The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “A third voice – young and clear and musical – spoke. ‘Rosa was the great expert on the freezing of mammoths. Has anyone has done work equal to hers? How good are the samples in other places?’

  The third woman – slim and graceful, in a hide dress as white as fresh snow – moved out of the shadows. She stopped next to the matron. The crone sat at their feet. They all stared at me, their dark eyes shining in firelight.

  “I said, ‘I’ll find a home for the tissue. I owe Rosa that much. But that will be the end of it. I have my own life to live.’ The dark eyes kept watching me. ‘Are you sure you are Indian spirits? You know a lot about biology.’

  “ ‘First of all,’ the crone said. ‘We are in your dream. Obviously, we know what you know. And we, like you, are at the end of the 20th century. White people have a god who exists outside time and history and pays far too little attention to his creatures’ misbehavior, in my opinion.

  “ ‘Indian spirits live in the world we helped make. Why not? We did good work! It’s a good place! And like people of every kind – the two legs and four legs, birds and fish and insects – we change in response to time and events. Don’t expect us to be like the spirits in an anthropology textbook.’

  “ ‘And don’t drink so much,’ the matron said. ‘It isn’t good for you.’

  “That was the last thing the women said to me. I think they turned into mammoths, and the house vanished, so we were all standing on a wide, dark plain, under a sky packed full of stars. But maybe I made that part up. Maybe I made everything up. I have never been certain about dreams, Emma, though many other people are, and I respect their opinions.

  “I woke in my old bedroom, next to Mamie. For a while, I lay in the darkness, trying to fix the dream in my memory. Finally, I got up and turned on a light and wrote the dream down. Did I believe I had actually spoken with spirits? No. The dream came from alcohol and my stay in the mammoth-haunted house. Rosa was the person who spoke with mammoths, not I. Still, it had been so vivid and had seemed so full of meaning.

  “It was time to tackle the books, I decided. Not Rosa’s scholarly collection, but the rest. Her popular science books were out of date; I wasn’t interested in modern Russia; and I rarely read novels. Almost everything could go into the yard sale, along with 30 years of Scientific American and National Geographic.

  “I held the sale three weeks later. The day was hot and bright, the sky full of big cumuli that were likely to become thunderclouds by late afternoon. I moved Rosa’s belongings onto the front lawn: books and kitchenware and a few pieces of furniture.

  “The first person to arrive was a tall man with long, straight, black hair. It flowed over his shoulders and down his back. He wore a plaid shirt, jeans, work boots and a wide belt with a silver and turquoise buckle. Maybe you don’t think I can remember him so clearly after all these years. But I do. Not that it’s hard to remember what Delbert wore on any given day. His costume rarely changed. In the winter, his shirts were flannel, and sometimes his belt buckle was beadwork. His brown skin was lightly scarred by acne. His eyes were hazel, though I didn’t notice this at first. How could I? He was bent over the books. He was obviously Indian, but not Lakota. Ojibwa, I thought, looking at his broad chest. An academic or a member of AIM or both.

  “Other people came and bought furniture and dishes. The man remained with Rosa’s books, going through them carefully. Finally, he came over with a stack. They were mostly histories and mostly about Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. ‘I was hoping for more on Native Americans,’ he said. ‘And mammoths. They aren’t nearly as important to the Ojibwa as to the Lakota and Dakota, but we do have some mammoth stories and songs.’

  “ ‘I’m keeping those,’ I said.

  “ ‘My tough luck,’ he said and smiled. I noticed his eyes. There were white people in his background. Probably voyageurs. ‘My name is Delbert Boisvert,’ he added. ‘You must be Rosa’s granddaughter. I saw your name in the obituary. I’ve been watching for a yard sale, since I learned that she died. I don’t rice or sugar like my relatives. But I do hunt and gather books.”

  “We ended on my porch, talking and drinking lemonade. Delbert helped people load the furniture and dishes they bought. And he recited a song about mammoths that the famous anthropologist Frances Densmore had written down:

  “They are coming.

  They are coming like thunder,

  Oh, my Mide brothers.

  “After that, he recited an Ojibwa love poem, also written down by Densmore:

  “I thought it was

  A loon.

  It was my lover’s

  Splashing oar.

  “ ‘Depending on the direction of the canoe – arriving or departing – it’s a sad or happy love song,’ Delbert said. ‘I like happy songs. For me, the canoe is arriving.’

  “That’s how I met your grandfather. I had always been careful about love before, maybe because I’d lost my mother and home when still young. I had learned that people were not reliable. They would die like Clara or vanish out of my life like my Standing Rock relatives.

  “You would think I could have looked at Rosa and seen her reliability. She loved me and cared for me as long as she lived. If I had been paying better attention, I could have learned about integrity and loyalty. Rosa was always herself and always loyal to me.

  “In any case, we talked till midnight. Then he went home, and I went to my bedroom. There were no dreams that night, just me staring into darkness and seeing Delbert’s male beauty. There’s nothing lovelier than a good-looking man. He’s like a tom turkey spreading his feathers or a mammoth bull trumpeting.

  “Del came back the next morning, and we spent the day talking about my life in St. Paul and Massachusetts and his life on the Red Lake Reservation and in Minneapolis.

  “I was partly right about him. He had studied at the University in the studio art department, though he didn’t have a degree. ‘It cost too much money and time. I didn’t have enough of either.’ He was a painter, he told me. ‘In fact, I am two kinds of painter. I do houses to make a living and pieces of canvas to keep from going crazy.’ He knew the AIM people, though he wasn’t a member of AIM. ‘I have disagreements with them about strategy and personal disagreements as well. But I won’t speak about them with disrespect.’

  “There was a story there, which he did not tell. In many ways, he was an odd duck, more Indian than I was, but not as Indian as his relatives on Red Lake or in the slums along Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. In those days, Indians were the poorest people in America, the most badly educated, the sickest and the shortest-lived. Even black people lived longer than we did. But there Delbert and I sat on the porch of Rosa’s house, drinking iced tea instead of whiskey or beer, two Indians with enough money to get by and good white educations. But I was haunted by the hills of Standing Rock; and he was haunted by Red Lake’s forests; and we were both haunted by our relatives and ancestors.

  “As I said before, my life has turned on small events and decisions that I often did not notice at the time. When I came west to close Rosa’s house, I was certain that I was going back to Massachusetts.”

  Grandmother paused. I could tell she was thinking. Two vertical lines had appeared between her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I would have sold the house, even if I had not met Del. It was my childhood home and far closer to Standing Rock than my apartment in the east; and the mammoth tissue was a problem. The more I considered the question, the more I realized I couldn’t dump it on the first institution that expressed an interest. It was Rosa’s life work, a sacred trust. I had to be sure it was used properly.

  “But falling in love with Del made my decision almost easy. He was settled in Minneapolis and not interested in moving east. If I went back to Massachusetts, I would lose him. I was not willing to do this. He was so handsome! I am not sure I should tell you this. Does a granddaughter need to know that her grandmother was a romantic, willing to change her life because she met a beautiful man?

&nb
sp; “Mind you, there is nothing wrong with beauty, so long as you have the right standards. The right kind of beauty tells you that your potential mate is strong and healthy, able to produce and maintain a large tail or a pair of enormous tusks. It may tell you that he is intelligent, since intelligence depends – at least in part – on good health. It also depends on education and experience. I am speaking about real intelligence, working intelligence, not the intelligence found by scientists in labs. Del had good health, a good education and lots of useful experience. He was bright and a fine artist. I don’t regret picking him.”

  I was too young to have an opinion on how to chose a mate, though I was interested in how Grandmother went about it. Grandfather lived in New Mexico now, in a house with a big studio full of paintings. I couldn’t tell if he was handsome. To me he looked like Gramps: a tall, thin man in faded jeans and a faded shirt, almost always blue. He wore his gray hair in braids; and there was usually a paint-stained rag tucked in his back pocket.

  “In any case, I fell in love. We spent the summer together. In the fall, I went east and packed up my apartment, bringing everything back to St. Paul.

  “Del moved into the house while I was gone and finished the attic. Rosa had left it as it came to her: bare wood and dust. He sheet rocked the walls and ceiling, put skylights in facing north and covered the floor with black ceramic tiles. They were easier to clean than wood, he said, and he liked the way they looked.

  “It’s been decades since I last saw the studio, but if I close my eyes, there it is: light flooding through the skylights, reflecting off the white walls and making the black floor shine. Del’s paintings lined the room. At that point, his art was abstract, but I could see the landscapes of northern Minnesota in them: broad, dark, horizontal bands like pine forest edging a lake or river; narrow, vertical lines like the trunks of birches; blues as clear as the winter sky; and reds like a sunrise or an autumn maple.

  “I loved that studio and the house and Del. It wasn’t a wrong choice I made.

  “When I got back, I sent out my resume and got a job at a local community college, Introductory Biology at first. I found that I liked teaching. I hadn’t, as an instructor in the east. My students were older than the kids at a university; and they saw education as a way to get ahead in a world that wasn’t getting any easier. I think they saw the hard times coming sooner than I did. Thanks to Rosa, I was middle class and out of touch, the way the middle classes so often are. You’d think being Indian would have helped.

  “In any case, my students were serious about learning; and teaching is a pleasure, when the students want to learn. Some of them – a surprising number, it seemed to me – liked learning for its own sake, maybe because it was an unexpected gift. Oh brave new world, that has such knowledge in it!” Grandmother smiled.

  “The college had no facilities for research. But I had plenty to do. The research could wait.” She leaned back and flexed her bony shoulders and sighed. “The next thing I knew, I was pregnant with your mother. I hadn’t planned to be; it was a genuine accident; but I knew at once that I was going to keep the baby. I was in my middle 30s. If I was going to have children, it was time to get started. By this time, I knew Del and his family well enough to be confident that his genetic material was good. And too many Indian children had died over the years of poverty and disease and simple killing. Too many had been taken from their families and raised white, like Rosa. Too many lost their parents to illness and alcohol. I wanted this child to live and be raised by her parents.”

  Grandmother paused and I had a sense she was thinking about things she might not tell me. Finally she said, “Del was less certain. Artists have trouble settling down. Their art asks too much of them. But we talked it through, and I had help from his family. His mother wanted grandchildren, and he owed a lot to her. She had spotted his ability when he was a child and sent him to live with relatives in the Cities, so he’d be able to go to art museums and buy art supplies. Without her, he might have been – what? Another unemployed fisherman, after the Red Lake tribal fishery closed down?

  “His father’s mother was on my side as well. Delores. She was an elder, very much respected. Your mother was going to be her first great-grandchild. There was no way she was going to let Del off the hook.

  “They all would have preferred an Ojibwa mother, but at least I was Indian. They had worried about Del. He had dated a lot of white women.”

  “What did Great-grandfather Claud say?” I asked.

  “He said, they would help, if Del needed help. ‘All the venison and wild rice you can eat, and you know my mother can sew. That baby will have the finest clothes of any baby in the Twin Cities.’ He kept his promise. Your mother had clothes that could have gone into a museum, covered with beadwork and trimmed with fur. We put them away, in case hard times came, and we needed to sell them.

  “The baby was born and named Delores, after her great-grandmother. I had planned to go back to work. But my contract with the college was for a year, and they didn’t renew it. The pregnancy had been difficult. I had taken a lot of time off. I suspected this was the reason my contract wasn’t renewed, but I couldn’t prove it. In any case, losing the job was almost a relief. I didn’t bounce back from the pregnancy as quickly as women are supposed to. I needed time to recover; and your mother was so tiny and vulnerable! No more so than any baby, but I couldn’t imagine putting someone so small, who could barely move and couldn’t speak, in the hands of a stranger. I also could not imagine Del as a stay-at-home father. He’d get interested in what he was painting and not even hear the baby cry. I had some money in the bank, my inheritance from Rosa, not a lot, but enough for a while. I decided to wait before I began to look for another job.

  “All this time the mammoth tissue was still in the basement. I suppose I should have been a better custodian, but I had been distracted by moving and teaching and having the baby; and I needed time to think. The tissue might be worth money, and we certainly needed money. But would it be right to sell Rosa’s life work? I might be able to use the tissue to find a new job, once I was ready to work. I could tell an interested school, ‘If you want the tissue, you have to take me as well.’

  “I hadn’t been entirely negligent. I’d written letters and made phone calls and given away some of the tissue. That was prudent. You shouldn’t keep all your eggs – or any organic material – in one basket. Schools knew about me now. More and more were becoming interested. Biotechnology meant it was going to be possible to analyze mammoth DNA and compare it to the DNA of living elephants. That was the kind of achievement that made the papers and TV news and helped get grants. I didn’t have the only mammoth tissue on the planet or in the country; but Rosa had made sure that her tissue – my tissue – was in very good shape. I had the freezers and generators checked on a regular basis, and I paid the electric bill as soon as I got it every month.”

  Grandmother paused. “Where was I?”

  “In St. Paul with my mother,” I replied.

  “We scraped through a year. I took care of the baby and gave away mammoth tissue. Del moved away from abstraction. Now his paintings showed Indians hunting and fishing and ricing. Partly this was the influence of Patrick DesJarlait, the Ojibwa artist from Red Lake. He was dead by then. But Del had studied his work. Of course he had! The world was not full of Ojibwa painters in those days.

  “It was also the influence of our trips north to show little Delores to her relatives. Del came back with sketchbooks full of Claud at work. Your great-grandfather had lost his job when the tribal fishery closed. Now he made his living in the old way, hunting and trapping and ricing and doing some construction. Home repairs, mostly. He was also good at fixing cars. On a reservation full of rez cars, this was a valuable skill. Mostly, he got paid in food or thank yous. If you wanted to know poor in those days, you went to a reservation.

  “There were sketches of Del’s mother holding the baby and old Delores bent over her sewing. Sometimes, when he painted, the
figures remained modern Indians; and sometimes their clothes became traditional. There was one I loved – Claud, dressed like an old-time warrior, bent under the hood of a beat-up rez car, working on the engine. I could see the influence of DesJarlait and the WPA or maybe it was the Mexican muralists. Claud in his buckskin and fur and feathers looked like a heroic worker in a post office mural. He was big and bold and bright.

  “Del had a show at the American Indian Center in Minneapolis. Then he got a job at the new casino being built south of the Twin Cities. There was a tiny reservation there: Prairie Lake, and this was the end of the 1980s, after the Supreme Court ruled that states could not regulate Indian gaming. It was the start of good times for a handful of Indian bands, the ones near white centers of population. Most, of course, were in the middle of nowhere and did far less well with gaming. But it was a help. I will not be cynical about it. We had been so poor for so long. Even a little money was wealth; and for a few bands, like the ones at Prairie Lake, the money was serious, even by white standards.

  “The band decided to name their casino Mammoth Treasure. I suppose it was a good name. Their emblem was a golden mammoth, a male with huge twisting tusks. They wanted a mural in the entrance lobby, showing traditional Indian activities. Del’s work fit the bill. Even though he was Ojibwa, and they weren’t, he got the job.

  “I went down to Prairie Lake with him sometimes. The lobby was circular, and the mural went all the way around the curving wall. If you stood in the middle of the lobby, you were surrounded by a nineteenth century landscape, rolling prairie with clumps of trees. It was a cloudless day in mid-autumn. The grass was tan and gold. The trees were red and brown. In the foreground were Indian hunters on horseback. In the middle distance bison grazed; and in the far distance were four groups of mammoths, one on each side of the lobby, in each of the four directions. Birds sailed above the prairie, so high up that their markings were invisible. But the length of their wings said they were eagles. Hard to say what they were doing there. Bald eagles are fishers and usually keep close to water. The raptors over a prairie ought to be hawks.