“Gitimishk!” she cried, finding me there.
I was chagrined to be found and called lazy. I rubbed my eyes, and quickly remembered my plan. I must present myself as addled and confused by the star’s blazing passage. I blinked and squinted, pretending to try to focus on her.
“How the light hurts my eyes,” I complained.
“What light?”
“The fire!” I roared suddenly as though in fear. She looked around in irritation, taking in the mess, and it was then she saw the hole in the floor, a dark and gaping spot, jagged around the edges. It looked to be still smoldering. It was even uglier and stranger to one who chanced upon it, and Margaret gasped in horror to behold the destruction. Speechless in shock, she turned to me. And I was ready with the story, completely prepared to act the part. In my excitement, I almost persuaded myself. I showed her exactly how close I was standing when the star blasted through the roof, leaving the hole through which a sweetly clouded sky was now visible. With my hands, swooping in a swift movement, I indicated the star’s trajectory. I showed her how far I’d leaped for safety, and then I displayed the pan of water I had poured from the storage can to douse the bits of fire that trailed in the star’s wake. Margaret nodded, her mouth open, astonished at the strangeness of my story, but nearly convinced. Encouraged, I invented the extraordinary scorching sensations I had suffered as the hot star plunged itself into our floor. It occurred to me to add how close I’d come to being struck and killed. A bit more to one side or the other and she would have found her love, her only Nanapush, a smoldering heap. Silence fell after that as she stared at me, sinking toward me in contemplation of her close call with loss. A look of forgiving softness, a tender blossoming of sentiment warred with her wrath at the ruin of her linoleum. Forgiveness began in her, I could tell by the slight tremor at one edge of her lower lip, but she caught it with her sharp tooth. Her eyes were still suspicious.
“And this star,” she reasoned, just as I had anticipated, “after it burned through my beautiful floor, destroying my floor, it must have extinguished its light in the dirt.”
“Mii nange,” I said, “of course! Unless it burned itself deep into earth, beyond reach, it is surely there.”
Margaret fixed me with a challenging look in which there was a hint of an ironic smile, and I saw that I hadn’t quite managed to persuade her of my story. This would be the test. She waited for me to offer to dig, and when I made no move she gave a slightly contemptuous snort and fetched her heavy cook spoon, her good steel one. That she would use her precious spoon to dig dirt impressed me with the serious nature of her cause and I inwardly congratulated myself on thinking past her, on creating the star, on burying it in the precise spot where she was digging now. Even more so, the minute she found it, did I inwardly rejoice. For once the earth was brushed off my creation’s points and curlicues, how it gleamed and caught the light! Margaret held the star out in amazement and turned it around in her hands. I watched her face as the knowledge of the vastness of her find sank in. She was absorbing this, I could see it, she was filling with belief. She was imagining herself the owner of this visitor from the sky world, or from the whiteman’s heaven. She was picturing the many curious visits and questions from relatives and friends. She was even forming in her mind the story I had given, which would become her story too. For a long while, she stared in wonder at the star. Then carried it in two hands, carefully, to the table beside our window.
“Old man,” she said, very softly at last, “I believe we have been chosen for some purpose. First the medicine dress. Now this!”
“Yes, my sweet face,” I gravely agreed with her, barely containing the force of my delight, “we must have been chosen.”
From outside, the sun, striking sudden from behind a cloud, then threw a fierce shaft of light in our direction. It slanted through the window and picked out the star in Margaret’s hands. Marveling at it, she bent to examine it with a close eye. I smiled to see her, but the smile dropped off my face when with a huge gasp she squinted even closer and then slowly, slowly, with a dangerously changed expression held her miraculous find out to me.
“Put on your spectacles, old liar,” she said in a softly charged voice.
Immediately, I hooked them around my ears and in the burst of radiance I saw the raised letters I had missed in the tin, now the center of the star, which had marked the bottom of the can. Red Jacket Beans. I lifted my eyes to hers with the hopeless shame and contrition of a dog caught halfway in the stew pot. Nothing would get me out of this now. She glared back at me and for a long time our gazes held over my bean-can star. I saw something building in her, something gathering, a storm, and my heart sank down into my feet. But when it came, it was not the bitter scorching, not the fire I feared. It was not the horror of sarcasm. Not the scrape of reproach. Margaret did something she had never done before in response to one of my idiot transgressions. Margaret laughed.
FOURTEEN
The Medicine Dress
Margaret
AS THE SNARE my old man had set tightened around my neck, I felt my life squeezing out. A haze of yellow spots covered up my vision, but I wasn’t gone yet, for through that awful radiance I saw the dress. Transparent at first, then made of impossible materials. Even though my life ebbed, I couldn’t help planning. Wondering. How do you make a dress of water? How do you make a dress of fish scales and blood? A dress of stone? I saw a dress of starvation worn meager. I saw an assimilation dress of net and foam. A communion dress worn by my mother, who tried to live white and then abandoned her attempt. I saw a dress made of bear’s breath. A dress of lake weed and fury. A dress of whiskey. A dress of loss. I had been working on that dress all my life. The noose jerked. My heart cracked. I was filled with a terrible sorrow to know that I would not be able to finish that healing garment.
Then the fool man saved me, or so it seemed, but really, I knew it was the dress wanting to be sewed.
To sew is to pray. Men don’t understand this. They see the whole but they don’t see the stitches. They don’t see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman’s eye can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
So the medicine dress wanted me to make it. A privilege I might have had no use for twenty years ago. Or forty. But now that I have lived upon this earth and seen what I have seen, I was ready. And so I began where all things begin—with the death of something else.
The power of the dress lay in the strict rules of its making, so I got my boys to drive a young cow moose into the water, then they roped and knocked her out while she was swimming across the lake. They killed her without the use of any whiteman’s weapon, and dragged her in by hand, lay spent on shore marveling at how the old-timers managed to do these things. Meanwhile, I went to work. To skin the moose, I used an ancient chipped spear point I had found one day while digging my squash vines under. The edge was still sharp, but I ground it sharper on a flint. It took me a good, long, bloody while to skin the moose, but I did it. When I was finished, I distributed the meat and took the hides. Removed the brain to tan the hides. Soaked the hides in ashes and water, then carried them dripping to the log bench I set up behind the cabin. I began rolling the hide, scraping it with the shoulder blade, pulling it across that log, manhandling it all one day and the next day, until I got it where I wanted it. Softer than chimookomaan velvet, softer than a hopeless touch, strong and long wearing but open to the needle. Which I made from a fish bone. I smoked that hide butter-brown and then I sat down to begin. I figured how the hides would cover me and talked as I sewed. Told the dress things I hadn’t remembered for fifty years.
I told the dress all about who I was as a child. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now,
I said, but I was not only very pretty but stronger than all of the boys. My mother hid me from the agents at the government school for as long as she could. Where did she hide me? A place they would never look. Under my great-grandmother’s skirt, behind the two stony posts of her legs. She was so old that she could not be moved from the corner of the cabin. All day, she sat on her little wooden chair with the curved back. Her mouth moved and her blind white eyes flickered. She chewed willow bark tobacco, and sucked constantly on chokecherry pits. Sometimes she passed me down a strip of jerky, where I hid underneath a balloon of calico broadcloth, a tent that smelled of sweet grass and stale piss, of potato-cellar dust and crushed mint pillows, of smoked moosehide, safe. School agents tramped around looking for me. Kookum closed her eyes and snored. When they awakened her, she screamed louder than a magpie, began to snarl, clawed the air until they retreated from the cabin in alarm.
“There, my girl,” she would say, patting my head. “Now you are safe for another year. Did you see something under my dress?”
“Oh no, kookum,” I would tell her. I would call her Gitchinookomis. I would offer her respectful thanks. But in truth I had seen something as I looked out from under her leg posts, from my place underneath her where it was darker than darkness. That something was not anything my husband’s dirty mind would invent. I’d seen something else, invisible and sacred. Time opened for me. I saw back through my gitchi-nookomisiban to the woman before, her mother, and the woman before that, who bore her, and the woman before that, too. All of those women had walked carefully upon this earth, I knew, otherwise they would not have survived. I saw back through a woman named Standing Strong to her mother named Fish Bones to her mother named Different Thunder. Yellow Straps. Sky Coming Down. Lightning Proof (Gitchi-nookomisiban told me she was struck and lived, but people next to her were sometimes scorched). I sat with my great-grandmother every night after that. She was my school. She told me all about the women reaching back into the darkness. How people always avoided Steps Over Truth when they wanted a straight answer, and I Hear when they wanted to keep a secret. As for Glittering, she put soot on her face and watched for enemies at night. The woman named Standing Across could see things moving far across the lake. The old ladies gossiped about Playing Around, but no one dared say anything to her face. Ice was good at gambling. Shining One Side loved to sit and talk to Opposite the Sky. Rabbit, Prairie Chicken, and Daylight were all friends of Gitchi-nookomisiban when they were little girls. She Tramp could make great distance in a day of walking. Cross Lightning had a powerful smile. When Setting Wind and Gentle Woman Standing sang together, the whole tribe listened. Stop the Day got her name when at her shout the afternoon went still. Log was strong, great-grandmother remembered, Cloud Touching Bottom was weak and consumptive. Mirage married Wind, and then married everyone. Children loved Musical Cloud, but hid from Dressed in Stone. Lying Down Grass had such a gentle voice and touch, but no one dared to cross She Black of Heart.
After the priests came among us, my great-grandmother said, She Knows the Bear became Marie. Sloping Cloud was christened Jeanne. Taking Care of the Day and Yellow Day Woman turned into Catherines. I became Margaret, but I always knew that would happen. The year they carried my great-grandmother out the western window, wrapped in red cloth and then tied into birch bark, the school finally got me. The girl who was named Center of the Sky became Margaret, then Margaret Kashpaw and then Rushes Bear. But I had already seen far back in time by then. I knew who I was in relation to all who went before. Therefore, although I went to school I was not harmed, nor while I was there did I forget my language. Not Margaret. Every time I was struck or shamed for speaking Ojibwemowin, I said to myself, There’s another word I won’t forget. I tamped it down. I took it in. I grew hard inside so that the girl named Center of the Sky could survive. Some think that I am mean, but that is why I’m with the living yet. My husband outwitted death by talking. So did I. Only when his talk was comical, kind, and obscene, mine was cutting and angry. I’ve been that way. The dress may change me. Or my talking to it, much the same.
I told the dress about my vision and I skipped stones across the water of my life, described the sensation of having my head shaved by those Lazarres. I told my dress about the distinctive ways each of my babies was born—what they looked like the first time I saw them and how they grew. Where they were now—scattered to the four directions of the earth. I told the medicine dress about Nector and Eli, my so-called twins, and their miserable mistakes with women. I trusted the dress and told it about the loss of my beauty, how difficult that was for a woman who used to rely upon it. Finally, I told the dress about Nanapush, or attempted to give some idea of all he is capable of doing and thinking. I didn’t get far. Nanapush is the only man I’ve never seen entirely through, never thoroughly understood. He has loved me with all his foolish heart, which at first outraged me. But for a long time now, secretly, I’ve let myself be charmed. I told the dress that I would die with him although he is an imbecile.
NANAPUSH collected the bones of the birds I required to decorate the dress, and he roamed the bush for the roots and stems I used for dye. I cut the bones into bead lengths and made a yoke of plum, rose, softest yellow. I used red willow and chokecherry bark to dye the quills and I wove them into the dress, thinking how my words stabbed, like those quills, when my husbands got too near me. When a quill sinks in deep, there is a barb in the tip that anchors the quill so it will work its way in ever deeper, to fester and kill. Only by clipping off the end of the quill and puffing air through the hollow can the barb safely be released. I’d done it many times with a snout-poked animosh. Perhaps, I thought, I’d buried my quills too deeply by now in my last husband’s heart. The poison might have lain there too long. Things might be too far gone. I couldn’t tell. But as I worked on the dress, it seemed to work on me. I was surprised to find that when I thought back to the snare that nearly killed me, I didn’t blame Nanapush. Not in my heart. I know I had purposely quickened his jealousy, and for no reason. Like a young girl who doesn’t know any better, I was taunting him, playing with his love, twisting up the sinews of his poor old heart.
Enough, I told myself. Mi’iw. Enough.
Even when he rolled back to the cabin, drunk as the keg itself, I wasn’t angry. I never laid into him. In fact, it crossed my mind to lay otherwise, even though the old man reeked. I nearly brought him to bed. I might have. I had it in my mind. If only his arrogant ways had not surfaced, if only he hadn’t challenged me to let him dance in my dress. Sometimes, if all my patience has had no effect, my anger gets twice the better of me. So it was, I left my old man wearing the medicine dress, and started out for Shesheeb’s house. Driven to it! I told myself. Forced into the arms of someone I hated, from the arms of the man I loved!
I am too old for such dramas to be played out upon my body. For a long time now, I’ve let myself slide toward comfortable ruin without even pretending concern. Loved by Nanapush, I had a wealth that I could squander. His love oppressed me at times, but I also valued it. As I walked through the bush, I smiled to recall the absurd sight the old man cut, dancing in my dress. Rather than afflict me with fury, it made me laugh. Which is why, as I made my way through the diamond willow and around the deep slough and over the little crossing to the house of Shesheeb, even then, I knew I was bluffing. I had no wish for troubles of the heart. No wish to take revenge on my childish husband. Revenge was beneath the stature I’d found as a woman. I reached the clearing in which the old duck’s house was set, and I even sat down on a little stump at the edge and had a smoke of my pipe, which I carried with me in a pouch that hung off my belt. After a while, I saw Shesheeb come out into the yard. He poked around, stopped to scratch his old duck’s balls, and generally made himself such an unattractive prospect that I melted away from the scene.
TO LOVE Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the so
ng went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line. Then there were times we both knew the song and love was effortless. Our old years flowed along, carrying us quickly in a rush. At least we were together, if at odds. No matter how foolishly my husband behaved, no matter how dreadful his mistakes, jokes, and sins, he loved me. In that, my suspicious woman’s heart came to trust. Somehow, between the exhaustion leveled on me by all previous men and the steady, if crazy, love-fortitude of this one, the good days came closer together for the two of us. I numbered the days on one hand and was nearly at the end of the years on the other—our lives had progressed that far—when it happened. As we always knew, as we had waited for, as was inevitable, Fleur returned.
SHE CAME BACK so rich that we didn’t know, at first, whether the slim woman in the white car, and the whiter suit fitted to the lean contours of her body, was the ghost of the girl we knew or Fleur herself. It was a dry afternoon. The dust swirled in a tan gray cloud when she stopped. Slowly, as she got out and stood beside the car, the dust settled around her feet like a dropped cape. She was left in the clear air, staring hard at the steps of the trader’s store, where I stood. When she saw me, her eye lit and she smiled—that direct punishment that men take for invitation.
Only to me it was this: acknowledgment. It was as though she and I had known this from the very beginning. It would come down to us in spite of all the men’s doings—us two women.
Then I noticed the pale blur of a face in the window of the car, and he stepped out, too, shaking his fat legs, frowning. This last time she left the reservation and returned, Fleur Pillager brought back a son. Not that we understood, at first, the connection. He seemed too soft, too baby fine, too chubby, too white, to be any son of Fleur Pillager’s, so at first gossip had it the boy was stolen goods. Kidnapped. Taken from whatever too-fine place he was spawned in return for the child Fleur had lost so long ago. The mean and envious waited, all eager, for her arrest. That never happened. The boy was big and hulking, his face was round, anxious, shut. He had not one of his mother’s features and he was spoiled. A pouter, he’d have his way or sulk for candy. We watched as he took big bites, filled his face with sweet sugar, powdery cakes, and was always seen with a bulging pocket eyeing other children with piggy suspicion.
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