The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  “I thought when I loved your mother my heart had come to life, but then her death killed my heart again. Even watching you grow hasn’t brought it back. I have been reading the ancients.”

  Augustus looked at the pile of books. He was twenty-three years old and had read most of them with his father, who admired the Greek philosophers. Anaximander viewed time as a judge, and Scranton Roy had meditated on this concept until its truth came clear. Time had judged and sentenced him in the form of an unforgettable word.

  “As a young man I committed a crime in the fever of war. Although I have tried to absolve myself repeatedly—I even took up self-scourging for a year—I still see the old woman’s face and hear her say that word. The word wakes me up at night. It is written in my brain. As you know, it is carved into my arm.”

  Augustus looked at his father’s arm, the white scars, the letters carefully blocked and scored. The word was a long word. The word reached up past his elbow.

  “I still see the children who fell,” his father continued. “Especially them. I still taste on my tongue the smoke, powder, blood, and burning fat.”

  Augustus had grown up in the shadow of his father’s ever more complex grief, and although he had few other adults to compare him with, he did think his father was lost. His father wandered in the dark. But Augustus himself grew up in wind and sun. He loved perpetual change and was glad it was the law of the universe. Heracleitus had also declared there to be a balance of opposites, and so Augustus was the balance of his wracked father, a happy child who ran boundless, hunting prairie chickens, stealing the blue eggs of robins, caring for descendants of the agile guinea hens his mother had laughed at. He walked overland to attend the same school, set in the center of the township, where his mother had taught.

  At home, he read with his father, and both agreed with Pythagoras that the essence of things was to be found in numbers. At school, Augustus’s best subject was math. He collected numbers until they made him dizzy. He counted everything around him and totaled it up with other countings and subtracted or divided those countings just to have the numbers in his head. Each number had a color and some had a sound or taste.

  “We are going to search out the people I wronged and give them the cracker tin,” said Scranton Roy.

  Augustus knew the tin well. Once very light, it had contained Christmas crackers sealed against moisture. Now the cracker tin was very heavy and contained gold and silver money. Exactly $438.13. A bright purple number. A noble number, scraped of sacrifice. When Scranton Roy felt the sad heat come on him, he put a bit of money in the tin and it helped to ease his burden. When Augustus Roy felt slightly morose, he took some money from the tin and it helped to ease his burden. It was hard caring for a father who raved of smoke and blood and carved into his arm the letters of a word he did not understand.

  I hope I don’t have to carry the cracker tin, thought Augustus. But of course he did, and it made his back sore, or his arms when he hefted it before him. Sometimes he made a pillow of his shirt and carried the tin on his head. As they walked on and on, Augustus was increasingly grateful that he had lightened the tin and he smiled to think how he’d spent the money—on home-brew fire. As he walked toward the place where his father had killed the woman and perhaps the children, too, Augustus counted the clouds until they blended together and there was just one gloomy sky. He counted trees until they turned into a crowded woodland. Where were they going? They were going backward, out of the good simple world he’d lived in so far and into complex rolling prairie. Every so often the land dipped and the trees stood thick. Sometimes they towered in lightless stands.

  The sloughs turned to shallow lakes and then the lakes deepened. Abruptly there began vast lumbered areas of rotting pine stumps surrounded by springy popple. He feared his father didn’t know where he was going and had forgotten where he’d murdered the harmless old woman.

  “Here is the place,” said his father at last. He put down the cracker tin. “Here is where I betrayed the silent light in which I was raised. Here is what desire made of me, and foolishness, and an irresistible and bloody impulse.”

  Scranton lay down in some poison ivy.

  “Cut my throat, please,” he said to Augustus, and handed his son the whetted knife he kept in his belt.

  Augustus kept the knife and spoke gently to his father. “Let time do its work,” he said. “Perhaps you will be pardoned.” Eventually he convinced Scranton that they must travel to the place where the Indians had fled.

  “Where did they go?” he asked.

  His father pointed in all directions. Augustus chose north, and again picked up the cracker tin.

  The Ones

  Inevitably, they crossed paths with Indians.

  “Are these the ones?” asked Augustus.

  His father looked carefully at the people, but shook his head and said no, that the people he’d killed were beautifully dressed in calico, buckskins, beads and strips of velvet. They’d been strong and well fed. These two people were skinny and ragged and they walked with a discouraged air. The man frowned and the woman glared suspiciously at the two white men.

  “I think these are the ones,” said Augustus, who longed to put down the cracker tin. “I think these are the children who survived, all grown up. Look what you did to them, father!”

  “My Lord,” said Scranton Roy.

  He took the tin of money from his son. As the people edged away from the two, he held it out with an awful smile and pressed it forward.

  “That’s all right,” said the woman. “We don’t need crackers.”

  Scranton’s sleeve was rolled up and she looked at his arm, then nudged her husband, who craned his head sideways and carefully mouthed the letters of the word.

  “All right,” said the Indian man, startled. “You can follow us. We don’t have much to eat, but we’ll shoot something. We live over there.”

  He pointed at a place that seemed empty. Augustus, sensing that he’d soon be relieved of the tin, followed eagerly so that his father was forced to stumble along behind.

  Old Shawano

  The man who read the word scored into Scranton Roy’s arm was named for the southern wind, just like his father and grandfather. Shawano. His wife was Victoria Muskrat. They knew about the old woman who was slaughtered and they knew about the woman’s great-nieces. Shawano had taken them after their mother disappeared. They were pretty girls but something was not right about them. Victoria thought they were coldhearted liars. Shawano said he pitied them, but did not trust them. The two white men and the Indians now ached to be delivered of different burdens. Both of the old people hurried along, sensing that they soon might be relieved of the girls’ disquieting presence.

  The Number Blue

  When the number two in any of its permutations entered Augustus Roy’s thoughts a limpid blue atmosphere surrounded it. The color darkened, tinged with indigo, as it climbed into the solid sky of twoness. Entering the tar-paper and scrap-board house of the people to whom he was determined to give the cracker tin, he saw the spectrum of blue that went with the number when he saw the twins. Zosie and Mary were identical. They dressed alike in flour-sacking frocks, gray with white piping, and they both wore their hair pulled back in long braids. Their eyes were cool and watchful. Their hands moved constantly at endless tasks that they took up and put down without seeming to notice. Augustus was too shy to look at them straight on, but he was moved by their uncanny harmony.

  His father seemed dazzled, struck dumb. His clothes had grown huge around him and he sat in a puddle of cloth, itching already from the leaves he’d lain in, and smiling. Idiotically, Augustus thought, with weary concern. He brought the cracker tin to a wooden table, the only piece of furniture besides the one chair Augustus occupied. He set the tin down with a solid metallic clunking jingle that could only be the sound of money. The heads of the twins turned with a jerk and their eyes fixed on the tin.

  “It is money,” said Augustus Roy. “It is for you.
Many years ago my father killed an old lady of your tribe and he wants forgiveness. He has been saving up.”

  The old people and the girls were absolutely silent for some time. Then one or another of the twins spoke.

  “You’ve come to the right place.”

  AFTER THE OJIBWE PEOPLE accepted the money and told Scranton Roy that he was forgiven, his eyes shed water. He was not exactly weeping because his teeth showed in a broad and grateful smile. He was scratching madly now. Water trickled down the angular creases at either side of his mouth and collected against the curb of his collarbone.

  “My father wants to sleep,” said Augustus.

  Victoria Muskrat pointed to a heap of blankets on the floor, in the corner, and said that he could lie down there and sleep as long as he wanted. Scranton thanked her, lay down in the corner, and pulled a blanket over himself. Old Shawano indicated a place on another blanket and Augustus sat. His eyes itched drowsily but he did not sleep. He read the walls, which were covered with catalog, magazine, and newspaper pages neatly pasted around the window frames. Land! the pages shouted. Rich, cheap, fertile, easy title! Indian Land for Sale! The wood slats were from broken-up cracker crates, probably salvaged from lumber camps. The slats were stamped with accidental word puzzles based on the word cracker. No wonder they didn’t want more crackers, Augustus thought. The family busied themselves, went in and went out. After a while Augustus roused himself. He noticed that his foot was getting wet, looked down, and saw that a trickle of blood was flowing from beneath his father’s blanket. Augustus reached for the knife his father had offered him, knowing it was gone. All four of the Ojibwe people entered. They studied the flow of blood and bowed their heads. For a long while, nobody spoke. The unmistakable still form in the corner dominated the room. At last one or the other of the twins turned to Augustus and said, “We will bury him in our own way. We will wrap him in that blanket and make him a fire. We will stand watch and help his spirit onto the road to the next life. We will feed his spirit and sing for him.”

  “Thank you,” said Augustus.

  He continued to sit on the floor. When everyone moved outdoors, he followed and sat down. Other people came with water drums, pipes, feathers, food, whiskey, more blankets. His father’s body was removed from the house through a window. The fire was lit for his spirit to follow. Sometimes Augustus lay on the ground near the fire. Sometimes he ate. The days came and went and in the flow of singing and drumming he seemed to pass into another life along with his father. At last, they told him that his father was safe on the other side. They showed him the small grave house, which was carefully made of boards, roofed, painted red, and placed over the spot where his father was buried. They waited for him to leave.

  Niizhoodenhyag

  Augustus Roy did not leave. The family spoke English with him, wrote in a finer script than he did, and used better grammar. They had been whipped into shape by the government. They’d been to boarding school. He got a job. Every day he walked to a bank in the nearest town, four miles each way. The work involved the essence of things as defined by number, and counting, his favorite pastime. His days were filled with color because of the pleasurable flow in numbers. He also enjoyed walking back and forth, especially after one or the other of the twins began to meet him on the way home. They walked along silently at first, not even holding hands. He was thrilled by each young woman’s singularity and by the game of trying to figure out whether she was Zosie or Mary. Sometimes both women came to meet him. Then the twoness, the blueness, flowed over him. He was lost in its choreography. Their voices and their movements were mirrors within mirrors. He decided they defined eternity although they lied and mocked him. They grew sly and bold. Spied on him, poked him, threw twigs at him. Kissed him. He was never certain. He would not be sure which one he married the Indian way. He would not be sure which one he slept with on whatever was their wedding night. Which one he got pregnant.

  Love and the Dawes Act

  Augustus built a cabin of thin logs and clay. He bought real shingles for the roof. The twins lived next door with the old people who had sheltered them. The twins also lived with him. He had tossed a coin and asked Mary to be his wife, but sometimes he was sure that Zosie took her place. Augustus put in a bedstead with a saggy mattress, and the twins curtained off another room. He built a kitchen table where the women sat at night. They made moccasins from the deerskin they’d tanned with the deer’s own brains. They sat in the lamplight, talking softly in their own language. In the cracker tin, empty now of money, they kept their quills and beads. At all times, as they talked or laughed, their needles moved in and out of the soft deerhide, complicating the design.

  Because of the Dawes Act, reservation land was parceled out to individuals instead of remaining in tribal trust possession. Land was the only thing that hungry people owned, and it started to disappear with astounding haste. At the bank, Augustus assisted every day with transferring money from white hands into Ojibwe hands. He then witnessed the signing of a land deed by Ojibwe hands and saw it transferred into white hands, which then placed the land deed in a safe-deposit box. Invariably, he begged the person with the money to open a savings account. That rarely happened. The money usually flung itself around the town.

  Augustus knew an Ojibwe man and woman named Whiteheart Beads who were persuaded to buy a grand piano with their land payment, and now their whole family slept beneath it just beside the road. Fancy clothing, rifles, liquor, pink and yellow and aqua shawls, and shiny buttoned boots appeared. Barrels of salted doves and sacks of white flour, dairy butter and tinned peaches, went out into the bush. People still lived on the margins of the land they had owned. But the land was gone, gone, gone and subject to the plow and No Trespassing. People milled about their old houses like ghosts and were driven off, bewildered. Augustus railed and threatened. He beat a speculator, nearly lost his job. Shrieked when his calm advice was ignored. He sprinted home every night and told his family not to sell their land.

  The twins answered that Old Shawano and Victoria and the two of them were not stupid like the others. They drank very little whiskey, not like the others. They were in addition apt to think in the old ways, not like the others. They had Augustus, too, not like the others. Augustus, who brought home provisions when the hunting failed and the garden was resting. They had no reason to sell their land, even though, and here one twin paused and looked down at her belly, there was going to be a baby.

  The other twin sucked in her breath ferociously and said, “Yes, it is I who will have the baby.”

  Augustus looked from one to the other, terrified.

  AFTER THAT ANNOUNCEMENT he got no sleep. One twin and then the other crawled into his bed. Or was it twice and the same woman? Their ways devoured him. Mornings, they glared at each other and then at him, and did not speak. He thought of running away before they wore him out, but could not because he was helpless before the nights, cold nights, northern and slow. And although he knew he’d be called to superhuman effort later on, he loved to watch them, just rest his eyes on them at their work every evening.

  The lamp shone a peach golden circle at the table where Mary and Zosie arranged their saucers of beads—white for the background, Hungarian cut glass, delicate size 13, tiny loops of old greasy yellows and blues, a hank of mauves, a collection of glossy whiteheart reds. Mary worked on moccasins already bought and half paid for by a missionary chimookomaan lady who would get them in the mail. Zosie worked on tiny slippers for the baby who was growing in one, the other, or perhaps both of them. As they worked, the two grew calmer. Augustus did not move. They were spooky as cats, but he could tell that his presence soothed them.

  They breathed in the tobacco scent of Augustus’s once-a-week cigar, and the very slight undertone of whiskey. Augustus had begun to take a shot with Shawano, who liked him and decided to adopt him. He was glad to have a son with a quick smile and a friendly outlook—these things seemed surprising in a whiteman. Augustus was glad to have as a f
ather a man who quietly went about the business of life, and taught him how to dream the whereabouts of animals and to follow their tracks and use the wind to catch them. Old Shawano taught Augustus how to pick wild rice, weave nets, tap maples, and ignore the doings of women. Augustus became adept at all but the last thing. As the twins worked, they breathed the smoked hide and touched the rabbit fur and tasted the duck grease of the birds the two men shot together. They breathed Augustus’s clean sweat, for he bathed in the lake each morning, even breaking the ice sheaves once November came around. He had learned from Shawano an old-time Indian’s habits. But also like Shawano, he wore suspenders and read aloud from the newspapers. Augustus acted like an akiwenzii although he was very young. This confused the twins’ rivalry and dulled their glares. Protected by his books and pens and envelopes and bills, Augustus tried to remain oblivious. But their feelings for him were a long thread. The two sisters had licked, threaded, and waxed either end. They began to sew with it, adding to their own peculiar pattern bead by bead until, one night, the thread pulled taut, the space shortened, Zosie’s and Mary’s needles halted, and they looked each other in the eye.

  Fried Robins

  Although the twins enjoyed flummoxing people, especially Augustus, with their sameness, they were in truth very different. Zosie liked sweet things and Mary preferred sour and salty. Mary hated to eat birds, eggs, and any roots that came out of the ground. Zosie liked those foods but rejected green cabbage and complained that if any maple sugar was added to her meat she was likely to get the runs. Mary was good at small things and Zosie was good at large. For instance, Mary could mend a sock to perfection while Zosie could help Augustus split new shingles for the roof. Zosie could also cook for many people at once while Mary was better at more intricate food tasks, although she cried while plucking birds. Zosie liked to snare birds although Mary called her heartless. Zosie was frying up six robins one day when she decided that she was tired of sharing her sister with Augustus. A husband was all right to have, as long as he could be controlled. But you couldn’t get along without your twin. If he ever learned their differences, he might tell one from the other and choose. So that night, as they looked at each other over their beadwork, Zosie put her hand on her head and twirled the crown of her hair. Mary put down her needle and did the same. “The robins are sacred,” said Mary. “If you ever eat one again, you will choke on its tiny breastbone.” “I will give them up,” said Zosie. Then they both laughed so hard, blowing and snorting with relief, that they didn’t stop until they felt drunk.