The Antelope Wife (11 page)
M
Y DEAR ONE
and me stay up all night, and I tell you it is a night to remember. A night I won’t forget. Sensations abound that haunt me even now in the underpasses and the park undergrowth and old abandoned boat shacks of Gakaabikaang. There is something very pure and old that happens when we’re on, together, moving like we’re running over distances, floating like swift clouds. The next morning, breakfast, and by nine o’clock we’re hustled off. We’re boarding. We’re gone. It’s like we dreamed the night. I can’t tell you with what a sense of desolation and purpose I look down on that green beauty and blue sea from on high.
Maybe I know then, and maybe I’m just starting to understand, that life will always be like this around Richard Whiteheart. One minute high in Maui and the next minute yanked from bliss. I’m heading back now to tell my story before the judge, and I don’t even know what my story is, though I’m certain it involves waste carpet. I decide, right then, as we pass into a cloud, whatever else happens I won’t take the blame I can sense waiting at the terminal. No, that will be Richard. I won’t pay. Will not be held responsible. I’ll rat. I’ll speak. Things get dumped, terrible poisons in deep old wells. Or barns. Nothing’s endless, though. Every place has limits. And everybody.
The Autumn Rose Dress
The air is pink and golden, smelling of fresh rain. The girls’ canvas high-top shoes soak through as they run over wet grass to the time tunnels, the monkey bars, the fenced plain of deer. Early fall. The late roses are blooming, their petals flimsy, trembling, floppy silk and tight furled centers. They see a woman in an autumn rose dress just like their mother’s. She is walking across the rose garden with a man. With Frank, of course. The girls see that the woman is their mother. Rozin. They are with their father, Richard, because he has been bullied into taking them somewhere, anywhere. They grab him by the wrist, bring him to the rose beds. They point across the grass to make him understand that it is Rozin. He returns their excitement with a calm gaze, chin tipped down. His eyes clouded and hard.
“No, that isn’t her.”
“Look!” The girls pull on his sleeves.
“No”—he speaks indifferently—“that isn’t your mother. I know she looks like your mother.”
“She is! She does!”
“I know she does.”
“But Daddy”—they are together in this now, persuading him—“she has the same
dress
.”
“A lot of women bought that same dress.” He speaks with deliberate and now forceful gravity. “Like I said, that’s not her.”
It is only when the two walking people get close enough for the girls to clearly see her face, laughter fading in their mouths, that they decide, as she bends to the other man, touching his chest with the flat of her hand, that their father is right. They are looking at some other woman whose face, alight and radiant and still with anticipation, they have never seen before.
C
ALLY AND
D
EANNA
turn away from their father and away from that woman who looks like their mother. They begin to slap each other’s hands in a complex, nimble patty-cake.
I don’t wanna go to Hollywood
No more, more, more.
There’s a big fat Michael Jackson
At my door, door, door.
He grabbed me by the hips
And made me kiss his lips.
I don’t wanna go to Hollywood
No more, more, more.
Shame on you!
Then they laugh hysterically and do the rhyme over and over all the way home and keep it up until Richard thinks he’ll lose his mind.
Love and Relocation
Get them off that land! Away from one another. Split apart those families just getting to know one another after boarding school. Relocation is the main reason fewer Indians now live on reservations than in cities—like Klaus, like his cousin Frank, like Rozin, and like Richard Whiteheart Beads, whose mind is a bright rubber-band ball twisted of bewildered jealousy.
He keeps taking the colored bands off the ball, his emotions, and shooting them into space. Green fury, white disbelief, yellow hurt, purple rage, brown embarrassment. Also, he gets served with papers. Right after he returns from the park, two men come into the yard. The dog doesn’t even bark. It only laughs. The men are there to serve him with papers. Not divorce papers, yet at least! These papers are a court summons. If he does not appear in court he will be arrested. The legal paper servers wear gray suits. They always wear gray suits. No ties. Maybe they think the person who accepts the papers will reach out and grab them by the tie. Do they carry mace? Do they carry weapons? Do they carry tissues or handkerchiefs for people to cry into?
I won’t do any of those things, thinks Richard as he takes the papers. They needn’t fear me. But maybe Klaus should!
“Klaus!”
“Yes, I told them.”
Klaus gave Richard up. Just like that. He told the men, whom he said were big and scary and wore black suits, where Richard lived. Klaus cracked. Klaus squealed:
Richard lives on Andrew Jackson Street in Minneapolis
. It doesn’t matter, though. Klaus is up to his neck. Implicated. Richard reads the papers, then he sits down on the front step and begins to chain-smoke. No matter whether he goes to court or whether he is arrested he will be served with divorce papers. No, he decides. From all papers, he will flee. Damn Relocation! None of this would have happened without the proximity of all those many acres of carpet, which could only be so proximate in the city, which is why Relocation sucks so bad, thinks Richard. If I had been educated on my home reservation and lived with my family and received instruction in our traditional ways, I would have probably been a medicine man.
Whiteheart Beads, Medicine Man
Richard keeps thinking about the future that he might have had but for government programs. The War Department program for Indian eradication in the beginning, then treaty-making or removal. If his reservation had not been clipped back severely his family would have had more land, perhaps enough to live on and farm. Then every kind of sickness. If the few left had not had their children forcibly removed and shipped off to boarding schools where they either died of fresh diseases or died of loneliness or survived and got drunk and run over in the road . . . then . . . And if the few left after that hadn’t sold their land during the allotment years and become completely homeless and got tuberculosis sleeping on the ground, then . . .
If my ancestors had not got so sick from sleeping underneath that grand piano, maybe I would still have deposited toxic carpet in that barn, thinks Richard. Or maybe I would have healed people with my ceremonial knowledge.
He visualizes himself in his natural state. Not naked. He is wearing a loincloth. One of nicely tanned buckskin that his woman has chewed until soft. Sad. Her teeth are all worn down. His imaginary loincloth is smooth as silk from all of Rozin’s chewing. He laughs and cracks a beer. Early in the day to drink, but he’s been served with papers, is no medicine man, so needn’t stand on ceremony.
Did a man just dangle under that loincloth, he wonders, or was there some sort of diaper arrangement? A ball band, he decides. There had to have been a soft buckskin jockstrap underneath the loincloth. He sees his flowing braids, his stomach hard as a pine board, his biceps tough and stringy. Racing around curing people keeps him in shape. He is a shaman. Not a
sham
man, as Klaus always calls them, but the kind of shaman white people search the Internet for now and, when they find one, worship.
W
HEN
R
OZIN COMES
home later on, after the girls have seen her in the park, she doesn’t show that face with the beauty and ecstasy painted across her features. She is the very same mother as before. Calmer. Irritable. But in the old familiar ways. But then she drives off with their father and they stay away for the weekend. The girls can tell that something has happened that is not love, not getting back together. It is some sort of panic over looking happy with Frank for Mom and breaking a law for Dad. Cally and Deanna heard their mother shout that they could lose the house. They heard their father angrily deny it as she’d kept it in her name. They heard the name Frank and they ran up to their room.
It is a small room with bunk beds and the paint on the windowsills has been tested for lead. The top layer is perfectly acceptable now, but the woodwork has been in place since 1882, so the mustard-colored, the black, and the bitter-red paint under the fresh white coats is toxic. Cally and Deanna have been instructed never, ever, to chip away at the paint on the walls and woodwork and especially not to eat it.
“Let’s eat it now,” says Cally. But Deanna does not understand the logic.
“They’ll have to pump our stomachs,” she explains. “That will bring them together.”
“Can’t we do it without getting our stomachs pumped?”
“No!” says Cally.
So she and Deanna chip off a bit of paint, put it on their tongues, swallow, and wait to die.
“First we’ll have convulsions, that will tip them off,” says Cally.
“Where are you getting this information?” says Deanna.
Nothing happens. They forget about having eaten the paint after a while. Then Sweetheart Calico bolts outside with the dog. They run downstairs and whirl through the yard playing tag and hide-and-seek.
Nookoomisag
They emerge from the truck with their hard little suitcases, and cast their cold eyes around the house and yard to check for enemies. They see Cally and Deanna and their eyes turn into grandma eyes, black and warm. The grandmothers are both round-shouldered, powerful, small women. Their little hands are tough and splayed. They heat up cans of beans and corn for the girls that evening and let them watch TV while they sit at the table with the harsh light on them. From cheap plastic bags they draw silky deerhide, needles in wooden cases, little fan-shaped boxes of quills, and spice jars full of colored beads. Grandma Noodin pricks up beads and sews calmly. Grandma Giizis wears moccasins. They have traveled down from the reservation to care for their granddaughters in the city, while Rozin and Richard work things out.
Grandma Noodin hopes they work it out and Grandma Giizis does not like Richard and says he is a snake. She thinks that Rozin and the girls should move back and live with them anyway. Forget about these no-good men and forget about the noisy, crowded, ugly, tangled-up, bewildering Gakaabikaang.
Sweetheart Calico
Grandma Noodin catches a glimpse of Sweetheart Calico playing with the girls the next afternoon and says to Grandma Giizis, “Something is not right with that woman.”
They both begin to watch her, to spy on her, to question the girls all about her. They are awake that night when it rains and they open the curtains to peek outside. There she is with her clothes off, running around and around the yard. In the morning, hoof tracks.
Grandma Giizis nods at Grandma Noodin. “One of those,” they agree.
The Girl Who Married the Deer
Their gitchi-gitchi-nookomis was a peculiar girl known for her tremendous appetite though she stayed thin as a handful of twigs. During berry season, she went picking many times a day, filling her birchbark makak over and over but eating it empty before she ever made it to the house. Not only that, but she couldn’t keep her hands off mushrooms, food of the dead. She robbed the wild rice caches. Ate all the boiled meat. It worried people to see that she was always eating, always hungry, but never full.
A voice.
I’ve been watching this girl. Maybe she’s a wiindigoo.
No, said her mother. She’s only that hungry. Nothing wrong with her.
Still, the other people ignored her or gave her shaming looks when she approached a food pot. Hungrier than ever, she took to the woods. More and more time, days even, passed with her gathering and cooking out there in the heart of the dense bush. You could smell the steam, the good smells, you could smell the smoke rising.
She’s cooking out there. Wonder what she’s making? Wonder if a little child disappeared, we would find it in the cooking pot?
Great-Great-Grandmother ate the whole rabbit. Ears too. She wanted to eat her own arm.
And then she was joined out in the woods.
The girl was cooking up a fine pot of dried corn stew when a deer approached, stood by the edge of her camp. Just waiting. The girl thought, Should I eat him or should I share with him? Which? She picked up her killing hatchet but when she finally advanced toward the deer and looked him in the eye, she felt ashamed. She knew hunger when she saw it. Just walked past the deer and chopped a little more wood for the fire. Finished that stew.
She put the stew onto the plate, set the plate down in front of the deer, got her own plate full, and ate sitting before him. He never moved. She ate the whole stew, mopped up every trace of it with bannock, then sat quietly looking at him, crescent of horns, waiting. Unafraid. She had this feeling. Full. So this was what other people felt. She looked over at the deer. His eyes were steady and warm with a melting black light. His heart shone right out of his eyes.
He loves me, she thought. He loves me and I love him back. Right down to the ground. Who he is. No different. Of course, too bad that he’s a deer. That night, she made a bed out of young hemlock branches and curled against his short, stiff pelt. She began to live with him, stayed with him out in the woods, and traveled with him on into the open spaces. Became beloved by his family, too. Got so that she knew how to call the hooved ones toward her. They came when she stood in the open. Her song was peculiar, soft, questing.
T
HE GRANDMAS LIGHT
their small red-bowl kinnikinnick pipes. They sit in the corner, smoking and brooding.
They are wondering what to do about Sweetheart Calico and what to do about their daughter, Rozin, and about the twins, Cally and Deanna, who say they have eaten lead paint off the windowsill. They are wondering what to do about Frank, who’s come by with sugar on his pants and flour in his hair. There was in his hands a large box. In the box, between layers of wax paper, an assortment of fancy sugar cookies cut into the shapes of carrots, trees, dolphins, stars, moons, dogs, and flowers. Each type of cutout is decorated with a different color of hard icing trimmed with a rickrack of frosting, studded with edible foil-sugar beads or blue-black raisins. Grandma Noodin puts down her pipe. She puts the head of a pink dog into her mouth and bites it completely off. As the crumbly cookie dissolves grain by grain on her tongue, she understands that Frank loves her daughter. She believes that Richard Whiteheart Beads will run from prosecution and try to hide. She hopes he’ll take Klaus along with him. Those two are a couple of bums.
Grandma Giizis puts her pipe down, too. She eats a carrot-shaped cookie frosted orange with green piping leaves.
“My doctor said carrots are good for me,” she says.
Cally eats a dolphin and Deanna eats a flower.
“So what happened to the girl who married the deer?” asks Deanna.
“Wait until I finish my carrot,” say Grandma Giizis.
T
HE GIRL DIDN’T
want to leave her deer husband, but her brothers came to get her one brilliant spring. Shot her man with three arrows, one bullet. Brought her back to her family, her village, her people. She was not hungry anymore, and she was grown. They named her for the flowers that stretched past her shielding arms and were spattered with deer’s blood, blue flowers scraped from patches of sky. Blue Prairie Woman.
