Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “Who’s the dad?”

  When she says this, a wave of feeling hits. Forgiveness. Remembering. This excruciating mixture of pain and joy seems, in retrospect, happiness. I’m so eager to talk about your father. Although she hasn’t asked for details, I describe his deep soft voice, his good-natured face, warm eyes, thick black hair. I tell Mary about his capable square hands, his favorite plaid flannel shirts, about his scratched-up work boots. How much he loves real Neapolitan pizza. I show her my fake golden wedding ring. They didn’t take that from me. Little Mary listens with complete attention and doesn’t interrupt except to ask hushed grown-up questions like where he’s from and what his family is like. I stop talking at some point. The fact I don’t know whether Phil is alive or dead now catches up with me. And whether I can, truly, forgive him. My chest is so tight I can hardly breathe. The room swims around me, darker, carrying me away on a raft of exhaustion and loss.

  As I am floating on that tide, something happens that may be supernatural. A presence sits on the edge of the blow-up mattress, weightless, formless, protective. It is a kind shadow. Maybe an angel. Magnetic and gentle, its love settles over me like a buoyant cape. Together, we sleep.

  November 1–All Souls

  Sweetie wakes me by tickling my feet with the tips of her fingers. The sun is late morning high. I’ve slept so long that most of the air has leaked from my mattress and my hip is touching through onto Mary’s floor pads of lumpy clothes. I open my eyes a crack, see Sweetie, drift sleepward. It almost hurts to feel this good. Sweetie watches me. Her joyous pixie eyes are fixed on me. She’s hardly smiling, yet her face is always on the verge of hilarity. We regard each other without speaking, an agreeable silence.

  “How you feeling?” she says at last.

  “Like I want to have this baby tomorrow.”

  I stretch hard and then cradle you, sitting up. Sweetie doesn’t say anything, just helps me to my feet. I’m wearing a huge black T-shirt that says Anishinaabe Warrior, and a pair of shrunken sweatpants that tie underneath my vast belly. I look like crap, but I feel wonderful.

  “I’m so big there’s nowhere to really hide me. But are they looking? Does the tribal militia protect pregnant women? I want to stay right here. I don’t want to go farther north. Right here is where I want to have my baby. Except . . . maybe not in this room.”

  Sweetie just says, “We’ll talk to Eddy.”

  In the kitchen, the all-purpose connecting room of the house, Mom mixes brown sugar into the raisin-dotted oatmeal and gets ready to spoon oatmeal into Grandma’s mouth. Grandma watches, her eyes sharp sparrow eyes, ready to peck. As Mom raises the spoon to feed a bite to her, Grandma snatches the spoon from her hand and begins to shovel in the oatmeal by herself.

  “Okay!” says Mom.

  She turns as I come in and her smile is subdued. She is worried about us being here, I can tell. Sweetie pulls up behind her.

  “I’m gonna make you brown oatmeal cakes,” she says.

  Sweetie opens the little firebox and adds another piece of wood to the old cookstove with green enamel trim. Last August it was a homey decorative piece of nostalgia set in a corner and covered with knickknacks. Now it is the center of the house. Sweetie spoons a clump of congealed oatmeal onto a cast-iron skillet. Then drips bacon grease into the skillet, runs it under the oatmeal cake, presses it with a spatula. A delicious smell comes off the pan and she delicately lifts the edge of the oatmeal cake, flips it. More brown oil slides underneath. She tips the cake onto my plate. It prickles with delicate crust and is so good that I ask for another before I’ve finished the first.

  Sera looks at me ironically, and the look I give her back says, “Yeah, bacon grease.” I pat my belly. The black T-shirt is stretched tight.

  “Only forty-two shopping days until Christmas,” I say, my mouth half full of crispy oatmeal. “I should wear a bow around my belly.”

  It is like I’ve dropped a stone into a well. Mom’s silence in the kitchen magnifies the words so they seem to echo. I look up from my plate because the sensation in the room is so peculiar—I can tell Mom is trying to control her hyperalertness and fear. They all know my due date, but only Mom is frozen.

  “Hey, it was a joke!” I try to lighten the atmosphere. But nobody says a word. I sense that each hopes the other will speak first, but none of them can think of what to say, I guess, because one by one they shut their mouths. At last, Grandma croaks, “My first baby ran me ragged. Get me the album, Sweetie.”

  Sweetie goes into the other room to find it. I’m bewildered by my mom’s stricken face, her stiff back.

  “Don’t worry, Mom.”

  “Of course,” she says swiftly. “You’ll be fine.”

  “I couldn’t find your book, Grandma,” says Sweetie, returning. “Now come on, Cedar. We’re gonna sit on the back porch before the air gets too cold. The sun’s out nice today. We’ll get some fresh air.”

  Sweetie’s got a cigarette half hidden in her palm. She sees me notice it.

  “My stash,” she says. “When things blew up, we quick threw the inventory in the basement. Mainly, we use ’em for—”

  “Trade,” I say. “And nobody delivers on their due date. Don’t stress yourself.”

  “Babies don’t stress me,” says Sweetie. She swivels her hips and strikes a match, poses to accept a light from herself. “I needed an excuse, though, to come out here and smoke. And talk to you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you . . . wanna talk?”

  “What about?”

  She looks down at her feet, in cute moosehide moccasins trimmed with rabbit fur. Sweetie makes them. She’s making a pair for me, and for you, baby. But she won’t show them to me until you are born. Old-time Ojibwe superstition. She shrugs, blows smoke, and mutters.

  “What do moms and daughters talk about?”

  “Beats me. I’m not doing so hot with Sera.”

  I am stalling because this is so unexpected. Sweetie momming me when in truth I’ve almost begun to think of her like an older sister. Someone more like me than Sera, which makes me feel happy and disloyal all at the same time. But there is something that I want to ask Sweetie. And I want to ask her without getting hostile, or upset, because maybe I am starting to understand that her decision may have been more difficult than I could understand, before you.

  “Did you actually see me, as a baby I mean, before you gave me away?”

  I try to say this in a neutral voice but my throat quavers. And I can immediately tell that Sweetie was hoping to talk about something less fraught and emotional. But I don’t feel like letting up. So I wait. She lights another cigarette.

  “Shit,” she says. “This is my last one. Okay. I had you, didn’t I? So yes, I did see you. And Glen was there.”

  “Wait, not Sera? Just Glen?”

  Sweetie eyes me carefully, then gives a little shake. “Glen was there first, I mean. It was, you know, this open adoption kind of thing. So we had a couple of days where I was in the hospital and I was . . . see, I was around Little Mary’s age and pretty much the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. She’s just like I was. Only I was punk.”

  “Punk?”

  “Yeah. Imagine. Me at nine months and neon-yellow mohawk. Rings and studs everywhere possible. I was still decked out when you were born. The delivery nurses kept coming in to take our picture.”

  “Do you have a picture?”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t in the album, it was in a little envelope I tucked in the back. Wait a sec.”

  She slips back in the house and is back before I can panic about the picture—a new possibly upsetting piece of story. She holds it out, carefully. The edges are soft and frayed. I realize that she’s looked at it many times. This wrenches me, but in a sweet way. The photograph makes me laugh. Weirdly, it also makes me happy. Young Sweetie sits in a hospital bed against a backdrop of white pillows, pink carnations, rosebuds, and baby’s breath. Lots of flowers! There are a couple of pink Mylar balloons almo
st out of the frame. I am a nondescript newborn, a doll bundle in her arms, and Sweetie in a hospital gown is smiling shyly, her face glinting with silver jewelry. Septum, nose bridge, medusa, labret, eyebrow piercing, even angel bites. Her bright yellow-green hair has flopped over and her eye makeup’s smeared.

  “You’re so pretty,” I say.

  “Yeah, pretty weird I guess.”

  “No, pretty. And I do look like you. I see that now. Did you ever have doubts, I mean, about having me?”

  “Nah. It was meant. At the time, I loved your father a lot. I wanted to have you, but I didn’t live with Grandma then. I had my own path to follow. I couldn’t bring you with.”

  “Your path led to Eddy and to Little Mary.”

  “Eventually. And it led to Saint Kateri. And because of her, I’m sure of it, my prayers were answered and my path led back to you.”

  Sweetie gives me a big funny eyebrow-raised grin that tells me the path was crooked and wild.

  November 6

  Mom’s working on the dishes, cleaning the kitchen in that absorbed and militant way she has—working left to right she methodically wipes down each item and either puts it away or cleans beneath it and sets it back into place on the counter, properly aligned. She has taught me to clean the way she cleans and I have recognized it as one thing given to me through nurture, a tool I can use to stave off despair. I’ve soothed anguish and fought madness by minutely scraping at a stain on the counter or a burnt-in bit of soot on the side of a pot. I go inside, and for a while work alongside my mom, without speaking. At last, I get up the nerve.

  “We’ve got to talk about this, Mom.”

  She puts down her rag and leans against the counter, frowning at the floor.

  “What this do you mean? There’s a lot of this.”

  I decide that I am going to use Sera on Sera. I’ll pretend to be her. “Maybe we should assess the situation,” I say. “Glen hasn’t gotten in touch. We don’t know if he has a place for us. There doesn’t seem to be an actual plan other than getting this far. So I’d like to stay here.”

  “There is a plan,” she says.

  “What is it?”

  She looks at her softened, soaked hands. Presses on her ragged nails. Sometimes I wish I could see my hands in her long thin fingers. My hands are more like Glen’s hands, strong with big knuckles. We sit down at the kitchen table and she reaches for my hands, holds my fingers.

  “Look, Cedar. You’re right. We haven’t heard from Glen. But if he were in trouble, I’d feel a vibe. So I am sure he’s okay, working on a safe place for you. Things change constantly. I think we’ll stay put for now, but don’t get too comfortable. You’ve got seven weeks left. So much could happen, right? The Church of the New Constitution has split the military. They’re calling in drone strikes on the basis of voice and facial recognition, so people are holed up anywhere there is a tunnel system. There is a whole city underneath St. Paul now, in hospitals, universities, old convents, the state capitol, all connected underground. And the drones are so artful, so small, that we have to be careful.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Bugs. And there are Listeners out there.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Dust. Leaf mold. Seeds. And some are transparent floaters, people call them Ears.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Ears.”

  “For real? They had to be literal?”

  “Maybe the snoops have a sense of humor. Some are soft, almost invisible. You catch one you can squish it like a slug.’’

  “Were these things around before?”

  “I guess they were being developed? Some corporation could be trying them out. They like to hang around the tribal offices. Eddy nets them. Puts them in this box with the recordings of the tribal council meetings going back thirty years.”

  “Ha. I hope somebody really bad is on the listening end. Someone who deserves thirty years of tribal council meetings.”

  Mom doesn’t actually laugh, but she does smile.

  “Weird, isn’t it,” she says at last. “How people just dumped the phones, the screens.”

  “As far from where we lived as possible.”

  “There are piles of them in the landfills and reclamation centers, all smashed and waterlogged.”

  “I miss the phones.”

  “I miss them too. Anyway, Sweetie’s fired up the vintage radio.”

  “Vintage is the new au courant. And we’re back to the moccasin telegraph,” says Sweetie, coming up behind us. “Eddy has tasked our fastest kids and rehabbed gang members as runners. We get the news twice a day.”

  “They’re like the old town criers,” says Mom. “They have posts at eight places on the reservation. They run there, recite the news to whoever shows up, then run back.”

  “As for food and stuff,” says Sweetie, “it’s all barter. We have big town markets where nobody fights because we need to exchange stuff.”

  “People go to the markets under truce,” says Mom. “You just can’t be pregnant, that’s all.”

  Her voice is sharp. Sweetie sighs, throws up her plump hands, and leaves the room. I look down at my black cotton beach ball, and my eyes fill with tears, like again she is accusing me.

  “I’m sorry, on edge,” says Sera. “Maybe I’m more worried about Glen than I’ll admit.”

  Sera links her arms around me and we stand in Sweetie’s kitchen, you between us. The wood range exudes a gentle heat and inside of it there are muted pops and sifting noises as the flames consume the wood. For the first time, last night, I did not dream of killing Orielee. The couple of times I woke, Little Mary’s breathy purring put me back to sleep. I felt safe as an animal surrounded by hills of its own shed skins. Near morning, I dreamed of Phil. I saw him walking toward me on the highway.

  “You know, Mom, my baby has a father.” Resentment and pain clog my chest. She doesn’t answer.

  “I love him.”

  Sometimes I fantasize he didn’t turn me in. I don’t have a choice about loving Phil. I just do.

  “I know you care very deeply for Phil.”

  Sera pats my back as she delivers these overly formal words, but there are tears in her voice, too, so I suppose that we both feel desperate for different reasons.

  “You make me feel like there is something wrong with loving him.”

  She stares at me without seeing me, like she’s making up her mind to tell me something. Then she tells me.

  “Cedar, I’ve kept something from you. The survival rates for babies are dropping lower every month.”

  “That’s not news,’’ I say. But the words are awful to hear. I’m very still, don’t want to pull away from her too quickly. Finally I take hold of myself. I stand up. But my head feels funny and I have to sit. I’ve entered a mental passageway and am walking down a set of lightless stairs. There is no railing. I can’t see where I’m going. I just keep placing one foot before the other until finally I reach the bottom. It is black there and I am utterly alone.

  Except that what Sera says has no basis in fact. How could she know? There is no reliable source of news. Why would she tell this to me anyway, if she was thinking straight? Maybe her tension over Glen has snapped a few strings and made her fixate on doomy predictions. She’s depressed. I turn to Sera, give her a forgiving smile, and gently guide her to a chair.

  “Things have been so tense, Mom. Why don’t you rest for a while? There’s no need to keep cleaning—it looks good in here. I’ll make tea.”

  I pat her shoulder and fill the kettle with water. “It’s okay, my baby’s a fighter and so am I.’’

  My voice is fake. She starts to cry although she doesn’t really cry, just gives a little sputter. I smooth her hair back around her ear. She shakes her head, as if to shake me off. I’m still patronizing her, talking lightly, rummaging around for tea. She answers me with one of her lectures, like the amateur pedant she’s always been. She actually tries to backtrack.<
br />
  “We begin our lives at a cellular level as female—all of us—and we develop male or female characteristics in utero. And we don’t know how many human species there actually were. How can we think we’ve found everything? Your baby may be just . . . normal.”

  “Right, Mom. Like you believe that! You just told me we’re gonna die.”

  “You don’t seem to see the risk, Cedar.’’

  “Yes I do, but what’s the point of believing it? I choose to believe we’ll make it.”

  I pick up her professor voice, sit down across from her, and keep on lecturing.

  “And not only that, but humanity is going forward. Maybe on some evolutionary forked road we used some form of parthenogenesis, like sharks, like the Komodo dragon. They are capable of fertilizing their own eggs. But maybe we aren’t just copying ourselves. Somehow we have begun to absorb new and genetically appropriate material. Our bodies can use it to self-engineer our pregnancies. How about a million years ago, we began outsourcing fertilization. At any time our bodies could change their minds.”

  I’m trying to make Sera laugh or at least smile again because she’s terrifying me. But getting her out of a bleak mind-set is never easy. She continues. Her voice starts again and lulls on, tender and gentle, somehow managing to still be condescending. I get it. She assumes what happened to Tia is going to happen to me. She doesn’t think you will survive. But her words remind me of a teacher soothing a preschooler heartbroken over losing a stuffed animal. With a sudden rush of gall that almost chokes me, I hate her.

  Wait. I love her. But I hate her. And I love her.

  November 10

  Eddy. Secretive and subtle, with a ferret’s long-waisted whip of a body. He’s growing out his hair and he doesn’t slouch anymore. He smiles, a lot, and brings his hand drum home at night. He plays hand drum songs and sings warrior songs out on the porch. Says his songs confuse the surveillers. His voice is reedy and penetrating. He’s singing the old songs that he learned from the old men, but also a few he’s made up to taunt the Listeners in the air. He tunes the drum by heating it gently near the woodstove.