Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “Oh, he’s smart, yeah, he’s got the brains. He went to Dartmouth for his undergrad and then Harvard for his Ph.D. in education. When he came back, he tried to fix the school system on the reservation, but so, well”—now Sweetie’s face turns sad, and her whole look fills with sorrow—“the attempt gave him a breakdown. After he returned to this reality, he decided to open up a business, support his family that way, I mean us. He ran for tribal council, and he’s writing a book. He is up to over three thousand pages now.”

  Sweetie purses her lips and indicates a door in the wall, a closet. “It’s in there. Drafts of his manuscript, which is all about me. He follows me everywhere I go and watches all that I do.”

  “Where is he, then? Why isn’t he here, witnessing this historic meeting? You and me?”

  “Well, he’s gotta mind the store,” says Sweetie. “Besides, I am supposed to, well, I do have something on my agenda today. I’m giving a presentation to the tribal council. After that meeting, we’re gonna lay sod.” Then, shyly, she says, “Wanna come?”

  I’m feeling better now, getting the hang of being here, and although I’ve got the most awkward part of the meeting out of the way, I haven’t got to the part where I pump the family for genetic information. But as soon as I’ve got that, I’m leaving. Getting out of Dodge, so to speak, the reservation version of it anyway.

  “What’s the meeting for? And the sod?”

  “For the shrine. Not the one in our yard. A shrine for Kateri, you know?”

  “Yeah, I do. Really?”

  Sweetie tells me about the wayside shrine that she and twenty other parishioners have decided to erect at a place on the reservation where people swear they have seen an apparition three times in the past four years. She says that people think it may be Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks, patron saint of Native people. Again, here’s that congruence. Catholic stuff. After we finish our tea, the two of us put Grandma down to sleep on a little bed stuck in one corner, piled high with quilts. Then we get into my Honda and drive over to the tribal offices.

  On the way there, we do not speak a word. We park, and go in through the big doors that open underneath the outspread wings of a cast fiberglass eagle. This is all new to me. I’m interested. The air inside is fresh and cool. I breathe in big gulps. I can’t wait to tell Glen and Sera details—fiberglass eagle! We sign ourselves in, and Mary chats with the receptionist, a cousin. Finally, we go into the meeting, sit down at the near end of the table. We are the only ones there without big plastic traveling coffee mugs. We’re first on the agenda. They’re making small talk now, ready to start the meeting. Mary opens a file that she’s brought along.

  A woman says a quick prayer, or gives an address of some sort, in Ojibwe, and then Henry “Bangs” Keewatin, heavy, pale, soft, a smoker and classic heart-attack candidate, reads out the minutes of the last meeting and introduces us.

  “Mrs. Potts will be explaining this shrine question,” he informs the others. Then Sweetie reads a thumbnail sketch on the life of Kateri.

  “Born in 1656 at Osserneon, New York, the daughter of a Christian Algonquin woman named Kahenta. Kateri’s mom married a pagan, of the Turtle clan, and died during a smallpox epidemic that also left Kateri’s face scarred and her eyes weakened. She converted and was baptized in 1670, and thereafter lived a life of remarkable virtue, even, it is said, in the midst of scenes of carnage, debauchery, and idolatrous frenzy.”

  “Idolatrous frenzy. Is that something like traditional religion?” asks Bangs.

  “Yeah, it is,” says Sweetie. “I’m a pagan Catholic. Moving on?”

  Bangs nods.

  “She took a vow of chastity and died young,” says Sweetie.

  “That’s why I never took one,” says Bangs.

  Sweetie raises her eyebrows, sighs, and continues.

  “Miracles occurred. She was beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II and since then canonized. Besides all Native people, she is the patron saint of ecologists, exiles, orphans, and . . . people ridiculed for their piety.

  “I’m going to pass out these financial impact statements from a site that has registered several appearances by the Virgin Mary. This place is located on Long Island, New York. You can see for yourselves what an effect pilgrimage crowds have on the local business community.”

  Sweetie slips the papers from the folder and distributes them to each of the members, who eye the numbers critically and come to the end smiling.

  “And that’s just a tentative sighting, my relatives. By children. The Blessed Virgin waved her hand over some rosebush. They sell the rose petals from all of the roses planted near the shrine. Here’s one.”

  She passes around a small card containing a laminated rose petal.

  “Good move,” says one of the members, setting down the figures that Sweetie has written up and copied. Bangs Keewatin smiles. “I’m thinking in light of this world situation we’re seeing there could be increased interest in appearances of a spiritual type of nature, and we’d best be ready. We should take advantage of this saint showing up here.”

  “Yeah, she picked us all right,” says Sweetie. “Here’s more figures on how much money the average pilgrim spent in the eateries and motels adjacent to that spot in New York. Oh, and here’s the description of the first two visits.” She hands out sheets of testimony.

  “You know, this whole thing would be a bigger deal,” says Bangs, “if this ghost or whatever had not just appeared to small-time losers.”

  “That’s always the first caveat most church officials have about the sightings,” says Sweetie.

  Caveat? I think. Maybe she’s been coached by Eddy. Or could it be that I’ve underestimated Sweetie?

  “The seven people who witnessed Kateri’s visitations weren’t small-timers,” she says sternly. “They had just lost big money at the slots or blackjack tables and were in a state of severe financial shock when the beautiful Indian maiden appeared in buckskins, carrying a cross. She wore a circle of flowers around her head, brandished the lily of purity. She spoke. Actually, she wasn’t comforting. She was forthright, accusing, and even said specifically to Hap Eagle that he’d wasted good food money and his kids would now have to eat from the commodity warehouse.”

  “Do they have commodities in heaven?” one of the council members, a guy named Skeeters, asks. “How’d she know about commodities?”

  “Saints know everything,” says Sweetie, her voice severe. “Apparently our saint has made a sort of decision here,” she continues, “and who are we to question it? She has decided to appear to nobody but the feckless. Yes, inscrutable, but it’s all we have to work with.”

  “Feckless, you go,” I whisper to Sweetie when she sits down.

  “I didn’t know she only appeared to virgins,” says Bangs, frowning at the others around the table.

  “That’s feckless, not fuckless,” says Sweetie.

  She smiles beatifically at the council, keeps talking. “As in irresponsible. If only they’d been affected enough to quit gambling. Nobody redeemed yet, I’m sorry to say. They keep going to bingo with their Bibles at their elbows. Anyway, we’d like to grass in that place you let us keep clear in the casino parking lot. We got a load of sod coming. Here’s the bill.”

  The treasurer takes the bill and says he’ll put the appropriation to the vote, which passes. That is that. We walk out and across the highway to the shrine, which is just out back of the newly surfaced and paved casino parking lot. The sacred oval of earth lies between the north and south parking lots, and the committee has decided to begin by grassing it with sod, which was scheduled to arrive an hour ago. The exact place where Sweetie’s saint has consistently appeared is marked by a large boulder, for which a plaque is just now being cast. Behind the boulder, the committee plans to put a statue, though Sweetie thinks that a statue might discourage Kateri from reappearing.

  When we get there, a black truck with wooden-slat sides is pulled up and six or seven people are pulling rolls of
grass off the back. Someone has dragged a long hose from behind the casino to water the dirt in the oval. Sweetie and I get out of the car and pitch right in. Between the two of us, we carry a sod roll to the site and carefully place it just so against the other strips. It only takes half an hour to do the whole thing. Then the others go, the truck too, and my new mom and I are left with the hose, watering down the grass.

  This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.

  Sweetie lights up and sits on the sacred rock while I stick my thumb in the stream of water and spray an even fan back and forth over the instant green lawn.

  Sweetie sighs—there it is again—shakes her head in that sexy way, and looks out over the parking lot.

  “Right on cue,” she says, pointing with her cigarette. “That’s Eddy, see? Just like always, he’s looking for material, and I’m it.” She stands up and slings her lighted cigarette with an eloquent motion into the drain at the parking lot curb. She takes the shoelace from her pocket and wraps it around her fingers. Eddy parks and gets out and Sweetie preens a little. I can see she has this fantasy that her husband is slavishly devoted to her, which already I don’t think is quite the case, but which somehow works because she can interpret anything he does as an act of obeisance. For instance, he has a slushie in the pickup’s cup holder, and now she reaches right in through the open window and fishes it out with a sigh that says my man takes good care of me.

  “So this is Cedar,” says Eddy, getting out of the truck, walking up to me, shaking hands like a well-socialized person. His attitude is just right, not too familiar, and yet he, too, suddenly has tears in his eyes. He’s trying not to stare at me. I sense that he is struggling hard to maintain the right distance, the right balance. And like me, he immediately goes for the abstract and talks too fast.

  “I was going to ask what’s up, how are you, something of the sort, but we can already answer that, right? Gawiin gegoo, nothing. Well, that’s not strictly true, is it, since the world as we know it is coming to an end and nobody knows what the hell is going on or how our species is going to look four months from now.”

  “Then again, maybe she just wants a slushie,” says Sweetie as she hands me the cherry ice soup. “That’s enough out of life.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more.” Eddy gives me a surprising smile. I say surprising because Sweetie told me that he never does smile.

  “Hey, he’s smiling,” I say to Sweetie. “I thought he never smiled.”

  “I don’t, as a rule,” says Eddy, smiling again at me. He looks like such a nice man, really, a little shy, even sweet. “I’m afflicted,” he says, half kidding. “I suffer from a chronic melancholy, the sort diagnosed by Hippocrates as an excess of black bile.”

  Then he tells me that he elects to believe that he shares his condition only with writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and great statesmen like Winston Churchill. He doesn’t have the modern sort of depression, he says, the kind that can be treated with selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors. His is the original black dog.

  “We’re all going down the tubes, the fallopian tubes that is, not to mention the seminal vesicles,” he says as he cheerfully throws back his head and lets the sun hit his face. “Ah, that feels good.”

  “The whole world can go to hell as far as I’m concerned,” says Sweetie, “as long as Eddy’s in a good mood.”

  “I’m in a real good mood.” Eddy plants a tender little kiss on Sweetie’s mouth. She looks at him, dazzled.

  “That was unexpected,” she says.

  Eddy’s about six two and has a slender build. His face is thin and foxlike, secretive, worried, and that rare smile is wistful, very tentative. But suddenly he is smiling way too much, grinning like an excited child, and I know that there’s something wrong with him. His emotions jump too fast for perfect mental health.

  “It’s just that I knew it all along.” His black, thick hair stands on end like a little boy’s exuberant cut. “All my life I’ve sensed an unseen deterioration, Cedar, I’ve always known that this was happening. It has colored my mental processes and been the reason for all that I have written. I have waited for it and known that it, or something like it, would come. I just feel an enormous sense of calm. Perhaps relief.”

  Sweetie did not describe Eddy as manic—that wasn’t part of his self-diagnosis—though I’ve read that depressives may seek out manic episodes as the melancholy weighs so heavy and keeps their thoughts so sluggish. Maybe Eddy is getting his wish. His demeanor right now might be temporary euphoria—an extremely understandable reaction to the strangeness of this disaster, so I am gentle with him and issue an invitation. I am going to ask them to lunch, after which, I decide that I’ll drive back to Minneapolis, counting my blessings all the way.

  “Let me take you two out to lunch, okay? Come on.”

  “There’s still lunch? Of course there is,” says Eddy. “We can probably still sit down and order our usual Cobb salads and wild rice soup. Lettuce is still being shipped here, most likely. Corn is still tasseling. Cows have not stopped giving milk. But then, I think, it won’t take long before they give a lot less as they are bred for milk capacity.”

  He’s right, I think as we walk to the casino. I remind myself to lay in a stock of powdered milk right away, to maybe hit a big Cub or Rainbow market before I get back to the Cities. I make a mental list of long-shelf-life high-protein foods. Peanut butter. Durum pasta. Rice, beans, lentils. And salt. I’ll get a lot of salt. We’ll need salt whatever we become. And people run quickly out of liquor, right? It’s good to have it, to bargain with. Walking toward the restaurant, I imagine myself hunkered in my house with a closetful of Morton salt and fifths of vodka, which I can trade for diapers.

  “Since you know so much then, Eddy, what’s going to happen?” I ask.

  “Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we’ll keep adapting.”

  “But the world is going to pieces.”

  “It is always going to pieces.”

  “This is different.”

  “It is always different. We’ll adapt.”

  We make our way through the jangling gloom, past Treasure Castaway and Bullrider quarter slot machines to the entrance of a discreetly Native-themed grill. Geometric wallpaper, heavily varnished stripped pine, metal light fixtures with eagle-feather cutouts. The booths, solid Naugahyde, are comforting and cushy. We order our food—everything is on the menu—and it comes in the usual amount of time. I noticed when Eddy got out of his truck that he had a briefcase with him, and I think immediately of Sweetie’s description of his manuscript. Sure enough, once Sweetie finishes her food and takes off for the tribal offices, where she works as some kind of special coordinator, a job I’m unclear about, he lifts the briefcase onto the tabletop between us and takes out some pages of what turns out to be his book.

  “I’m revising,” he says, “not that it’s going to matter, ultimately. Short is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of earth where he lives, and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor human beings. Marcus Aurelius. Typically up to the moment.”

  Eddy says that although he quotes the Roman emperors and orators, he also likes Russian novels. Dostoyevsky is a favorite. Eddy lugs The Idiot around in an old clothbound edition. That’s what he was bent over when I saw him through the big glass windows. He says that people buying gas at the Superpumper sometimes catch the title and ask him if it’s his autobiography. But Eddy really does feel that Dostoyevsky has used up the only two titles that could possibly work for his own book—The Idiot and Notes from Underground. He is constantly searching for a title as good as those. He is keeping a list. Eddy tells me that his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.

  “Some potential titles include the very literal,” he says. “Why Not to Kill Yourself. There is the more colloquial, Don’t Off You. The triumph
ant declarative, I Live Yet! The confusedly academic, Contra Selbstmord. Here!”

  Eddy pushes the page he is editing across the table. That page, numbered 3027, is titled “Even Gas-Station Food Can Save You.”

  1

  Today I did not kill myself because of the sweet foam on the top of a cheap cardboard cup of cappuccino. What can I tell you except that it was delicious, swept off the surface of the denser brew onto my finger, which was slightly redolent of windshield wiper fluid. As I lowered my lips to the steaming liquid, I inhaled tones of vanilla, then took a tentative sip. Intense sweetness filled my mouth. I tasted fully. Malt dextrose and a resonance of airplane glue with a scorched plastic finish. My senses fully awakened. Awful and Superb!

  2

  I had a cardboard tray of nachos for lunch that was slightly flawed in the presentation, as I pushed on the hot cheese pump too forcefully and splattered the edges of the tray and counter. But that failing was made up for by the implacably rich marriage of salt and sodium, corn and hydrogenated grease, vegetable gum and number-five red that lingered in the back of my throat for hours.

  3

  I ate a postdated ham-and-cheese sub. Then two oranges from the fruit bin. Thusly, tasting deeply of all that gave me life, I made it through another unpromising morning and wholly treacherous afternoon in which between ringing up sales and unblocking gas pumps I attempted to manage my dread. The syncopation of my heart. A willful retreat of my entire mental process as I contemplated the 1 p.m. tribal council meeting which I was scheduled to attend.

  Strike that. Endure. That I was scheduled to endure.

  “I wouldn’t change a word,” I tell him. And I wouldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think that my services as an editor are really required. I’m pretty sure that what Eddy mainly wants is validation. I am happy to give it, although you may think, given the subject of the book, that I should perhaps ask Eddy to report to a psychologist. I do consider it, and then decide not to because even now I believe Eddy’s book serves as therapy. Like this book, or notebook, like yours. Also, Eddy makes me promise not to.