The Painted Drum

1

Shawnee sat her little brother down and pried the crayon from his strong, chubby fist—it was purple, it looked to him like something good to eat, the name of the crayon was even grape. The feel of the word on her tongue made her mouth water and she wanted a cup of commodity grape juice so terribly: the feeling came over her with such a strong rush that she tasted the cold sweetness of the drink in her mind. Her brother, Apitchi, made a lip-trembling face and then opened his mouth to bawl but Shawnee had a trick she played on him. She reached toward his mouth quickly and tickled his tongue softly with her finger. Usually, he was so surprised that his howl turned into a laugh, but this time he was very, very hungry, truly felt deprived, and in his heart he really knew that the crayon would have been good to eat. So he let blast with a scream of rage that made Shawnee clap her hands over her ears and brought Alice from the other room, where she was curled up under the blankets.

Alice was six years old, way past the toddling age, her legs skinny and bare. All she wore was one of her mother’s old sweatshirts, and it drooped off of her slender body, hanging empty past her fingers and knees. The sweatshirt said University of Phuk U in red block letters, and it was sweatshirt color, gray. Alice’s thick black hair was cut straight off, right below her ears, and it stuck out on both sides of her head like Darth Vader’s helmet in Star Wars. For a while, they had owned that movie, and also a small black TV that had a slot to insert a movie cassette in the bottom, and the movie would come on the screen. But then it had to get sold, and the movie went with it. Before it was sold Shawnee and Alice had watched the movie countless times. They knew it all by heart, every word. Alice rubbed the sleep from her face and watched Apitchi bawl, along with Shawnee. They both just watched him because they knew there was nothing that could be done once he started like this.

“I’m hungry,” said Alice.

“No, you’re not,” said Shawnee, “because there’s nothing.”

Alice nodded and sucked on a finger. She knew that. They had already scraped every particle of oatmeal from the pot that Mama had left on the stove. They had been hungry the day before, and the day before that too. They had wiped the pot with their fingers. Alice’s stomach felt so caved-in she thought maybe it was sticking to the back of her body, and the places that it stuck hurt with stabbing pains. While she was wrapped in the blankets, she had peeled some flecks of paint off the walls and chewed on them like candy.

“I’m cold,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” said Shawnee, “because Mom said don’t turn up the heat there’s just enough to last until she gets home.”

Alice knew that too, and so she put the blankets around her and waited to fall asleep. There was a thick old bearskin on the mattress they had dragged out onto the kitchen–living room floor, dusty and stinking a little, but the fur was the warmest place in the house. Shawnee wished that she could curl up on the bearskin with Alice until Mama came back, but Apitchi was everywhere, into everything. He knew how to climb. He would look for food until he discovered something that he thought he could eat. Shawnee was afraid he would find some kind of poison. She supposed now that it really wouldn’t have hurt him to eat the crayon.

“Maybe I should have let you,” she said gently to his screaming face. “Maybe you would have thought you really ate something.”

Then he screamed again and she felt her hand go back with a sudden jerk. Her hand swept forward so fast she couldn’t stop it from slapping him on the side of the face. The slap made a sharp crack in the air. Apitchi didn’t stop bawling, he only whirled away from Shawnee and ran at the opposite wall, grabbed the one curtain that sagged off a window, pulled until it fell in a brown and white checkered heap. Then he kept running around the room, at one wall then the other, still crying. His shoes fell off. Snot covered his face and then quickly dried to a glaze. Shawnee tossed her long hair back and stood by the kitchen stove, watching him. Her eyes were lovely, dark and slanted in a face shaped like a heart.

Even though she’d already done this, Shawnee decided to look through the whole house methodically to see if there was anything to eat forgotten in some bag or box, some corner. There were two rooms, and the bathroom. She started in the bathroom. They had eaten the toothpaste already. Striped towels were balled up in a corner, and she carefully took them apart and shook them free of wrinkles. The bathroom was icy cold; the wind shot through the window, which did not close right. Sometimes the pipe that made the faucet work froze, and Mama had told her to leave the water on just enough to drip through the night. Shawnee opened the cupboard and dragged out the nearly empty bottles of shampoo, the cracked plastic toys, the broken tubes of hair mousse, her mother’s plastic hair cap printed with bright yellow flowers. She put the combs and the brush aside in a heap. Way back in the cupboard there was a bottle with an inch of cherry cough syrup in the bottom. She drank most of it and then ran water in the bottle and shook it. She brought it out to the kitchen and gave it to Apitchi. He went quiet and began to drink the pinkish stuff with a greedy sob. Shawnee went back to the bathroom, dumped the trash out carefully onto the floor. She pawed through it and then jammed it back into the plastic bin.

She began to search all through the room that was part kitchen and part living room. She had looked all through that room before, but the find in the bathroom encouraged her. She opened the cupboard doors one by one. Easy to tell, of course, they were completely empty. But in a time past her remembering, someone had covered the shelves on the bottom with white paper, now yellowed and stained. When it occurred to Shawnee to lift those papers up, she found crumbs underneath or maybe they were crushed bugs but she did not care. She swept them carefully into a plastic bowl and then parceled them out into shallow coffee cups. Alice and Apitchi saw what she was doing and watched her. When the crumbs were evenly divided, each took a cup and then they went over to the blankets and carefully sat down. Quietly, intent, they wet their pointer fingers and then dipped into the crumbs. Put their fingers in their mouths. While they sucked on crumbs, Shawnee kept searching.

The refrigerator had not worked for some time and was used to store dishes and cereal and bread. There were only plates and cups in it now, a box of screws and some jar lids. Shawnee looked through the compartments and drawers anyway because her mother always hid treats so that the children wouldn’t eat them all at once, or sometimes because she’d bought herself a special little something. Shawnee was counting on her mother’s habit of stashing things away and forgetting where she put them. She opened pots, overturned empty cans, reached her hands into the creepy dark recesses under the sink and behind the stove. She unbent a clothes hanger and plucked at the catch on the rectangular hinged door beneath the oven until it opened. She stood on top of the counter and swept her hand carefully across the tops of the cupboards where she couldn’t see. There were no closets to look inside, but there was a rack by the door that held coats and sweaters. Boots, shoes, socks, and slippers were piled all around. She pushed them aside and it was here, rummaging through pockets, that she made a spectacular find. As soon as her hand closed on the bar of candy, she froze. She didn’t let the paper crackle. Alice and Apitchi were curled in the pile of blankets. Shawnee drew the bar out slowly until it nestled in her sleeve. If Apitchi had been crying again or Alice chewing on her hair, she might have kept it for herself. But when she turned, she saw that they were watching her with dull hope, so she slowly held it out.

They knew exactly when the oil ran out because it got so cold, so fast. Shawnee dressed Apitchi in everything that she could find for him to wear, and then she made Alice put on her leggings and three pairs of socks and snowsuit and packs. She got herself dressed, too, in every warm piece of clothing that she had. But it was a restless, unrelenting cold and it was late afternoon. If the bill was paid they could have used the stove, it was electric. They could have opened the oven and sat around it as they had done before. Or used the woodstove. They should have kept the woodstove. Shawnee’s grandfather had been angry when they took it out. Now it was dumped behind the house and covered with snow. The hole in the wall was still there, sealed over with an aluminum pie plate. Shawnee knew the old stovepipe was propped next to the back door. She went outside and tugged it out of the snow, then dragged it into the house. It wasn’t that heavy, it was a hollow of thin sheet metal. She stood on two chairs and ripped the pie plate off the wall. She had Alice steady the pipe as she fitted it into the hole. Twice it fell out of the wall before Shawnee thought to drag another chair underneath the bottom half. The pipe stayed, propped up.

Now the thing was to make a fire right underneath the stovepipe, without burning up the chair. It was an old metal chair but had a plastic seat and backrest. Cement blocks and boards made a shelf in one corner. Shawnee took four blocks and laid them out underneath the stovepipe. She took four more blocks and set them on top of those. The blocks were heavy. By the time she’d got them all set up she was warm in all her clothing, but she was also dizzy. She took a deep breath, went over to the stove, and removed the rack from the middle. There were two cookie sheets underneath the oven and she took those, too. She put the rack on the blocks and the cookie sheets over it, and said, “Now let’s get some paper and some wood.” Her voice surprised her. It was scratchy and cold as the air.

First she crushed up old papers and movie-star magazines. Then on top of that she put shredded cardboard and tiny sticks. She took a book of matches from where Mama kept them, a bowl on the counter out of Apitchi’s reach. She lighted the crumpled paper, and when the flames were long she added more strips of cardboard and thicker twigs that had been lying outdoors on top of the snow. But the snow was too deep to get bigger pieces of wood and the old wood pile had been used up in the summer. Shawnee cracked apart an old stool and dragged over a laundry basket full of wooden blocks that a church group had given them—all different colors. When the fire was hot enough, she fed first the pieces of the stool, then a block, another block, into the flames. She thought Apitchi might cry, for they were his blocks, but though he opened his mouth in distress no cry came out. He clung tight to Alice. Some of the smoke went up the chimney pipe and some collected over them, but they could breathe all right. There were a lot of blocks, there was another chair, a lamp base, birch-bark baskets that her mother had started but hadn’t yet finished to sell, other things that could be burned. Shawnee dragged all those things around them and then she got into the blankets with her brother and sister. The fire gave off enough warmth and they all fit underneath the bear robe.

2

“The dead are drinking here tonight,” said Ira as she joined the man at the table. They were in a town bar where the hard-drinking people went, a tough place where everyone looked up each time a new person entered from the icy street. The drinkers didn’t look away once the door shut and the blast of cold air was absorbed into the bar’s steamy atmosphere—they just kept watching emptily the way the dead stare. Ira looked right back at them and narrowed her eyes.

“I don’t feel like going home.”

“You feel like coming with me,” the man, who was not drunk, stated, “but you can’t because if you do, you will have to sleep on the other side of my wife.”

“Is she good-looking? Or is she ugly like you?” asked Ira, but she smiled to show she meant he was the opposite of ugly.

The people had turned away to resume their conversations, to drink or argue. Thirty or more sat scattered in the booths or at the tables, some in unzipped snowmobile suits or dressed in camou-flage hunting parkas. The man sitting beside Ira had given her the only friendly look in the place, so she’d sat down next to him.

“C’mon,” said Ira, smiling, “ugly like you?”

The man said with a kind of shy reluctance that his wife was beautiful, but for the scar on her lip. He passed his finger slantwise across his own mouth, and Ira remembered the woman he spoke of. Instead of mentioning her name, people often made a sign for her like that, and everybody knew who they meant.

“I’m almost beautiful, too,” said Ira. “I would be except for what’s in here.”

She tapped her breast over the heart, casually, then she took a drink of the beer that the man had just bought for her.

“Maybe you could clean that up,” the man suggested, nodding at that place Ira indicated.

“I’m trying to,” said Ira. “Alcohol kills germs.”

She took an abrupt swallow of her drink and tapped her face with her fingers. “I’m getting sterilized inside. You won’t catch anything from me.”

“Even if I did,” the man said, “my wife would cure it. She knows a lot of these old-time medicines?”

His voice rose as though he was asking a question of Ira, who nodded just as if she was giving a real answer to his question. She drank her beer, had another, and then one more. Now she was just drunk enough. She didn’t want to get any drunker, but she also did not want to get sober, not yet, not by any means. As she’d already said, she wasn’t ready to go home. She said it again in a vaguer, softer way than before.

“I’m not ready to go home.”

“Don’t say that around just anybody,” said the man, chiding her in a friendly way. “There’s dirty men in here.”

“Where, where,” said Ira, looking openly at the drinkers now. Their stares seemed comical. “I want a dirty man.

“But not that one,” she went on, following the chin-pointing nod of the man who was buying her drinks. “I’ve had him and he’s no good. His wife hired someone, maybe hired your own wife, to put a medicine upon his wiinag so it droops when he thinks of anyone but her.” She laughed and made a sad face as she held up her finger and then slowly curled it into her palm.

“I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want that, either.”

“What do you want?” asked the man.

“I want something else,” said Ira. “I definitely want something else.”

“Maybe you want spiritual help,” said the man.

Ira lowered her face and then cast her eyes up at him and shook her head back and forth.

“What are you doing in a bar, anyway?” she said. “What do you mean spiritual help? You don’t go talking about spiritual things when you’re drinking.”

“I do,” said the man. “I’m like that. Different because I know how to handle my drinking. Therefore, in a bar, I can talk of these things as though I was a regular person.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Ira, “you’re not a regular person. You’re a windigo. You’re made of ice inside. You turn your drinks to slush in your belly, then you try and offer me spiritual help and you say your wife is beautiful, she has a scarred lip, she knows medicine. There’s something not right about this conversation.”

Ira pushed her finger around the lip of her glass, then scooped up some foam. She stuck her finger in her mouth. Looking at him curiously, she continued. “You know what I mean? Something off.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said the man. “You’re a good-looking woman. You’ll get laid.”

“Any time I want,” said Ira, tossing her hair back, fluffing it with her hand like an old-time movie star, “I look in the mirror, don’t I? You should see me naked, but you never will. I’m so good-looking when I’m naked that it hurts to look at me. I have a painfully good-looking body that makes men beg like dogs. But you’ll never see it.”

“Another beer.” The man signaled.

“Thanks,” said Ira. “All the same, you’ll never see it. Just think. There you’ll be in the rest home. You open your mouth like a toothless old bird and they pour soup down your gullet through a funnel. You’ll be thinking to yourself, If only I’d seen her body, what she looked like under that sweater, that parka, those jeans. Maybe I could resign myself to drinking soup through a funnel. But no. You’ll always wonder.”

“I don’t need to see you that way, really,” said the man. “I can tell. Of course, to raise children right, your looks don’t matter.”

“You got that right,” said Ira, shifting in her chair, frowning at the black plastic ashtray, tipping it critically back and forth. “Kids, they don’t care. They think you’re beautiful anyway, no matter what. I should go home. That’s where my kids are. They’re sleeping anyway.”

“You hope.”

“Well, it’s cold. It’s very cold. They’re not going out of doors.”

“It is very bad, this cold.”

“This dry cold.”

“And it’s still going down.”

Now for a few moments neither did speak, as they were both caught up in their private worries and thoughts about the cold. The man knew his wife had the car and he hoped she would remember to start it in the middle of the night, otherwise the battery would go dead. In this kind of deep cold you had to run the car every four or six hours, unless you could plug it in someplace. He’d looked ahead. He had a heater for it because he really did work. Sometimes if you covered the hood up with blankets, to keep the wind off, that helped too. His wife also talked to the car, treated it like an animal and told it when it was going to be fed. Sometimes she was joking when she did that, sometimes she was serious. Sometimes she put tobacco down beside its wheels before a long, tough trip. She didn’t drink. The scar was put upon her face when she was just a little girl.

“I don’t know.” Ira was talking again. “I should have a reason. I just don’t want to go home. I don’t know how I would get there anyhow, through the bush. I got a ride into town, here, before I knew it was going to keep on getting colder and colder like this.”

“Maybe you should come home with me,” said the man in a transparently false tone of voice, “I was bullshitting you about my wife.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Well, I am pretty sure that she is at her sister’s with the kids and with the cold going deeper like this they will not be coming home. Do you want me to make a phone call?”

“I’m just that drunk I don’t have good judgment right now. Do you have an STD?”

“What’s that?”

“Oh right, your wife and her medicine. I’m just sure she fixed it,” said Ira. “Where do you live anyway?”

It seemed to Ira that she knew where he lived, that she’d heard about him. Something more than that scar was familiar about his wife, too, but she couldn’t put the story together.

“I live just outside town here. I work at the electric plant. I got my own house through the housing board.” The man sounded dreamy now. “It’s a three bedroom and it came to us already half assembled. They drove it up to the lot in two pieces, wrapped in plastic. Then they took the plastic off and set the halves down and fit them together. When we walked inside, the rooms already had their cupboards, toilets, everything. It was a miracle.”

The man was solemn, remembering the day that the house arrived. Ira laughed. “Cheap miracle. A prefab. My father built our house by hand.”

“All they had to do was hook up the plumbing, the electric, the gas.”

“You might be contented,” said Ira. “I wouldn’t be. I’m looking for something else.”

The young man now laughed. “How long have you said that,” he asked, “how many times to a guy in a bar? I’m a little different because I can live with my habit, controlled drinking. You’re getting drunk though.”

“And you’re helping me.” Ira pointed at him and squinted along her finger. “You are an enabler. That is what I call you.”

“Why do we do this, oh why do we do this,” said the man, a false pathos in his voice at which the two of them laughed in a slightly overanimated way that made them both know they were attractive to each other, and that they were thinking about what might happen.

“I suppose your wife, with all of her medicines, she has a theory on why.”

“Yes she does, it’s an elegant theory. She’s a social worker and she sees all that people do. Her theory? It’s called sheer stupidity.”

“You met her in a bar?”

“No, at a ceremony.”

Ira slapped the table lightly.

“There you go again referring to spiritual things in a bar. You can either be a drunk or a spiritual person. Not both if you’re an Indian. I’m sorry. That’s the way it is.”

“Who said?”

“Oh, come on,” Ira looked around the bar, as though someone might be listening in, “the Shawnee prophet. You ever heard of the Shawnee prophet? That’s who said.”

The man looked down at his hands, at his beer, which he had drunk too quickly.

“I suppose I am no better than you.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” said Ira. “If you’re here, you’ve made a choice. That choice is not to be spiritual. That choice is to be like me.”

The man now turned and looked at her for a long time. He was in his early thirties and she in her late twenties. Their hair was identical, a dull and wavy black, and his was longer, tied in a ponytail with a band of black elastic. Ira’s hair was springy and thick. She pushed it back behind her ears, but her ears were small and flat so the hair kept falling back in wiry tendrils around her face. She was lucky, she knew, to have the face she had. It could be worse. A round face with small, clever, up-slanting features. Someone had called her mouth passionate—not that she had big pouty zhaaginaash lips—her upper lip was straight across. But it curved in an arc as though a man had pushed against it with his teeth. Although she’d had three children, and ate cheap, starchy, greasy food, her body was still young and slender. Maybe her eyes, deep and smoky black, carried a wounded look in them. Maybe she was just confused because of the beers and the uncertainty about returning home. Her wants conflicted. She wanted this man to bring her home, but that was twenty miles, so she needed for him to have a working car and take her there. But first, she needed to buy food. She had already arranged for a delivery of fuel, but that would be tomorrow. At the same time, she wanted to stay here, suspended. Like one of those bugs trapped in plastic for a souvenir, she thought, looking at the light in the warm color of her beer. Halfway drunk forever. Not yet sloppy, but not back there, either, in the sober gray static. She supposed that she was desperate.

“Objectively speaking,” she whispered, knowing the man would bend closer to hear, “I shouldn’t have left them in this cold. But the only way I could get some money was if I came to town.”

“How,” said the man, “and where?”

“Here,” she said, calmly. “I came here to sell my body to the highest bidder. The truth is my kids need some food, the house needs heating oil. My oldest, she’s nine. They’re okay for a little while. So listen, niiji, if you don’t have the money, if you can’t pay, tell me now so I quit wasting my time on you.”

He stared at her with his mouth a little open.

“I’m just kidding,” said Ira. “Thanks for the beers.”

As she wasn’t kidding at all, she got up. She stuffed her gloves in her purse. She zipped up her thin black parka and put up the pointed hood. Her face was surrounded by bristles of cheap black fur.

“Wait,” said the man, “I can’t just let you go like that. We should walk down to the gas station, get some food. I have this much.” He took a ten-dollar bill from one pocket, fished a five from the other. “And I do not even have to see your naked gleaming body. We can get some milk and bread at the gas station. Peanut butter. If what you say is true, if your children are out there, then we get my brother to give you a ride to your place. Once there, you put your kids to bed and then deliver yourself to our lust.”

Ira looked at him and raised her eyebrows, two clean black arches.

“Just a joke,” said the young man.

“What’s your name?” said Ira.

“John,” he said.

“And your brother?”

“Morris.” Then in Ojibwe. “Ma’iingan izhinikaazo. He is named for the wolf.”

“Your brother shouldn’t have that name,” Ira said as she followed him out the door.

She watched him walk ahead of her. His hair hung long down his back and he adjusted a heavy skinning knife at his belt. He wore a heavier parka than she owned, and good leather boots. So maybe his story about the job, the house in two pieces, the wife, maybe all of that was true. She had persevered in the tribe’s social service agency all day filling applications for emergency heating oil. Before she left home that morning, she’d cooked up a pot of oatmeal. She thought of her daughter, who was named for the Shawnee prophet like her cousin and great-aunt, so many in her family. Ira thought what a practical girl her Shawnee was, how she’d take the younger two and put them to bed, and then would crawl in next to them for warmth. They’d be sleeping by now, underneath all of the quilts and blankets, curled in the skin of the bear her father had shot. She would be back with the food before they woke, and the delivery truck was on its way. So she followed the man with the ma’iingan brother.

3

Shawnee stared into the fire for a while, then suddenly she was so comfortable that she went directly into a sleeping dream where everything that just happened was a dream and her mother was shaking her and saying, “Wake up, wake up,” and when she did wake up she saw that the half-made baskets piled next to the makeshift fireplace were blazing. The fire had already spread over to the trash can just under the window. Shawnee blinked as the curtains burst into light. Then the fire licked here and there like a tongue. Alice woke up and the two girls tried to throw cups of water on the flames, but the water only trickled out of the tap, which was already blocked with ice. Still, the fire gave them time. They took all they could outdoors. The fire ate into the walls and then pulled itself under the roof until it found a way to push an arm of flame into the air. The children stepped back, and back again, then sank again into their blankets and huddled in the bearskin. There were blasts and balls of exploding shimmers and then the blaze attained a steady roar. It was warm in the blankets. I shouldn’t sleep, Shawnee thought, but she found herself curling around Alice, who held Apitchi tight against her, and then she closed her eyes.

When they woke the flames were low and the sky was still dark. Somebody must have seen it, Shawnee thought. If we stay here they’ll find us. So they edged closer, and closer, as the house cooled, but it was still dark outside when the house no longer gave enough warmth. They were standing in the ashes by then and were covered in black soot. Apitchi whimpered in a low, despairing, birdlike voice. Alice was silent. Her eyes were wide and glittered with black frost. They couldn’t get warm. Their nearest neighbor was six miles down the road. Three miles if you cut through the woods. Although it had just snowed, the old snow was crusted hard enough to hold them, Shawnee thought. So she tied Apitchi onto her back with a long, knitted scarf. Then she walked into the woods. Her feet sank through the snow about three inches, then found the hard pack. She broke the trail. Alice followed in her steps.

At first they could see by the starlight reflected on the snow. Then, where the pines grew thick, Shawnee couldn’t see at all. The children walked in a liquid black ice, knocking into trees and snapping sharp fir branches. “Alice, hold my parka,” said Shawnee, but she felt her sister’s grip weakening. “Hold my parka,” she screamed, shaking Alice. The grip desperately tightened. Apitchi was a block on her back. She kept shifting him to keep her balance. The snow was softer underneath the pine trees and from time to time they floundered and fell, but always righted themselves at last and went on, weaker, colder. It would happen a little bit at a time this way, Shawnee thought, and finally they would not get up at all. The thought made her pedal her legs with more force and drag Alice with her and so they went on, forward, she thought. She didn’t know anymore. She wasn’t like some kids who stayed in the house. She went outside a lot. Played all day in the woods and never got lost. But she’d never been out in the dark and in the cold like this. She thought her feet were frozen, maybe. She couldn’t feel them. Alice had good boots. She thought that maybe Apitchi was frozen dead, too. But she did not stop. The force of her own wanting to live drove through her. Something passed through her in the dark that was darkness also. She knew that she would keep walking and she’d drag her sister and her brother too. She fell asleep walking once, and then woke, pulled her sister’s jacket, dragging her along. They would not get away from her. She wouldn’t stop. And she kept on thinking that until the snow gave way beneath them.

4

At the lighted gas stop, Ira bought fifteen dollars worth of groceries—bread, peanut butter, milk, applesauce, macaroni. The man paid and Ira took the bag. Walking back outside, they hunched over, stabbed with cold.

“Gisina,” he said.

“I gotta get home now,” said Ira. “You take me.”

“I told you I can’t, we get my brother and he takes you in his truck, remember?”

“I remember it,” said Ira as they ducked along the edge of the road, hunched against the cold. “But I think I would rather go with you if you could take me. I don’t know about your brother as I’ve never met him. Your brother is a stranger to me.”

“Morris, he’s okay.” In his voice there was something else, too, and Ira’s mind grabbed onto it.

“What,” she said, “what about him?”

But they were at the house. It was very close to the gas station. The man’s brother lived in town, in a house Ira had never before noticed, which in itself was odd, the never having noticed a house in a place so small that everything was seen many times. Now the brown-board one-story house stood out. It felt to Ira like the house had suddenly been put there, as in a dream. They walked through unbroken snow up to the door, which was clawed by animals and jimmied around the knob. As they stood before the door waiting for the brother to answer, Ira’s throat tightened and she realized that even in the cold she was sweating lightly. The sweat was freezing in a sheen of ice on her brow. She wanted to turn and run away but John held the groceries. So she stood there, and when the door opened with a fierce shake, as it was stuck, she flinched and stepped back. Then she was pulled or propelled into a dark, close, rank den of a place. The two men went into another room and talked and made some deal, apparently, because when John returned, he gave Ira the groceries.

“I have to go, really, because my wife will be needing me.”

“Please.”

“I am who I said I was. I am not any different than that. I am not a bad person.”

“But your brother is.”

His eyes shifted away.

“Not always,” he said. And then Ira was alone with the brother who bumped around in the half-dark getting dressed to go outside.

“Morris,” she called out. “So chi miigwech for giving me the ride back to my kids. They shouldn’t be out there alone.”

“They shouldn’t be out there,” he agreed. His voice was gravelly, harsh maybe, but at least he said something to her. And he did seem to be getting ready to go. “I don’t mind. We have to start my truck though and she’s a bitch in this cold.”

“Okay,” said Ira, clutching the bag. She was encouraged and felt easier. She didn’t look at the brother directly, but stole small glances in the dim light. He was tall and rangy, with a lean, hungry-looking face, powerful shoulders and a bony, jutting nose. She couldn’t see his eyes, but when they went out the door she finally caught a glimpse, then wished she hadn’t. His eyes were bugged out, big and staring, white all around the black pebble of the iris. He looked like a man scared permanently out of his wits.

“Don’t mind it,” he said, as he noticed how Ira went very quiet getting into the truck. “I got this sickness where I can’t ever shut my eyes.”

He frowned, jiggled the key softly, then bent to the wheel in concentration and tried to get the engine to turn over. “C’mon, c’mon,” he said, “ninimoshe, c’mon baby.” He cranked the engine and each time gave a squirt of gas; he had some method by which he slowly brought the frozen block to life, but it took a while and in that time Ira began to know something. There grew in her a feeling that her children weren’t all right, they weren’t asleep. Hungry, well, she knew that already. She began to think that she should have taken them along with her to town because at least they could have crashed someplace together, somebody’s couch. Now their situation was not good; she could feel it in her gut, a crawling sensation that made her act desperately. Later, she regretted very much that she put her hand out, touching Morris. At the time she even knew it was wrong, because he looked at her as the engine groaned. Even though his face was dark in shadow, the whites of his eyes gleamed out, and there was something awful in his look.

“Gegaa, gegaa,” he shouted, and then, at last, the motor caught with a roar and the cab shuddered. Morris whooped and pounded the wheel. He was sort of too excited, thought Ira, as though he was on some drug, but maybe it was for his eyes. He could be on some medication. Morris backed the truck from the snowy yard and said, “Which way?”

“I live out by the border at the old treaty signing.”

“Way out there!” Morris marveled as they pulled into the road. “You guys are true-life bush Indians.”

“My dad was. He still hunted and trapped all year but there wasn’t a living in it. He has died since.”

“You got a job?” Morris’s eye rolled wildly at her and he grinned, his teeth big and sharp in the dashboard’s reflected lights.

“I did until my dad went, then I didn’t have no one to take care of my kids. So I get by, you know, I sell my beadwork and stuff. If I moved into town, I guess I could do pretty well.”

“Oh, I’d say,” but when he looked sideways at her, Ira thought he meant something else.

“Not that way,” she stated, without laughing. Now was when she began to wish she hadn’t touched him.

Morris gave a little hoot. As the heat came on, the cab of his truck began to smell like blood.

“You hunt yourself?” said Ira.

“Do I hunt myself ?” Morris asked. “I’d like to see that.”

“I mean, do you hunt, just hunt?”

Morris didn’t answer, so Ira said, “You can’t shut your eyes for real?”

“Yeah. They will not close. I put drops in. Take the wheel.”

He quit steering and Ira slid over beside him to keep them from going in the ditch. He plucked a little squeeze bottle from his breast pocket and tipped back his head. “Ah,” he screwed the top on the bottle, dropped it back in his pocket, took the wheel with one hand. He grabbed Ira with the other and hauled her close to him. “I liked that.” The truck swerved.

“You got to keep both hands on the driving,” she said, unhooking his arm from around her shoulders. She slid back to her side of the truck. “Look, it’s iced up bad out there. Really, it’s very dangerous.” The road was plowed recently enough so that beneath the new and fluffy snow there was a hard, slick finish. “The conditions are definitely no good. Hey,” she tried to shift the mood. “How do you sleep?”

“I never do sleep,” said Morris. “That’s why I’m crazy.”

“You don’t seem too crazy,” Ira said.

“The VA sent me everywhere, all around the world, I been to Singapore. They couldn’t do shit. I can’t have sunlight or any light. Mostly I live inside listening to TV. Tapes. I got a million tapes. Cassette tapes. Nobody wants their cassette tapes anymore. The church gives ’em to me. People give ’em to me. I sit indoors and listen. So I know everything. All there is to know. It’s all on tapes. It comes through my ears.” He tapped the side of his head.

His ears look normal, Ira thought.

“My brother is the good talker. He’s the one who charms the ladies. He told me all about you.”

“What about your tapes? What are your tapes about?”

“Every kind of music, you would not believe. I got opera tapes which I can’t make out the language, Mötley Crüe tapes, George Michael, every C-and-W tape there is or was. I got classical music tapes however I don’t like to read the labels as it hurts my eyes, so I can’t tell you who is who by name. There is this one guy I listen to all the time, the fucker plays like his hands are on fire. And books, every book. Everything from horror books to spiritual messages. This one I had on before I left, I got the whole set of wisdom. Listen to this one,” Morris spoke slowly and carefully. “‘If anyone were to ask life over a thousand years, why are you alive? The only reply could be—I live so that I may live. Life lives from its own foundation and rises out of itself.’ How about that?”

As they bounced along Morris steered the truck, slowly, carefully.

“A guy wrote that in the twelfth century A.D.”

“If somebody asked me over a thousand years,” Ira said, cold inside, “I would say I live because my children need me.”

“Yeah,” said Morris. “That’s what my brother said. He told me all about how you needed money.”

“I don’t need it all that bad anymore,” Ira said. “I only got to last until tomorrow.”

“Well, I got money,” said Morris. “I got quite a bit of money. On me. And I don’t ever get a chance to be with a woman. I can’t go in bars.”

Now Ira knew why her throat clenched, why she’d been afraid. She knew why John had delivered her to his ma’iingan brother.

“If you have so much money,” she said, her voice rising too high, “why don’t you buy CDs?”

“Well, I have them too, and a player, of course. But I like listening to tapes for some reason. The assortment, I guess, and they’re free. My house is a grab bag of tapes. Powwow tapes. Poetry tapes. The most beautiful stories in the language. Ira, listen to this,” Morris’s voice rose high, almost a wail. “‘It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal.’ What about that? Fitzgerald. I wish I could stop this truck,” said Morris. “I wish that I could kiss you.”

“No,” said Ira, “I got to get back to my kids.”

“Well, I think this is a rare healing moment, and a kiss”—Morris slowed the truck until it crawled—“that won’t take a few seconds. A kiss is an efficacious drug. It might change my life.” The truck stopped, idling. Morris turned to her and the light played up in his eyes so they flashed and burned. “Please,” he said, putting the truck in park. Ira didn’t move. “You want me to start the truck moving?” They sat suspended, breathing, looking at each other.

“You’re pretty,” said Morris. His voice was low. He was choking on his breath. “Want me to start the truck?”

“Yes,” Ira said.

“C’mere then.”

She slid across to him in a trance of fear, but when he did not move toward her but only sat very still, something else happened. She put her hands over his eyes. He seemed to be holding his breath now, even trembling a little. He wasn’t going to hurt her, she realized. She kissed his mouth, and his foot pressed the gas pedal involuntarily, so it roared with a human sound. He laughed sheepishly and said, “I guess that tells you how I feel.” His breath was surprisingly sweet and his face smelled like soap. Still, underneath that, the truck smelled of blood. He leaned back into the seat like he was fainting a little. She kissed him again. Then she took her hands off his eyes and got back on her side of the cab. He sat up, stared forward, then pressed the gas pedal slowly and shifted evenly so there was no sudden jolt. They went along in silence.

“You do love your children, don’t you,” he said.

“Yes,” said Ira.

“But that second kiss,” Morris said. “Was it maybe personal?”

Ira said nothing, just pointed out the many small drifts on the road. Morris concentrated, slowing now, very cautious. When the driving was smoother he put his hand in his pocket and pulled something out and slid it across the seat.

“You take this.”

It was a wad of money.

“No,” Ira said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

“Please keep it,” Morris said, in a formal voice. “I feel dishonorable. Anyway, I got to get us to your place and return home by sunup. Morning light hurts my eyes very bad, I might need a pain pill, though I’m trying to get off those things. In the full sun I’ll get sick. I maybe could go blind. Things are going bad for me. Yesterday I head-butted a mirror. Then I cut my feet bad walking in the bits. I scored my knuckles with a knife, cutting cabbage for a soup. I had to go to the emergency and get everything sewed up and there’s still frozen blood all over in here; I guess I was hunting myself.”

“You don’t have a bandage on.”

“I don’t care to have one.”

He put his hand in the dash light’s glow and she saw black stitches running down between his fingers. His hand looked like a paw.

“You shouldn’t go slamming your face at mirrors,” she said.

“They give me the creeps. The Chinese believe you shouldn’t ever have one facing your bed or your soul might crawl out of your body at night and slip into the mirror.”

“Oh,” said Ira, startled, “I sort of believe that too.” Then she was watchful. “We’re almost at the turnoff. Slow down.” She helped him steer and they bumped down the awkwardly plowed road until they came to the place where Ira’s house was. The dark was lifting only slightly and at first she couldn’t see past the headlamp’s arc. So she couldn’t tell what had happened until the truck got close to the black and delicately smoking foundation.

5

Shawnee pulled herself out of her body and went up into the trees. At first she was frightened by the lightness, the drifting. She clung to her brother and sister and they came up with her. They were made of ash, black reeds, soot, a powder of loneliness, smoke. They held one another, but they couldn’t speak or cry out. They were in blackness so deep that they did not know where it stopped or where they started. There were tiny blue flashes of light. Strings of electricity pulled snapping out of the air. They could hear things, just as they had before, though the reference between sound and object was fading. The wind rushed in the heavy branched pines. There was the hushed question of an owl. Then just the sound, and not the bird.

Jostling lightly as they moved along the branch, they made a sound like the scrape of dry twigs. Their heads were bowls. Air flowed through the hollows of their curved, black ribs. In the deep eyeholes, fragments of ice gleamed. When one of them bent the branch too far and fell, they found they could hang in the air. Awkwardly, slowly increasing their skill, they figured out how to maneuver from one tree to the next. Jerky and tentative at first, then launching themselves with increasing grace and ease, they traveled. But they kept returning to the tree, the shapes underneath. Those shapes drew them. They cocked their black skulls, and the ice in the eye sockets gleamed with raw curiosity.

Shawnee woke up in the dark. The sound of drumming would not let her sleep, although she wanted to. She had finally gotten comfortable, so comfortable. Her dream was dark and fantastic. Nothing hurt. But the drum was loud, insistent, a full noise that made her jumpy inside. She lifted her head and shook off the snow. That sound was coming from just outside of the ditch. A fast, rolling beat. It drew her staggering to her feet. On her back, nestled close in the shell of nylon and down, her brother stirred. Alice didn’t move, but Shawnee lifted her anyway, dragged her by her hood and her hair. The drum grew louder, showing a way out, beating her around a tree and then a rock and over solid ground, all in the dark. Roused by the drum whenever she almost quit, Shawnee went on until she bumped flat into a wall. She moved along it and felt a window. She beat on the glass so hard with mitted and frozen fists that it shattered, and then she bawled like a little dog right outside the door.

6

Morris found the pile of blankets and stepped into the tumbled ash and debris of what had been the house. He put his arms around Ira and lifted her out. He shook her and kept talking to her until finally she could hear him. She grabbed his hand.

“Bernard’s place,” she said, understanding that Morris had found signs of her children. “They might of took the woods.”

By the time Ira and Morris reached the house, it was light out and they saw the tribal ambulance team was already pulled up in the plowed drive. They ran, stumbling. The children were in back, wrapped in heated blankets. The EMT showed them to Ira, but when they stared at her their eyes looked frozen. She kneeled in the rescue truck, waiting for them to blink or move. When they slowly closed their eyes she grabbed for them, but they were all right, just falling asleep. The EMT told Morris to get in front because of his eye condition, then he told Ira she couldn’t ride with her children, but had to follow with Bernard. There wasn’t any room for her and they had to keep these children stable, he said, though really, it looked as though they’d all come through it.

“They were dressed pretty decent anyway, it saved them. I don’t think they’re even gonna lose their hands or feet.”

“Their ears and noses look okay too. And they kept a core temp. Don’t listen to Bug,” said the other EMT. “Of course they’re not gonna lose something. Make old Bernard crank the heat up and you follow us. We will not speed but we’ll keep the light on and hit the siren if anybody gets in our way.”

Morris sat in front, strapped in, with gauze packs on his eyes, dripping saline.

“Reach behind that bandage and put those drops in, Popeye,” said the driver.

“Popeye?” said Ira.

“Nickname,” said Morris.

Then they were off; Ira and Bernard followed along in his truck. Her head was tucked down. She was breathing in a panicked way, moaning a little with each breath. Bernard drove steadily along behind the ambulance, his tough old hands out of their gloves, gripping the wheel. He wore a plaid parka and a gray hat with padded flaps. He kept his eyes on the back of the ambulance, frowning in concentration. The wind was up, blowing the snow in snake swirls across the road. The cab of the truck finally began to warm.

“That’s Chook’s son, Morris,” he said, jutting his chin at the ambulance. “Ma’iingan. He can’t see nothing. Legally, he’s blind.”

“Well he drove me to the house. It’s burnt down. Just ashes there.”

Bernard looked over quickly at her. He hadn’t known this.

“That’s why your kids come through the woods.”

“I went to the agency for emergency fuel, some groceries.”

Bernard could smell the smoke and stale booze on his old friend’s daughter. He knew she had done some partying, too. He didn’t ask, or speak of it. He listened to her tell him about the people at the office and how the fuel truck would get out there later this morning and there wouldn’t be a gas tank or a house to heat. She said that she could pick up a box of commodities at any time that day. She could have yesterday but didn’t have a ride.

“I’ll pick it up and have it at the hospital for you. They will keep your kids a few days, I bet. How come you never called me? I could have given you a ride.”

“I didn’t have no phone. I just went out to the road and waited and hitched in. Once I was there, I never thought of you, but I could of gone over to the hospital and caught you when you got off.”

If you weren’t drinking, Bernard thought, but he just shrugged.

“Well, I had a day shift for once, lucky thing. I was home because of it. And Morris, he got you out there somehow. And your kids made it, safe.”

Ira’s face was wet. Tears were leaking from her eyes now and her nose was running. It wasn’t the pain from thawing out her hands and feet.

“I’m not a bad mom. I had a few drinks,” she said. “I was gonna…well, I did get some food off Morris’s brother. Then he dropped me off with Morris. I knew there was something wrong.”

“They said it was close,” Bernard said. “Your kids were going hypothermic when they got to my house. Those emergency guys hooked your kids up right away to their warm IVs and got their temperatures regulated. That girl of yours, that Shawnee, she’s a strong one.”

“You got it,” said Ira.

“Something else,” said Bernard.

“What?” said Ira. Now that she was getting warm, now that the blood was swelling painfully in her hands and feet, she fought sleep. She was sinking into it, leaning against the seat-belt strap. Her head lolled down; she jolted herself upward.

“She said that she heard the drum,” Bernard said. “She said the drum told her where to go. It was pitch-black in the woods. My lights were out. She found me anyway.”

“So you were up at night, drumming in the dark, having your own little powwow,” Ira mumbled, dropping into sleep. She began to breathe deep and light.

“No,” said Bernard to himself, after a while. “No, I wasn’t. That drum is still covered up in the corner, where it always sits. I was asleep when they broke my window.”

7

A hospital is a world apart, running day and night by its own rules. Ira had stayed in the hospital for only a short time when her children were born. Her father had been in the hospital a few weeks but then he died at home. She hadn’t ever stayed overnight with him. So the way things worked at the Indian Health Service hospital was new to her. The first day passed in getting the children settled, in watching them, talking to the doctors, calibrating each step of their recovery. That night, Ira fell asleep on a plastic recliner in her daughters’ room. The chair was slippery and hard but reclined at a good angle. She’d certainly slept in worse places. The next morning, she woke stiff and sore, but that could have been from running through the snowy woods. Shawnee and Alice were in a double room and Alice still had the IV drip with the plastic catheter taped fast to the back of her hand. She was too weak to use the bathroom and the nurses had fixed an overnight diaper onto her, which humiliated her. She wouldn’t speak. She lay very still with her eyes shut, pretending to be unconscious. During the night, Ira had risen every time the nurses had come in to check the children. They used a finger tube to read their respiratory rates and oxygen levels. They checked pulse, temperature, and blood pressure. After she was sure that the nurses were satisfied, she had gone into Apitchi’s room. He had a fever. She had dragged her pillow and blanket in and stayed with him for half the night in a chair identical to the one in her daughters’ room.

Ira knew or was related to some of the nurses who had trained on special IHS scholarships and then come back home. One, her cousin Honey, had always said that she was going to be a nun, but ended up as a nurse. She was a strict Catholic. As Ira helped Honey and the other nurses tend to one and another of her children, they talked to her and got the story. No one blamed her outright. But the Indian Child Welfare was going to conduct an interview with her, no question, and then speak separately with each of her children. The head of that department had scheduled a case worker from ICW to come by the hospital.

Honey brought fresh clothes, and Ira showered in the bare tile bathroom next to Shawnee’s bed. The water washed down black at first, and Ira remembered the soot and it seemed very long ago. She turned the water up as hot as she could stand it. There was a big plastic bottle of all-over body-wash shampoo fixed to the wall of the shower. She used a lot of it, and then stood under the hot dribble like a grateful dog, she thought, just like a grateful animal. The bathroom was full of steam as she dried off with a tiny, thin hand towel. She hadn’t wanted to ask about getting a real bath towel. She skimmed her hair back in a ponytail and checked her purse, but she didn’t put on makeup. Looking plain was good, she thought. She never could look good again. She would never leave her children for a minute.

Once she was clean, it felt like she really lived at the hospital now. She still felt fuzzy—too much had happened. She wished she had a cup of coffee. A woman came into the girls’ room. She carried a briefcase and held a clipboard, and she wore a full-length down coat, mukluks, and St. James Bay woolen mitts. Looking straight at her, Ira’s heart jumped. It was the wife of John, the woman with the neat white scar that cut across her lips. Her name surged into Ira’s mind. “Seraphine!”

“Yes, boozhoo! We’re getting a blizzard sometime today,” she informed Ira. “We’re really lucky it wasn’t yesterday.”

Ira was glad she’d said we; it would have been an accusation if she’d said you. Seraphine left the room and Ira followed her silently, numb in her thoughts. They went down the hall and entered a little office with a wall of gray shelves and cabinets, stacks of papers and boxes of tongue depressors and rubber gloves. A dead computer and a fake plant were on the desk.

“Let’s just squeeze in here, it’s private,” said Seraphine.

There was a padded desk chair and metal folding chair. Seraphine swept her hand at them both and let Ira choose where to sit. Ira took the metal folding chair.

“Now let’s go over things,” Seraphine said. There was a pen chained to the top of her clipboard. A tribal ID hung from her neck on a bright pink, canvas ribbon. Her dress was stone gray with soft little sage-green flowers on it. Seraphine’s face was extraordinarily beautiful, finely made, a haughty Michif face. Her skin was the pale gold color that white people broil themselves on tanning machines to achieve. John was right, thought Ira, his wife is very good-looking. He had also said that she knew medicines, and Ira wondered if she would act all spiritual. But Seraphine was quietly matter-of-fact.

“First of all,” she said, after she had confirmed Ira’s basic information, “what are you now doing for a living?”

“I sew a lot. Quilts and powwow outfits. And I bead. I had a thousand-dollar men’s fancy regalia burn up with my house,” Ira said, remembering and missing, as she would now for years, something lost in the fire.

“That’s a chancy living.”

“True.”

“I think I saw one of your bead yokes—I know your style.”

“All my dad’s things are gone now, too,” Ira went on, and a strange feeling overtook her momentarily. Those things that had burned were all that her father had left behind in his life. Now there was nothing to remember him by but his grave. “Oh, no,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” Ira touched her face.

“Tell me what happened the day before yesterday,” said Seraphine. “Can you explain why your children were left alone for an extended period? I have to set this down in my report, so take it slow.”

“They weren’t alone,” said Ira, “they were with Shawnee.”

“Shawnee is a minor. The law says you can’t leave your children with a minor overnight. Of course, you’re under tribal jurisdiction, but the judge usually upholds the same standard.”

“I didn’t know it was against the law.”

“Have you done this often?”

“Never, no, maybe once. This was an emergency. I went to the office to get some heating assistance and a food voucher or whatever. You can ask the personnel, Itchy Boyer, some others. I hitched in but I had trouble getting a ride back.”

Seraphine made some notes on her pad of paper, then rested her clipboard on her knees.

“Look,” she said, “I know all about it. John told me.”

Heat flooded Ira’s face. How much was told? What had John said?

“Morris gave me a ride out to my place.”

“And John and you walked to Morris’s place.”

Ira hesitated. “Yeah.”

Seraphine frowned at her paper, then shook her pen to get the ink to flood into the tip.

“Hey,” said Ira suddenly. “I met John at a bar, but he was only interested in getting me to Morris’s place. He gave me money for groceries.”

Ira rubbed her hands together. Her skin was tender.

“Okay,” Seraphine said, writing down some words. “So far your stories match.” She was only joking, and she smiled as she wrote, but Ira felt her throat go dry and scratchy. If Seraphine wrote up a bad report on her, what? Could they take her children? Her breath snagged in her chest. Seraphine kept talking. “So you met John at a bar and he gave you money for groceries and then left you over at Morris’s house.”

Ira nodded. The red cotton placket-front blouse she was wearing, the too large bra, the baggy black pants, and the hospital slippers made her feel poor and beggarly. But I am poor and beggarly, she thought. Everything I have is burnt. She remembered Shawnee’s school pictures. Her breath caught. And now this woman is going to ask me if I had sex to get the money. But I can honestly tell her that I did not, though I would have, but would have doesn’t matter. And Morris can tell her, too.

“Morris knows,” Ira blurted.

“Morris knows what?”

“I’m really tired,” said Ira, wiping her hand across her face. “Can I go back to my kids? I lost my daughter’s school pictures in the fire.”

“I just have a few more questions.”

Ira leaned across the desk, put her head on her fist. “Okay.”

But Seraphine didn’t ask about why John gave her money or why Morris gave her a ride. She was more interested in where Ira thought she might stay while she applied for emergency housing and got on the waiting list for permanent housing.

“I don’t know yet,” said Ira.

“Well, you’ve got to find somewhere,” said Seraphine. “We can put you and your children in the women’s shelter for a month, maybe, starting in a couple of weeks, but before that we’d have to put them in foster care and you, I don’t know…” She touched the scar on her lips.

“I’ll find a place,” Ira said. “Bernard maybe. He might let us stay with him. I don’t know. It’s pretty far out there.”

“That’s a problem.” Seraphine nodded. “You with no transportation. I’m going to ask your daughters some questions now. I need to find out how the fire started.”

And do you need to check my story out, Ira wondered, see if they saw me getting high on drugs or I beat them up or fucked Morris on the living room rug while they were eating breakfast, not that we have a rug anymore, or a living room, and the whole thing that started it was there was only breakfast, only oatmeal.

“Okay,” said Ira. “You go talk to them.”

Ira went back to Apitchi’s room. He was hot, limp, in a very deep sleep. He didn’t stir when Ira kissed his forehead. Ira peered closely at him. Then she pushed the nurse’s call button and went out the door.

“There’s something wrong with him,” she said to a nurse. “Come in here. Please. You’ve got to get the doctor to look at him. There’s something wrong.”

“We’ve got a chest X ray ordered,” said the nurse, brushing past her, “and we’ll probably get him on IV antibiotics. The doctor was here while you were gone and they think he maybe has pneumonia. It’s probably pneumonia,” the nurse said, as though that was reassuring. “Do you want to help me,” she said, seeing that Ira looked stunned, eyes filling with tears, “do you want to help me get him ready for the X ray?”

Ira nodded and tucked his blanket in around his feet.

“We can wheel him out,” the nurse said.

Ira kept her hand on Apitchi’s head as they made their way down the hall. His hair was rough, thick, and matted. They had given him a sponge bath but there was still soot behind his ears, she saw, and a black line at his hairline, and soot in the corners of his nose. He didn’t smell like ash, though, she thought, bending over to kiss him again as the elevator took them down. He smelled like a little boy. He was named Apitchi for the robin that made its nest just over the door and raised its babies the summer she was pregnant. Alice was named for her mother and Shawnee for the prophet. Ira’s father had been religious, he had named them with spirit names, too, and he had brought Ira back from the Cities when her husband left her. He had helped her obtain a legal divorce and he had given them all of his veteran’s pension money and his social security.

They went down to the X-ray room. Ira had to stand behind a lead shield. Apitchi was shrinking, she thought, into his sleep. But the nurse assured her that she’d seen plenty of children with pneumonia and every one of them had gotten well.

Once Apitchi was settled back in his room and got his antibiotics, Ira thought she’d better go back and see the girls. Shawnee was sitting up in bed when Ira entered the room. Her hands were wound in soft clubs of gauze and she was trying to work the remote control on the television. The TV was suspended between the girls, opposite them on the wall.

“Here,” said Ira, taking the remote control, “what do you want?”

Shawnee looked fixedly at the screen and shrugged.

“Alice?” Ira was carefully pressing channels.

Alice frowned at the television. They let their mother flip through the channels, twice over. Finally Alice raised her arm, the one without the IV. “I want that one.”

“Okay.” Ira put down the remote control and sat next to Shawnee, but Shawnee said, “Mom, could you get off the bed? I need to lay down.” Ira got up and helped arrange the covers over her. Shawnee’s feet were bandaged, too.

“How do they feel?” said Ira.

“Bad,” said Shawnee.

“Can I do anything?”

Shawnee stared briefly at her mother, then looked away. It seemed to Shawnee that she had been on a long trip, that she had gone somewhere far away and her mother was left behind. Her mother was back in a place where nothing had happened to Shawnee, but in truth everything had happened. She had been to the edge of life. Apitchi and Alice had gone there too. Shawnee had dragged her brother and her sister back. She hadn’t allowed them to die. Or herself, either. Now that she was back on this earth, she was lonely. She wanted someone to say to her, Shawnee, you saved them. Not to look at her with eyes that said, You burnt the house down.

Ira put her hand out to stroke Shawnee’s hair, but Shawnee jerked her head away from her mother’s touch without taking her eyes from the television screen. Ira sat down and put her hands in her lap and pretended to watch a man coaxing an alligator from its underwater den. She was wondering if Seraphine had told her children something that set their minds against her, or if they were mad at all, but maybe just surprised to be in a hospital. She thought that she should talk to Shawnee and Alice about what had happened. I should find out, I should know, I am their mother, she thought. But at the same time she dreaded knowing any details because all of it, every bit, was her fault. She had put her children in that danger, she had left them, and knowing more about what they had suffered could only make her feel worse. It reflected her failure to protect them. Also, she had a bad instinct. It was growing in her. Ira was afraid that at some point, when she was very tired maybe, she would say to Shawnee, How the fuck could you have burnt down the house? Our only place to live? All we own? Gone? How the fuck? Ira was so afraid of blurting this out that she got up suddenly, and left the room.

She sat with Apitchi until his fever let go, his skin cooled a little, and he no longer frowned in his sleep. When she returned to the girls, a nurse was giving them extra milk, juice, pudding, crackers, and they were eating every bit. It was still an hour before the lunch trays would come. Ira was hungry. Yesterday there had been an extra tray sent to the floor and one of the nurses had brought it to her. So she’d had an entire dinner—turkey, gravy, beans, mashed potatoes, even a coffee. She had eaten every scrap on that tray. But there had not been an extra breakfast this morning. Ira was hoping there would be an extra tray at lunch again, and she did not want to leave the floor in case she might miss it. But she also wanted to find out how Morris was.

Ira went searching down the hall on the adult ward. But she was too shy to actually look into the rooms. Quick, casual glances through each door did not reveal Morris, so she asked about him and a nurse took her all the way to the end of the hall. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, and Morris’s eyes were covered, as Ira had thought they would be.

“You have a lady visitor,” the nurse said.

“Seraphine?” said Morris.

“No, Ira.”

“Boozhoo!” Morris put out his hand. “How are your kids? Come in here. Siddown. There’s crackers.” He didn’t grope, but put his hand precisely on the table pushed up next to him. He lightly touched a stack of cellophane-wrapped saltines. “Would you like some?”

Ira took a package, opened it, and ate both saltines. They melted on her tongue.

“Have more,” said Morris.

“No, I gotta get back. My kids’ lunch trays are coming. My kids are doing good. Apitchi’s got pneumonia, except.”

“They can treat pneumonia, it’s safer to get pneumonia than a lot of things.”

“Yeah,” said Ira. “I was scared though. How about you?”

“Me,” said Morris, touching his hair, which was bunched up over the bandages, “I think I have finally done it. Maybe I’ll go blind now, all the way blind. One of my cornea’s all scratched up, the other got ulcerated. They just told me. Anyway, the suspense will be over.”

“You won’t be able to drive,” said Ira.

“Well, I wasn’t supposed to, really, I should have told you. I’m sorry about that.”

“You tried,” Ira said. “If you hadn’t gone in the woods after my kids and the snow got so bright, maybe your eyes wouldn’t have quit on you.”

“It was gonna happen,” Morris said. He patted the covering on his eyes, adjusted the bandages. “So, your kids okay, really?”

“The girls won’t talk to me yet.”

Morris nodded, as if that made sense. “Give them time to come out of it,” he said. “There’s water, too, in that pitcher. The nurse just put new ice in.”

“They taking good care of you?”

“Yes,” said Morris. “Morphine. They know me from before.”

“You been in for your eyes then?”

“Other things, too,” said Morris. “Where you supposed to live now?”

“I don’t know yet. Bernard, maybe. I never asked him though.”

“Your mom’s dead.”

“Long time ago.”

“And I heard about it when your dad died. He was a spiritual man, I knew him.”

“My dad knew how to give names. They gave him the ceremony. It was because he had dreams. He couldn’t stop his dreams. They kept coming at him. It turned out he was meant to do certain things that would put his dreams to use.”

She stopped. “Ma’iingan,” she said. “He gave that name to you.”

“Your dad said that was the only time he ever gave that name out.”

“That name meant a lot to him because wolves saved his life, once, I guess.”

“Amen,” said Morris. “My name saved me, too.”

“How?” said Ira.

“That’s for another visit,” Morris said. “I got to hook you in somehow.”

Ira went quiet because she didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know whether she wanted to be hooked in or left on her own. “Anyway,” she said, “Popeye?”

“Yeah, too bad about that.”

“You don’t like your nickname?”

They both laughed.

“Well, I must go,” said Ira. “Bye.” She leaned over and put her hand in Morris’s open hand. He held her hand a minute. Just held her fingers with his fingers. Then he carefully let go.

Had she missed the lunch trays? Ira was so hungry that she was beginning to feel all wobbly down the center. She walked quickly back to her children and first checked on Apitchi, then went to Shawnee and Alice’s room. There was no sign of lunch yet. She lowered herself into a chair. She noticed a little box of Sugar Pops on the table next to Shawnee’s bed, and she wanted to say, “Are you going to eat those?” But she thought that Shawnee might give her that stare that she had given her before.

“What are you watching?” she asked.

“Powerpuffs.”

“It’s stupid,” Shawnee said.

“No, they’re good!” said Alice.

I’d better call up Bernard, thought Ira. Or maybe go look for him when he comes on his shift. She heard the rumble of the lunch cart coming down the corridor and her stomach pinched hard. An aide brought two trays in, each with a piece of skinless chicken, a spoonful of rice with some vegetables mixed in, a salad with pale pink tomatoes, and green Jell-O. There was a carton of milk and a few sticks of celery and carrots. Ira cut up Alice’s meat. The girls ate everything. When they were done, Ira put their trays back outside, on the cart.

“I’m going to see Apitchi now,” she told Shawnee and Alice. On the way out she asked a nurse if there was an extra tray. The nurse said no. Ira said that if anybody didn’t eat their tray could she have it, and the nurse looked closely at her.

“You got money for the cafeteria?”

“No,” said Ira. “I’m here with my children.”

“I’ll make sure they order a supper tray for you,” the nurse said. “In the meantime, come over here.” She took Ira to a small closet kitchen. From the little refrigerator, she took two cartons of chocolate milk, two yogurts, and a bowl of peaches covered with plastic wrap. She balanced a handful of wrapped crackers on top of the plastic wrapped bowl. “Those peaches are from just yesterday,” she said.

Ira took the food to Apitchi’s room. He was still sleeping, his arms tucked close. He huddled in the sheets. Ira arranged the food on the windowsill and then she sat down next to Apitchi’s bed. Slowly, she reached over, selected a carton of milk, and sipped it. The chocolate milk was rich, cold, and she felt it trickle all the way down to her stomach. Next, she ate the yogurts—first the blueberry then strawberry—taking little precise scoops with a plastic spoon. She put her head back on the chair and rested for a while. She ate the peaches and the crackers. Then she drank the last milk. When Apitchi woke, he looked anxiously all around the room and let his gaze rest, at last, on his mother’s face. I don’t know what I will do if he hates me too, Ira thought, but when he realized it was she, he burst into tears and tried to hold his arms out. Ira went to him gratefully. His arm was strapped to a board along with the IV and his other hand was taped to a little paddle so he couldn’t reach over and pull out the needle. Ira carefully positioned him against her so that she could read a picture book to him. She read it six times, the same book, until it made her sleepy. She leaned back in the bed with Apitchi and felt his heart beating right over her heart.

When she woke from her light sleep with Apitchi, it was late afternoon. All of her children were still asleep. She went to Morris’s room and stood in the entrance. He was looking at her with his lids half shut. His bandages had fallen off. She said hello, and he seemed to acknowledge her by gazing at her peacefully, but when his expression did not change, she realized from his deep breathing that he was actually asleep with his eyes open. This sight startled and made her want to turn away, but she was held by the strangeness of exchanging this calm regard with a person who was unconscious and maybe even dreaming.

“It’s Ira,” she said, when he stirred. “If you want to keep sleeping, I’ll go.”

“No, I’m not tired.” He sat up and fixed the bandages back over his eyes. “Just bored. They’re gonna bring my tape player and my tapes in later.”

“Maybe I could read to you,” said Ira. “I just finished reading to my little boy.”

“What did you read him?”

“Green Eggs and Ham.”

“I’ve heard that one,” said Morris.

“Well, I could get you another,” said Ira. “Probably they have a bunch of books somewhere.”

“Okay,” said Morris, “if you find a good one, you read it to me. It’s a deal.”

“I’ll check downstairs later.”

Ira stood awkwardly in the doorway, not sure whether to sit down or to leave.

“Look,” said Morris. “I gotta say, I’m sorry. It’s about what I was thinking, what I implied, when I stopped the truck on the road.”

Ira dragged a chair next to the bed, sat down. She put her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. Now that the bandages were on he couldn’t see, so what did it matter. She had wondered if he was going to mention that moment.

“You were lonely, and me, I was desperate,” she said at last. “And it’s true, I was after some money. If somebody had offered me money to fuck them, I would have done it earlier, but then your brother gave me money for some groceries, so I wasn’t that desperate anymore.”

“He screwed me, then!”

She laughed a little. “We should let it go, I mean, because the kids are gonna be alive and they could have…whatever. But they’re okay. Your sister-in-law visited me.”

“Seraphine. War wounds.”

“She was in the army? Which one?”

“The one that was conducted on us where they took our children prisoner.”

“She went to boarding school then.”

“Yes. And now as I have scratched up my corneas to the point of ulceration, I truly see through a glass darkly, as in Corinthians.”

“That’s the Bible,” said Ira.

“Yes, the New Testament, which is on twenty-four double sided tapes.”

“So you lay in the dark and you listen to the Bible.”

“That Old Testament, especially, rated R for sex and violence. Don’t let your kids near that book.”

Ira laughed. “Wow.”

“You’re impressed?”

“I’m kind of scared of you.”

“Why, because my eyes bug out? Most cases like mine do not persist, but I even had surgery and they still popped out again, and the treatments haven’t worked. The doctors say I’m just stubborn. The whole thing stems out of my thyroid gland, and I know it got fucked up in Kuwait. They’re going to paralyze my eyelids with Botox and see if they drop.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’ll be young forever. I’ll have young eyes.”

Ira looked down at her hands.

“I don’t know what I’d do. I feel for you.”

“I’d rather you just feel me,” said Morris. “Up.”

“Sad.”

“I know it, I’m so out of practice.”

“Yes, you are. But that’s a plus in my mind.”

“Good.” Morris paused. “Are you used to your house being gone yet?”

“I am trying to get used to remembering that I have no house, nothing, just what I have on me.”

“Which is?”

Ira began to rummage in her purse. “A comb, a compact, a stick of gum, an extra diaper, some bills, food vouchers, old mascara, a bunch of toilet paper, photographs, which now I’m very glad I always carry, and lots of lint balls.”

“That’s in your purse.”

“Right. Oh, and I also have a beadwork clip and a bag of earrings I was hoping to sell. Here,” she handed him the clip, which was a sunburst design picked out in extra-small fancy cutbeads. “This is an example of my work. You can feel how I made it anyway.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah, I’m real careful. I do good, tight, work, me.”

Morris held the clip, running his fingers over it. “Can I keep it?”

Ira hesitated, “Well, I’d like to give it to you. But I could maybe get forty for it. I was gonna show the nurses.”

“I’ve got fifty.”

“Trying to give me money again.” Ira pushed the clip back at Morris. “Just take it. Keep it. I want you to have it.”

“No,” said Morris. He tried to give it back, but Ira had left the room. So he lay back with the beaded sunburst in the palm of his hand, running his fingers across the perfect, smooth, curved rows of beads.

“We’re none of us perfect,” said Honey. Ira’s cousin was round, cute, and full of satisfaction about her house and children and hardworking husband. She had it all. She was sitting in the girls’ room on the plastic recliner. Ira came in and sat on the end of Alice’s bed and wondered if Honey had found them a place to stay.

“You blame your mom,” said Honey to Shawnee. “But you shouldn’t. Your mother is a human being. She has her faults, as do all of us.”

Shawnee had been staring at the blank TV. Now she looked at Honey. She saw her so clearly. She saw her thin brown hair with the floss cut so it curled around her ears. She saw the heaviness in her face and neck, her strong little black eyes. She saw how Honey liked to visit them because they made her feel so much better about her own children and her situation in this life. She wondered if Honey went to school or just practiced until she got the job of nurse. Anyway, even if she’d learned all there was to know, she didn’t know her mother or have the right to tell Shawnee to blame or not to blame her. And her mother was a human being, that was true, anybody could see that. This woman had not been to the edge of life.

“I’m not stupid,” said Shawnee to her mother’s cousin.

After that, although Honey tried to talk to her, held her hands out, Shawnee did a thing she discovered she could do with her mind. She clicked the woman’s mute button. She had just learned about the mute button on the television’s remote control. So it was comical—nothing she said came through—just her mouth moving, her eyebrows wiggling up and down, her finger pointing, waving, her arms finally flapping at Shawnee’s mother, who went out the door with Honey and came back alone and said, “So much for that.”

“What?” said Shawnee.

“She hasn’t got a place for us.” Ira laughed suddenly. “You told her, I guess,” she said. “We’re not stupid. You got that right, baby girl.”

Ira sat back down on Alice’s bed.

“That woman came,” Shawnee said, “and Alice asked her how she got that scar on her face.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have asked that, Alice.”

“But it was interesting,” said Shawnee.

“It was?” Ira could not help it, she was curious and still could not remember.

“A matron,” said Shawnee. “What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s in boarding school,” Ira said. “I’m not going to send you kids to boarding school.”

“That’s good,” Shawnee said.

“Bernard came,” said Alice.

“He said to tell you he has our food. He’ll bring it to wherever we go,” said Shawnee. Then stopped. Bernard had patted her shoulder and told her that she was a strong little girl, a good sister. Her mother had tried to touch her only that one time, since the fire. Shawnee almost wanted to force her mother to get angry with her just to get it over with, but at the same time she hoped her mother would say that Shawnee had saved her brother and sister, that she had dragged them through the snow, that she had refused to let them fly away as black skeletons.

“Where do we go now?” Alice asked.

Ira leaned over and put her arms around Alice. As she held her, rocking, she looked over at Shawnee, and that was when Shawnee thought her mother was going to say, in a mean and low voice, maybe, How could you have burnt down the house? But Ira didn’t say it, she just kept rocking Alice, and looking at Shawnee, and looking back down at Alice. After a while her mother’s face seemed to open up like a flower. She smiled and a softness flowed from her and wrapped around Shawnee and held her.

Apitchi was burbling weakly, coming out of his long still sleep. This time he didn’t know his mother, he could get no comfort from her and each breath wheezed and rasped in his chest. Ira sat with him, holding him. She thought he seemed to be losing weight. Even as they sat there, he was growing less substantial in her arms. She put him down and he was motionless, hot, his skin dry and burning. Ira got a washcloth and rinsed it in cold water, squeezed it out, and began washing Apitchi down with it. With every few strokes of the cloth against his skin, the cold was gone. She had to rinse it again. She kept on rinsing and wiping and then suddenly his eyes, which had been wide open, went glassy and blank and stared sideways. His arms and legs moved in climbing motions. He grinned terribly, his baby teeth clamped tight, and he shuddered. Ira pressed the nurse call button, yelled for help, tried to hold his arms still but he was twisting, snaking along the bed. She clamped herself over him. His mouth was open and he was choking on blood and foam. She turned him over and at last the nurse came, and then more nurses and two doctors, until people filled the room. Ira stepped back into the corner, frozen to the wall. All she could see of Apitchi was his foot, still jerking, then his foot went still.

They kept working on him, calling for things she didn’t know the names of. Nobody noticed her. He couldn’t be dead, she thought, as long as there was so much activity. She fixed on the bustling of the nurses. The low-key, businesslike voices of the doctors reassured her. If the doctors were giving orders there was hope. At last, one of them said, “His mother?” A nurse said Ira’s name and beckoned to her. The doctor turned from the bed and took Ira’s hand, an act that made her gasp with fear.

“Ira,” the doctor said, quiet behind the mask, “your son is very sick. But we think we have him stabilized.”

Now the nurses were moving away from the bed and the other doctor went out of the room. Ira could see Apitchi in the bed. He seemed to have shrunk yet again, he looked like a tiny monkey. He was far, far away. Ira could tell he wasn’t in his body.

“We’ve got a problem,” the doctor said, taking off her rubber gloves and removing her mask. “This seizure is probably related to the fever, but it could have some other source. Normally, I’d have your little boy helicoptered out, but we’ve got bad weather out there. We’re going to have to keep him here until the blizzard clears up. You’re staying nights, aren’t you?”

Ira nodded. She reached forward and held Apitchi’s foot. His foot was still fat and round. His foot still fit into her hand.

“I’m sleeping in the chair.”

“Let’s get a roll-away in here,” the doctor said to the nurse.

“Now you”—the doctor touched Ira’s shoulder—“you’re going to have to keep your strength up. Your little boy is going to need you.”

“What about my other two, my daughters?”

“They’re going to be fine, but I’d like to keep them another day or two.”

“That’s good,” said Ira, “because I don’t know where we’re going next.”

“I hear your house burned down,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.”

Ira said thank you.

“Do you have someone you can stay with?”

“I should go ask Bernard.”

“Okay,” said the doctor. “For now, let’s just take care of your little boy.”

A hospital aide brought in a roll-away cot and shoved it against the wall. The doctor stayed and went over Apitchi’s pulse and temperature again, then she left and later on the nurse left too. Alone with Apitchi, Ira didn’t dare take her eyes off of him. But finally she had to use the bathroom and when she came out he was still all right, he even looked a little better, maybe. So she unlocked the steel hook on the side of the cot and laid out the bed. Then she lay down on it. The bed was so comfortable that she fell asleep for perhaps an hour. When she woke, old Bernard was sitting in a chair on the other side of Apitchi’s bed.

“Oh, hey,” she said. “You’re here.”

“I came to work early,” said Bernard. “Zero visibility out there. I barely did make it. I heard this little one is sick.”

“Pneumonia,” said Ira. “But he had a seizure and they don’t know why. Maybe the fever.”

“Poor little guy,” said Bernard. “A seizure.”

“Scared the living hell out of me,” said Ira, sitting up and staring at Apitchi. “Now they have him on a medicine for that, too.”

“What about you,” said Bernard. “Did you eat?”

“I forgot about supper. I slept.”

“They left a tray here,” Bernard said, collecting it off a table behind the curtain. “Must have seen you were sleeping.”

Bernard brought the tray around the side of the bed and Ira put it on her knees. She’d lost her hunger, but she thought that she should eat, in case.

“Probably got cold,” said Bernard. “Should I go and leave you to eat?”

“No, no,” said Ira. “Stay here and talk to me. Can I interest you in a piece of”—she lifted the plastic dome, wet with condensed steam—“gray stuff? There’s chocolate pudding, too.”

“I’ll keep you company,” Bernard said. “I bring me a lunch every night, but sometimes I eat those good old hospital cafeteria leftovers, too. They bring ’em around to me.”

Ira found that, although she felt no hunger, she was eating everything with quick efficiency. She hoped that somebody had helped Alice cut her meat into little pieces. Perhaps they were asleep now, her daughters; it was late.

“Can I ask you something?” Ira was nervous. “You can say no.”

“All right. What is it?”

Ira stirred her pudding around and around. “Well, I’ve got to ask you, I mean, can we come stay with you? Until we figure out our housing?”

“Okay,” said Bernard.

Ira looked up in relief, she smiled. “Really?”

“I got room,” Bernard said.

“Oh, thank you.” Ira put her hands on either side of her tray. She nodded. Tears suddenly stung in her throat. “Chi miigwech, Bernard.”

“I got room,” he said again.

“I can cook,” said Ira. “I’ll cook for you.”

Bernard waved his hand aside and they both sat in the quiet looking at Apitchi, watching the glowing numbers of his oxygen and the graph of his heartbeat on the monitor. Ira finished up the food on her tray and set the tray on the broad windowsill.

“I sat with your dad in the nights,” said Bernard, “when he was sick in this here hospital. We used to talk.”

“I didn’t know that. I mean, of course I knew you two were friends, and that, but I never knew you stayed with him in the hospital.”

“Oh yes, he told me things I never knew. I learned things about him, when he was here in the hospital.”

“I guess people talk,” said Ira, watching Apitchi’s face, “at night. It can be a lonely place. I wish I could’ve stayed with him. I was taking care of the kids.”

“He sure loved these little ones,” said Bernard.

“I know he did,” Ira said. “Shawnee remembers him best. What kind of stories did he tell you?”

“About the wolves,” Bernard said.

“He gave that name to Morris,” said Ira. “Why was that?”

“Morris was going in the army. He needed that name for protection.”

“Okay,” said Ira.

“I think I have to tell you something,” said Bernard.

“Go ahead.”

“I was sleeping when your daughter heard that drum. I never struck that drum. That drum is no ordinary drum. It is very old and originates generations back. I have been looking after this drum, waiting for it to tell me what to do. Every day I put out my tobacco, and I ask for direction. Sometimes I hear the songs. The drum talked to your daughter.”

Ira sat very still, her hand on Apitchi’s ankle. “I don’t know what that means,” she said.

“I think it means that this drum is now ready to be put to use,” said Bernard. “I was going to wait and say this. But being as your boy here is sick, I think we must act.”

Ira looked into Bernard’s eyes, round and direct as a bird’s. “It can’t hurt,” she said.

“Tonight I’m going to bring the drum up, then,” said Bernard. “I have it sitting downstairs in my office. And I am going to get Morris to help me with the songs.”

“Morris knows them?”

“Some. His mother bothered me to work with him. See, this here drum went traveling for a time. Most of the songs got scattered.”

“What will the nurses say?”

“Oh,” said Bernard, “they’ll be all right. It’s not the first time they had to contend with their own medicine. There’s a hospital policy on traditional healing. We can’t burn any sage, but the drum we can pound as long as we keep it low and everyone is awake. We’ll do it in the morning.”

Bernard left the room and went downstairs. While he was gone, Ira checked on Shawnee and Alice. They were asleep, breathing calmly, and when she slipped from their room she saw Bernard getting off the elevator. He carried the drum in a canvas case, by a strap, and he also carried a cloth case that looked as though it held a short pair of skis, but she knew it held the legs that kept the drum off the floor. She followed Bernard into the room. He took the drum from its case, then put the drum on the recliner, and pushed it against the wall.

“There’s room, isn’t there?”

“Sure,” Ira said, “there’s room.”

Bernard left the case standing in the corner, and he went out the door. The night nurse came in and checked everything about Apitchi. Then she left. Ira smoothed out the covers on the cot again, and climbed in with her clothes on. The drum was behind her head, just above. Immediately, she slept.

The nurse tucked the digital thermometer underneath Shawnee’s arm and she swam up from her dream to half-wakefulness. She heard the whoosh of the pump on the blood pressure cuff, and heard it again as the nurse stood over Alice. An hour ago, Shawnee’s hands had throbbed and itched, but now that the medicine the nurse had given her had kicked in, she was comfortable. The nurse went out of the room, but Shawnee did not return entirely to sleep. The door was open a crack and she could hear the nurses talking at their big round station in the middle of the ward. It was comforting talk. A low babble. Heat flowed softly through the louvered vent alongside the window. Her mother was down the hall with Apitchi, and she had come through the woods. They were all safe. Since they’d been in the hospital, every time Shawnee closed her eyes she was back at the house as it burned, or dragging Alice, or floundering through the snow with Apitchi on her back. Now when she slept, she dreamed the whole thing over again, and several hours later she woke cold. She did not know where she was at first. Her vision was clouded, her eyes weak, and she felt the snow reaching up around her waist. But then she heard the beating of the drum, as she had back in the woods. Once she heard it she slowly allowed herself to return to consciousness. She pushed the sheet down, tossed off the pillow that had fallen over her eyes. As the room and its safety surrounded her, she was flooded by a startling and almost painful happiness.

Morris knew that he had fallen hard in love with Ira while they were back there in the cab of the truck. Did she know that her voice was lovely? So precise and yet hesitant? Could she even imagine how the give of her lips and the soft, hot little cave of her mouth, behind her lips and teeth, affected Morris? His fall was so dramatic and sudden that he’d actually trembled when she said her name in his room. They had taken him off morphine and he hadn’t cared. That’s how distracted he was. He thought of everything about her, everything he’d learned. The power and determination as she trudged through the snow, her devotion and her failure, her dignity which had not yet allowed her to ask to move in with him, though he hoped that she would ask. He had to know her. He had to understand the simplicity and even placement of the beads in her beadwork. It took patience and years of practice to bead that well. Yet she was impulsive, too. She made tiny mistakes, one here, one there. Some mistakes had bigger outcomes than they deserved. He felt so much pity for Ira that he wanted to take some of her trouble on. He missed her. He felt the print of her body against his when he’d dragged her across the seat. The aching print. There was the knowledge that his eyes were all fucked up and would not get better and he was addicted to painkillers. Not an ideal father figure. But there were positives. He did get a disability check and Bernard had come to talk to him about the songs belonging to the drum. His father had left those drum songs to him—taken the scrolls into the earth, but taught some of the songs to Morris first. The old man who had spoken to the wolves had both named him and taught him a few more songs. Then Bernard had taken over. Those songs had helped Morris, even kept him sane. He was sane now. He wanted her. He wanted to get his shit together and be clean. He wanted to construct a life that she could tolerate.

“Thank you for bringing my next wife,” he said to his brother on the phone. “I love her and can never thank you enough.”

“I got no claim on her,” said his brother, who was very surprised.

“You sure as hell don’t,” said Morris.

“She’s got kids,” said John.

“Don’t I know it. And don’t give me any of that shit about getting herself laid for food. I want to know something. Why I saw men die for oil in this country where a woman has to sell herself for bread and peanut butter.”

“Macaroni too,” said John.

“The hell with you. I want to know why I lost my eyes for that. It should not be.”

“Okay now,” said John, “don’t go off on that track.”

“I’m going to have her,” said Morris.

“You’re not ordering a Happy Meal,” said John. “She’s no Happy at all that I could tell. But then again, she can talk straight at you.”

“I’m going to do more,” said Morris.

“And what is that?”

“I’m going to help her raise her kids. I’m going to give her all my money. I’m going to teach them everything I know.”

“Well, good luck to you then, brother.”

Morris hung up the phone, quiet with ecstasy. In his mind Ira drove the truck and they put the kids in the jump seats right behind. Tipi canvas and poles and their suitcases of regalia corded down in the truck bed. Him on the passenger’s side. They were going to the big arbor powwows in Montana where the drum entered you straight up from the earth. Yes, it will be a beautiful, new life, thought Morris. I’m just going to lay here and pile on the details. I’ll play my own tape in my head. Let’s see, first I’ll buy her a soft fleecy tight-fitting sweater through which I will feel her breasts with my hands. And food, we’ll have food. Maybe all kinds of waffles in a restaurant. Juneberries. We’ll pick from a roadside bush. The only thing is, I’ve seen her face for the last time, maybe. Probably. This made Morris weep. His eyes felt deliciously soothed, but the tears stung his raw cheeks.

Bernard checked the gauges on the boilers and went down his twenty-item checklist. He made sure his crew was keeping the emergency room entrance free and clear of drifting snow. He helped clean a hospital room, using proper infection-control procedures. He ordered lightbulbs and did a small repair on the intercom system. Then he sat down in his office, drank a cup of strong tea, and thought he’d go up next and check on the drum. What had happened surprised him, but at the same time he had expected something like it. Ever since his children had grown up and moved to Fargo and his wife had followed, he had wondered why he couldn’t make himself move away to be near them. Though they visited often, he missed out on his grandchildren growing up. And he missed out on living with his wife, although it seemed like they got along better now. Still, he hadn’t known why he stayed on the old allotment except that the city was too loud, too fast and cramped for space. There were only sidewalks to walk on, no paths. Perhaps, he thought, someone needed to keep up the old house. There was his hospital job, but he could have quit that. He was over retirement age anyway.

No, the reason he stayed had not come clear until it was piercingly apparent. He’d stayed for the drum. He had the most intimate knowledge of it, knew the sequence of all the songs, could bring together those who possessed those songs he’d forgotten. He alone could fit the scraps together. And he had, as best he could, in these past few months. His waiting was over now and he and Morris would sing the healing songs, softly enough, after the doctors did their rounds. Seraphine would come. He thought of Seraphine and of the strange thing about her scar.

Seraphine had been raised in a traditional way by her grandparents and she spoke little English. But then her grandparents died and Seraphine was sent to boarding school. Bernard recalled that life well, for he had been there, too, in his own day. Sometimes all of the children in the rows of beds cried at night and it was the saddest sound Bernard had ever heard. It was forbidden to speak what the teachers called Indian; sometimes those words seemed to inflame a special wrath from the teachers and the matrons who took care of the children. One day, Seraphine forgot or rebelled and began to speak her own language and would not stop. The matron was showing girls how to mend cushioned chairs. In her hand there was a thick needle for sewing together upholstery. She turned and struck Seraphine. The needle ripped across the girl’s face, and although the doctor who sewed the wound together was sensitive and careful, the scar of speaking her language remained across her lips all of her life.

Bernard thought about Seraphine as a little girl and about the wolves who had talked to Ira’s father and about the curved bones in the drum. He thought about Shawnee and her stark little heart-shaped face. And about those women who had brought the drum here from the east. Everything now fit. The little girl had come home and she had saved a girl, a relative, a sister. Bernard promised the drum that he would teach Shawnee everything he could, before she went away. She and her brother and sister would not be with him long, not if Morris had anything to say about it. But then, who knew? Who could tell what Ira was thinking?

Ira was staring at Apitchi. She couldn’t sleep. She had got up to watch him. It was impossible to tell whether he was better or worse or just the same. His arm seemed even thinner than a few hours ago, and as she stroked it she felt his slim bones and tried not to let her throat shut with fear. You’ll be all right, you’ll be all right, she prayed. She closed her eyes and tried to send her spirit out of her body into his body, she tried to make her spirit fight everything that hurt him, she tried to make him well. She opened her eyes, tears fell on her hands, and she thought, Any moment I’ll start raving at the mouth. I’ll start making those God bargains people do. I’ll scream my fucking head off and I’ll beat myself up. But she did nothing, only sat there for a long time more, holding his arm.

She was no Christian, certainly no Catholic, but she wasn’t of her father’s conviction, either. An odd thing came into her mind suddenly. She realized that her father’s ceremonial pipe, a sacred pipe, had survived the fire. It was the only thing besides what they were wearing, and the blankets on the ground outside the house, now under the snow. The pipe had survived exactly because she was so careless with these old beliefs. Her father had told her that when he died she should put his pipe in the woods, in a hidden place, and go and get it when she needed it. There were plenty of times since then she might have needed it, but the truth was she had forgotten all about her father’s pipe. Well, she’d go out there now and she’d find it, hidden in a hollow log under rocks in a place halfway to Bernard’s.

“I don’t know about these things,” she said out loud. “I don’t know.” This business about the drum sounding. This man with the eyes not closing. What, had Morris seen too much? Join the club. Was it the war maybe? Was it looking at himself in the mirror? But he had a kind face as long as he closed his eyes. Even, he would be called good-looking. Basically. Without the eyes, again. I’m starting to like him. Ira grabbed her hair. I hate looking at my face now. I don’t know. And I don’t know either about myself as a mother. No good, maybe. I know I love them. I know I give up things for them. I don’t have men. I don’t have lots of things. But why did I go in that bar on this one night of all fucking nights instead of going home? How did all of this get set into motion? Was it the oatmeal? The last pan of fucking slop? How come I didn’t walk to Bernard’s then, and borrow some food and catch a ride in and out with a trustworthy person? Was it because I never thought of it, or was it because I wanted—just for a moment, or one night, just an evening, really—to get away from my kids?

She had put her hands on her head again and tugged at and messed up her hair. After a while she smoothed it down and wiped her face. Stupid drama. She whispered to Apitchi, “I am going to take care of you real good when you get well.” She put her hand on his chest and felt his ribs go up and down. The regularity of his breath calmed her and she sat for a long time with him like that, just letting her hand rise and fall.

The sun blared down, slats of blinding white through the hospital blinds, the intense brilliance after a storm. Ira woke. Apitchi woke. The girls woke. Morris. Even Bernard, who got a nap in, woke. It was that disorienting day that always occurs after a storm, when there is no school so kids come in to work with parents, or the parents stay home and change shifts around. All routine is shot to hell, yet everything that needs to run, does run. The roads are not yet plowed out. Houses are covered. Or the ashes of houses. Snow blankets the whole reservation. The trees glitter. The open fields are long swoops of white. The reeds sticking out of the sloughs are spears of glowing frost. Under the whiteness the world looks perfectly arranged. Things look settled and planned and accounted for. The business of building and digging and tearing up the earth is halted. And yet, you will see that the roads that matter, the ones most necessary, are cleared between people. Just one lane at first. The plows push away the snow with a cheerful energy. By the end of the day there will again be a pattern of trails.

In the service bathroom, Bernard washed his face and combed back his hair. He smoothed his shirt down his arms and adjusted his belt, then brushed his teeth and stuck his toothbrush in his shirt pocket. He got some tea and talked to a few people, telling them that he was going to use the drum. He went back to the office area and punched his time card out. As he walked up the back stairs he sang low, under his breath, the first song that the little girl had taught to Old Shaawano. But he prayed his own prayer, and as he climbed toward the drum, he begged the guardians from the earth’s four directions, and the one from beneath, and the one from above, to draw close and listen.