The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  I won’t do any of those things, thinks Richard as he takes the papers. They needn’t fear me. But maybe Klaus should!

  “Klaus!”

  “Yes, I told them.”

  Klaus gave Richard up. Just like that. He told the men, whom he said were big and scary and wore black suits, where Richard lived. Klaus cracked. Klaus squealed: Richard lives on Andrew Jackson Street in Minneapolis. It doesn’t matter, though. Klaus is up to his neck. Implicated. Richard reads the papers, then he sits down on the front step and begins to chain-smoke. No matter whether he goes to court or whether he is arrested he will be served with divorce papers. No, he decides. From all papers, he will flee. Damn Relocation! None of this would have happened without the proximity of all those many acres of carpet, which could only be so proximate in the city, which is why Relocation sucks so bad, thinks Richard. If I had been educated on my home reservation and lived with my family and received instruction in our traditional ways, I would have probably been a medicine man.

  Whiteheart Beads, Medicine Man

  Richard keeps thinking about the future that he might have had but for government programs. The War Department program for Indian eradication in the beginning, then treaty-making or removal. If his reservation had not been clipped back severely his family would have had more land, perhaps enough to live on and farm. Then every kind of sickness. If the few left had not had their children forcibly removed and shipped off to boarding schools where they either died of fresh diseases or died of loneliness or survived and got drunk and run over in the road . . . then . . . And if the few left after that hadn’t sold their land during the allotment years and become completely homeless and got tuberculosis sleeping on the ground, then . . .

  If my ancestors had not got so sick from sleeping underneath that grand piano, maybe I would still have deposited toxic carpet in that barn, thinks Richard. Or maybe I would have healed people with my ceremonial knowledge.

  He visualizes himself in his natural state. Not naked. He is wearing a loincloth. One of nicely tanned buckskin that his woman has chewed until soft. Sad. Her teeth are all worn down. His imaginary loincloth is smooth as silk from all of Rozin’s chewing. He laughs and cracks a beer. Early in the day to drink, but he’s been served with papers, is no medicine man, so needn’t stand on ceremony.

  Did a man just dangle under that loincloth, he wonders, or was there some sort of diaper arrangement? A ball band, he decides. There had to have been a soft buckskin jockstrap underneath the loincloth. He sees his flowing braids, his stomach hard as a pine board, his biceps tough and stringy. Racing around curing people keeps him in shape. He is a shaman. Not a sham man, as Klaus always calls them, but the kind of shaman white people search the Internet for now and, when they find one, worship.

  WHEN ROZIN COMES home later on, after the girls have seen her in the park, she doesn’t show that face with the beauty and ecstasy painted across her features. She is the very same mother as before. Calmer. Irritable. But in the old familiar ways. But then she drives off with their father and they stay away for the weekend. The girls can tell that something has happened that is not love, not getting back together. It is some sort of panic over looking happy with Frank for Mom and breaking a law for Dad. Cally and Deanna heard their mother shout that they could lose the house. They heard their father angrily deny it as she’d kept it in her name. They heard the name Frank and they ran up to their room.

  It is a small room with bunk beds and the paint on the windowsills has been tested for lead. The top layer is perfectly acceptable now, but the woodwork has been in place since 1882, so the mustard-colored, the black, and the bitter-red paint under the fresh white coats is toxic. Cally and Deanna have been instructed never, ever, to chip away at the paint on the walls and woodwork and especially not to eat it.

  “Let’s eat it now,” says Cally. But Deanna does not understand the logic.

  “They’ll have to pump our stomachs,” she explains. “That will bring them together.”

  “Can’t we do it without getting our stomachs pumped?”

  “No!” says Cally.

  So she and Deanna chip off a bit of paint, put it on their tongues, swallow, and wait to die.

  “First we’ll have convulsions, that will tip them off,” says Cally.

  “Where are you getting this information?” says Deanna.

  Nothing happens. They forget about having eaten the paint after a while. Then Sweetheart Calico bolts outside with the dog. They run downstairs and whirl through the yard playing tag and hide-and-seek.

  Nookoomisag

  They emerge from the truck with their hard little suitcases, and cast their cold eyes around the house and yard to check for enemies. They see Cally and Deanna and their eyes turn into grandma eyes, black and warm. The grandmothers are both round-shouldered, powerful, small women. Their little hands are tough and splayed. They heat up cans of beans and corn for the girls that evening and let them watch TV while they sit at the table with the harsh light on them. From cheap plastic bags they draw silky deerhide, needles in wooden cases, little fan-shaped boxes of quills, and spice jars full of colored beads. Grandma Noodin pricks up beads and sews calmly. Grandma Giizis wears moccasins. They have traveled down from the reservation to care for their granddaughters in the city, while Rozin and Richard work things out.

  Grandma Noodin hopes they work it out and Grandma Giizis does not like Richard and says he is a snake. She thinks that Rozin and the girls should move back and live with them anyway. Forget about these no-good men and forget about the noisy, crowded, ugly, tangled-up, bewildering Gakaabikaang.

  Sweetheart Calico

  Grandma Noodin catches a glimpse of Sweetheart Calico playing with the girls the next afternoon and says to Grandma Giizis, “Something is not right with that woman.”

  They both begin to watch her, to spy on her, to question the girls all about her. They are awake that night when it rains and they open the curtains to peek outside. There she is with her clothes off, running around and around the yard. In the morning, hoof tracks.

  Grandma Giizis nods at Grandma Noodin. “One of those,” they agree.

  The Girl Who Married the Deer

  Their gitchi-gitchi-nookomis was a peculiar girl known for her tremendous appetite though she stayed thin as a handful of twigs. During berry season, she went picking many times a day, filling her birchbark makak over and over but eating it empty before she ever made it to the house. Not only that, but she couldn’t keep her hands off mushrooms, food of the dead. She robbed the wild rice caches. Ate all the boiled meat. It worried people to see that she was always eating, always hungry, but never full.

  A voice.

  I’ve been watching this girl. Maybe she’s a wiindigoo.

  No, said her mother. She’s only that hungry. Nothing wrong with her.

  Still, the other people ignored her or gave her shaming looks when she approached a food pot. Hungrier than ever, she took to the woods. More and more time, days even, passed with her gathering and cooking out there in the heart of the dense bush. You could smell the steam, the good smells, you could smell the smoke rising.

  She’s cooking out there. Wonder what she’s making? Wonder if a little child disappeared, we would find it in the cooking pot? Great-Great-Grandmother ate the whole rabbit. Ears too. She wanted to eat her own arm.

  And then she was joined out in the woods.

  The girl was cooking up a fine pot of dried corn stew when a deer approached, stood by the edge of her camp. Just waiting. The girl thought, Should I eat him or should I share with him? Which? She picked up her killing hatchet but when she finally advanced toward the deer and looked him in the eye, she felt ashamed. She knew hunger when she saw it. Just walked past the deer and chopped a little more wood for the fire. Finished that stew.

  She put the stew onto the plate, set the plate down in front of the deer, got her own plate full, and ate sitting before him. He never moved. She ate the whole stew, mopped up every trace of i
t with bannock, then sat quietly looking at him, crescent of horns, waiting. Unafraid. She had this feeling. Full. So this was what other people felt. She looked over at the deer. His eyes were steady and warm with a melting black light. His heart shone right out of his eyes.

  He loves me, she thought. He loves me and I love him back. Right down to the ground. Who he is. No different. Of course, too bad that he’s a deer. That night, she made a bed out of young hemlock branches and curled against his short, stiff pelt. She began to live with him, stayed with him out in the woods, and traveled with him on into the open spaces. Became beloved by his family, too. Got so that she knew how to call the hooved ones toward her. They came when she stood in the open. Her song was peculiar, soft, questing.

  THE GRANDMAS LIGHT their small red-bowl kinnikinnick pipes. They sit in the corner, smoking and brooding.

  They are wondering what to do about Sweetheart Calico and what to do about their daughter, Rozin, and about the twins, Cally and Deanna, who say they have eaten lead paint off the windowsill. They are wondering what to do about Frank, who’s come by with sugar on his pants and flour in his hair. There was in his hands a large box. In the box, between layers of wax paper, an assortment of fancy sugar cookies cut into the shapes of carrots, trees, dolphins, stars, moons, dogs, and flowers. Each type of cutout is decorated with a different color of hard icing trimmed with a rickrack of frosting, studded with edible foil-sugar beads or blue-black raisins. Grandma Noodin puts down her pipe. She puts the head of a pink dog into her mouth and bites it completely off. As the crumbly cookie dissolves grain by grain on her tongue, she understands that Frank loves her daughter. She believes that Richard Whiteheart Beads will run from prosecution and try to hide. She hopes he’ll take Klaus along with him. Those two are a couple of bums.

  Grandma Giizis puts her pipe down, too. She eats a carrot-shaped cookie frosted orange with green piping leaves.

  “My doctor said carrots are good for me,” she says.

  Cally eats a dolphin and Deanna eats a flower.

  “So what happened to the girl who married the deer?” asks Deanna.

  “Wait until I finish my carrot,” say Grandma Giizis.

  THE GIRL DIDN’T want to leave her deer husband, but her brothers came to get her one brilliant spring. Shot her man with three arrows, one bullet. Brought her back to her family, her village, her people. She was not hungry anymore, and she was grown. They named her for the flowers that stretched past her shielding arms and were spattered with deer’s blood, blue flowers scraped from patches of sky. Blue Prairie Woman.

  She married one of the Shawano brothers, even though that family was said to be descended of wiindigoog. She lived winters on the traplines with his father and brothers. Spring through late fall they stayed in a village where she could be with her woman relatives, talk all night, cook, laugh. She never used her medicine to attract the hooved ones. Never. But everyone knew what she could do.

  Sometimes the deer people came to her, anyway.

  One slender doe did on the morning of the big knives. Told Blue Prairie Woman to leave, go now, tie her baby on the back of the dog, and run. Too late, though. Just as she started out a tornado of bluecoat men. Everything scattered, lost, burned, murdered. She saw the same man who killed her great-aunt leap forward suddenly and run, uttering inhuman cries of loss, from the swirl of death into the distance. He was following her baby. Her baby tied in the dikinaagan. Riding on the back of the dog-mother of six fat, fine puppies. One, Blue Prairie Woman would nurse with her own milk. The others grew too weak to save.

  Chapter 10

  The Gravitron

  THEY ARE GIVING out free figures of gods of the underworld along with Happy Meals at McDonald’s. Driving up to the window, Rozin buys the meals. Cally gets Hades, a sinister blue guy with skinny arms, and Deanna gets two plastic halves of the three-headed dog Cerberus, which makes the twins wonder immediately whether, if Hades went into a pet parlor to get the dog clipped for the summer, he’d have to pay triple.

  “Cerberus has one body. That’s definitive,” says Cally.

  “But the heads represent separate thoughts, separate dogs,” Deanna points out.

  “With my crummy job we’ve got enough to worry about,” Rozin tells her daughters.

  She laughs shortly but the supermarket checker job she took again, temporarily, is turning out to last a long time and still no benefits.

  THE TWINS’ ROOM has a rattling old window. Their outlook on the world. The trees are black locust and tree-of-heaven trees that grow everywhere, tough, with small, oval pointer-finger leaves that flip over in a breeze. Sometimes the girls watch the dull underside roil. They bathe their brains in showers of four-o’clock gold, streaming from the west. Sometimes a branch tosses high, like a horse against the bit. They think of riding the branch, hair flying against the wind. The thought of that same wind ruffling leaves and heading north along no highway to ruffle the leaves of their grandmas’ trees pulls at them with longing. Some days, the twins feel that pull more than others. Summer has been comics and bakery and turning almost ten. Already leaves are turning on the driest trees. Some mornings are quick and cool. A low wind rides, trembling in the stiff grass, unwinding and slowing their steps. The gravity tugs harder. School looms too close. The girls turn to each other with wide eyes.

  Will they take us on rides, anyplace there are rides, if we dance, if we cry, if we hold our breath? How about we reasonably ask.

  THAT IS WHAT almost being ten is about. They ask to go to the state fair and their mother says yes. End of August. It is night, the cheese-curd stands frying curdled milk, the Australian batter-fried potatoes, the chili con carne bars at war, the dip cones, and the beer gardens. Eating something long, snakey, and blue, the twins, Cecille, Rozin, and Frank watch the show horses practice outside the arena in a sawdust ring. So delicate. So fine. Hooves like sewing machine needles, they do fancy stitch work up and down the sides of the metal fence. They pass so close the girls can feel the breath off their velvet noses and smell the warmth of their glossed hides, braided manes, sense the determination of their stiff little riders.

  Here is Frank, so kind, his hands plucking cotton candy off a paper cone to hand first to her, then the girls. And so unassuming. He looks at the prize rabbits of every shape and size, and the bread sculptures and the Elvis faces made of beans and seeds, and he makes no jokes whatsoever about the size of the prize boar’s sexual equipment. Nor does he look as though he feels entirely outclassed in that matter, like some men, staring back over their shoulders at the pig in envy and fascination. Frank might be good for me, Rozin thinks, walking behind the girls, who hold hands with him. Cecille walks ahead of them all. Rozin follows as they make their way zigzagging to the sizzling zipper lights of the midway. They walk past the howling bungee jump, over the Chinese bridge, on and on until right before them the Gravitron rears.

  CALLY AND DEANNA stand in the drama of light and music and fair noise watching people move like happy zombies to the entrance of the ride, a big crowd. Just over their heads, they see the exit and entrance of a new bunch of people slightly nervous and chattering as bored attendants strap them in. The operator of the ride looks way too young—brushstrokes of a soft yellow beard, hair in a braid, earring. Vacant. He disappears for a minute under the equipment and then jumps to his music monitor control panel and begins rattling some strange Wolfman Jack spiel into the microphone.

  The Gravitron starts slowly with the purr of a giant motor and a lurch of gears. The deep bass throbs to life, heavy rock beat, a flame of guitars. Strapped in standing, hands at their sides, the riders are hugged by welded bars to the inside of a gigantic pie plate that starts turning now, turning against the night. Green lights in refracting bands. Rippling blue. Pink. A maddened cake stand that swivels on its base! Tipping side to side, it spins faster, faster, gravity a hand flattening the faces of the screamers to one green dimension. . . .

  “Looks like fun,” says Cecille.

&
nbsp; “Yes!” says Rozin.

  The twins think they must be hearing things. Rozin says it again. Her tone so dry the twins think she must definitely be kidding, but she’s actually not. This is how on the next run the girls find themselves watching with Cecille, astounded at Frank and their mother. They walk up the ride stairway and climb into the cages that close over them like alien claws. Again the Gravitron comes to life, now, Frank and their mother clinging to the bars and straps, blurring into one unit as the ride commences. The girls’ faces are serious with worry. Cecille tells them not to worry and she turns away for a moment. Turning back the other way around, she casually catches the eye of the operator, or not his eye so much as the strange fixed grin that he is shooting right through her from the little cage he inhabits next to the gears and motors.

  He stares at Cecille and she stares back at him until she realizes he’s not seeing her. Staring through her as though he’s disordered, his whole body fixed and frozen, he’s a shirt-store dummy.

  High, Cecille thinks in total understanding.

  “Hey you!” She waves her hands at him, yells. He whips his head away and with a screech of Wolfman laughter only crazier and nastier, he accelerates the ride. Faster. Higher. Cranked up and down with fire shooting from their eyes, the riders scream. The operator starts to blow froth bubbles. Rabies! An overdose! And he’s garbled, makes no sense. There’s only this overarching manic howl that penetrates the Hendrix “Purple Haze” lick and funk. The girls cling to Cecille in terror. She is certain he’s hit the far edge. She starts forward. Others, concerned, do the same. Cally and Deanna grab each other and watch as people surround the lighted booth and start to knock, and then find that his door’s wedged shut. The people start to claw and beat and yammer. He’s spouting chilling warbles and declaiming as he revs the inner body of the Gravitron.