Prudence (22 page)

“You should know. It was him that did it. I’m telling you.”

“And I’m telling you I’m tired. And I’m telling you I want to go. I need to go home. Let’s go.”

“Prudy.”

“Just stop talking, Billy, and start driving. Please start driving.” She drummed her feet on the floor.

Billy slid behind the wheel and moved the packages back to the middle of the bench seat.

Prudence retracted her feet and hugged her knees.

He started the truck and the sound of it was loud in his ears.

When they reached the blacktop, Prudence dropped the rest of her cigarette out the window and curled up, facing away from Billy.

“Here,” said Billy, pushing the package across the seat. “You can put this on. It’s new. It’s brand new.”

Prudence reached behind her and felt around on the seat for the package. She found it and dragged it across her hips and clutched it to her chest. Billy couldn’t see her face. She stayed that way till they pulled up in front of the Wigwam. Then she gathered her things—dress, underwear, bra, purse, and the package containing the dress Billy had bought at J. C. Penney for Stella—and got out of the truck, clutching them to her chest. She turned and kicked the door shut with her bare foot, then leaned her face in the open window.

“You know what, Billy?” Her teeth were clenched and she hissed the words. “You know what? You ain’t my type. You ain’t even my type at all.”

With that she turned and walked around the side of the Wigwam and disappeared from
view.

THE RESERVATION—AUGUST 3, 1952

T
he stranger knocked on the door just after noon, sweating into his black clothes. He held his black hat in one hand and a soda bottle in the other, and his lank hair stuck to his scalp. He was small, with narrow shoulders, and his suit was much too big. His eyes were dark and deep-set, framed by gold-rimmed glasses. His jaw was narrow and pointy, and his mouth was very small. He was nervous, even Mary could see that. She peered out past his shoulder to confirm that there was no car—she’d been out back hanging laundry and hadn’t heard one. He must have walked from town. She looked down at his shoes. They were like the black shoes the men wore to church, with leather soles. The tops were covered in road dust.

She used to walk all the way from her parents’ camp into the village and back, once a week. Six miles one way. What looked like easy walking could be hard if you weren’t dressed for the heat. And her short leg—the one they said would catch up to the other but never did—ground into her hip with each step and made walking painful and difficult. Even as a young girl, by the time she’d made it to town, she was tired, a slow coal burning in her hip. But she’d have to load up her pack with flour and soda and whatever else they needed and walk back. Later, when she was a teenager, she worked in the kitchen
at the Pines, and that had been hard, too: a long walk from town, the river crossing, and then all that cleaning, scrubbing, sweeping.

Now she was married. No one thought she’d ever get a husband, and they said as much. At best you’ll find some drunk half-breed, they’d said, but most likely not even that. But she had found Gephardt, or he had found her. They found each other. Together they proved everyone wrong. How many times had she seen him at the camp without actually seeing him? How many times had she limped by on the other side of the fence? She searched her mind but had no recollection of him, not until after the war. He had decided to stay on when the rest of them were sent back to Germany. She first encountered him in the spring of 1946, when he saw her in the store and helped her carry her things back to her parents’ sugar bush. Mary liked to think that he stayed for her. He had chosen her, though. He had chosen her and she had chosen him when everyone in the village had nothing good to say about her, but she had succeeded.

Now that she was married, she made her shopping list at her table, and then she tied on her scarf to keep her hair down in the truck, and Gephardt drove her and she didn’t have to walk. Her husband. Hers. Her house. Her wash. Her kitchen. Her stove. It was all hers. She had proved them all wrong, and she was not above being a little prideful about it.

She was still shy. She hid her shopping list face-side against her aproned belly because only she understood her pencil marks, little symbols that weren’t real words, not like the ones the girls who had gone to boarding school knew how to make. Oh, you’re real old-time, the others would sneer. Why even use real paper, they’d ask. Why even use your hand or a pencil? You should just bite down on birch bark and make your list that way. Mary had wanted to go to school far away in the prairies in Flandreau like many of the other girls. But not even the missionaries or the agent or the superintendent at the school would have her. When she went to church as a girl, the priest
didn’t seem to care one way or another about her salvation. And why? Because one leg was shorter than the other? Because she wasn’t pretty like the other girls? What kind of God had men like that working for him? The pastor at Trinity Lutheran in Deer River was always nice to her, almost as nice as Gephardt, whose arm she held as she climbed the steps to the church.

She wished she knew more English, though, more than the little she had to do her shopping and trading. When the stranger stood at the door and said, “I have come,” his accent was so thick she couldn’t follow along, and she wished she understood more. “I have come for him,” he said again, and of course Mary knew that he was speaking of Gephardt. She smiled and motioned the stranger into the kitchen, and then motioned for him to sit. She held a jar under the pump and filled it with water and set it on the table. Once the stranger was seated, she went out to the shed to get Gephardt. Gephardt was so creative. He’d found a way to run a line in the house so she didn’t have to pump water in the yard, which was a terrible chore in the winter, with her leg the way it was. Hard work. But with him, the hard work wasn’t quite so hard as it used to be.

Gephardt was in the shed patching a canoe. She told him there was someone to see him, and he put his things down and walked past her. She turned and followed him. He opened the screen door and stopped just inside. The stranger sat at the table with the water in front of him, untouched. They stared at each other. Both afraid. Both tense. Mary wasn’t sure Gephardt wanted to sit down. It was so unlike him. Lots of people came to the house. Gephardt’s skills were in demand. He could make anything, really anything, out of metal. Rice threshers, saws, spuds. He had a still and made liquor out of potatoes. Who else knew how to do that? People were always coming by, especially for a jar of “Gephardt’s,” which is what they had come to call it. Since he couldn’t always understand them very well, he made big gestures with his hands and smiled at them a lot. He served
them coffee and didn’t mind when they sat in the shed and watched him work, even when they drank. Once a couple of breeds from over across the line had fallen asleep while they were waiting for Gephardt to finish welding the seams of a syrup pan, and he didn’t even wake them. He threw some blankets over them and let them sleep in the shed. In the morning Mary came out with biscuits and yesterday’s coffee and set them on the packed earth of the shed floor. She stood over them until they stirred and since she knew the type—she knew they’d take whatever they could and wouldn’t think twice about it—she said: “Eat. And then out.” And she added:
“Maajaayok akawe. Giishpin igo maajaasiweg giga-basidiyeshkooninim.”
Just so they’d know she wasn’t joking. Gephardt was so kind, so generous, that he’d get taken advantage of if she wasn’t there. But that’s how it always was, wasn’t it?

Gephardt wasn’t so easygoing with the stranger in the kitchen. He didn’t even look like he’d sit down with the man. The man didn’t look like he wanted Gephardt to sit down, either. Then he reached in his pocket and took out a pistol and pointed it at Gephardt.

It couldn’t be bigger than a .22. They had one, too, and it was barely strong enough to put down the pigs. Sometimes even holding it against their skulls didn’t do it, and she had to shoot again.

Gephardt raised his hands like a crook in a movie and sat down.

Once the men faced each other across the table, the stranger spoke to Gephardt in German. Gephardt nodded slowly, his eyes on the stranger.

“We are in America now. I speak English now.”

The stranger said something and he grew angry, and Gephardt said something back to him in the language of his country.

All the prisoners at the camp had spoken that language. During the summers she’d walked past the camp and seen them inside. One had even escaped, but he had drowned in the river. She’d seen them in the winter, too, when the Pines was closed, walking in long lines
out into the tamarack swamps south of the village to cut timber. She saw them laying the corduroy and heard them singing while they worked. She didn’t know what they had done. She didn’t know if they were warriors or just men who got caught up in war. They were hard workers and they were cheerful, too. Nothing like the old men she knew when she was a girl—old men who had fought the Dakota and still carried scalps they’d taken and hidden from the Americans. Those old men had brought out those scalps at the drum dances back when her family still went to the dances. At the ceremonies they recounted how they’d come by the scalps—how they’d shot or stabbed or bludgeoned the enemy and then cut off his scalp. The belt man at the dance, Felix, was the most fearsome of them all. When he danced the belt, he held his war club high. Mary was just a girl and was made to sit off to the side. Her parents told her not to look at Felix, not to say anything to him. She stole looks out from under her scarf and thought she could see blood on his war club. He held it up in the air over his head when they checked the drum. It was still dirty with blood after all those years, though he certainly couldn’t have used
that
in the war. When she saw him at the Pines, working on the dock or painting the house or cutting the grass, he didn’t seem so fierce. Not as fierce as he did when he danced the belt or spoke for his songs. For each feather, he recounted a kill he had made in the Great War. It took a long time. There were seventeen feathers on the belt.

Gephardt was nothing like that. He laughed and sang and he worked hard, and she was sure he’d never touched blood, even though he was one of the enemy. He had wanted to stay. He liked the woods, he said. He liked the cold. He liked her. It was possible, but no: Gephardt had not touched blood. Mary knew men who had, like Felix, and he was not like them. Not like them at all.

The stranger said something to Gephardt and he shook his head. He shook his head and scowled and spoke. The stranger said something else. Gephardt raised his hands and held them up so the
stranger could see. The stranger sat back and picked up the gun. He shook his head and then he looked at Mary.

“He is not who he says he is,” said the stranger. He said it twice before Mary understood what he meant. “He is not who he says he is.”

“He is my husband,” said Mary as best she could. “He is my husband in the church.”

“He is a bad man,” said the stranger. “Bad things he has done.”

“No,” said Gephardt. “No bad man. I make things. I fix things.”

A bad man. Could it be? Could a bad man have chosen her? Was that all she could hope for? Had the other girls been right?

The stranger ignored Gephardt. He kept looking at Mary. Finally he turned and spoke to Gephardt in their language again. He went on for a few minutes. While he spoke, Gephardt kept shaking his head, and once he hit the table with his fist.

“We are in America now. All that is over. We speak English now.”

“My English is good. Better than yours,” said the stranger. “But we don’t speak it. We speak so you can understand. I speak so you understand.”

“I am married. Speak for she to understand.”

The stranger looked at Mary.

“I, too, was married. I have children. I tell you about your husband. What kind of man he is.”

Mary narrowed her eyes. What kind of man he is? One who works. That’s who. All he does is work. He spends nothing. He works and they save. The farm that had broken the Norwegians who moved there first makes a life for them. The fields were bad. Rocky and sandy. But they made the fields work for them. Gephardt was good with his hands, and if there was a job, he did it. They had a pig and chickens. Gephardt has made a small mill and cuts lumber. The roof didn’t leak and the walls were packed with rock wool. The cellar dug into the side of the hill was braced and solid and cool and lined with canned pork and beans and berries. And he had, the year
before, built a parcher and parched rice. Now it was only the old-timers or the very poorest who dug pits in their yards and danced their rice and ate their meager harvest full of chaff and hulls. The rest brought their rice to Gephardt, and he parched it and threshed it with his machines, and it was fine rice. He never burned it. And it never broke. Long, tan grains of rice—none of them popped. No hulls floated to the top of their pans when he finished it.

And this man, this stranger. Who was he? Who was he to come here and tell her about her husband? Gephardt took care of her. He didn’t mind that when they walked through town he was a block, sometimes two, ahead of her, stomping through his errands at full speed while she lagged behind. He didn’t mind and he didn’t make jokes about her. He never teased her about her leg. He had even cut a block of wood and fashioned it just so and attached it to her shoe so her legs would be the same length. That’s who he was.

And she worked, too. Their bedding was clean and ironed. Their pots shone. None of her canning popped in the summer. She knew Gephardt. She knew the man was better than anyone. No stranger could tell her what he was, she could see it in his life. He had chosen her when no one else would, and that meant a lot to a person—even to someone lame and marked for work and who would never bear a child.

“I speak so she understands,” said the stranger. “He is not who he says he is. He is from my town, my city. You understand? We know each other.”

Her hip hurt. She leaned against the sink and narrowed her eyes, trying to catch the words that flew by. They knew each other. They were from the same country. This much Mary caught, but the rest was lost. She squinted and stared at the stranger. It was the look that took over her face when she was trying to understand what people were saying. They thought she looked that way because she was mean. The kids joked that she was a witch. They were scared of her.

Gephardt scowled. Shook his head. “I know him not. I know not this man here.” He gestured at the stranger across the table, his water untouched, his sweat drying on his brow.

The stranger ignored him. He spoke to Mary but he looked at Gephardt while he spoke.

“He is from my town, see? In the war we hide. I hide. My wife. My children. But this man”—he pointed at Gephardt—“he tells them where to find us. He tells them. Now I have no wife. I have no children.”

Gephardt half stood. “
Nein, nein. nein
. No, no! I say nothing. I don’t know you. I never see you.”

“Your name is Gephardt Miller.”

“Yes. No. I am not that man.” He sat down. His face was crunched and concerned. “I am not that man.”

Mary couldn’t pronounce his name. Miller. Her name now, too. But she didn’t need to. She was thirty-five years old. She’d lived with her parents until she was twenty-five and then her aunt after that. All that time—all those long years—she’d lived in shacks covered in tar paper, under roofs covered only in tar paper. She’d endured the damp summers and dry, cold winters as everyone did. She’d never felt the thrill of milled lumber under her feet except at the store, church, or post office. It never occurred to her that it was ridiculous to live in a shack with dirt floors, and to sweep them every day. Cleaning dirt. That had been her life until Gephardt, sweeping dirt on dirt. But then Gephardt had come up to her in the store and talked to her, or tried to. She bowed her head. She couldn’t understand anything he said. She looked at her hands. But Gephardt smiled and gestured and smiled some more. He took the rice sack full of groceries from her hands and helped her carry the flour and the pound of nails back to her family’s sugar bush. Her parents offered him tea. He held the tin cup on his lap and smiled. He came back to the sugar bush until they closed it down. He found her
through the spring and summer—at fish camp and picking berries. Always her parents offered him tea. Always he accepted. Sometimes he brought them gifts. Yards of cotton twill. A pound of salt. A roll of tar paper. They were married in the fall and moved into Gephardt’s cabin southwest of the village, just off the highway. She was happy. She took great pleasure in sweeping the wood floors of their cabin. She scooted the dirt into a pan and threw the dust and hair and wood chips inside the cookstove, where they crackled away into nothing. No more sweeping the dirt off a dirt floor. And so it didn’t matter that she couldn’t say his last name, her own last name, the
l
’s a sound she couldn’t get her mouth around. It didn’t matter because she had proved them all wrong. She was the one with insulation in her walls. She was the one with a husband she didn’t have to pull off the road because he fell down drunk. A husband who never set foot in the Wigwam. He worked hard and he took care of her. And what could they say about that?