The Plague of Doves

The Plague of Doves

IN THE YEAR 1896, my great-uncle, one of the first Catholic priests of aboriginal blood, put the call out to his parishioners that they should gather at Saint Joseph’s wearing scapulars and holding missals. From that place they would proceed to walk the fields in a long, sweeping row, and with each step loudly pray away the doves. His human flock had taken up the plow and farmed among German and Norwegian settlers. Those people, unlike the French who mingled with my ancestors, took little interest in the women native to the land and did not intermarry. In fact, the Norwegians disregarded everybody but themselves and were quite clannish. But the doves ate their crops the same.

When the birds descended, both Indians and whites set up great bonfires and tried driving them into nets. The doves ate the wheat seedlings and the rye and started on the corn. They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year’s chaff. The doves were plump, and delicious smoked, but one could wring the necks of hundreds or thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number. The pole-and-mud houses of the mixed-bloods and the bark huts of the blanket Indians were crushed by the weight of the birds. They were roasted, burnt, baked up in pies, stewed, salted down in barrels, or clubbed dead with sticks and left to rot. But the dead only fed the living and each morning when the people woke it was to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight, to those who still possessed intact windows, of the curious and gentle faces of those creatures.

My great-uncle had hastily constructed crisscrossed racks of sticks to protect the glass in what, with grand intent, was called the rectory. In a corner of that one-room cabin, his younger brother, whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom, slept on a pallet of fir boughs and a mattress stuffed with grass. This was the softest bed he’d ever lain in and the boy did not want to leave it, but my great-uncle thrust choirboy vestments at him and told him to polish up the candelabra that he would bear in the procession.

This boy was to become my mother’s father, my Mooshum. Seraph Milk was his given name, and since he lived to be over one hundred, I was present and about eleven years old during the time he told and retold the story of the most momentous day of his life, which began with this attempt to vanquish the plague of doves. He sat on a hard chair, between our first television and the small alcove of bookshelves set into the wall of our government-owned house on the Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation tract. Mooshum would tell us he could hear the scratching of the doves’ feet as they climbed all over the screens of sticks that his brother had made. He dreaded the trip to the outhouse, where many of the birds had gotten mired in the filth beneath the hole and set up a screeching clamor of despair that drew their kind to throw themselves against the hut in rescue attempts. Yet he did not dare relieve himself anywhere else. So through flurries of wings, shuffling so as not to step on their feet or backs, he made his way to the outhouse and completed his necessary actions with his eyes shut. Leaving, he tied the door closed so that no other doves would be trapped.

The outhouse drama, always the first in the momentous day, was filled with the sort of detail that my brother and I found interesting. The outhouse, well-known to us although we now had plumbing, and the horror of the birds’ death by excrement, as well as other features of the story’s beginning, gripped our attention. Mooshum was our favorite indoor entertainment, next to the television. But our father had removed the television’s knobs and hidden them. Although we made constant efforts, we never found the knobs and came to believe that he carried them upon his person at all times. So we listened to our Mooshum instead. While he talked, we sat on kitchen chairs and twisted our hair. Our mother had given him a red coffee can for spitting snoose. He wore soft, worn, green Sears work clothes, a pair of battered brown lace-up boots, and a twill cap, even in the house. His eyes shone from slits cut deep into his face. The upper half of his left ear was missing, giving him a lopsided look. He was hunched and dried out, with random wisps of white hair down his ears and neck. From time to time, as he spoke, we glimpsed the murky scraggle of his teeth. Still, such was his conviction in the telling of this story that it wasn’t hard at all to imagine him at twelve.

His big brother put on his vestments, the best he had, hand-me-downs from a Minneapolis parish. As real incense was impossible to obtain, he prepared the censer by stuffing it with dry sage rolled up in balls. There was an iron hand pump and a sink in the cabin, and Mooshum’s brother, or half brother, Father Severine Milk, wet a comb and slicked back his hair and then his little brother’s hair. The church was a large cabin just across the yard, and wagons had been pulling up for the last hour or so. Now the people were in the church and the yard was full of the parked wagons, each with a dog or two tied in the box to keep the birds and their droppings off the piled hay where people would sit. The constant movement of the birds made some of the horses skittish. Many wore blinders and were further calmed by the bouquets of chamomile tied in their harnesses. As our Mooshum walked across the yard, he saw that the roof of the church was covered with birds who constantly, in play it seemed, flew up and knocked a bird off the holy cross that marked the cabin as a church, then took its place, only to be knocked off the crosspiece in turn. Great-uncle was a gaunt and timid man of more than six feet whose fretful voice carried over the confusion of sounds as he tried to organize his parishioners. The two brothers stood in the center of the line, and with the faithful congregants spread out on either side they made their way slowly down the hill toward the first of the fields they hoped to clear.

The sun was dull that day, thickly clouded over, and the air was oppressively still so that pungent clouds of sage smoke hung all around the metal basket on its chain as it swung to each direction. The people advanced quickly. However, in the first field the doves were packed so thickly on the ground that there was a sudden agitation among the women, who could not move forward without sweeping birds into their skirts. The birds in panic tangled themselves in the cloth. The line halted suddenly as, to our Mooshum’s eyes, the women erupted in a raging dance, each twirling in her own way, stamping, beating, and flapping her skirts. So vehement was their dance that the birds all around them popped into flight, frightening other birds, so that in moments the entire field and the woods around it were a storm of birds that roared and blasted down upon the people, who nonetheless stood firm with splayed missals on their heads. The women forsook modesty, knotted their skirts up around their thighs, held out their rosaries or scapulars, and moved forward. They began to chant the Hail Mary into the wind of beating wings. Mooshum, who had rarely been allowed the sight of a woman’s lower limbs, took advantage of his brother’s struggle in keeping the censer lighted, and dropped behind. In delight, watching the women’s naked, round, brown legs thrash forward, he lowered his candelabra, which held no candles but which his brother had given him to carry in order to protect his face. Instantly he was struck on the forehead by a bird hurtled from the sky with such force that it seemed to have been flung directly by God’s hand, to smite and blind him before he carried his sin of appreciation any farther.

At this point in the story, Mooshum became so agitated that he often acted out the smiting and to our pleasure threw himself upon the floor. He mimed his collapse, then opened his eyes and lifted his head and stared into space, clearly seeing even now the vision of the Holy Spirit, which appeared to him not in the form of a white bird among the brown doves, but in the earthly body of a girl.

Our family has maintained something of an historical reputation for deathless romantic encounters. Even my father, a sedate-looking science teacher, was swept through the Second World War by one promising glance from my mother. And her sister, Aunt Geraldine, struck by a smile from a young man on a passenger train, raised her hand from the ditch she stood in picking berries, and was unable to see his hand wave in return. But something made her keep picking berries until nightfall and camp there overnight, and wait quietly for another whole day on her camp stool until he came walking back to her from the stop sixty miles ahead. My uncle Whitey dated the Haskell Indian Princess, who cut her braids off and gave them to him on the night she died of tuberculosis. In her memory he remained a bachelor until his fifties, when he married a small-town stripper. My mother’s cousin Agathe, or “Happy,” left the convent for a priest and was never heard from again. My brother, Joseph, joined a commune in an act of rash heat. My father’s second cousin John kidnapped his own wife and used the ransom to keep his mistress in Fargo. Despondent over a woman, my father’s uncle, Octave Harp, managed to drown himself in two feet of water. And so on. As with my father, these tales of extravagant encounter contrasted with the modesty of the subsequent marriages and occupations of my relatives. We are a tribe of office workers, bank tellers, book readers, and bureaucrats. The wildest of us (Whitey) is a short-order cook, and the most heroic of us (my father) teaches. Yet this current of drama holds together the generations, I think, and my brother and I listened to Mooshum not only from suspense but for instructions on how to behave when our moment of recognition, or perhaps our romantic trial, should arrive.

The Million Names

IN TRUTH, I thought mine probably had occurred early, for even as I sat there listening to Mooshum my fingers obsessively wrote the name of my beloved up and down my arm or in my hand or on my knee. If I wrote his name a million times on my body, I believed he would kiss me. I knew he loved me, and he was safe in the knowledge that I loved him, but we attended a Roman Catholic grade school in the mid-1960s and boys and girls known to be in love hardly talked to one another and never touched. We played softball and kickball together, and acted and spoke through other children eager to deliver messages. I had copied a series of these secondhand love statements into my tiny leopard-print diary with the golden lock. The key was hidden in the hollow knob of my bedstead. Also I had written the name of my beloved, in blood from a scratched mosquito bite, along the inner wall of my closet. His name held for me the sacred resonance of those Old Testament words written in fire by an invisible hand. Mene, mene, teckel, upharsin. I could not say his name aloud. I could only write it on my skin with my fingers without cease until my mother feared I’d gotten lice and coated my hair with mayonnaise, covered my head with a shower cap, and told me to sit in the bathtub, adding water as hot as I could stand.

The bathroom, the tub, the apparatus of plumbing, were all new. Because my father and mother worked for the school and in the tribal offices, we were hooked up to the agency water system. I locked the bathroom door, controlled the hot water with my toe, and decided to advance my name-writing total by several thousand since I had nothing else to do. As I wrote, I found places on myself that changed and warmed in response to the repetition of those letters, and without an idea in the world what I was doing, I gave myself successive alphabetical orgasms so shocking in their intensity and delicacy that the mayonnaise must surely have melted off my head. I then stopped writing on myself. I believed that I had reached the million mark, and didn’t dare try the same thing again.

Around that time, we passed Ash Wednesday, and I was reminded that I was made of dust only and would return to dust as soon as life was done with me. This body written everywhere with the holy name Corwin Peace (I can say it now) was only a temporary surface, fleeting as ice, soon to crumble like a leaf. As always, we entered the Lenten season cautioned by our impermanence and aware that our hunger for sweets or salted pretzels or whatever we’d given up was only a phantom craving. The hunger of the spirit, alone, was real. It was my good fortune not to understand that writing my boyfriend’s name upon myself had been an impure act, so I felt that I had nothing worse to atone for than my collaboration with my brother’s discovery that pliers from the toolbox worked as well as knobs on the television. As soon as my parents were gone, we could watch the Three Stooges — ours and Mooshum’s favorite and a show my parents thought abominable. And so it was Palm Sunday before my father happened to come home from an errand and rest his hand on the hot surface of the television and then fix us with the foxlike suspicion that his students surely dreaded. He got the truth of the matter out of us quickly. The pliers were also hidden, and Mooshum’s story resumed.

Apparition

THE GIRL WHO became my grandmother had fallen behind the other women in the field, because she was too shy to knot up her skirts. Her name was Junesse. The trick, she found, was to walk very slowly so that the birds had time to move politely aside instead of startling upward. Junesse wore a long white communion dress made of layers of filmy muslin. She had insisted on wearing this dress, and the aunt who cared for her had become exhausted by her stubbornness and allowed it, but had promised to beat her if she returned with a rip or a stain. Besides modesty, this threat had deterred Junesse from joining in that wild dance with a skirt full of birds. But now, attempting to revive the felled candelabra bearer, she perhaps forced their fate in the world by kneeling in a patch of bird slime and then sealed it by using her sash to blot away the wash of blood from Mooshum’s forehead, and from his ear, which he told us had been pecked halfway off by the doves as he lay unconscious. But then he woke.

And there she was! Mooshum paused in his story. His hands opened and the hundreds of wrinkles in his face folded into a mask of unsurpassable happiness. There was a picture of her from later in that era, and she was lovely. A white ribbon was tied in her black hair. Her white dress had a flowered bodice embroidered with white petals and white leaves. She had the pale, opaque skin and slanting black eyes of the Metis or Michif women in whose honor the bishop of that diocese had written a warning to his priests, advising them to pray hard in the presence of half-breed women, and to remember that although their forms were inordinately fair their hearts were savage and permeable. The devil came and went in them at will. Of course, Junesse Malaterre was innocent, but she was also sharp of mind. Her last name, which comes down to us from some French voyageur, describes the cleft furrows of godless rock, the barren valleys, striped outcrops, and mazelike configurations of rose, gray, tan, and purple stone that characterize the badlands of North Dakota. To this place, Mooshum and Junesse eventually made their way.

“We seen into each udder’s dept” was how my Mooshum put it in his gentle old reservation accent. There would be a moment of silence among us three as the scene played out. Mooshum saw what he described. I can’t imagine what my brother saw — after the commune, he seemed for a long while immune to romance. He would become a science teacher like our father, and after a minor car accident he would settle into a dull happiness of routine with his insurance claims adjuster. I saw two beings — the boy shaken, frowning; the girl in white kneeling over him with the sash of her dress gracefully clutched in her hand, then pressing the cloth to the wound on his head, stanching the flow of blood. Most important, I imagined their dark, mutual gaze. The Holy Spirit hovered between them. Her sash reddened. His blood defied gravity and flowed up her arm. Then her mouth opened. Did they kiss? I couldn’t ask Mooshum. Perhaps she smiled. She hadn’t had time to write his name even once upon her body, though, and besides she didn’t know his name. They saw into each other’s beings, therefore names were irrelevant. They ran away together, Mooshum said, before each had thought to ask what the other was called. And then they both decided not to have names for a while — all that mattered was they had escaped, slipped their knots, cut the harnesses that relatives had already tightened.

Junesse fled her aunt’s sure beating and the endless drudgery of caring for six younger cousins, who were all to die the next winter of a choking cough. Mooshum fled the sanctified future that his half brother had picked out for him. The two children in white clothes melted into the wall of birds. Their robes were soon to become as dark as the soil, and so they blended into the earth as they made their way along the edges of fields, through open country, to where the farmable land stopped and the ground split open and the beautifully abraded knobs and canyons of the badlands began. Although it took them several years to physically consummate their feelings (Mooshum hinted at this, but never came right out and said it), they were in love. And they were survivors. As a matter of course they knew how to make a fire from scratch, and for the first few days they were able to live on the roasted meat of doves. It was too early for there to be much else to gather in the way of food, but they stole birds’ eggs and scratched up weeds. They snared rabbits and begged what they could from isolated homesteads.

The Burning Glare

ON THE MONDAY that we braided our blessed palms in school, braces were put on my teeth. Unlike now, when every other child undergoes some sort of orthodonture, braces were rare. I have to say it is really extraordinary that my parents, in such modest circumstances, decided to correct my teeth at all. Our off-reservation dentist in the town of Pluto was old-fashioned and believed that to protect the enamel of my front teeth from the wires, he should cap them in gold. So the next day I appeared in school with two long, resplendent front teeth and a mouth full of hardware. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d be teased, but then somebody whispered, “Easter Bunny!” By noon recess boys swirled around me, poking, trying to get me to smile. Suddenly, as a great wind had blown everyone else off the bare gravel yard, there was Corwin Peace. He shoved me and laughed right into my face. Then the other boys swept him away. I walked off to stand in the only sheltered spot on the playground, an alcove in the brick on the southern side facing the littered hulks of cars behind a gas station. I stood in a silent bubble, rubbing my collarbone where his hands had pushed, wondering. What had happened? Our love was in danger, maybe finished. Because of golden teeth. Even then it seemed impossible to bear such a radical change in feeling. Because of family history, though, I rallied myself to the challenge. Included in the romantic tales were episodes of reversals. I had injustice on my side and, besides, when my braces came off, I would be beautiful. Of this I was assured. So as we were entering the classroom in our usual parallel lines, me in the girls’ line, he in the boys’, I maneuvered right across from Corwin, punched him in the arm, hard, and said, “Love me or leave me.” Then I marched away. My knees were weak, my heart pounded. My act had been wild and unprecedented. Soon everyone heard about it, and my bold soap-opera statement brought fame even among the eighth grade girls, one of whom, Beryl Hoop, offered to beat Corwin up for me. Power was mine, and it was Holy Week. The statues were shrouded in purple, except for our church’s exceptionally graphic stations of the cross.

Nowadays, if you see them in churches, they are carved in tasteful woods or otherwise abstracted. But our church’s stations were molded of plaster and painted with bloody relish. Eyes rolled to the whites. Mouths contorted. Limbs flailed. It was all there. The side aisles of the church were wide, and there was plenty of room for schoolchildren to kneel on the aggregate stone floor and contemplate the hard truths of torture. The most sensitive of the girls, and one boy, destined not for the priesthood but for a spectacular burnout in community theater, wept openly and luxuriantly. The others of us, soaked in guilt or secretly admiring the gore, tried to sit back unobtrusively on our bottoms and spare our kneecaps. At some point, we were allowed into the pews, where, during the three holiest hours of the afternoon on Good Friday, with Christ slowly dying underneath his purple cape, we were supposed to maintain silence. During that time, I had decided to begin erasing Corwin’s name from my body by writing it backwards a million times, ecaepniwroc. I began my task in the palm of my hand, then moved to my knee. I’d only managed a hundred when I was thrilled to realize that Corwin was trying desperately to catch my eye, a thing that had never happened before. As I’ve mentioned, our love affair was carried out by intermediaries. That fist in the arm was the first time I’d ever touched him, and that now famous line the first words I’d ever spoken to him. But my fierce punch seemed to have hot-wired deep emotions. That he should be so impetuous, so desperate, as to seek me directly! I was overcome with a wash of shyness and terror. My breath tugged. I wanted to acknowledge Corwin but I couldn’t now. I stayed frozen until we were dismissed.

Easter Sunday. I am dressed in blue nylon dotted swiss. The seams prickle and the neck itches but the overall effect, I think, is glorious. Not for me a Kleenex bobby-pinned into a bow on top my head. I own a hat with fake lilies of the valley on it and a stretchy band that digs into my chin. But at the last moment, I beg to wear my mother’s lace mantilla instead, the one like Jackie Kennedy’s, and the headgear of only the most fashionable older girls. I am splendid, but I am nevertheless completely unprepared for what happens when I return from taking Holy Communion. I am kneeling at the end of the pew. We are instructed to always remain very quiet and to allow Christ’s presence to diffuse in us. I do my best. But then I see Corwin in the line for Communion on my side of the church, which means that returning to his seat farther back he will pass only inches from me. I can keep my head demurely down, or I can look. The choice dizzies me. And I do look. He rounds the first pew. I hold my gaze steady. And he sees that I am looking at him — dark water-tracked hair, narrow brown eyes — and he does not look away from me. With the host of the resurrection in his mouth, my first love gives to me a burning glare of anguished passion that suddenly ignites the million invisible names.

Mustache Maude

FOR ONE WHOLE summer, my grandparents lived off a bag of contraband pinto beans. They killed the rattlesnakes that came down to the streambed to hunt, roasted them, used salt from a little mineral wash to season the meat. They managed to find some berry bushes and to snare a few gophers and rabbits. But the taste of freedom was eclipsed now by their longing for a hot dinner. Though desolate, the badlands were far from empty, and were peopled in Mooshum’s time by unpurposed miscreants and outlaws as well as honest ranchers. One day, they heard an inhuman shrieking from some bushes deep in a draw where they’d set snares. Upon cautiously investigating, they found that they had snared a pig by one hind leg. While they were debating how to kill it, there appeared on a rise the silhouette of an immense person wearing a wide fedora and seated on a horse. They could have run, but as the rider approached them they were too amazed to move, or didn’t want to, for the light now caught the features of a giant woman dressed in the clothing of a man. Her eyes were small and shrewd, her nose and cheeks pudgy, her lip a narrow curl of flesh. One long braid hung down beside an immense and motherly breast. She wore twill trousers, boots, chaps, leather gaunt-lets, and a cowhide belt with silver conchos. Her wide-brimmed hat was banded with the skin of a snake. Her brown bloodstock horse stopped short, polite and obedient. The woman spat a stream of tobacco juice at a quiet lizard, laughed when it jumped and skittered, then ordered the two to stand still while she roped her hog. She proceeded to do so, then with swift and expert motions she tied him to the pommel of her saddle and released his hind leg.

“Climb on,” she ordered them, gesturing to the horse, and when the children did she grasped the halter and started walking. The roped pig trotted along behind. By the time they reached the ranch, which was miles off, the two had fallen asleep on the back of the companionable horse. The woman had a ranch hand take them each down, still sleeping, and lay them in a bedroom in her house, which was large, ramshackle, partly sod and partly framed. There were two little beds in the room, plus a trundle where she herself sometimes slept, snoring like an engine, when she was angry with her husband, the notorious Ott Black. In this place, my Mooshum and his bride-to-be would live for six years, until the ranch was broken up and Mooshum was nearly lynched.

In Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud’s compendium of memorable women and men from North Dakota, “Mustache” Maude Black, for that was the name of my grandparents’ benefactress, is described as not un-womanly, though she dressed mannishly, smoked, drank, was a crack shot and a hard-assed camp boss. These things, my Mooshum said, were all true, as was the mention of both her kind ways and her habit of casual rustling. The last was a kind of sport to her, said Mooshum; she never meant any harm by it at all. She rustled pigs sometimes. The one in the bush had not belonged to her. Mustache Maude sometimes had a mustache, then sometimes not, when she plucked it out. She kept a neat henhouse and a tidy kitchen. She grew very fond of Mooshum and Junesse, taught them to rope, ride, shoot, and make a tasty chicken and dumpling stew. Divining their love, she banished Mooshum to the men’s bunkhouse, where he quickly learned all the ways that he could make children in the future with Junesse. He practiced in his mind, and could hardly wait. But Maude forbade their marriage until both were seventeen years old. When that day came, she threw a wedding supper that was talked about for years, featuring several delectably roasted animals that seemed the same size and type as many lost to the dinner guests. It caused a stir, but there were only bones left when the wedding was over and Maude had kept the liquor flowing, so most of the surrounding ranchers shrugged it off. But what was not shrugged off, and what was in fact resented and what fostered an undercurrent of suspicion, was the fact that Maude had thrown a big and elaborate shindig for a couple of Indians. Or half-breeds. It didn’t matter which. This was western North Dakota at the turn of the last century. Even years later, when an entire family was murdered outside Pluto, four Indians including a boy called Holy Track were blamed and caught by a mob.

In Mooshum’s story, there was another foul murder, of a woman on a farm just to the west; the neighbors disregarded the sudden absence of that woman’s husband and thought about the nearest available Indian. There I was, said Mooshum. One night, the yard of pounded dirt between the bunkhouse and Maude’s kitchen and sleeping quarters filled with men hoisting torches of flaring pitch. Their howls rousted Maude from her bed and she didn’t like that. As a precaution, having heard they would come to get him, Maude had sent Mooshum down to her kitchen cellar with a blanket, to sleep the night. So he knew what happened only through the memory of his blessed wife, for he heard nothing and dreamed his way through the danger.

“Send him out to us,” they bawled, “or we will take him ourselves.”

Maude stood in the doorway in her nightgown, her holster belted on, two cocked pistols in either hand. She never liked to be woken from a sleep.

“I’ll shoot the first two of youse that climbs down off his horse,” she said, then gestured to the sleepy man beside her, “and Ott Black will plug the next!”

The men were very drunk and could hardly control their horses. One fell off and Ott shot him in the leg. He started screaming worse than the snared pig.

“Which one of you boys is next?” Maude roared.

“Send out the goddamn Indian!” But the yell had less conviction, and was punctuated by the shot man’s hoarse shrieks.

“What Indian?”

“That boy!”

“He ain’t no Indian,” said Maude. “He’s a Jew from the land of Galilee! One of the Lost Tribe of Israel!”

Ott Black nearly choked at his wife’s wit.

“She’s got a case of books, you damn fool idiots!” He took a bead on each of them in turn. The men laughed nervously, and called for the boy again.

“I was just having fun with you,” said Maude. “Fact is, he’s Ott Black’s trueborn son.”

This threw the men back in their saddles. Ott blinked, then caught on and bellowed, “You men never knowed a woman till you knowed Maude Black!”

The men fell back into the night and left their fallen would-be lyncher kicking and pleading to God for mercy in the dirt. Maybe Ott’s bullet had hit a nerve or a bone, for the man seemed to be in an unusual amount of pain for just being struck by a bullet. He began to rave and foam at the mouth, so Maude got him drunk, tied him to his saddle, and set out for the doctor’s as she didn’t want him treated at her house. On the way, he died from loss of blood. Before dawn, Maude came back, gave my grandparents her two best horses, and told them to ride hard back the way they had come. That’s how they ended up on their home reservation in time to receive their allotments, upon which they farmed using government-issue seed and plows, where they raised their five children, one of whom was Clemence, my mother, and where my parents let us go each summer to ride horses just after the wood ticks had settled down.

Story

THE STORY COULD have been true, for, as I have said, there really was a Mustache Maude Black with a husband named Ott. Only sometimes Maude was the one to claim Mooshum as her son in the story and sometimes she went on to claim she’d had an affair with Chief Gall. And sometimes Ott Black plugged the man in the gut. But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with facts. Saint Joseph’s Church was named for the carpenter who believed his wife, reared a son not his own, and is revered as the patron saint of our bold and passionate people, the Metis. Those doves were surely the passenger pigeons of legend and truth, whose numbers were such that nobody thought they could possibly ever be wiped from the earth.

Mooshum slowed down that spring and had trouble putting in the garden. As he got more enjoyment out of his chair, our parents relaxed their boycott. More often now, our father fixed the magic circles of plastic onto their metal posts and twiddled them until the picture cleared. We sometimes watched the Three Stooges all together. The black-haired one looked a lot like the woman who saved his life, said Mooshum, nodding and pointing at the set. I remember looking at his gnarled brown finger and imagining it as the hand of a strong young man gripping the plow or a boy holding the candelabra, which, by the way, my grandparents had lugged all the way down to the badlands, where it had come in handy for killing snakes and gophers. They had given their only possession to Maude as a gesture of their gratitude. She had thrust it back at them on the night they escaped.

That tall, six-branched, silver-plated candelabra with the finish worn down to tin in some spots now stood in a place of honor in the center of our dining room table. It held beeswax tapers, which had recently been lighted during Easter dinner. The day after Easter Monday, in the little alcove on the school playground, I kissed Corwin Peace. Our kiss was hard, passionate, strangely mature. Afterward, I walked home alone. I walked very slowly. Halfway there, I stopped and stared at a piece of the sidewalk I’d crossed a thousand times and knew intimately. There was a crack in it — deep, long, jagged, and dark. It was the day when the huge old cottonwood trees shed cotton. The air was filled with falling down and the ditch grass and gutters were plump with a snow of light. I had expected to feel joy but instead felt a confusion of sorrow, or maybe fear, for it seemed that my life was a hungry story and I its source, and with this kiss I had now begun to deliver myself into the words.

A Little Nip

ON THE KITCHEN wall beside the black tin clock whose hands of poisoned radium glowed in the dark, three pictures hung. John F. Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, and Louis Riel. The first two were color photographs that my father and mother had acquired through school and church. The last was a newspaper photograph, yellowed and frail. My mother had clipped the picture out and placed it carefully into a dime-store frame. In the picture, Riel looked morose and disheveled, a little blurry. Yet he was the visionary hero of our people, and the near leader of what could have been our Michif nation. Mooshum and our mother venerated him, even though Mooshum’s parents had once lived in neat comfort near Batoche, Saskatchewan, and their huge farm would have passed to their sons, if not for Riel. That farm was put to the torch before Mooshum gained the power of speech, because the Milk family had harbored the genius of Riel, supported his cause with money, taken in his wife and child, fed his lieutenants, fought beside him, and angered the priests who threatened excommunication to Riel’s followers and ultimately betrayed them to their killers.

After the rout at Batoche, the family had fled south and crossed the border in darkness, not knowing exactly where they were. As soon as they found an agreeable setting, they tried to homestead again, but the heart was out of them. They lost a baby, settled into a despondent subsistence, and were crushed when they heard Riel was tried and hanged. Riel went to his death wearing moccasins and holding in his hand a silver-worked crucifix. His last words to the attending cleric were Courage, mon père. Joseph Milk, our great-grandfather, had been particularly fond of the moody prophet of the new mixed-blood Catholicism, and he cursed the priests even though his son Severine had just been ordained.

Mooshum had a younger brother, a violin player named Shamengwa, who was neat and dignified as Mooshum was happily disordered and profane. Except for his folded-up arm, Shamengwa was stark elegance. The last of their generation, these two enjoyed each other’s company in spite of their differences. They had grown up in that melancholy house and the history affected them in different ways. Shamengwa was driven to music and Mooshum to stories. Both escaped as soon as possible but history followed them, of course, and now as old men they took comfort in chewing it over. When Shamengwa visited, he sat straight up in a hard kitchen chair, and often played the old tunes, while Mooshum liked to lounge or slouch beating time on his knee. Outside in summer, Mooshum claimed an old bench car seat that he refused to let Mama haul away. Inside, the nubbly, sagging, overstuffed couch was his. Sometimes the two brothers sat at the kitchen table drinking hot sugared tea into which Mooshum “slipped a little something.” But nothing made them happier than the chance to fling history into the face of a member of the hated cloth. And so, on days that the old retired priest, frail as dried flowers and all but forgotten up there on the hill, would laboriously totter down to pay the brothers a visit, or when he arrived in a kind of huge, makeshift baby carriage pushed by an obliging Franciscan sister, the brothers grew much excited. They took special pains to procure whiskey and badgered Mama or Aunt Geraldine for boulettes or the special high-risen and light galette they had learned to make from Junesse. Other foods sat heavy on their bowels, but all three of the old men claimed that the meat soup and bread unbound them wonderfully if soaked in sufficient grease. The old priest used a polished diamond willow stick to negotiate the rutted road, and would plant it hard between his feet as he lowered himself into the wine-dark billows of the couch. From there, nodding his eggshell-thin skull, he’d opinionate in whispery, gentle tones, which were maybe too agreeable to the brothers. Sometimes they fell silent in disappointment at the priest’s lack of opposition, but the visits always ended in polite toast after toast. But then the good priest died and the brothers had no ecclesiastic to play off until a big, whey-faced, pompous, and painfully hearty priest was transferred from Montana. He was nicknamed Father Hop Along because of his cowboy origin, his real name, Cassidy, and an unfortunate tendency to pop a bit too daintily along on his pointed feet when using his aspergillum to sprinkle holy water upon worshippers at High Mass.

THE SUMMER AFTER my first kiss, the TV faltered and all sound was lost. We could raise only random buzzing noises and the picture spun so rapidly it made us queasy. But we lived outdoors anyway. Joseph and I were allowed to catch and ride the paint horses belonging to Aunt Geraldine whenever we wanted. Both were swift and loved to run. The black and white was fairly good-natured, but the other, a flighty brown and white pinto, had been struck in the face and bit viciously if you stepped into her blind spot. We rode them bareback with rope halters and tied them at the edge of the yard when we stopped long enough for food. One day, as we were sopping up bowls of soup across the table from Mooshum and Shamengwa, our horses tied under the trees in the backyard, it began to rain lightly down. Sheltered by thick leaves, the horses busily cropped the long grass all around them, so when Mama answered the door and ushered in Father Cassidy we did not attempt to escape, but decided to play gin rummy against the door until the sky brightened.

The two old men greeted the priest with huge delight.

“Tawnshi! Tawnshi ta sawntee, Père Cassidy! How good of you to visit us! How well you look, please sit down, sit down with us, have a bite to eat, a bowl of soup, a crust of bread.”

“Perhaps a pour from the jar, too. Clemence?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Father Cassidy, shivering a bit, though with anticipation, for it wasn’t cold. “A little nip would take the chill off me.”

Joseph looked at me, raised his eyebrows and drew his mouth down in that way he had. It wasn’t even the least bit cool outside. The air had stayed hot and the rain made steam rise off the grass, by which it was immediately obvious that here we had a thirsty priest. Mooshum crowed with pleasure and tipped Clemence’s hand up when she poured stingily.

“Daughter, be more hospitable!”

Mama frowned, and sighed huffily, but left the bottle on the table.

“So, Father Cassidy, you have been here for several months now. What do you think of our ways?”

But the priest had his head tipped back to catch the last drip from the shot glass.

“Oh yai! I remember when priests used to take their whiskey with water, but this one takes the firewater straight. My brother, let us do the same!”

“That’s a Montana boy for you,” said Father Cassidy, trying to appear as though he’d not tossed his shot back too greedily. “We don’t stand on ceremony and we don’t water down our whiskey, but we do believe in going to Holy Mass. Now Clemence attends regularly and she drags along Edward, and the young are of course obliged to make Holy Confession every Friday and attend at least three Masses during the week. But you, now I haven’t seen the two of you at church since I arrived here. So that means at the very least that your confessions are much overdue.”

“Tawpway, Père Cassidy, you speak the truth. But old men have no chance to sin much,” said Mooshum in a regretful voice. He looked at Shamengwa. “Brother, have you had a chance to sin this year yet?”

Shamengwa made a long face and sighed in reproach. “Frère, you would know it, as I would tell you immediately in order to make you jealous. Hiyn, no, I have been pure.”

“I, too, completely pure,” said Mooshum. His chin trembled.

“Are you sure,” said Father Cassidy, eyeing the bottle. His hand clutched his empty water glass. He lifted the glass toward the bottle. “Great sins are not required. Have you not, perhaps, taken the name of the Lord in vain?”

“Mon Dieu! Never!” The brothers looked quite shocked and displeased at the notion, and hastily poured the priest a double shot and refreshed their own glasses.

Father Cassidy looked thoughtful, and perhaps a little downcast to find the two old brothers sinless. But then he sipped deeply and brightened. “There are so many ways of sinning not readily apparent! You may for instance share in the guilt of another’s sin without actually committing it yourself, via the Sin of Silence. Has anyone you know sinned?”

The brothers shook their heads in blank surprise. The priest cast about, waving a plump hand for inspiration. “You may have sinned against the Holy Ghost by resisting known truth — the worth for instance of Holy Mass — thus hardening your soul to the penetrations of grace!”

Father Cassidy looked extremely pleased with himself, but the brothers seemed most offended that he should imagine their souls hardening and they put their hands protectively upon their pulsing hearts. The priest did not give up, however, and quickly rattled off a list of venial sins: “a stab of envy or pride or…, no? Bad temper or even a minor untruth, no? Or even, I hesitate to say…” The priest’s soft hand wobbled a bit as he closed it around the glass, and he smiled in tender delight at its contents, swirling the golden liquid gently as he spoke. He was now a bit dreamy. “Impure thoughts,” he whispered. “Very common.”

At this, Mooshum gave his brother a look of wounded puzzlement, and raised his eye questingly to the ceiling. Shamengwa made the sign of the cross with his good arm, and then took a small sip of his drink.

“We should know what he is talking about,” said Mooshum, touching his poor maimed ear, “but we must admit, we are completely ignorant of these…”

“Impure thoughts,” said Joseph, from the doorway, frowning at the cards in his hand.

“Gin,” I said.

“Aw.”

“Impure thoughts,” said Shamengwa. “Dear priest, could you explain to us — exactly what are these impure thoughts you mention? As you say, if they are common, we must have experienced them, and yet we haven’t noticed somehow.”

“Perhaps we sin unknowingly,” said Mooshum, his eyes sincere as he gazed at the priest over his poised shot glass. He tried for dignity, but his chewed-up ear always made him look ridiculous. “Which would be something…”

“Tragic!” said Joseph. He tried to cover a snorting laugh with several quick card shuffles.

“Tragic…as we’d end up in the bad place without warning, were we to die!”

“Could these impure thoughts send us to hell?”

Paralyzed with alarm, both men sat bolt upright. The priest frowned cross-eyed into his empty glass and Mooshum neatly filled it.

“Concupiscence,” said Father Cassidy, raising one finger beside the glass, which he held slightly out at the level of his clerical collar. With his other hand, he tugged at the collar itself, as though it was tightening. “From the Latin, concupisserry, I believe, meaning, ah, to dwell upon unclean emissions in one’s past or to anticipate such as…any act of imaginary or ejaculatory fornication. Bluntly speaking!”

“Ah, fornication!” The brothers grew animated and tipped their glasses to each other, then to Father Cassidy, who inadvertently tipped his in automatic fellowship and then stared confusedly down, mumbling, “from the Latin…”

“From the Latin forn, as in foreign, for relations with foreigners,” cried Joseph.

“Ho, ho!” exclaimed the brothers, toasting again as Joseph set his cards down and skimmed out the door.

I quickly followed, but Father Cassidy and Mama were out the door right behind us and Mama said, “Now you two stop right there, and apologize to Father.” But Father Cassidy, perhaps to prove what a horse-savvy Montanan he was, strode up behind us with his great chin of dough bulging over his collar and said, “No need, no need, yours, eh? Nice little docile scrub ponies, awful conformation, of course, positively knock-kneed and they do need the currycomb something worse.” A nasty light sparked in the long-necked pinto’s eye. Father Cassidy stepped up to her face and put his hand out. Quick as a rattlesnake, she struck and crushed his fleshy bicep in her teeth. Father Cassidy screamed and began to skip in place. But the mare held on firmly, like a mother might grip a naughty boy. Father Cassidy tried to swat her nose with his open hand. Her eye rolled back, she gave some coughing grunts that sounded like sobs of laughter, and bit down harder before she finally released his arm. There was hot shock in Father Cassidy’s eyes.

“Oh,” said Mama, “I am so sorry, Father. Please come back in and let me ice that little nip.”

“Little nip!” cried Father Cassidy. He clapped his hand over his upper arm as if to keep the meat of it in place and was edging backwards now, heading for his automobile, which was parked in the road before our house. “Good-bye, Clemence, much gratified, the drop did no harm. Aghhh. Who knew I’d need the anesthetic!”

“From the Latin anesthed, meaning numskull,” said Joseph to me.

Father Cassidy got into the car. “Tell your father and his brother that they flirt with damnation by resisting Mass!”

“I’ll tell them, Father, yes, don’t you worry.”

Mama stepped forward to wave politely to Father Cassidy, and by the time she’d turned around to come at us full steam we’d mounted up and sped away. So I believe on that day she walked into the house and poured her frustration out on her father and her uncle, even though she was normally gentle with the two old men, whom she loved as greatly as she loved us. They were chastened and quiet when we returned for supper. Shamengwa stayed on because she had not allowed him to “slink off,” as she put it. The television blared out and the picture scrolled slowly along, edging up the screen and sticking halfway so that a woman’s legs would be on top of her talking head. Then her head would rise and the legs would tremble for one moment beneath her, until her head disappeared and popped up below. The two old men leaned back and closed their eyes, unable to bear the disorienting sight. They fell asleep. They were snoring lightly in profound innocence.

THAT WAS NOT the end of it. Mooshum and his brother attended Holy Mass and then lapsed intentionally in order to provoke a visit from Father Cassidy. His hopes had been raised by seeing the two old men, so close to eternity, in the pew before him, and he wished to secure their souls. This second visit was as ridiculous as the first. Mooshum promised to make an heroic attempt to sin, so he would have something to confess. Joseph watched all of this with a teenager’s long suffering omniscience.

Life as a boy was hard on my brother. To be the son of a science teacher in a reservation school cast him under suspicion, while it was to my advantage. It is always good for a girl to have a visible father. Worse for Joseph, he loved science and actually was teaching himself the Latin names of things. To make up for this, he rode one or the other of Aunt Geraldine’s pintos all over, way back into the bush, and got drunk on bootlegger wine whenever he could. We both had friends, as well as eight or nine Peace cousins first to third, about sixteen others that we could count, and Corwin. I had girlfriends and I did not mind going to school, but somehow the closeness of my family was enough for me outside the classroom. We were not social. Plus Joseph and our father were somewhat isolated by their fascinations — collecting stamps, of course, which was a way of traveling without leaving, but also stars and heavenly phenomena, grasses, trees, birds, reptiles and happenstance insects, which they collected methodically, pinned to white squares of cardboard, and labeled.

Joseph was particularly interested in a species of fat black salamander that he believed endemic to the region, and he’d persuaded Dad to help him follow the life cycle throughout the year by observation in the field. Thus, they would be off even in dead winter with shovel and pick to unearth a hibernating creature from the rock-hard mud of Aunt Geraldine’s slough. Or in summer, as now, they created false playgrounds for the creatures and watched their every move, taking notes in precise printing. For some reason they had agreed to avoid cursive.

Maybe the fact that I grew up admiring Joseph made him softer-hearted toward me than most brothers. We also knew that there would be no other children. Mama said so, and when we fought she shut us up by saying, “Just imagine how you’d feel if something happened.” Imagining the other dead helped us enjoy each other’s company. I helped Joseph collect specimens in stolen canning jars, and memorized a few Latin names just to please him. It helped that I also liked the salamanders — or mud puppies, as they were commonly known. They were lumps of earth, dark with yellow spots, helpless when they left the water. During heavy rains, they swarmed with slow gravity out of wet cracks in the ground. There was something grand and awful about their mute numbers. Mooshum said that the nuns had believed they were emissaries from the unholy dead, sent up by the devil, and hell was full of them. We shuffled slowly through the grass, gently kicking the plump things over. We picked them up and stashed them on higher ground, covering them with wet leaves. They dropped in piles down low wet spots around the school buildings — ten or twenty could be found in the window wells. Joseph always woke me early when the drowning rains came, late in warm spring, and we got to school first so that we could fish the creatures out before the boys found and stomped them to death.

That summer, using picks and shovels, Joseph and my father had dug a deep pond in the backyard. The water table was high that year, and it immediately filled. They planted cattails and willow around the edges, then added frogs and salamanders. The pond was not for fish, those enemies of neotenic larvae, but they stocked it well with chorus and leopard frogs transported from Geraldine’s slough, and then the salamanders, which we carried home in buckets. To Joseph’s disappointment, the salamanders seemed to vanish into the earth. Even if he did find one, they were hard to observe actually doing anything. It took all day to see one open its mouth. Joseph grew impatient and swiped a dissection kit from Dad. The cardboard box contained a scalpel, tweezers, pins, glass slides, a vial of chloroform, and some cotton balls. There was a diagram of an opened frog with all of its organs labeled.

Joseph laid the instruments out carefully on the windowsill of the small room we had divided between us. He took a jar from under the bed. It contained a specimen of Ambystoma tigrinum, the eastern tiger salamander. Into the jar, he dropped a cotton ball dabbed with chloroform, then he stashed it under the bed. Our father didn’t really like dissections.

That night, I moved a candle to shed more light where Joseph needed it. I watched as he sliced the belly of the salamander open and revealed the slippery muck of its insides — a tangled set of tubes filled with transparent slime.

“It was just about to release its spermatophore,” said Joseph with awe, poking at a little white piece of mush. There was a footstep outside the door. I blew out the candle. Dad opened the door.

“No candles,” he said. “Fire hazard. Hand it over.”

I rolled the candle to his feet from under the bed and he said, “Evey, get out of there and go to bed!”

The next morning, I got up before Joseph and found that the salamander had revived and tried to crawl away, unraveling the piece of entrails that Joseph had pinned into the soft wood of the dresser. The trail of its insides stretched to the windowsill, where it had managed to die with its nose pressed against the screen. That day, at the funeral, Joseph buried the dissection kit beside the salamander. He sighed a lot as we covered the plump little graying body, but he did not speak and neither did I. It was months before he dug up the dissection kit, and a year might have passed before he used it on something else.

BOTH MOOSHUM AND Shamengwa insisted that if Louis Riel had allowed his redoubtable war chief Gabriel Dumont to make all of the decisions preceding and at Batoche, not only would he have won for the mixed-bloods and Indians a more powerful place in the world, but this victory would have inspired Indians below the border to unite at a crucial moment in history. Things would have been different all around. The two brothers also liked to speculate about the form that Metis Catholicism would have taken and whether they might have had their own priests. Mooshum insisted it would be better if the schismatic priests were allowed to marry, and Shamengwa was of the opinion that even Metis priests should keep their chastity. Both agreed that Louis Riel’s revelation, which he experienced upon learning of his excommunication and that of his followers, was probably sound. After much meditation, Riel the mystic had announced that hell did not last forever, nor was it even very hot.

“And I believe this,” Mooshum insisted, “not only because Riel was comforted by angels, but because it stands to reason.”

“Enlighten me.”

Dad went to Mass to please Clemence and vanished at the first sight of Father Cassidy. He was a Catholic of no conviction whatsoever.

“If hell was hot enough to eat the flesh, there would be no flesh left to suffer,” said Mooshum. “And if hell was meant to burn the soul, which is invisible, it would have to be imaginary fire, the flames of which you cannot feel.”

“So either way, hell is seriously compromised.”

“Either way.” Mooshum nodded.

“I find that totally believable.” Dad nodded. “It really makes a great deal of sense. Scientifically speaking, of course, nothing can burn forever without an unlimited fuel source. So you have to wonder.”

Clemence, who said that she believed in hot fires that burned forever to the bone, shook her head in pity at the men. She considered it a weakness of character not to believe in hell, a convenient mental trick to excuse slack conduct. She had noticed the failure was most pronounced and useful in those who had no expectations of heaven. But although she wished intensely to rear her children in such a way that they would surely join the kingdom of God (her legacy), she was somehow foiled in her intentions, and by her own sympathies.

For instance, she could be persuaded to pour for Mooshum with a too liberal hand; and she took a shot herself now and then. Also, anyone could tell she did not think much of Father Cassidy. Her lack of enthusiasm in his presence, after that first visit, was obvious. She sometimes let slip a word or two behind his back. Joseph and I were certain we had heard her mutter, Fat fool, after one of his sermons on God’s plan for creating babies in the wombs of women. Father Cassidy preached against interference with this plan, but in terms so obscure that I couldn’t understand what he was talking about at all. When I asked Mama what it was Father Cassidy meant, she gave me a long stare and then said, “He means that God’s plan was for me to get pregnant again and die. However, the doctor I spoke with did not agree with God’s plan and so here I am, alive and kicking.”

She saw the worry on my face and realized, I suppose, how her words sounded. “I’ll explain when you’re fourteen,” she said in a voice meant to sound reassuring. I wasn’t reassured at all and had to ask Joseph if he understood Father Cassidy.

“Sure,” said Joseph, “he’s talking about birth control. Aunt Geraldine’s the one to ask if you need sex information. She’ll draw it out on paper.”

So the next time I went to catch a horse, I came back with knowledge. Thanks to Geraldine I also understood about impure thoughts, and I realized that the miraculous feelings that were part of God’s plan for me, and which I had experienced in the bathtub with a headful of mayonnaise, were considered sins.

“Do I have to confess those?” I had been aghast at the prospect.

“I don’t,” said Geraldine.

The next time Father Cassidy appeared at the door, I greeted him with a pure conscience and took his light jacket and hat and put them on the chair beside the door. Then I retreated to a corner of the room. This time, once the priest was ushered inside to the table, Mama did not leave the bottle after she’d poured the shots. She took it with her to the other room. With the bottle gone, there came a dampness of feeling among the men.

“Ah, well,” said Mooshum, “they drank no wine in the trenches at Batoche, and the priests were halfway starved, too. Father Cassidy, are you familiar with our history?”

“I’m a Montana boy,” said the priest. “I know how they put down the rebellion.”

“Rebellion!” Mooshum puffed out his cheeks. He didn’t drink from his little glass yet.

“With a Gatling gun!” Shamengwa said. “Trucked from out east. A coward’s invention, that.”

Father Cassidy shrugged. Mooshum suddenly became very angry. His face went livid red, his mangled ear flared, his brows lowered. He grit his teeth, shivering with hatred.

“It was an issue of rights,” he cried, slapping the table. “Getting their rights recognized when they had already proved the land — the Michifs and the whites. And old Poundmaker. They wanted the government to do something. That’s all. And the government pissed about this way and that so old Riel says, ‘We’ll do it for you!’ Ha! Ha! Howah! ‘We’ll do it for you!’” He raised his glass slightly and narrowed his eyes at Father Cassidy.

A look of happiness had taken hold of Shamengwa. He took a tiny sip of the liquor on his tongue, and beamed. “Why,” he said, “this is sure smooth.”

“My lease money come in last week,” said Mooshum. “Clemence, she purchased me a special bottle. My, but she’s stingy! If we had our rights, as Riel laid ’em out, Father Cassidy, you’d be working for us, not at us. And Clemence would pour a deeper glass, too.”

“Well, I doubt that,” said Shamengwa, “but there are so many other things.” Shamengwa’s joy had stirred him to sudden life. “I’ve thought about this, brother. If Riel had won, our parents would have stayed in Canada, whole people. Not broken. We would have been properly raised up. My arm would work.”

“So many things,” said Mooshum, faintly. “So many…But there is no question about one word, my brother.”

“What is that word?”

“Respect.”

“Respect is as respect does,” Father Cassidy commented. “Have you respected Our Lord’s wishes this week?”

“Did Our Lord make us?” Mooshum asked belligerently.

“Why, yes,” said Father Cassidy.

“As we are, in our bodies,” said Mooshum.

“Of course.”

“Down to the details? Down to the male parts?”

“What are you getting at?” asked Father Cassidy.

“If Our Lord made our bodies down to the male parts, then He also made the male part’s wishes. This week, I have respected these wishes, I will tell you that much.”

Before Father Cassidy could open his mouth, Shamengwa jumped in. “Respect,” said Shamengwa, “is a much larger subject than your male parts, my brother. You referred to political respect for our people. And in that you were correct, all too correct, for it is beyond a doubt. If Riel had carried through, we would have had respect.”

“To our nation! To our people!” Mooshum drained his glass.

“Land,” said Shamengwa, brooding.

“Women,” said Mooshum, dizzy.

“Not even the great Riel could have helped you there.”

“But our people would not have been hanged…”

“Ah, yes,” said Father Cassidy, eyeing the bottom of his glass. “The hangings! A local historian—”

“Don’t speak ill of her, Father. I am in love with her!”

“I wasn’t…”

“Let us not speak of the hanging,” said Shamengwa firmly. “Let us speak instead of requesting another glass of this stuff from Clemence. Oh niece, favorite niece!”

“Don’t favorite me.” Mama came back into the room and poured the men a round. She swept out with the bottle, again, so quickly that she didn’t see me. I had sunk down behind the couch because I didn’t feel like being stuck with weeding the beans right then. That she wasn’t more hospitable with the priest confirmed her low opinion of him, but then I realized he’d also come to see her.

“Could we have a little word?” Father Cassidy tried to loop his voice around her swift ankles, to drag her out of the kitchen, but she had passed through the back door out into the garden.

MOOSHUM WAS, INDEED, in love with Mrs. Neve Harp, an annoying aunt of ours, a Pluto lady who called herself the town historian. She often “popped in,” as she called it. We were never free of that threat. She was what people called “fixy,” always made-up and overdressed. She was rich and spoiled, but a little crazy, too — she sometimes gave a panicky laugh that went on too long and seemed out of her control. Mama said she felt sorry for her, but would not tell me why. Neve Harp seemed proud of having beaten down two husbands — one she had even put in prison. She was working on a third, bragging of stepchildren, but had already started using her maiden name in bylines to reduce confusion. As he was not allowed to visit Neve Harp often enough to suit his desires, Mooshum wrote letters to her. Some evenings, when the television worked, Joseph and I watched while Mooshum sat at the table composing letters in his flowing nun-taught script. He prodded our father for information.

“Is your sister fond of flowers? What is her favorite?”

“Stinging nettles.”

“Would you say she favors a certain color?”

“Fish-belly white.”

“What were her charming habits when she was young?”

“She could fart the national anthem.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yes.”

“Howah! Did she always have such pretty hair?”

“She dyes it.”

“How did she come to have so many husbands?”

“Obscene talents.”

“What does she think? What is her mind like?”

Our dad would just laugh wearily. “Mind?” he’d say. “Thoughts?”

“She’s got her teeth, no? All of them?”

“Except the ones she left in her husbands.”

“I wonder if she would be interested in memories of my horse-racing days here on the reservation. Those could be considered historical.”

“You only quit two years ago.”

“But they go way back…”

And so it would continue until Mooshum was satisfied with his letter. He folded the paper, setting each crease with his thumb, fit it into an envelope, and carefully tore a stamp from a sheet of commemoratives. He would keep the letter in his breast pocket until Mama went to the store, then he’d go along with her and put it directly into the hands of the post lady, Mrs. Bannock. He knew that his pursuit of Neve Harp was frowned upon, and he believed that Clemence would throw his letters in the garbage.

I PROBABLY DID not fully realize or appreciate our family’s relative comfort on the reservation. Although everyone in the family except my father was some degree of Chippewa mixed with some degree of French, and although Shamengwa’s wife had been a traditional full-blood and Mooshum abandoned the church later to pursue pagan ways, the fact is, we lived in Bureau of Indian Affairs housing. In town, there was electricity and plumbing, as I’ve mentioned, even an intermittent television signal. Aunt Geraldine still lived in the old house, out on the land, and hauled her water. Her horses were the descendants of Mooshum’s racers. We also had shelves of books, some of which were permanent, others changed every week. But because we lived in town we were visited more often by the priest. There was, in fact, one final visit from Father Cassidy, a drama that had far-reaching effects in our family. For one, our mother blamed the argument on liquor and banned Mooshum from drinking it as best she could. For another, the grip of the church on our family was weakened as Mooshum thrillingly broke away.

It was a low and drizzly summer day. Joseph and I had caught a number of salamanders after a rain and were busy restocking the back pond from a galvanized tin bucket, when Father Cassidy appeared in the yard and skipped his bulk along the grass to inspect our work. We looked up from beneath his vast belly, and were surprised to see him crossing himself double time.

“What’s wrong?” asked Joseph.

“There are some who believe those creatures represent the devil,” said the priest. “I, of course, do not hold with superstitions.”

But perhaps there was something to it, as we later found.

By the time Joseph and I had finished releasing the salamanders and come back in the house, the conversation was in full swing and the bottle, too, was out because Mama was out. The three men nodded happily at us. They were drinking not from shot glasses, but from hard plastic coffee cups, Mama’s favorite new set, harvest gold.

“We better stay here and watch over them,” said Joseph to me, low, and I dipped out cold water for us to drink. We sat down on the couch. There was no doubt things were preceding swiftly. Father Cassidy had asked of Mooshum a particular question, one he never answered the same way twice. The question was this: What had happened to Mooshum’s ear? The ear had not actually, he’d tell us later, been pecked away by doves.

Mooshum squinted, curled his lip out, and asked Father Cassidy if he’d ever heard of Liver-Eating Johnson.

Father Cassidy smiled indulgently and tried a weak joke: “He must have been from Montana!”

“Tawpway,” said Mooshum.

“Paint the picture in words, mon frère!” said Shamengwa.

Mooshum made himself into a hulking beast and clawed at his chin to show the man’s scraggly blood-soaked beard. He then related the horrifying story of Liver-Eating Johnson’s hatred of the Indian and how in lawless days this evil trapper and coward jumped his prey and was said to cut the liver from his living victim and devour that organ right before their eyes. He liked to run them down, too, over great distances.

Father Cassidy gulped and laughed weakly. “That’s enough!” But Mooshum drank from the coffee cup and barged ahead.

“Me, I was a young boy, not yet a man, alone on the prairie hunting for some scrap to eat. Turned out of my family, eh? Away across in the distances I see a someone running, a hairy and desperate man. But me, I have no fear of anything.”

Shamengwa glanced at us, tapped his head, and winked.

“I kept to my own pace, as I was searching for something to eat. A rabbit, maybe, a grouse, even a rattlesnake would have set me up good. I myself was very hungry.”

“Boys get hungry,” said Shamengwa.

“I glance around in hopes that maybe this stranger has some food to spare. He’s coming at me, still running. He’s covered with ragged skins and he has a scrawly beard and that beard, eh? I suddenly see, when he gets close enough, how that beard is all crusted with old blood. And I know it’s him.”

“Liver Eater,” said Shamengwa.

“I see that light in his eyes. He’s very hungry, too! And I begin to spring, I’ll tell you, I take off like a rabbit, quick. I’ve got speed, but I know Liver Eater’s got endurance. He’ll outrun me if we go all day, he’ll exhaust me. And sure enough, the minute I slow my pace, he’s on me. I speed up. It’s cat and mouse, lynx and rabbit. Then he puts a burst on and he jumps me!”

Father Cassidy looked aghast, forgot to drink. Mooshum slowly touched what was left of his ear.

“Yes, he got that. His teeth were sharp. But he must have lost his hunting knife, for he did not stab me. I struggled out of his grip.” Mooshum struggled out of his own arms, burst free of his own clutching hands. “I hopped out, running once again, just ahead of him, but as I charge along, blood from my ear flying in the wind, I get to thinking. Riel, if he’d won there would be some justice! This devil would not dare to chase an Indian. Hey, I think, I’m hungry too! Let’s give Liver Eater some of his own medicine, anyway. I’ve got sharp teeth. So I stop, quick.”

Mooshum jolted in his chair.

“The hairy white man flips over me, and as he does, I bite off one of his fingers.”

“Which one?” said Shamengwa.

“I just got the pinkie,” said Mooshum. “But now he’s foaming mad, so I let him come at me again. This time, I strike like a weasel. Snap, a thumb comes off!”

“Did you eat it?” said Joseph.

“I had to swallow it down whole, no chewing. It tasted foul,” said Mooshum. “I needed it for strength, my boy. We blasted out again. The next time I slowed he went for my liver — but only ripped a chunk out of my left cheek here.” Mooshum pointed at the baggy seat of his pants. “I tore a bite from his hindquarters, too, and wrestled him down and got a piece of thigh, next. I kept after him. I was young. We must of ran for twenty, thirty miles! And over those miles I whittled him down.”

“Howah!” cried Shamengwa.

“By the time he dropped from blood loss, he was down six fingers. I got one of his ears, the whole thing. I took a couple of his toes just to slow him down. Those, I spit right out. And I got his nose.”

“Yuck,” I said.

“It’s my lucky piece,” said Mooshum. “Want to see it, Father?”

“No, I do not!”

But Mooshum had already drawn his handkerchief from his pocket, and with an air of reverence he unwrapped it to show a blackened piece of leatherlike gunk.

“A bit of Thamnophis radix,” said Joseph, peering at it over Mooshum’s shoulder. “Why’d you keep it?”

“It’s his love charm,” Shamengwa said.

“That is…positively pagan!” Father Cassidy spluttered the words out and Mooshum’s eye lighted.

“In what way, dear priest?” he asked with an air of curious innocence, pouring whiskey into the coffee cup that Father Cassidy gripped in his shuddering fingers.

“A nose!” cried Father Cassidy.

“And what piece of good Saint Joseph is lodged in our church’s altar?” asked Mooshum. He spoke in a nunlike voice, gentle and reproving.

Father Cassidy’s mouth shut hard. He frowned. “To compare, even to compare…”

“I was told,” said Joseph readily, “as he is my name saint of course, I was told that our altar contains a bit of Saint Joseph’s spinal material.”

Father Cassidy drank the whole cup back.

“Sacrilege.” He shook his head. Wagged his empty cup, which Mooshum promptly filled again.

“It saddens and outrages me,” Father Cassidy said, sipping moodily off the brim. “Saddens and outrages me,” he repeated in a fainter voice. Then he got all stirred up, as if some thought pierced the fog. It was the same thought he’d had already.

“To compare…” he blurted out, almost tearful.

“Compare, though, I must,” said Mooshum. “When you stop to consider how the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, is eaten at every Mass.”

Father Cassidy’s tears vanished in a wash of rage. He blew up at this — his cheeks puffed out and he swayed monumentally to his feet.

“That is the transubstantiation, which is to say you speak of the most sacred aspect of our Mother the Church as represented in the Holy Mass.”

Father Cassidy was building up more and more gas, and soon a froth of fresh bubbles dotted the corners of his mouth. Mooshum leaned forward, questioning.

“Then do you mean to tell me that the body and the blood is just, eh, in your head, like? The bread stands in for the real thing? Then I could see your point. Otherwise, the Eucharist is a cannibal meal.”

Father Cassidy’s lips turned purple and he tried to roar, though it came out a gurgle. “Heresy! What you describe. Heresy. The bread does indeed become the body. The wine does indeed become the blood. Yet it does not compare in any way to the eating of another human.” Father Cassidy wagged a finger. “I fear you’ve gone too far now! I fear you have stepped over the edge with this talk! I fear you will be required to make a very special, and grave, confession for us to allow you back into the church.”

“Then back to the blanket I go!” Mooshum was incensed with delight. “The old ways are good enough for me. I’ve seen enough of your church. For a long time I have had my suspicions. Why is it you priests want to listen to dirty secrets, anyway?”

“All right, be a pagan, burn in hell!” Father Cassidy restrained a belch and put out his cup for another shot. The bottle was nearly empty now.

“We don’t believe in the everlasting kind of hell, remember that?” Shamengwa said primly.

“We put our faith in a merciful hell,” said Mooshum.

“Then there’s nothing for me to do!”

Father Cassidy threw his hands up and staggered to the door, fumbled his way out, made it down the steps. Joseph and I sat on the couch still sipping cold water. Shamengwa and Mooshum stared musingly at the door. Shamengwa had just stirred himself to pick up his fiddle when there was a terrific sound from outside, a resounding thud, like a dropped beef. I was closest to the door and got out first. Father Cassidy was laid out on the grass like a massive corpse. He looked quite dead, but when I bent over him I saw that his breath still moved the froth bubbles at his lips.

“Oh no!” Joseph cried out, kneeling at the other end of Father Cassidy. He peeled something from the sole of Father Cassidy’s black cleric’s shoe, and cradled it in his two hands. He walked away with the flattened salamander, glaring back once at the felled priest.

Mooshum gaped at us, holding on to the wood railing. He and Shamengwa did not trust their feet to negotiate the front steps and were picking their way down sideways, as if descending a steep hill.

“He slipped on a salamander,” I said.

“Does he live yet?”

“He’s breathing.”

“Payhtik, mon frère,” he said as Shamengwa stepped carefully down the road to his own house. Shamengwa waved his good arm without turning back. Mooshum went out to his car seat on the back lawn, lay down across it, and fell asleep. I stayed with Father Cassidy, who snored in the grass for a little while. I helped him to his feet when he came to, and then to his car, which he drove wanderingly up the hill.

Things would be harder, now, for Father Cassidy. As I went back inside to stash the empty bottle and wash out Mama’s cups I knew that word would spread — the priest drunk, tripped up by the devil in the form of a mud puppy, cursing an old man to hell, all of these things would be recounted by Mooshum and Shamengwa when talking to their cronies. And Mooshum really did follow through with what had seemed like a drunken threat. He cast his lot in with the traditionals not long afterward and started attending ceremonies, which took place out on the farther reaches of the reservation and to which our dad drove him secretly. For Clemence was furious with Mooshum’s defection. When I asked my grandfather why he’d decided to change so drastically, so late in his years, Mooshum told me.

“There is a moment in a man’s life when he knows exactly who he is. Old Hop Along did not mean to, but he helped me to that moment.”

“You were drunk, though, Mooshum.”

“Awee, tawpway, my girl, you speak the truth. But my drunkenness had cleared my mind. Seraph Milk had a full-blood mother who died of sorrow with no help from the priest. I saw that I was the son of that good woman, silent though she was. Also, I was getting nowhere with the Catholic ladies. I thought that I might find a few good-looking ones out in the bush.”

“That’s not much of a reason.”

“You are wrong there, it is the best reason.”

And Mooshum winked at me as if he knew that I went to church because I hoped to see Corwin.

Sister Godzilla

MY LOVE FOR Corwin Peace turned to outraged betrayal when he told the other boys that he had kissed me. I was wretchedly angry with love now, determined to revenge myself on Corwin no matter how much my heart broke to do it. But I soon found that my heart didn’t break at all, and I enjoyed tormenting Corwin. That whole summer, I struck him out whenever he dared join a game, and I looked forward to the moment when he slung his bat behind him in despair, sometimes cracking the shins of his teammates, turning their jeers to cries of pain. I shot at him with a BB gun. Years later, he claimed that my BB had migrated through his body and came out his kidney, causing him agony. My brother and I rode our ponies everywhere and took turns giving everybody rides except Corwin, around whom I barrel-raced one day in a circle, slowly obscuring him with dust as he stood and watched, hands out, helpless.

Yet, no matter how I tried to humiliate him, Corwin stayed in love with me. We grew side by side. I don’t know what happened to him underneath his clothes, but that summer my breasts turned to sore buds, and I almost cried when I found hair where it didn’t belong. Stoically, I endured my body’s new secrets. Summer went and the air cooled. I got a new dress, saggy in the bust. We were in the sixth grade, at last, and it was the first day of school. Mama got us up and shoved us onto the dirt road that led up the hill. We dawdled until we heard the other children on the playground, then we ran. Two lines formed as always. We went in, already knowing our classroom. The door banged shut and we were alone with our teacher.

The habits of Franciscan nuns still shrouded all but their faces, and so each of the new nun’s features were emphasized, read forty times over in astonishment. Outlined in a stiff white frame of starched linen, Sister’s eyes, nose, and mouth leapt out, a mask from a dream, a great raw-boned jackal’s muzzle.

“Oh, Christ,” said Corwin, just loud enough for me to hear.

I had decided to ignore him for the first month, at least, but the nun’s extreme ugliness was irresistible.

“Godzilla,” I whispered, turning to him, raising my eyebrows.

The teacher’s name was really Sister Mary Anita. People who knew her from before she was a nun said she was a Buckendorf. She was young, in her twenties or thirties, and so swift of movement for all her hulking size that, walking from the back of the room to the front, she surprised her students, made us picture athlete’s legs and muscles concealed in the flow of black wool. When she swept the air in a gesture meant to include all of us in her opening remarks, her hands fixed our gazes. They were the opposite of her face. Her hands were beautiful, white as milk glass, the fingers straight and tapered. They were the hands in the hallway print, of Mary underneath the cross. They were the hands of the apostles, cast in plastic and lit at night on the tops of television sets. Praying hands.

Ballplayer’s hands. She surprised us further by walking onto the gravel field at recess, the neck piece cutting hard into the flesh beneath her heavy jaw. When, with a matter-of-fact grace, she pulled from the sleeve of her gown a mitt of dark mustard-colored leather and raised it, a thrown softball dropped in. Her skill was obvious. Good players rarely seemed to stretch or change their expressions. They simply tipped their hands toward the ball like magnets, and there it was. As a pitcher, Mary Anita was a swirl of wool, graceful as the windblown cape of Zorro, an emotional figure that stirred something up in me. By the time I got up to bat, I was so thoroughly involved in the feeling that, as I pounded home plate, a rubber dish mat, beat the air twice in practice swings, and choked up on the handle, I decided that I would have no choice but to slam a home run.

I did not. In fact I whiffed worse than Corwin, in three strikes never ticking the ball or fouling. Disgusted with myself, I sat on the edge of the bike rack and watched as Sister gave a few balls away and pitched easy hits to the rest of the team. It was as if, from the beginning, the two of us had sensed what was to come. Or then again perhaps Mary Anita’s information simply came from my former teachers, living in the redbrick convent across the road from school. Hard to handle. A smart-off. Watch out when you turn your back. They were right. After recess, my pride burned, I sat at my desk and drew a dinosaur encased in a nun’s robe, the mouth open in a roar. The teeth, long and jagged, grayish white, absorbed me — I wanted to get the shadows right, the dark depth of the gullet behind them. I worked so hard on the picture that I didn’t notice as the room hushed around me. I felt the presence, though, the tension of regard that dropped over me as Mary Anita stood watching. As a mark of my arrogance, I kept drawing.

I shaded in the last tooth and leaned back to frown at my work. The page was plucked into the air before I could pretend to cover it. There was silence. My heart sped with excitement.

“You will remain after school,” the nun pronounced.

The last half hour passed. The others filed past me, smirking and whispering. And then the desk in front of me filled suddenly. There was the paper, the carefully rendered dinosaur caught in mid-roar. I stared at it furiously, my thoughts a blur of anticipation. I was not afraid.

“Look at me,” said Mary Anita.

It was at that moment, I think, that it happened. I couldn’t lift my head. My throat filled. I traced the initials carved into the desktop, my initials.

“Look at me,” Mary Anita said to me again. My gaze was drawn upward, upward on a string, until I met the eyes of my teacher. Her eyes were the deep blue of Mary’s cloak, electrically sad. Their stillness shook me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

When those two unprecedented words dropped from my lips, I knew that something terrible had occurred. The blood rushed to my head so fast that my ears ached, yet the tips of my fingers fell asleep. My eyelids prickled and my nose wept, but at the same time my mouth went dry. My body was a thing of extremes, contradicting itself.

“When I was young,” said Sister Mary Anita, “young as you are, I felt a great deal of pain when I was teased about my looks. I’ve long since accepted my…deformity. A prognathic jaw runs in our family. But I must admit, the occasional insult, or a drawing such as yours, still hurts.”

I began to mumble, then stopped, my throat raw. Sister Mary Anita waited, then handed me her own handkerchief. I buried my face in the cloth. She’d used it to mop her brow when beads of sweat crept down beneath the starched white square that cut into her forehead. There was no perfume whatsoever, of course, but something cleaner. Maybe lavender. Or marigold. Some pungent leaf.

“I’m sorry.” I was intoxicated by the handkerchief. I wiped my nose. I asked to keep the square of white material, but Sister Mary Anita shook her head and retrieved the crumpled ball.

“Can I go now?”

“Of course not,” said Mary Anita.

I was confounded. The magical two words, an apology, had dropped from my lips. Yet more was expected. What?

“I want you to understand something,” said the nun. “I’ve told you how I feel. And I expect that you will never hurt me again.”

Again the nun waited, and waited, until our eyes met. My mouth fell wide. My eyes spilled over again. I knew that the strange feelings that had come upon me and transfixed me were the same feelings that Mary Anita felt. I had never felt another person’s feelings, never in my life.

“I won’t do anything to hurt you,” I babbled in a fit of startled agony. “I’ll kill myself first.”

“I’m sure that will not be necessary,” said Sister Mary Anita.

I tried to rescue my pride, then, by turning away very quickly. Without permission, I ran out the schoolroom door, down the steps and on, into the road, where at last the magnetic force of the encounter weakened and I suddenly could breathe. Even that was different, though. As I walked I realized that my body still fought itself. My lungs filled with air like two bags, but every time they did so, a place underneath them squeezed so painfully the truth suddenly came clear.

“I love her now,” I blurted out. I stopped on a crack in the earth, stepping on it, then stamped down hard, sickened. “Oh God, I am in love.”

CORWIN TRIED EVERYTHING to win me back. He almost spoiled his reputation by eating tree bark. Then he put two crayons up his nose, pretend tusks. The pink got stuck and Sister Mary Anita sent him to visit the Indian Health Service clinic. He only rescued his image by getting his stomach pumped in the emergency room. I now despised him, but that only seemed to fuel his adoration.

Walking into the school yard the second week of September, on a bright cool morning, Corwin ran up to me and skidded to a halt like he was stealing base.

“Godzilla,” he cried. “Yeah, not too shabby!”

He picked himself up and wheeled off, the laces of his tennis shoes flapping. I looked after him and felt the buzz inside my head begin again. I wanted to stuff that name back into my mouth, or at least into Corwin’s mouth.

“I hope you trip and murder yourself,” I screamed.

But Corwin did not trip. For all of his recklessness, he managed to stay upright, and as I stood rooted in the center of the walk I saw him whiz from clump to clump of children, laughing and gesturing, filling the air with small and derisive sounds. Sister Mary Anita swept out the door, a wooden-handled brass bell in her hand. When she shook it up and down, the children who played together in twos and threes swung toward her and narrowed or widened their eyes and turned eagerly to one another. Some began to laugh. It seemed to me that all of them did, in fact, and that the sound, jerked from their lips, was large, uncanny, totally and horribly delicious. It rose in my own throat, its taste was vinegar.

“Godzilla, Godzilla,” they called underneath their breath. “Sister Godzilla.”

Before them on the steps, Sister Mary Anita continued to smile into their faces. She did not hear them…yet. But I knew she would. Over the bell, her eyes were brilliantly dark and alive. Her horrid jagged teeth showed in a smile. I ran to her. Thrusting my hand into my lunch bag, I grabbed the cookies that my mother had made from recipes she clipped from oatmeal boxes and molasses jars.

“Here!” I shoved a sweet, lumpy cookie into the nun’s hand. It fell apart, distracting her as my classmates pushed past.

MY FELLOW STUDENTS seemed to forget the name off and on all week. Some days they would seem to have passed on to new disasters — other teachers occupied them, or some small event occurred within the classroom. But then Corwin Peace would lope and careen among them at recess; he’d pump his arms and pretend to roar behind Sister Mary Anita’s back as she stepped up to the plate. As she swung and connected with the ball and gathered herself to run, her veil lifting, the muscles in her shoulders like the curved hump of a raptor’s wings, Corwin would move along behind her, rolling his legs the way Godzilla did in the King Kong movie. In her excitement, dashing base to base, her feet long and limber in black-laced nun’s boots, Mary Anita did not notice. But I looked on, helpless, the taste of a penny caught in my throat.

“SNAKES LIVE IN holes. Snakes are reptiles. These are Science Facts.”

I read to the class, out loud, from my Discovery science book.

“Snakes are not wet. Some snakes lay eggs. Some have live young.”

“Very good,” said Sister. “Can you name other reptiles?”

My tongue fused to the back of my throat.

“Yes,” I croaked.

She waited, patient eyes on me.

“There’s Chrysemys picta,” I said, “the painted turtle. And the Plains garter snake, Thamnophis radix, and also T. sirtilis, the red-sided garter snake. They live right here, in the sloughs, all around here.”

Sister nodded in a kind of thoughtful surprise, but then seemed to remember that my father was a science teacher and smiled her kind and frightful smile. “Well, that’s very good.

“Anyone else?” Sister asked. “Reptiles from other parts of the world?”

Corwin Peace raised his hand. Sister recognized him.

“How about Godzilla?”

Gasps. Small noises of excitement. Mouths opened and hung open. Admiration for Corwin’s nerve rippled through the rows of children like a wind across a field. Sister Mary Anita’s great jaw opened, opened, then snapped shut. Her shoulders shook. No one knew what to do at first, then she laughed. It was a high-pitched, almost birdlike sound, a thin laugh like the highest keys played on the piano. The other students’ mouths opened, they all hesitated, then they laughed with her, even Corwin. Eyes darting from one of us to the next, to me, Corwin laughed.

But I was near to puking with anxious rage. When Sister Mary Anita turned to new work, I crooked my fist beside me like a piston, then I leaned across Corwin’s desk.

“I’m going to give you one right in the bread box,” I said.

Corwin looked pleased, and so with one precise jab — which I had learned from my uncle Whitey, who fought in the Golden Gloves — I knocked the wind out of him and left him gasping. I turned to the front, my face clear and heart calm, as Sister began her instruction.

FURIOUS SUNLIGHT. BLACK cloth. I sat on the iron trapeze, the bar pushing a sore line into the backs of my legs. As I swung, I watched Sister Mary Anita. The wind was harsh and she wore a pair of wonderful gloves, black, the fingers cut out of them so that her hand could better grip the bat. The ball arced toward her sinuously, dropped, her bat caught it with a clean sound. Off the ball soared, across the playground boundaries, over into the yard of the priest’s residence. Mary Anita’s habit swirled open behind her. The cold bit her cheeks red. She swung to third and glanced, panting, over her shoulder and then sped home. She touched down lightly and bounded off.

My arms felt heavy, weak. I dropped from the trapeze and went to lean against the brick wall of the school building. My heart thumped in my ears. I saw what I would do when I grew up. Declare my vocation, enter the convent. Sister Mary Anita and I would live over in the nuns’ house together, side by side. We would eat, work, eat, cook. Sometimes we’d have to pray. To relax, Sister Mary Anita would hit pop flies and I would catch them.

Someday, one day, the two of us would be walking, our hands in our sleeves, our long habits flowing behind.

“Dear Sister,” I would say, “remember that old nickname you had the year you taught the sixth grade?”

“Why no,” Sister Mary Anita would say, smiling at me. “Why, no.”

And I would know that I had protected her.

IT GOT WORSE. I wrote letters, tore them up. My hand shook when Sister passed me in the aisle and my eyes closed. I breathed in. Soap. A harsh soap. Faint carbolic acid. Marigolds, for sure. That’s what she smelled like. Dizzying. My fists clenched. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes and loudly excused myself. I went to the girls’ bathroom and stood in a stall. My life was terrible. The thing is, I didn’t want to be a nun.

“There must be another way!” I whispered, desperate. The whitewashed tin shuddered when I slammed my hand on the cubicle wall. I decided that I would have to persuade Mary Anita to forsake her vows, to come and live with me and my family in our BIA house. Someone was standing outside. I opened the door a bit and stared into the great, craggy face.

“Are you feeling all right? Do you need to go home?” Sister Mary Anita was concerned.

Fire shot through my limbs. The girls’ bathroom, its light mute and brilliant, a place of secrets, of frosted glass, paralyzed me. I gathered myself. Here was my chance, as if God had given it.

“Please,” I whispered to her. “Let’s run away together!”

Sister paused. “Are you having troubles at home?” she asked.

“No.”

Sister’s milk-white hand came through the doorway and covered my forehead. My anxious thoughts throbbed against her lean, cool palm. Staring into the eyes of the one I loved, I gripped the small metal knob on the inside of the door, pushed, and then I felt myself falling forward, slowly turning like a leaf in wind, upheld and buoyant in the peaceful roar. It was as though I’d never reach Sister’s arms, but when I did, I came back with a jolt.

“You are ill,” said Sister. “Come to the office and we’ll call your mother.”

AS I HAD known it would, perhaps from that moment in the girls’ bathroom, the day came. The day of reckoning.

Outside, in the morning school yard, after Mass and before first bell, everyone crowded around Corwin Peace. In his arms, he held a windup tin Godzilla, a big toy, almost knee-high, a green and gold replica painted with a fierce eye to detail. The scales were perfect overlapping crescents and the eyes were large and manic, pitch-black, oddly human. Corwin had pinned a sort of cloak upon the thing, a black scarf. My arms thrust through the packed shoulders, but the bell rang and Corwin stowed the thing under his coat. His eyes picked me from the rest.

“I had to send for this!” he cried. The punch hadn’t turned him against me; it had made him crazy with love. He turned and vanished through the heavy wine-red doors of the school. I stared at the ground and thought of leaving home. I could do it. I’d hitch a boxcar. The world went stark, the colors harsh. The small brown pebbles of the school yard leapt off the play-sealed earth. I took a step. The stones seemed to crack and whistle under my feet.

“Last bell!” called Sister Mary Anita. “You’ll be late!”

MORNING PRAYER. THE PLEDGE. Corwin drew out the suspense of his audience, enjoying the glances and whispers. The toy was in his desk. Every so often, he lifted the lid, then looked around to see how many of us watched him duck inside to make adjustments. By the time Sister started the daily reading lesson, there was such tension in the room that even Corwin could bear it no longer.

Our classroom was large, with a high ceiling, floored with slats of polished wood. Round lights hung on thick chains and the great, rectangular windows let through enormous sheaves of radiance. Our class had occupied this room for the past two years. I had spent every day in the room. I knew its creaks, the muted clunk of desks rocking out of floor bolts, the mad thumping in its radiators like a thousand imprisoned elves, and so I heard and registered the click. Then the dry grind of Corwin’s windup key. Sister Mary Anita did not. She turned to the chalkboard, her book open on the desk, and began to write instructions for us to copy.

She was absorbed, calling out the instructions as she wrote. Her arm swept up and down, it seemed to me, in a kind of furious joy. She was inventing some kind of lesson, some new way of doing things, not a word of which was taken in. All eyes were on the third row, where Corwin Peace sat. All eyes were on his hand as he wound the toy up to its limit and bent over and set it on the floor. Then the eyes were on the toy itself as Corwin lifted his hand away, and the thing moved forward on its own.

The scarf it wore, the veil, did not hamper the beast. The legs thrashed forward, making earnest progress. The tiny claw hands beat like pistons and the hollow tin tail whipped from side to side as it moved down the center of the aisle, toward the front of the room, toward Sister Mary Anita, who stood, back turned, still absorbed in her work at the board.

I had got myself placed in row one, to be closer to the one I loved, and so I saw the creature close up just before it headed into the polished space of floor at the front of the room. Its powerful jaws thrust from the black neck piece. The great teeth were frozen, exhibited in a terrible smile. The painted eyes had an eager and purposeful look.

Its movement faltered as it neared Mary Anita. The whole class caught its breath, but the thing inched along, made slow and fascinating progress, directly toward the hem of Mary Anita’s garment. She did not seem to notice. She continued to write, to talk, circling numbers and emphasizing certain words with careful underlines. And as she did so, as the moment neared, my brain finally rang all of its alarm bells. I vaulted from my desk. Two steps brought me across that gleaming space of wood at the front of the room. But just as I bent down to scoop the toy to my chest, a neat black boot slashed down inches from my nose. Sister Mary Anita had whirled, the chalk fixed in her hand. Daintily, casually, she lifted her habit and kicked the toy dinosaur into the air. The thing ascended, pedaling its clawed feet, the cape blown back like a sprung umbrella. The trajectory was straight and true. It knocked headfirst into the ceiling and came back down, in pieces. The class ducked beneath the rain of scattered tin. Only Sister Mary Anita and I stood poised, unmoved, absorbed in the moment between us.

There was no place for me to look but at my teacher. But when I lifted my eyes, this time, Sister Mary Anita was not looking at me. She had turned her face away, her rough cheek blotched as if it bore a slap, her gaze hooded and set low. Sister walked to the window, back turned against me, against the class, and as the laughter started, uncomfortable and groaning at first, then shriller, fuller, becoming its own animal, I felt an unrecoverable tenderness boil up and rise around my ears. Inwardly, I begged Mary Anita to turn and stop the noise. But Sister did not. She let it wash across us both without mercy. I lost sight of her unspeakable profile as she looked out into the yard. Bathed in brilliant light, her face went blank as a sheet of paper, as the sky, featureless as all things which enter heaven.

Holy Track

ALTHOUGH SHE TREATED me with neutral interest from then on and did not punish me, I was grieved by Sister Mary Anita’s disregard. I wrote letters, tore them up, and at last, as there was no other course of action, I collected facts, and I studied Sister Mary Anita. In a fit of longing, I retrieved papers she had written on and thrown away. Her sloping hand was absolutely uniform. You could put her capital letters one on the other, hold the pages up to the light, and see no variation in the size or ornamentation. Yet her handwriting wasn’t strictly Palmer script, but very much her own invention.

One startling day I learned that she was allergic to chocolate and broke out in hives. The red welts across her face gave her a warrior’s intensity. She never scratched, but they must have tormented her. Even so, sometimes she could not resist chocolate and was known to take a piece of candy or cake at a wedding, saying, “Darn the consequences!” even though for a nun “darn” was considered a swear.

Unlike the other nuns who taught at the school, and came from a mother house in Kentucky, Sister Mary Anita had grown up near the reservation, on a farm between Hoopdance and Pluto. She told this to us in the middle of our history class. None of the other children thought that unusual, but I perceived it as some sign. At home, I spoke of her constantly, and one day my mother gave me a long look.

“Sister Mary Anita this, Sister Mary Anita that. You sure talk about Sister Mary Anita a lot. What’s her full name anyway?”

I turned aside but muttered, “Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf.” I stole a look back at my mother, but she raised her eyebrows and glanced at my father. He gave no sign that he found the name of significance, but continued to paste stamps into his stamp album. He had inherited these polished leather albums and was adding slowly to some arcane arrangement which had originally been assembled by Uncle Octave, the one who had died tragically, for love. When attending to his albums, my father’s absorption was so complete that he was unreachable. Mooshum was sitting at the table playing rummy with Joseph. He caught the name though, and said, “Buckendorf!” He tried to keep on playing, but Joseph jogged his arm to make him quit. My mother went outside to hang the wet laundry on the line, in spite of the storm brewing. I’d caught the same note in Mooshum’s voice as my brother had, and checked again on my father, who was examining through a magnifying glass some stamp he held up with a tweezers. Our father drew a rapt breath and smiled as though the frail scrap of paper held a mystic secret. I moved to the end of the table and asked, “What about the name?”

“What name?” Mooshum knew that he had us hooked.

“You know, my teacher, Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf.”

“Oh yai! The Buckendorfs!” His mouth twisted as he said it.

“She’s a nun!”

Mooshum packed his jaw and nodded at his spittoon. Joseph made a retching noise but went outside carrying the snoose can — a red Sanborn coffee can with the man in a yellow robe walking across it sipping coffee. We always emptied the can onto the roots of Mama’s struggling blue Colorado spruce — eventually, it surrendered to the killing juice, turned black, and dried up.

“You know why she’s a nun, after all, my girl,” said Mooshum, while Joseph was outside. “Not too many people have the privilege of seeing right before their eyes there is no justice here on eart.” He said “eart,” he hardly ever used a th.

Mooshum put his hands down before him and pushed the air twice. He pushed the air like he was stuffing it into a box. “She saw it. No justice.”

“Yeah?”

Joseph came back in and we waited, but Mooshum suddenly turned his back on us and rummaged in his shirt pocket. We could not see what he was doing. He turned back to us and spat into the empty coffee can with such a loud ping that my father glanced up, but his eyes didn’t even focus on us before the stamps reclaimed his attention. Mooshum shifted the wad a little and kept squinting at us. Measuring us. We sat still and stared at him, trying to contain ourselves. The television had succumbed to some disturbance in the atmosphere and no delicate adjustment of its long wire antennae had cleared the snow from the picture. We were very bored, but there was more — perhaps I could add to my facts about Sister Mary Anita. It seemed that Mooshum had knowledge of something new about her, or her family at least, and I suspected that it might be something that no one else would tell me.

Mooshum straightened with a creaky groan and rocked himself forward. He found his balance, launched himself. We followed as he walked out the screen door, down the wooden steps, onto the tortured lawn. He lowered himself into the peeling yellow kitchen chair that he brought out in spring and took back inside after frost. It was late September, but the day was very warm. He liked to sit outside on the dead grass of the yard and inspect people as they walked the road to the agency offices. We grabbed a pair of camp stools and sat watching him think. His mouth fell slack and then his face seized up; he scratched his jaw and glared at us. Mooshum’s strange reluctance to tell this story was compelling. The less he wanted to tell, the more we wanted to hear. He turned away from us again, bent his head and with a furtive squint reached into his shirt. He took a snort of something that we couldn’t see. Whirling quickly, he focused on our mother. She put a wooden clothespin between her teeth and picked up two others. Then she bent down, grabbed a pillowcase, and snapped it once, briskly, before she pinned it with the two pins she had in one hand. The pin in her teeth always was an extra, or she used it for securing her underwear beneath thin top sheets, she was that modest.

Mooshum spat, ringing the can again, and waited to see if our mother would turn around. She didn’t, so he began to talk to us in a low voice, returning to that time when he had been young, though not as young as when the doves filled the sky. They were gone when this next thing happened, he said, and Joseph asked if the prayers had worked to drive them off. Mooshum said that everything had dwindled away by then, even the buffalo, which he’d been told were once limitless. Killed off, he said, shrugging and spitting at the same time, a gesture we tried to imitate later, with stolen snuff. Mooshum told us that we should not tell our mother or father the things he was about to tell us. This of course squeezed our breathing tight, and we huddled closer.

The Boots

MOOSHUM SPAT THOUGHTFULLY and repacked his lip. He repeated the name Holy Track several times, his voice trailing. Then he suddenly roused, as the old do, and told us in a rain of words how, when he and Junesse rode Mustache Maude’s good horses back onto the reservation, they were accused of stealing those horses. For a time, they had had trouble fending off the newly appointed tribal police, who coveted good blood stock. They kept the horses only through the intervention of Father Severine. Scolded by the priest, the authorities quit. The young mare Junesse rode had long legs, a great keg of a barrel, and a fighting heart, and so raced very well. Mooshum made enough on bets to buy a cow and to outfit the farm with a windmill. He traded the stud services of his horse for help building a cabin of hewn oak. But having fallen in with the sort who raced horses — not a good sort, said Mooshum — he began, for the first time, to drink whiskey.

“I could always take or leave it,” he paused, crumpling his face with an odd wince, and added, low, that sometimes the whiskey would not just take or leave him. The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.

A boy and his mother, who was a cousin to Junesse, lived on the edge of Mooshum’s land, and it was pitiful. The mother’s lungs had rotted. Mooshum spread his hands across his own chest. She was so weak that she could hardly stir out of her bed to care for the boy. He was thirteen years old and getting rangy, but he was an innocent boy. Until his mother weakened, he walked her to church every day. She remained after, sunk in prayer, while her son memorized the Latin Mass and learned exactly how to help Father Severine change bread and wine into the body and blood of the Son of God. Sometimes Junesse came with her and the three walked back together, Junesse and the boy holding the sick woman between them. From time to time she stopped and coughed blood carefully into the dust of the road, bending way over so that it would not stain her dress.

This went on all autumn until the weather got too cold. Through the winter, the mother wasted. By the time the snow was entirely gone and the bitter new leaves had darkened, she was nearly dead. Junesse sent Mooshum by the house every day to see if her cousin had survived the night. One spring morning, he brought along the hammer and fine nails she had requested. The boy was there as well as an aunt who worked in Canada at a sanatorium for tubercular patients. That place did not as a rule take Indians, but because of the aunt’s piety the nuns had agreed to make an exception and had prepared a bed.

The boy’s mother had a small cross in each hand, prizes given to her son for memorizing the long prayers. She nodded at her boy’s crude, thick-soled boots and gestured that he should remove them and give them to Mooshum. She then told Mooshum to fix a cross to each sole. He nailed carefully through the inside of the boot, and covered the tops of the nails with pieces of her blanket that she’d cut away for this purpose. When Mooshum was finished, she staggered toward her sister, who helped her into the bed of a small cart, hitched to a tough old pony.

“Wear them,” she whispered to her son. “The sickness will not follow you. Evil will not cross your tracks. You will live.”

The boy put his feet in the boots and stood miserably beside Mooshum as his aunt led the horse and cart off down the grass trail, then turned onto the broader road leading north. Mooshum brought the boy to an old man called Asiginak, who was named for a great chief, Blackbird, and lived alone farther back in the bush. The old man was the boy’s great-uncle.

At first the boots must have cut, said Mooshum. But by the time he saw the boy again, he had bound his feet in strips of leather and had gradually gotten used to their weight. People came to believe that his mother was right about the boots, for her son did not begin to cough. After some time, because he left tracks printed with a cross, the people began to call him Holy Track.

The Clothesline

MOOSHUM LOOKED UP, brightened his eyes, and nodded. Mama had finished pinning up everything in the basket. Dad’s blue teacher’s shirts, all of our denim pants, white bedsheets, and the brown dress I hated flapped there, lightly soaking in the sun. Through the box elder leaves, we could see clouds massing to the west, building radiant pink towers against a blue-gray backdrop of distant rain. Mama watched us. She had a talent for looking at a person with no expression — you filled in whatever you felt guiltiest about. Mooshum stopped talking. She set down the empty basket under the wire lines and stepped across the dry grass. Dust puffed up behind her firm steps.

“They don’t need to hear it,” she said.

“Hear what?” asked Mooshum.

“You know.”

“Ah, that, tawpway, my girl!”

Mama would usually have made sure that Mooshum left off, or given us each some task to ensure that her directions were followed, but she seemed distracted that day and simply walked up the back steps. The moment she passed into the house, we leaned close to Mooshum.

The Basket Makers

BIG STANDS OF willow grew around their cabin, so Asiginak taught Holy Track the art of making baskets. That spring, they cut willow and bundled it away in a cool place, then split the ash to make the framework of the baskets — some with carved handles, tikinaganan for babies, wide and flat baskets, even heart-shaped baskets for the farm women. Every day, they wove pliable willow into ash frameworks until their fingers were tough as sticks. When they had thirty or forty, as many as they could carry, they went out selling.

People readily bought baskets from Holy Track. The boy’s big childish teeth were white and crooked; his smile was shy and his eyelashes were so long they shadowed his cheeks. Asiginak had tried to give him a whiteman’s haircut and it got clipped so short in places that the hair stood out like brushy quills.

One day in early summer, when the little strawberries ripen along the edges of the field and the ducklings whisk across the sloughs, the two set off walking to the towns and farms off the reservation. They sold a basket or two everyplace they went. Only ten baskets were left when they met Mooshum and Cuthbert Peace coming down the road.

“Us two rowdies,” said Mooshum, winking at us, “were unhappily sober. We fell in with Asiginak and Holy Track hoping that we could persuade the old man to spare enough of his basket money to get his old friends drunk.”

“Gewehn!” Mooshum swiped his hand in the air, remembering. “Go home!” the old man told us.

“Ah, no, brother, I replied, let us carry these things for you!”

Mooshum put his hands out as if to help carry the baskets, but told us how Holy Track held tight to his baskets and tramped steadily beside his uncle.

Mooshum’s friend Cuthbert was dark as a bear, round, and his nose was like his nickname, Opin, a potato. Something had gone wrong with it after a fight and it had kept growing out of control on one side. It took up most of his face now and was an odd, lumpy shape. He spat tobacco and tugged at Holy Track’s arm.

“Leave him alone,” said Asiginak. “Your nose will sprout.”

Cuthbert took offense, dropped his hands away, and kicked his feet like a dog scratching dirt on its shit. Holy Track was still studying catechism with Father Severine, but he couldn’t help laugh at Cuthbert. The rascal pranced down the road, then stopped, jiggled his dodooshag and preened like a pretty girl. Mooshum showed us, doing a little dance in his chair. Then he sat back, laughing, and mimicked Cuthbert: “You’d be surprised what this nose gets me, and this belly, but it’s down here the women love the best!”

Asiginak tried to shut up the two other men, saying, “This boy is going to be a priest. He can’t hear things like that.”

Mooshum said that he and Opin walked in silence behind the two basket makers, still hoping, until Asiginak turned and warned them, “Don’t step in his tracks.”

Mooshum shook his head slowly back and forth, shifting his wad of chew, frowning as he did. “The old man meant that we were not worthy to step in the boy’s tracks. Evil had us in those days.”

The Lochren Farm

THEY WALKED DOWN the wagon path into a farmyard bounded by a scraggle of cottonwood. The farm was set near the town of Pluto, but the entrance was obscured by a low rise and the brushy tangle of a slough. When they got to the farm, Mooshum said he wished they had not followed the boy’s tracks. He said he knew there was something wrong from the beginning, with the smeared door to the house wide open and no smoke from the chimney. When they got close, the cows in the barn set up a sudden groaning to be milked. The desperation in their resonant bawls stopped the men in the trampled yard.

Asiginak set down his baskets. One of the cows screamed like a woman in pain, and everything went abruptly quiet. After a moment the frogs started up again, trilling and sawing in the slough.

“Let’s not go any closer,” said Asiginak. “The devil has this place.”

And then they heard the baby crying. It was a scratchy cry, a thin, exhausted wail from inside the house.

Asiginak picked up his baskets and turned to leave.

“That’s a baby,” said Cuthbert, and he grabbed Mooshum’s shirt and stood rooted, staring, his stained jaw working.

The baby continued to cry as if it knew they were out there, but they did not move and soon the little sound died away. The wind struck up in the leggy young cottonwoods. Bits of fluff whirled high above them. There was the clatter of stiff, new leaves. As Asiginak started to walk away, the cows started up even louder. Maybe the baby did, too, but now they couldn’t hear it over the vast moans from the barn.

“I feel the devil,” Asiginak cried. “Look there!”

But Cuthbert had gone through the door marked with blood. He vanished into the house. When he came out, he was carrying the baby and his eyes were bugging out — that’s how Mooshum put it, his eyes were bugging out. Cuthbert staggered to the barn with the baby. It wore a tiny white dress and a reeking diaper. The others followed. On the way there, they saw two boys curled on their sides, in the weeds, like they were sleeping, and then a man, his fingers clutched in the green black grass, his head up and still staring at the boys when he died crawling. His back was blasted out.

“Don’t look in that direction,” Asiginak told Holy Track.

The men cracked the barn doors wide and entered the mad wall of sound.

There were ten cows, one dead. Mooshum helped Holy Track put down the baskets somewhere in the dark, and blinked until he could see the nearest cow. He began on that one, then found another. Soon there was just the hiss of milk and a few last cows. The milked ones sounded like they were weeping, softly, in relief. Cuthbert cradled the baby in one arm and squeezed a teat to its lips — the bud of its mouth was hardly big enough, but he squirted the milk in deftly. At last the baby relaxed and its head lolled back. A smile played around its chapped scarlet lips. Mooshum turned the cows out to pasture and the men fled outside, rubbing their eyes, dazzled.

“I’ll carry this baby back,” said Cuthbert, peering anxiously into its face.

“Back where?” said Asiginak.

“To the sheriff.”

“The white sheriff?”

Asiginak saw that his nephew was gaping at the yard. He gently pushed the boy’s face so that Holy Track was facing not the sleeping forms but the watery blue line of the horizon.

Asiginak turned back to Cuthbert. “You’re not drunk, so why do you say this? We are no-goods, we are Indians, even me. If you tell the white sheriff, we will die.”

“They will hang us for sure,” said Mooshum. He picked up Holy Track’s baskets.

“It’s all right,” said Holy Track. “I know what to do. I will tell the priest.”

The other men looked at him.

“Do not tell the priest,” said Mooshum.

Cuthbert held the baby tight. “We cannot put this little one back. If we go, we take it with us.”

“We cannot,” said Asiginak.

“I will not go in that house again,” said Cuthbert.

“You know how to write,” said Asiginak to the boy. “You will write this down: One lives yet on Lochren. Tonight, I will place your message in the sheriff ’s box where he receives his papers. They will come for the baby in the morning.”

Cuthbert nodded slowly and gave the baby to Asiginak, who went back into the house. When he came out, he was looking at the ground. He noticed the tracks.

“We must brush your tracks out wherever we find them,” he said, in a serious, distracted voice. “Take your shoes off.”

The men walked around the yard brushing out marks of the cross in the loose dirt. When they were satisfied, they left, melting down along the edge of the cow pasture, off into the woods, then down paths that raveled out for miles.

A Little Medicine

MOOSHUM QUIT. WE thought he’d had enough of talking, and as this was such a strange and awful thing that he was telling us, we just sat there. I twisted my hair around and around my finger and Joseph frowned at the rock-hard ground.

The door creaked open, and Mama leaned out to look at the sky. The blazing balls of clouds were getting sucked back into the dark, though the rain seemed far away yet. The wind had started up in the box elder grove and the laundry flapped on the line. She bent her head like she was shouldering a yoke, and let the door slam behind her. She strode over to the line to feel whether the clothing was dry enough. Something was definitely bothering her that day, but we did not find out until later what that was. Maybe if she hadn’t been so absorbed in her irritation she would have stopped Mooshum from telling us the whole story, or from sipping at the brown medicine bottle under his green zippered Sears work jacket. He drew the bottle out, swirled its contents round and round, and popped a small slug back into his throat. We caught a whiff of bitter, wild leaves. His eyes watered as he replaced the bottle.

Mama took down a couple of flat sheets, leaving some of her own nylon underwear on the line. I’d never seen her underwear right out there on the line. The pale blue and tissuey pink panties puffed with air and stayed true to her rounded shape. She walked past and said to Mooshum, “Geraldine’s coming and I know what she’s going to tell me already.” She went up the steps and shouted back down to Mooshum. “And I don’t like it.”

Mooshum popped his eyes out comically as the door slammed, and made an oooh, she’s mad ducking gesture.

“What happened to the baby?” Joseph asked.

“A man named Hoag came and got that baby,” said Mooshum. I thought the story was over and got up to follow Mama — she was going to want me to help her fold the clothing, or roll it for ironing. She was so perturbed already that I didn’t want to test her patience. But then Mooshum took another toot from his medicine bottle and said, “They came for Asiginak at night.”

“They?” I turned back.

“They who?” said Joseph.

“The town men,” said Mooshum. “That’s why I’m telling this to you. Wildstrand, the Buckendorfs…”

“The Buckendorfs?” I said.

“Oh yai! They’re the ones! They came for Asiginak at night, but he heard them first and bolted. Me, I had come to warn them and I dragged the boy out just in time.”

Confessional

THE LITTLE CABIN had a tiny window out back covered with a flap of hide. Holy Track and Mooshum were out that window in an iced second — blown by terror into the woods. They landed like leaves, sprang into the trees, and crept into a tangle of chokecherry and willow. Then they floundered into a slough and sank down among the reeds. There were dogs with the men, but they were cow dogs, not trained hounds, and they barked at everything. They smelled an animal or maybe Asiginak and started off in another direction. The men’s torches played over the surface of the water. There was more trampling, shuffling, the dogs’ mad barking, and they were gone. The noise got smaller and smaller. The two pulled themselves through the muck until they were on solid ground. There was no choice now but to run to Father Severine. Though he was unreliable and didn’t like Mooshum anymore, he very much loved Holy Track.

As the two made their way down the trail that led around the hills, along pastures, the birds started up singing in the alder and wild raspberry. Mooshum asked the little birds for help, and Holy Track said Hail Marys. As they walked along, they talked about the priest’s habits — how he took forever to fraction the Host and drawled his prayers out so it was nearly impossible to keep one’s eyes open and not pitch forward on the floor. How soft the floor looked while listening to Severine’s sermons and how dreadful it was when a louse or flea began to bite, or when a piss was necessary. They agreed that the most agonizing itches always developed while serving Mass. They revealed that both of their butt ends knew a sharp corner attached to the kneeler that afforded a merciful, secret scratch.

On the swelling side of a hill, along a small stream that ran slough to slough, they heard horses and rolled into the torn system of a tipped-up cottonwood tree. They hid in the cage of black roots and froze as the white men passed. Asiginak had not been caught.

“They might give up on us,” said Holy Track.

The air was still fresh with night dew when Holy Track and Mooshum pulled open the door to the church and slipped inside. There was the odor of rotting burlap and field dust from all of the potato bags placed down as rugs. One tiny lamp flickered before the carved wooden cabinet where the priest kept the Hosts. It was covered with a towel embroidered in red letters.

“I don’t like the taste of that bread!” Mooshum made a face. “You cannot call it bread! Not even a cracker. You could eat a thousand and not live.”

“You’re supposed to get everlasting life from it,” said Joseph.

“That did not work for Holy Track,” said Mooshum.

The boy knelt for a moment before the cabinet. Then he pushed aside the towel, opened the gilded door in its side, and ate all the wafers. He closed the door, and blew out the flame of the lamp. He told Mooshum that he hadn’t eaten for days — ever since Asiginak had come home raving with fear saying there was drunk talk and now the white sheriff and maybe some farmers, also, knew that Indians had been in the presence of the murdered family. Holy Track’s hands reached forward and he drank the rancid fat from the bowl of the lamp. His stomach immediately cramped up. He broke out in a sweat, ran outside, and leaned his head against the back wall of the church. He forced himself to keep down the spirit bread by breathing hard and concentrating on the presence inside of him. Father Severine had explained his soul to him. Now, he told Mooshum, it made sense that the bread he had eaten would feed this soul, this spirit, and increase its strength. He thought he would need this strength.

At last, when the boy felt better, Mooshum helped him creep back inside. There was an aperture of enclosed space in the church where the priest heard confessions. A sack curtain hung down the front. Holy Track ducked in and crouched on the dirt floor with his knees drawn up to his chin.

Mooshum left him there and sipped like an animal at the stale font of holy water. Then he fell asleep underneath a pew until morning sun filtered through the rough curtains. He peered into the brown light of the church. The door opened and a narrow band of white light struck across the floor. Father Severine approached the confessional with long, delicate, strides, and looked inside.

“My son!” he breathed. A dark cleft of anxiety formed between the priest’s eyebrows. “Are the others here too?”

“No,” said Holy Track.

Relieved, the priest let out his breath. The boy had formed himself into a ball on the floor. The priest’s face worked back and forth between expressions of pity and disgust, and at last settled on peevish disappointment.

“I suppose you are here to confess.” His voice was shaky and shrill. His breath was agitated. “You have done a monstrous thing!” He seemed to gather himself and stepped backwards.

“I will feed you, only that,” he said, and left. But when Father Severine returned, he had such food. There were tears in his weak eyes as he watched his favorite eat the tinned crackers and the dried peaches, cold fried venison, a jar of honey, and bread soft as flower petals. Mooshum kept quiet although his stomach yawned.

Holy Track ate with gravity, devotion, and lust. He spoke with his cheeks bulging.

“They were all dead but the baby.”

By the time he swallowed, there were men outside. The priest got up. His eyes were swimming.

“Nothing, we did nothing…we never,” said the boy, but his tongue was weighed down with honey and his mouth too dry to swallow the food.

“They led you to it,” said Father Severine, his eyes spilling over, the tears running down the furrows beside his beaky nose, splashing down inside his collar. “Stay hidden, I will talk.”

The Sisters

THE DOOR SLAMMED with a deliberate whack. Mooshum spat. Joseph started. I jumped up. Mama had Geraldine with her now and as they passed I heard my aunt say, “Who told you?” Then they were halfway down the yard, past the tangled brushy trees and the hanging clothes, which Mama didn’t bother to touch for dryness this time. They were lost in a conversation. Mama’s shoulders were hunched and her head was turned just a bit toward Geraldine. They looked a lot like each other from behind — their permanented black hair bobbed prettily just over their collars. Mama wore a green blouse and Geraldine’s was yellow. Their dark skirts were long and full, belted tight with elastic cinch belts. Their feet were dainty in Keds shoes and anklets. Mama painted her canvas shoes with white polish to keep them spotless. Their clothing was always secondhand but they still looked dashing. People thought they went to Fargo to shop when their clothes really came from the mission.

They walked to the end of the yard where the old outhouse stood, now cluttered inside with hoes and shovels. There, they folded their arms and faced each other, mouths moving, skirts whipping in the hot rain-smelling breeze. Mooshum began to talk again, knowing that Mama’s attention was absorbed. It wasn’t like he was talking to us, though, or even using his usual storytelling voice. He wasn’t drawing us in, or gesturing. This was different. Now it was like he was stuck in some way, on some track, like he couldn’t stop the story from forcing its way out. This was the one time he told the story whole.

The Party

OUTSIDE THE CHURCH, the men’s voices were a tumble. First the priest’s choked pleas, then a rolling barrel full of words. Mooshum made no sense of it, but dreamily shoved in the food Holy Track pushed over. He caught the back and forth of the talk. The words jammed together until the men and the horses made one sound, a heavy confusion of breath and stomping blood. Then a brief quiet in which the wind came up whining in the eaves. Suddenly Holy Track leapt up, stuffing bits of the boiled meat into his pockets, and rolled underneath the darkest bench with Mooshum.

The white men knocked Father Severine aside and banged into the church. They strode down the church aisle in their heavy boots and each genuflected. Some crossed themselves. Then they looked behind the altar and into the confessional.

“He run again,” said a bright, clear voice.

“We got one anyhow, let’s hang the one we got,” sang a man from outside. It was a lovely, melodious voice with a German buzz.

As the men outside dragged Asiginak past Father Severine, the priest went rigid. He opened and shut his mouth like he was choking, and tried jerkily to bless the old man. Asiginak slapped his hands away.

“Don’t be useless,” he cried. “Get them off me!”

From under the bench, Holy Track heard his uncle cry out. Asiginak gave a wail of penetrating fear and shouted in Ojibwe, “I don’t want to die alone!”

Father Severine swayed and propped himself against a tree in the yard. Suddenly everyone stopped. They sensed that someone had come to stand in the doorway of the church. They all turned as one.

“Uncle, I will go with you,” said the boy.

Mooshum crawled from under the pew and jumped up to pull Holy Track inside. He struggled to bar the door against the men, but the Buckendorfs surged in and caught them both fast in their big hay-pitching arms. The men hoisted Mooshum and the boy out into the light. One held the boy by the nape of his neck. When he saw the horror and the shame on Asiginak’s face, Mooshum knew that Holy Track regretted showing himself. But he stood his ground and made the sign of the cross over and over until the white men pinned his hands behind his back. They tied his wrists together and threw the boy along with Mooshum and Asiginak into the bed of their wagon. Father Severine cried something out in Latin and bolted to life. He clawed at the sides of the wagon and tottered awkwardly beside them. He blurted crazily useless threats and conflicted blessings as they rattled down the hill. Soon, his croaking died away. Asiginak hunched over at first, staring at his feet, and would not speak. At last, in a voice filled with anguish, he said to Holy Track. “I never knew you were hiding in there. My words were not for you to hear.”

Holy Track glared, angry at his uncle for a moment, then he shrugged and pretended that he didn’t care.

Wild plum trees were blooming in the scrub. Willow had leafed out narrow and green, and the sloughs glittered in the early light. The question of a tree and a place arose among the chimookamanag. However, they were diverted by two others who appeared dragging Cuthbert behind a horse. They pulled him slowly, so they could hang him, too. Cuthbert looked like a big caterpillar coated with gray dust. They cut him out of his ropes and hoisted him into the wagon. He lay still, blinking up at the others.

“Ah,” said Cuthbert after a little while, from his bloody face, “they have rubbed off the worst of my nose. It is a pity to die now that I am handsome.”

“You’re still ugly, my brother,” said Asiginak.

“Then I won’t be such a loss to the women,” said Cuthbert. “It is a comfort.”

The wagon jostled them along in a friendly way. As they crossed the boundary into the fields and roads off the reservation, a farmer or two stood in his field, stilled and planted, and watched the slow procession of men, horses, dogs, wagon, and trussed Indians, pass by.

The Baby

MOOSHUM LOOKED OVER at his daughters, who had begun arguing away at the end of the yard. He swigged precisely at his medicine. Suddenly, Mama and Geraldine quit talking and frowned up at the sky. They walked over to the clothesline, but before they had even plucked off one clothespin, they resumed arguing. Instead of taking in the rest of the wash, the two looked over at us to make sure that we weren’t listening. When they saw us watching, they swished their skirts and strode swiftly around to the front of the house. We turned back to Mooshum. He told us other things he knew. How the little brother of a woman named Electa Hoag — well, he wasn’t little, exactly, at seventeen — had run away in the night just after the murder, taking two of her newly baked loaves, his shoes, a woolen jacket, and an extra pair of overalls. Her husband Oric’s cap was also missing from the hook by the door. Oric had gone off so quickly, summoned by Colonel Benton Lungsford and the sheriff, that he’d forgotten to wonder where he’d put the cap. Electa might have said something about Tobek running off when the men came back from the farm, not long after. She might have said something, but she was too surprised by the baby Oric held up there on the horse. She was too distracted by it, and then absorbed when he leaned over the saddle and transferred it into her arms. Instead of screaming, the baby just gave her a calm and trusting look, a direct look, like it was all grown up now but still caught in the tiny body. Oh, it screamed later, she told Mooshum, it turned into a baby again. That was once the men had rustled up some food for themselves and gone and she was alone cleaning it and trying to feed it. After she knew about the murders, Electa decided that she would tell Oric that he must have taken the cap with him and lost it, laid it down in shock somewhere on the farm. Knowing what had happened, she decided that she would not let on that Tobek was missing, run off, not for a while, not for as long as she could.

“If she had told…” said Mooshum. “If only she had told…and then there was Johann Vogeli. My old friend Vogeli. He was coming back from the barn when he saw his father, Frederic, smoke a cigarette in the middle of the day.”

“What’s so strange about that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mooshum.

Vogeli

FREDERIC VOGELI WAS standing in the yard talking everyday German to the Buckendorfs. Johann’s late mother had spoken a more complex German. Her voice was fading in his mind, or getting used up, like everything else about her. She had written letters back to her family in Heidelberg and made copies, written love letters to Frederic and notes to Johann himself, and she had kept a detail-filled diary of their little adventures and all that happened in their daily lives — except the beatings Frederic gave her once she got sick: those she hadn’t written down. All the same, Frederic never liked all that writing and he ripped out a page of her diary or used the fine paper of a letter whenever he rolled himself a cigarette. Johann hated to see it.

He came around the corner of the house now, and there they were. The Buckendorfs were also smoking. His father had rolled cigarettes for them. The slender tube of paper and tobacco hung off the younger Buckendorf ’s boulder jaw. As they stood there, talking, Johann watched the men breathe the burning paper into their lungs. His mother’s exact words vanished into their chests and emerged as formless smoke.

Johann walked into the house and hid his mother’s diary in a new place. He had grown about a foot in the months since she’d died and put on muscle. He wasn’t used to how strong he was now. When he walked out again, Frederic grabbed him by the collar and said, “Catch the horses,” then shoved him toward the pasture. He came back with a horse called Nadel and his father made him saddle Girlie, too. As they mounted their horses, his father said, “Now you will see something.” And they rode off after the Buckendorfs.

“So that was old Johann,” I said. “That’s the one you called the Deutscher.”

“Ya vole,” said Mooshum. “The Deutscher. Later on, he told me what happened when he and his dad caught up with the others, and when the sheriff and the old colonel tried to stand in their way.”

Death Song

COLONEL BENTON LUNGSFORD and the sheriff, whose name was Quintus Fells, caught up with the party of men as they were searching out a place that would do for hanging. Oric Hoag had fallen back and approached from a distance. The men were standing at the side of a well, peering down the hole, discussing the problem and testing the rope that held the bucket. The colonel and the sheriff maneuvered their horses in front of the wagon and they blocked the party of men from moving forward.

“Well, friends,” said Sheriff Fells in his easy way, “I see you’ve done some of our work for us.”

“We’re going to finish it, too,” said Frederic Vogeli.

Eugene Wildstrand, a neighbor of the slaughtered family, and William Hotchkiss, a locksmith and grain dealer, stepped their horses close to the sheriff. Some of the men were on foot. Two or three had even ridden in the wagon. Emil Buckendorf was driving the wagon. His pale-eyed brothers sat on the wagon seat with him, their hands in their laps. They looked like oversize boys in a pew.

“Step down,” said Sheriff Fells. “I’m commandeering this wagon and it is my duty to drive the suspects to jail.”

“Commandeer,” said Emil Buckendorf. He snorted through his beard. One of his brothers laughed, and the other, with the big jaw, just stared at his knees.

William Hotchkiss craned forward over his saddle. He was carrying an old repeating rifle. Sheriff Fells had his shotgun out, and Colonel Lungsford had his hand on the revolver he had carried in the Spanish-American War, and kept oiled and clean on a special shelf ever since. The men and horses were so close that they grazed one another as the horses nervously tried to avoid a misplaced step.

“That’s a boy you caught,” said Colonel Lungford to them all. “No more than.”

“That’s a killer,” said Vogeli.

“Don’t you have no conscience?” Wildstrand, holding his horse tight up, spat and coldly addressed the sheriff and the colonel. His eyes stood out black as tacks on white paper. “Didn’t you or didn’t you step in that house?”

William Hotchkiss urged his horse up suddenly behind Colonel Lungsford and he poked his gun against the other man’s back. Colonel Lungsford turned and spoke to Hotchkiss, pushing the barrel of the rifle away from his kidneys.

“Put that thing down, you idiot,” he said.

Vogeli herded Hotchkiss away from Sheriff Fells.

“Sorry, boys,” said Wildstrand. “We got to do what must be done.”

He leaned across the space between them and shot Fells’s horse between the eyes. The sheriff threw up his hands as he went down with the horse. There was the bullwhip crack of bone. The report made everybody jump. The men all looked at one another, and in the wagon Asiginak started toward the sheriff. He was thrown back by one of the Buckendorfs.

“We are done for,” said Cuthbert. He began to gag on the blood soaking down his throat from his nose.

Emil Buckendorf slapped the reins and the wagon rolled smoothly ahead.

“We still ain’t figured out a place to hang these Indians,” said William Hotchkiss. “Maybe we could use Oric’s beef windlass.”

“I ain’t in this!” cried Oric, who’d just caught up. He jumped off his horse to help Quintus Fells. The sheriff was breathing fast and saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa…” He was still under the dead horse. His eyes rolled up to the whites and he passed out. Lungsford said “damn” and a few other words and got off his horse to help Oric free the sheriff, letting the wagon go by.

Jabez Woods, Henric Gostlin, Enery Mantle, and all the others stood quietly alongside the road watching the men who had guns and horses. Now they began to walk alongside the wagon, down the two-track grass road.

“Maybe over that swell,” said Mantle. “Those trees this side of it are scrawny.”

“All the good trees is back of us, over the reservation line,” said a Buckendorf.

“We just need one tree branch,” said Wildstrand. He looked into the wagon and his face was white around the eyes, like all the blood was gone underneath the field tan.

“We found those people already dead,” cried Cuthbert, stirring Holy Track from a drowsy stupor. Mooshum was listening to everything. “We found them, but we did not kill them. We milked their cows for them and we fed the baby. I, Cuthbert, fed the baby! We are not your bad kind of Indians! Those are south of here!”

“Don’t talk bad of the Bwaanag,” said Asiginak. “They adopted me.”

Cuthbert ignored him and badgered the white men. “Us, we are just like you!”

“Just like us!” Hotchkiss leaned over and slammed the butt of his rifle against Cuthbert’s head. “Not hardly.”

“You are right,” said Asiginak in Ojibwe. “You are a madness on this earth.”

Cuthbert’s head was all blood now. His eyes were hidden in his bloody hair, his neck awash with blood, his dirty shirt was blood all up and down. He spoke Ojibwe from inside the bloody mask and said to Holy Track, “Don’t worry. There is another boy among them. Pretty soon one of them will notice and remember the sheriff ’s words. They’ll let you go. When you speak of my death to others, tell them of my courage. I am going to sing my death song.”

“I hope you can remember it before you shit your pants,” said Asiginak.

“Aiii! I am trying to think how it goes.”

Both men began to hum very softly.

“To tell you the truth,” said Cuthbert, after a little while, “I was never given a death song. I was not considered worth it.”

“Make one up,” said Asiginak. “I will help you.”

They began to tap their knees and mumble a whine of melody beneath their breaths again. They did not address a single word to Mooshum. He gazed out over the fields, which were newly plowed and planted, the furrows straight and just sprouting a faint green fuzz. The sky was the sweetest color of blue. The horizon was dusty with a hint of green, just like the egg of a robin, and the clouds were delicate, no more than tiny white breast feathers way up high.

They came to a tree that looked all right, but the white men thought the limbs were too slanted and thin. They came to another tree and the men argued underneath it and measured with their arms and hands. Apparently, that tree wasn’t good, either.

“They are giving us time to practice our song, anyway,” said Cuthbert. He wiped his face. It looked as though his nose-lump had been shorn away smoothly.

“Now that I look at you closely,” said Asiginak, “I think you would have been handsome, my friend.”

“Thank you,” Cuthbert said.

“That tree over there will do,” said Emil Buckendorf.

Mooshum heard someone begin to sob and he thought at first it was himself — it sounded just like himself — but then he realized that it was Johann Vogeli. The boy was riding next to him, his hands clutching the mane of his horse. His tears rushed down and wet the leather of the saddle. Frederic Vogeli rode up beside his son and swung his arm back, then smashed his knuckles and forearm across his son’s face. Johann nearly fell off the back of his horse, but he caught himself. As he gained his balance, he changed, grew broader, bigger, and something in him could be seen to light. This thing took fire, and blew him right up. It propelled him off his horse: he lunged into an embrace with his father, who flew sideways out of his saddle and was still underneath his son when the two men landed and skidded — Frederic’s back the sled. Johann sat on his father’s chest and began to hit his face with the side of his fist like he was pounding on a table. He pounded with all his arm’s strength, like he would strike through the wood, or the flesh. His other hand had closed around his father’s throat. The wagon lurched on and the other men traveled with it, leaving the two rolling and kicking, then standing, then swinging and punching. Down again, then up, their battle looked more comical as they receded into the distance. Finally they were two black toy figures popping up and down against an endless horizon and beneath a boundless sky.

“The boy’s heart was good, anyway,” said Cuthbert.

“I hope he doesn’t kill his father, yet,” said Asiginak. “He could carry that hard.”

Cuthbert agreed.

“So you talked to Cuthbert, too,” said Joseph, his voice strained. “And Holy Track? Asiginak? They lived to be old men, right?”

“No,” said Mooshum. “Oh,” said Joseph.

The Clatter of Wings

THE OAK TREE had a generous spread. It had probably grown there quietly for a hundred years.

“I can show you that tree to this day, on the edge of Wolde’s land,” said Mooshum. “There’s tobacco put down there. Prayer flags in its branches.”

The men rode up to it and got down and walked around the base, peering up into the branches and pointing at one particular limb that ran straight on both sides of the tree and then bent upward, as if in a gesture of praise. They decided that it was the tree they had been looking for and drew the wagon up beneath it. Five or six ropes were neatly coiled underneath the straw on the wagon bed. Enery Mantle and the Buckendorfs took the ropes out and argued over which ones to use. Then they tried and repaired the knots, clumsily, several times, still arguing, and threw the ropes over the limb. They tested the slip of the rope and discussed who would hit the horses, and when.

“They don’t know how to snare a rabbit,” said Cuthbert, “or drop a man. This will not go easy.”

Holy Track was sick and wild. Asiginak did not answer. Mooshum was staring into space and pretending to be already dead.

“The Michif will do all right,” said Cuthbert, meaning Mooshum. “He knows how to jig.”

Asiginak roused himself from deep thought and touched his nephew’s shoulder.

“I regard you as my son,” he said to Holy Track. “We will walk to the spirit world together. I would not have liked to walk that road alone. Howah! You made my old heart proud when you showed yourself in that church door!”

“Thank you, my uncle,” said the boy, his voice soft and formal. “I regard you as my father, too.”

“We will see them soon,” said Cuthbert. “All our relatives.” He touched the boy’s arm, and smiled. His smile was awful in the dried blood. “Aniin ezhinikaazoyan?”

“Charles.”

Cuthbert shook his head. “Not the priest’s name. Not even our nickname for you, Holy Track. How do the spirits know you?”

Holy Track told him.

“Everlasting Sky. Good, you were named well. Give that name to the Person who will be waiting for you on the other side. Then you will go to the Anishinaabeg spirit world. Your mama and deydey will be waiting for you there, my boy. Don’t be afraid.”

“Don’t fight the rope,” said Asiginak. His voice shook.

Wildstrand made the four stand up and he refastened the ropes that tied their hands behind them. Emil Buckendorf arranged them on the wagon bed and lowered the loops of rope over their heads and then tightened the loops to fit more snugly.

Henric Gostlin stepped up to the wagon.

“He says he doesn’t want the boy to hang,” said Emil Buckendorf.

One of his brothers said, “Yah, just leave him.”

Eugene Wildstrand’s face darkened with a sudden rush of blood. “Were you there,” he said, looking at Gostlin and the others, one after another. “Were you there, at the place? You were there. You seen it.”

He held their gazes and his face burned strangely in the light.

“The girl,” he continued. “The wife. The two boys. My old friend, too. All of them.”

Emil stared at his brothers until they nodded and looked down at their feet. Henric Gostlin walked away, back down the path, slapping his hat on his thigh. The other men standing next to the horses started as Asiginak and Cuthbert suddenly burst out singing. They began high — Cuthbert’s voice a wild falsetto that cut the air. Asiginak joined him and Holy Track felt almost good, hearing the strength and power of their voices. And the words in the old language.

These white men are nothing

What they do cannot harm me

I will see the face of mystery

They sang the song twice before the Buckendorfs shook themselves and prepared the wagon. Emil steadied the two horses and counted down to whip them at the same time. The boy tried to open his mouth to join in his uncle’s song, but could only hum to himself the tuneless lullaby that his mother had always used to sing him to sleep. The Buckendorfs threw their arms back, cut the horses at the same time, then again, harder. The wagon lurched, stopped, then bucked forward. The men stumbled but did not stop singing. Finally, the horses bolted away. They halted after twenty feet. The men tried to keep singing even as they strangled. The boy was too light for death to give him an easy time of it. He slowly choked as he kicked air and spun. He heard it when Cuthbert, then his uncle, stopped singing and gurgling. Behind his shut eyes, he was seized by black fear, until he heard his mother say, Open your eyes, and he stared into the dusty blue. Then it was better. The little wisps of clouds, way up high, had resolved into wings and they swept across the sky now, faster and faster.

Bitter Tea

MOOSHUM FINISHED TALKING as the storm moved over us — the clouds low and black-bellied. In the yard, the sheets were thrashing wild, the overalls and Mooshum’s work shirts were ballooning out. Even my mother’s pastel underthings were flying straight back, wisps, and her bras corkscrewed around the wooden pins and line. She must have gone somewhere with Geraldine, leaving the baskets to tumble over empty.

I bolted forward as the first big drops splashed on my shoulders and began unpinning the clothes. The clothing flew from my hands, twisted off in the sharp wind. A circle-skirt wound me in its embrace. I was still caught in the story, and it took all of my concentration to struggle across the yard with my thoughts and that clothing into the quiet of the house.

My mother followed me into the kitchen, drenched. She had walked back from our uncle’s place in the rain, but it hadn’t put out her fire. Anyway, it was the kind of rain that passes quickly and leaves the air hot and clear right afterward, so she wasn’t inside for long, talking to Mooshum, before I saw her outside with the basket again, pinning up the same clothes that I’d just taken down. This time she was carefully hiding her underwear. Mooshum had gone out with Mama and he stood, hunched a bit, beside her, holding the clothespin bag. I thought that maybe she was giving him hell for telling us what had happened, about the hanged boy, but when she came back in the door holding Mooshum’s arm in hers, having left the basket outside again underneath the clothes, she only said, “I can’t persuade her, she has to see him, she cares for him. And she even knows about that woman doctor he was loving on the sly. You know who, you know damn well.”

I pretended like I was doing something else and not listening, but she was not in the least fooled. I wanted desperately to ask about the doctor.

“Oh, good. Evelina. I need you to peel potatoes.”

“Can we put our hair up tonight, like Geraldine’s?”

Mama gave me a sharp look, and I glanced away. I pulled up the ring on the square kitchen trapdoor rimmed with pounded tin and set into the linoleum. I gingerly let myself down the ladder into the cellar. She handed me a colander.

“I’ll shut you down there if you mention Geraldine right now,” she said.

I scrambled back up with the potatoes. While I was down there, though, I heard her say something about the judge to Mooshum, so I guessed this had to do with why she was so upset with Geraldine, only I got it wrong, entirely. I thought that Geraldine (surprisingly, for her!) had done something outside the law and would have to go before the judge, in court, pay some fine or go to jail. That’s what I thought.

THE NEXT DAY, Uncle Whitey and Shamengwa came over to the house. Uncle Whitey was teaching me how to hold my own in life and I was punching at his hands.

“You’re quick,” he said, “but not quick enough.”

I tried to duck my head before he touched my ear, but never could.

“Think like a snake,” he said. “Don’t think, react.”

But he could tell that I was a thinker and would never have lightning reflexes. Nor would Joseph.

“Boy, you’re hopeless,” said Uncle Whitey. He was a big, square man with an Indian Elvis face and a springy pompadour that he slicked back with hair oil out of a bright purple bottle. Sometimes he lived with us, sleeping on the couch.

“What’s going on with Aunt Geraldine?” I asked him.

“I could get killed for saying,” said Whitey. “It’s classified.”

“Let’s get some gloves,” said Joseph, “you come out back behind the sheds and they can talk all they want about Aunt Geraldine. Gossip is beneath us as men.”

“I’m with you,” said Whitey, and showed that inside his shirt he had a pint of Four Roses.

That left me with Shamengwa and Mooshum, and after I sat drinking water with them for a while I asked, because I knew they would not get mad at me, what Geraldine had done to make my mother so angry.

“Done?” said Mooshum, trying for once to look as if he didn’t know. “She’s not done nothing.”

“Yet,” said Shamengwa, his face still.

Shamengwa had brought his fiddle over, but he was only plucking and tuning it, frowning. He complained about the poor quality of the strings.

I asked what happened to the men who had lynched our people.

“You talked of that!” Shamengwa hissed through his teeth.

With a wary look at his brother, Mooshum turned to me. “The Buckendorfs got rich, fat, and never died out,” he said. “They prospered and took over things. Half the county. But they never should of. And Wildstrand. Nobody hauled him up on a murder charge. Sheriff Fells turned into a cripple and old Lungsford, out of disgust, he went back to the civilized world he called Minnesota. He moved to Breckenridge, where in 1928 they went and hung the sheriff. He could not escape it. I think he died out east.”

“And you,” I said, “how did you live? Can you live after being hung?”

“They were never going to hang him to death,” said Shamengwa.

“Why not?”

But Mooshum began to argue with his brother, saying things that made no sense to me. I saw the same thing as Holy Track, the doves are still up there. Their annoyance with each other grew, so I went away and turned all that I had heard over in my mind. Later on, someone drove up to the house, and I went out to see who it was. When I saw her, I ducked back in the door.

Aunt Harp had came over from Pluto to interview the two brothers for the local historical society’s newsletter. My mother usually arranged to be out whenever Aunt Harp visited. But if she couldn’t get away, Mama endured Neve because our father was still fond of his sister, even though she had kept their inheritance to herself with my other grandfather’s blessing. Old Murdo never forgave my father for not becoming a banker. My father thought about getting a lawyer and making his sister divide what was left, but he never did. He insisted that he just wanted a few old stamp albums that had belonged to Uncle Octave.

Still, it wasn’t that greed we held against Aunt Neve. She irritated and exhausted everyone around her with continual nave questions that she would ask, and without waiting, answer herself.

“What did the Indians use for firewood?” she asked that afternoon. It became one of her more famous questions. “I can’t believe I asked that!” She dissolved in self-appreciation.

Shamengwa wearily humored her, but Mooshum was delighted to have her near to work his charms on. He flirted with her outrageously, asking if she’d like to sit on his lap.

“You ever sit on a horse, in a saddle? Then you know there’s a horn you got to grab on to. I got one too…”

Mooshum’s brother turned his face away in distaste and I said, “What horn, Mooshum? Where is it?”

Mama came out the door and stood watching her father with a very quiet look on her face. I shut up. She was wearing a blue checked apron trimmed with yellow rickrack and had her arms folded over her breasts. Mooshum noticed her, straightened up, cleared his throat, and asked Mrs. Neve Harp if she had ever received his notes. She said yes, and that she’d come because she wanted material for her newsletter. Mooshum said eagerly that he would answer her questions. Shamengwa folded his hands. But when Neve Harp said that she was going back to the beginning of things and wanted to talk about how the town of Pluto came to be and why it was inside the original reservation boundaries, even though hardly any Indians lived in Pluto, well, both of the old men’s faces became like Mama’s — quiet, with an elaborate reserve, and something else that has stuck in my heart ever since. I saw that the loss of their land was lodged inside of them forever. This loss would enter me, too. Over time, I came to know that the sorrow was a thing that each of them covered up according to their character — my old uncle through his passionate discipline, my mother through strict kindness and cleanly order. As for my grandfather, he used the patient art of ridicule.

“What you are asking,” said Mooshum that afternoon, opening his hands and his mouth into a muddy, gaping grin, “is how was it stolen? How has this great thievery become acceptable? How do we live right here beside you, knowing what we lost and how you took it?”

Neve Harp thought she might like some tea.

“I’ll make it,” I said, and went inside the house. I filled the kettle with water and lit the front burner. Over the sink, there was a little window, and I stood there waiting for the water to boil. I was just able to see over the sill. I watched Aunt Neve waggle her tiny fingers at the two old men and squeeze smiles out of her face. Mama came in the door and stood beside me. She hardly ever touched me, so when she put her hand on my back I might have shaken it off, in surprise, and then regretted I had done so. I think I moved a step closer to her so that my shoulder lightly touched her arm. We stood there together, and for maybe the first time ever I understood that we were thinking roughly the same thing about what we were seeing.

“It’s not her fault,” said Mama, not talking to me. She was reminding herself to think charitable thoughts, so that she could stand having Mrs. Neve Harp in her yard.

“I think it is her fault,” I said.

“Oh? Maybe you’re thinking about the money,” said Mama. “I know you know about that. We don’t need it.”

“There were no Harps at the lynching,” I said without thinking. “But there was a Wildstrand. She married one.”

It surprised me that Mama didn’t question the fact that I knew what she had warned Mooshum not to tell us. She just took a little breath.

“Well,” she said, “and Buckendorfs. That was a long time ago. And look how Mary Anita has come back to help the young children of the parish.” Her voice took on that overcareful pious quality that always made me step away from her. I stepped away.

“Oh, her,” I pretended, and we were quiet for a little while. Just before the tea boiled, Mama shook herself.

“Evelina, you know that your grandma, Junesse, was not all Chippewa.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Her father left her and of course she was raised by her aunt. Her father’s name was Eugene Wildstrand.”

I just kept looking out the window, as if I hadn’t heard what she said. But inside I thought I now understood the reason that they hadn’t hanged Mooshum to death, as his brother put it. Behind me, I heard her take the kettle off the stove. The handle rattled a bit as she set it down. She scooped the tea leaves out of a tin with her fingers, then dropped them in the teapot and tapped the lid back onto the tea can. I heard the pour of steaming water as she filled the brown teapot and then she came back to stand beside me. This time, when she put her hand on my back, I did not shrug it off. We waited, together, for the tea to brew the way the two old brothers liked it, dark and bitter. Neve Harp could add a pound of sugar and she’d never get it sweet enough.

“Oh, anyway,” said Mama, “I might as well tell you everything. You’ll hear it anyway. Your aunt Geraldine and Judge Coutts are having…” But she couldn’t say it. She just gave a great, cracking sigh and put her hand on her chest.

“A baby?” I said.

Mama looked at me in surprise, then realized I didn’t really know what I was saying.

“Your aunt can’t have babies,” she said, in a somber way.

“Oh?” I said. “Then what? What are they having?”

But Mama regretted her moment, I could tell, and sent me outside with the teacups.

Lines

THE STORY MOOSHUM told us had its repercussions — the first being that I could not look at anyone in quite the same way anymore. I became obsessed with lineage. As I came to the end of my small leopard-print diary (its key useless as my brother had broken the clasp), I wrote down as much of Mooshum’s story as I could remember, and then the relatives of everyone I knew — parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper. Still, I could not erase the questions underneath, and Mooshum was no help. He bore interrogation with a vexed wince and silence. I persisted, kept on asking for details, but he answered in evasions, to get rid of me. He never spoke with the direct fluidity of that first telling. His medicine bottle, confiscated by our mother, had held whiskey. No one knew from what source. She’d never get him to stop. I still loved Mooshum, of course, but with this tale something in my regard of him was disturbed, as if I’d stepped into a clear stream and silt had billowed up around my feet.