up its songs or helped the drum somehow—repaired it or gave it gifts or even helped the people who came to see it—we grew strong. That’s what the drum is about—it gathers people in and holds them. It looks after them. But like a person, things can go wrong in spite of all the best care. And this drum had its own history and sorrow.

When I was growing up, singing that drum’s songs, I heard things discussed. I listened in on the old men’s gossip. Some stories went on for months, even years. There was one that the old men always returned to and found endlessly interesting to discuss. Years back, they said, a comical delusion had apparently gripped a man called Simon Jack. It had started with his sly mention of the fact that he was a two-woman man. That was not allowed in the church of course, or by law, but in the old days it had been the privilege of a clever hunter. A man who could attract, keep, and provide for two women was considered powerful, a man to envy and to follow.

Simon Jack had made this boast, but when the old men went to visit the cabin where, Simon Jack implied, the women served his every need, it was found that the opposite was true. Simon Jack was bossed, bullied, and disregarded. He was a slave to those women’s ideas. He jumped when they commanded. And yet, when he talked in town, he boasted of their meekness and made out that he was feared and adored. Perhaps he really believed his own words. Those who visited Simon Jack’s home reported, for instance, that he’d ordered Ziigwan’aage to make tea. She ignored him. After some time he went over to the stove and poured water into cups from a cold kettle and served it to his guests. Anaquot, where’s the bannock, he cried. She slung the round loaf at his head. He picked it up, thanked her condescendingly, as though she had humbly delivered it. And so on it went. He claimed that “his women” were working on a beautiful beaded outfit for him, and although that was true, there was something about the way they beaded that made the other men uncomfortable. After all, everybody knew that Anaquot and Ziigwan’aage had been working on that outfit each winter for years. They hadn’t finished it, or maybe they had, and then they had resewn it. What was going on? Were the two of them, perhaps, crazy too?

Then all of a sudden, the men heard that the outfit was completed. Simon Jack was seen in the woods from a long way off, flashing, gleaming, beaded everywhere. He was a riot of flowers and vines. Every inch of his clothing was covered. He wore a beaded vest and beaded breeches trimmed with otter fur. It was the most extraordinary clothing that anyone had ever seen, and he wore it constantly. He didn’t take it off to go to sleep or for the dirtiest work. The outfit grew stiff and began to reek, but Simon Jack kept wearing it. He wore it for one whole winter on his trapline. He was still wearing it when he came out of the woods in the spring with a load of furs. By now he had become an object of pity. Although he was avoided because his odor had become spectacular, people left food out for him, on stumps, where the dogs could not reach. He had nowhere to go. Barred from his own cabin, chased from the tent that Ziigwan’aage now shared with a younger man, he took to sleeping in barnyards, wandering the ditches. He showed up anywhere people gathered, hoping he’d be fed.

And to think, said the old men, at one time he was well off. He had all he could want. A wife, children, knowledge, and powerful songs. Now, he has only the clothes he wears.

Which though stinking had held together. In spite of his claw-like, broken nails and the matted balls of hair that hung down beneath the hat, in spite of the filth crusted along the neck of his shirt and the perfectly black, glossy black, engrained dirt that became his skin, his clothing had not fallen to ruin. The fully beaded sashes and epaulets and leggings had lost not a single stitched bead. Nothing had unraveled. The colors held. The cut beads still glittered at the flowers’ center. Manidoominensag, little spirit things, that is the word for beads in our language. They are more than just decorations. They have a life of their own. It was now perfectly understood that the women whom Simon Jack had bragged of dominating—the young one he’d gotten pregnant and the first wife, that spring wolverine—had known just what they were doing. They had trapped him. It was he who had donned the suit, after all, clothes that supposedly illustrated for the world his wives’ meek devotion. But those were not just flowers, not just vines, not, as I said, little beads. Those little spirits were his arrogance for all to see. Filth and brilliance. They were Simon Jack inside out.

Ahau! said the old men. It happened this way. He walked into the dance circle one afternoon early in the summer, and he sat down next to my grandfather. They should watch out for the rain! He pointed his chin up to the clear sky and the men remembered, as much as his smell, thinking that it certainly was not going to rain. That much they thought they knew. Rain required clouds. But my grandfather took no issue with the pitiful being and only offered Simon Jack his open can of chewing tobacco. Simon Jack took a pinch, made a little wad of the stuff, and stuck it in his lower lip. His teeth were green fangs. His long narrow jaw snapped like a fox’s. People were fascinated with his fingernails—long and twisted, gnarled like gray turtle shell. Of course, they also looked at the fancy beadwork designs that flowed all over him. He wore two bandolier bags with white backgrounds fully beaded. He folded his legs crosswise and people noted that the bottoms of his makizinan were beaded. The old men said that those makizinan were only worn by the dead. Simon Jack nodded critically at my grandfather when he rose to go sit near the drum.

“They are singing those songs backwards,” he said. “They shouldn’t do that.”

The other men thought he was wrong, and who was he to criticize? But it turned out Simon Jack knew what he was talking about, for my grandfather was very troubled by what was happening. He knew the songs that had appeared in people’s minds when the drum came into being, knew them like he knew how to breathe, but all of a sudden, when Simon Jack came into the circle, there was a shift. Grandfather Shaawano described it afterward as someone talking in his ear so he couldn’t think. The men were distracted. The songs got jumbled.

All we crave is a simple order. One day and then the next day and the next after that, if we’re lucky, to be the same. Grief is chaos. Death or illness throw the world out of whack. The drum’s order is the world’s order. To proceed with and keep that order is a gesture of desperate hope. Protect us. Save us. Let our minds remain clear of sorrow so that we can simply praise the world.

When the songs go backward, when they won’t stay in place, when the men strike the drum out of time, things should stop. We should ponder the event. Later, my grandfather was to make clear what he should have done when things went haywire. But until that day he had never lost the order and thought that he could recover it by force of mind, so the men kept on playing and singing.

Simon Jack stood and danced in place, then he danced into the circle and rounded the drum. There was nothing wrong with what he did, at first. He was showing respect. Except that soon there were no pauses, no relief. One song now led straight into the next and it was as though they all were caught—drummer, singers, dancer, drum itself—in a dark outpouring of energy. The others in the circle were disturbed. They didn’t know what they were hearing, or seeing, but they knew what they were feeling. One man said his breath cracked in him. Their hearts stopped, then raced. A sickness in another man’s belly became an ache. Someone’s legs itched, but he knew he shouldn’t dance. It was enough to see Simon Jack out there, stamping and bobbing with a terrible intentness, close-stepping as if he was flattening the grass with his dead, dead makizinan. It was enough to understand that moving toward the drum at this time would be a mistake. Those in the circle didn’t know what they felt or whether they were possessed; but nobody stopped the drummer and nobody stopped the dancer. It was as though they were all suspended, frozen, as though nothing about the scene was moving. Although everything was. And it was moving faster. The beat was. The men. Their high-pitched voices. And even faster and faster until—and my grandfather saw this, for he was staring at Simon Jack—he turned around, a flash of beads and fur and tails, and he began to go the wrong way. He went the spirit world way around the drum. The old men saw it happen. They saw his face go gray and his eyes roll white into his head. They knew, right then, he would not complete his circle and he did not. Halfway around, he fell dead.

After that, my grandfather put the drum away. He kept it off the ground, in its own place, of course. He took it out occasionally to visit other drums. He fed it tobacco and water and he made sure that it heard no bad talk and saw no bad sights. But even when the desperately ill or those pleading for the sick begged him to take out that drum, he never would. And as I said, he told me why, he confided in me. He said that he couldn’t be sure of that drum anymore. He told me that the drum itself contained his daughter’s bones. He believed that she was subject, as children are, to rages beyond their control, and that she had caused what happened in the circle. She was angry at the man who took away her mother and caused her own life to end. She had no pity on pitiful Simon Jack.

In the end, though Simon Jack had nearly ruined his life, my grandfather was the only one to take pity on him. The men carried Simon Jack from the circle to my grandfather’s house and laid him out on a bed of pine boughs in the yard. There, the women who care for the dead made a fire that they would keep burning for three days to light the way for his spirit. They washed Simon Jack for burial. As they worked, the rain sprinkled directly down upon them from a clear sky, just as the dead man said it would.

I heard it whispered when I was young, then it was talked about more openly as people forgot who the Pillagers were or why so many had feared Ziigwan’aage. When they prepared Simon Jack, they found the reason he never took those clothes off. It was simple. He couldn’t. The clothes were stitched directly to him. His skin had grown around the threads and beads in some places. The clothes were molded to him in others. The women clipped the clothes carefully from Simon Jack and burned them in a great fire hot enough to consume even the glass beads. They tied his body in birch bark and laid him naked in the ground. He was buried at the entrance to the main path out to the Pillager camp, where those two women would have to step over him whenever they came to town.

Generally, it is, or was, not considered right for a woman to step over anything that belongs to a man. It supposedly gives her power over him. So I don’t know what the women had in mind when they put Simon Jack underground there—perhaps it was a warning or a reminder, or perhaps with the dead the old taboo is reversed. I really don’t know whether Simon Jack’s placement bothered Anaquot or Ziigwan’aage or whether his death made the least difference to them at all. They were to die in the appalling illness that shook our tribe apart. The child alone survived, my father’s half sister, Fleur. And of course there was Niibin’aage, lost into the east by then. As for the drum, it was cared for in the best way possible, as I have said, but it was never used again. I think my grandfather had a conflict in his heart over what to do with it. Once, he told me about the secret location of a cave and he asked me to make sure he was buried there, and the drum with him. Another time he said it should be burned. He also told me that he’d written down songs with some old men and that the drum should be restored to use after forty winters.

My grandfather died unexpectedly. He died before any of these options could be made definite. After his death, when the old men came together to discuss who should take over his songs and feed his guardian spirits, and who should care for his little girl drum, things were disposed of as the old men saw fit. They gave the drum to my father. Perhaps they thought its power would heal him up, sober him. Or maybe they knew he would sell the drum, as eventually he did, to the trader Jewett Parker Tatro for rum and beer. Perhaps they knew how it would happen and they thought that the drum needed to go east, to grow up a little more before it returned. Because the forty years my grandfather spoke of are past. All those afflicted, bothered, or healed and made whole by that drum are gone. Only the songs remain.