The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  Part Three

  Niswi

  Sounding Feather, great-grandma of first Shawano, dyed her quills blue and green in a mixture of her own piss boiled with shavings of copper. No dye came out the same way twice. According to her contribution, always different. The final color resulted from what she ate, drank, what she did for sex, and what she said to her mother or her child the day before. She never knew if she’d end up with blue dye, green, or a dull combination. What frightened her was this: One morning, after she had lost her struggles, done evil in the night, resented and sought revenge of her sisters, slapped her husband and screamed at her child, the quill worker peed desultorily and finished her usual dye. Dipping the white quills into the mixture, she found that the blue she made that day was unusually innocent, lovely, deep, and clear.

  Chapter 16

  The First Mix-up

  WHEN CALLY AND DEANNA were born, the new assistant nurse who clicked the stopwatch twice, as each twin emerged, and later cleaned up after the birth had then to deal with Grandma Noodin.

  “Where are their birth cords?” Grandma asked the nurse.

  The young woman thought she hadn’t heard right. “They don’t get cards, they get certificates.”

  “I said cords, like the thing between the baby and the mother. Where are they?”

  “The umbilical cords?”

  “That is right, smarty-pants.”

  “I guess I threw them out. They’re in the trash!”

  “The trash?” Grandma Noodin swelled in alarm. “Go get them,” she cried.

  The nurse hustled to the hazardous waste bins, filled with bloody paper birth pads and rubber gloves. She knew already that this must be one of the cultural issues surrounding birth that she had read of in her maternity textbook. She was preparing to keep a straight face if Grandma Noodin wanted to fry the birth cords. She imagined telling her roommates about it. Good thing she remembered how she’d carefully wrapped the two long cords that the father had severed. Cutting the babies’ cords was not his idea, but the mother said it was the father’s job and he had taken it on, reluctantly. He had tried not to shut his eyes. The nurse found the cords and showed them to Grandma Noodin in triumph.

  “Here they are!”

  “Which one goes to which baby?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Does it matter if you’re going to eat them? Here.”

  The nurse had wrapped each piece of umbilical cord in a new length of gauze. Grandma Noodin glared at her in new outrage.

  “We don’t eat them, you fool,” she said. “The babies play with them.”

  “Play with them?” The nurse’s voice betrayed her disquiet and she tried to hide it by clearing her throat. “Play with them.” She said it again to make sure.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Grandma Noodin sternly. “So you need to have the right cord for the right twin.”

  The nurse now looked fascinated. “Because if one played with her sister’s cord . . . ,” she prompted.

  “She could get sick later on.”

  Grandma Noodin took the cords in their clean gauze wrappings, frowned at them, compared them, shook her head, and put them in a cigar box already filled with tobacco and sage. The herbs would dry the cords out and then she would sew each one into a buckskin holder shaped like a small turtle. She and Grandma Giizis would bead those little turtles using precious old cobalts and yellows and Cheyenne pinks and greens in a careful design. Grandma Noodin pretended that she knew which cord belonged to each baby. She labeled each roll of gauze because she did not want to upset anyone. It was a heavy responsibility. And ever after that, she secretly worried. If the cords were mixed up right from the beginning, all sorts of things could happen.

  Indis

  The turtles hung off the curved headbands of the babies’ dikinaaganan, then off their belts. Just as Grandma Noodin had said, the indis was each baby’s first toy. Some believed that an indis was supposed to be placed off in the woods. Others said the person was supposed to have it all their life, even to get buried with it back on reservation land. But one day the twins came in from playing and their beaded turtles were gone. Grandma Noodin breathed a sigh of relief. No longer would the girls be mixed up, too mixed up maybe, the way she and Giizis had always been ever since they were young.

  Why They Needed Names

  Rozin thought differently when she knew they had lost their beaded turtle pouches. Slowly, over time, the absence . . . it began to tell. The girls began to wander from home, first with Sweetheart Calico. Then they flew away on fevers and she was afraid they would not return. Where would they go next? Rozin wanted to keep them here on this earth.

  “I fear the spirits are trying to take them away from me. What should I do?” she asked Noodin and Giizis.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Noodin.

  “Oh, that,” said Rozin.

  The girls did not have traditional names. They did not have Ojibwe names. This had always been a sore spot with everyone. One thing or another always intervened. Maybe Rozin had been lazy about it. No, she’d been lazy for sure. One thing was also true. She could ask only Noodin and Giizis to name them, otherwise they would be offended, but then whatever names they came up with everyone would have to accept. Rozin would have to live with their names for her daughters. That was giving her mother and her aunt a lot of power, but now Rozin decided that she had to do it.

  Rozin went over to her purse, pulled out a pouch of Prince Albert tobacco, and put a pinch of it in each woman’s hand.

  “I am giving you tobacco to find names for Cally and Deanna,” she said.

  The old twins’ hard eyes misted over, their hands enfolded the tobacco, they touched the flakes of tobacco with their fingers, and slowly like sleepy birds cocked their heads from side to side. The fact is they had already dreamed long complex dreams in which the names of their granddaughters were revealed. But that night they had short dreams that were like page markers of the other dreams.

  The Names

  In Noodin’s dream she followed Cally into the woods and out of the woods and along a lakeshore out onto the prairie until she met the place where sky met earth and Cally wrote her name in the dirt: Ozhaawashkmashkodikwe.

  THAT SAME NIGHT, Grandma Giizis dreamed that an old white man with stringy gray hair approached her and lifted his arm. He held it sideways so that Giizis could read his scar. Gaagigenagweyaabiikwe.

  THEY MADE THE mistake of telling Rozin about the dreams before the ceremony.

  Objection to History

  “Those names are both freighted with tragedy,” says Rozin. “I knew it! I just knew you’d come up with names that carried old baggage.”

  The grandmas stand firm. They have had their dreams and the dreams are definitive. Yes, there was a Blue Prairie Woman. Yes, there was a man named Scranton Roy who killed their ancestor and then appeared on the reservation with that word scored into his arm. Yes, there is history. No getting around it. But the dead exert a protective influence and their spirits rejoice when they know that their names are still used in this world. So Cally and Deanna should receive their traditional names in a family ceremony.

  Rozin refuses to give her daughters those names, and the grandmas are shocked and grieved. The dreams are strong. The dreams are correct and it is completely wrong to interrupt the naming.

  “We don’t like it,” says Giizis.

  “Something might go wrong now,” says Noodin. “Again.”

  “You’re trying to scare me,” says Rozin. “Anyway, there’s no hurry. The names are the names, right?”

  Cecille drives up from Minneapolis for the ceremony and Rozin tells her that there will not be a ceremony. Cecille says, “I drove up here and canceled all of my classes. Everyone has rearranged their schedules. But who cares!”

  The grandmas pout and glower. They smoke their pipes and pray to the spirits that gave the names and tell them that no disrespect is meant. They ask the spirits to have patience with Rozin. They pray over Cally and Dean
na. They do their best to put their invisible world back into some order. Right afterward the twins run away again.

  This time they stow away in the backseat of Cecille’s car, so of course the running away is again by accident. Cally and Deanna think she’s just going into town to the store, where they’ll surprise her and beg her to buy some candy. But the car keeps going and going and they fall asleep underneath a star quilt that represents the ancestors of the Ojibwe who came from the stars.

  Cecille keeps driving, oblivious in the scrawl and loop of her favorite music. One road widens into two lanes, then four, then six, past the farms and service islands, into the dead wall of the suburbs and still past that, finally, into the city’s complex heart.

  Lemon Light

  The girls wake up when the car stops at Frank’s Bakery, where Cecille is still living in the upstairs apartment. After Cecille gets out and takes things from the trunk to bring upstairs, they slip from the backseat. They walk into Frank’s shop, and the bell dings with a cheerful alertness. They have the chance to smell those good bakery smells of yeasty bread and airy sugar. Behind the counter, lemony light falls on Frank. He is big, strong, pale brown like a loaf of light rye left to rise underneath a towel. But his voice is muffled and weak, like it is squeezed out of the clogged end of a pastry tube.

  He grabs the telephone, his eyes still on the girls.

  “They’re down here! They just walked in! They must have been in Cecille’s car because she just pulled in! They’re okay. They’re . . .”

  Frank puts his hand over the phone and whispers, “Are you girls fine?”

  They nod vigorously.

  “They’re fine,” he reports. “No, you can’t kill them. I’ll kill them for you.”

  And he puts down the phone and comes around the counter and sweeps them into his arms.

  He holds them and they shake his hair out of the thin dark ponytail that he binds up in a net.

  “Just as I’m closing.”

  His eyes are tearing up. “What will we do with you? I don’t know. Maybe custard buns.”

  He cleans his hands on a towel and beckons the girls into the back of the bakery shop, between swinging steel doors. They know him as a funny man, teasing and playing hand games and rolling his eye, making his pink sugar-cookie dogs bark and elephants trumpet. But now he is serious, and frowns slightly as the girls follow him up the back stairs and into the big top-floor apartment with the creaky floors, the groaning pipes, odd windows that view the yard of junk and floating trees. The girls tap the door open.

  Cecille sees them and screams. “Omigodomigod!”

  “Calm down,” says Frank. “The drama is over. Rozin knows.”

  “Let’s put them in the back room, huh?” says Cecille.

  This little back room, no bigger than a closet, overlooks a maze of tree branches. There is a mattress on the floor. The girls look out the window and see an old brown car seat below, a cable spool table, spring lawn chairs, a string of Christmas lights.

  The room seems safe, the mattress on the floor even has a sheet on it, the blankets, the shelves for things, and the familiar view below.

  “Talk to your mom?”

  Frank gives orders in the form of a question. He acts all purposeful, as though he is going back downstairs to close up the store, but as the girls dial the number on the kitchen wall phone he lingers. He can’t drag himself away from the magnetic field of their mother’s voice, muffled, far off, but on the other end of the receiver. He stands in the doorway with the towel he brought from downstairs, folding and refolding it in his hands.

  “Mama,” the twins say, and her voice on the phone suddenly hurts them. They want to curl next to her and be little babies again. Their bodies feel too big, electric, like powerful bear bodies enclosing tiny mouse souls.

  They begin to cry and Frank darts a glance at them, then stares at his feet and frowns. The girls picture everything at Grandmas’. On the wall of their room up north, there hangs a bundle of sage and Grandma Noodin’s singing drum. On the opposite wall, Cally taped up a poster of dogs, photos of Jimi Hendrix and the Indigo Girls, a second grade boyfriend Deanna had but doesn’t have anymore, bears, and Indigenous, their favorite band, another of a rainbow and buffalo trudging underneath. Ever since they were little, they have slept with a worn bear and a new brown dog with wiry blondish hair and a red felt tongue. And their real dog, too, curled at their feet sometimes, if Mama didn’t catch them. Though she lets him sleep with them ever since he rescued them. Now they start crying worse than ever because they realize they left him behind.

  The twins never liked dolls. They made good scores in math. They are so lonesome for their dog that they lose track of Mama’s voice and hand the telephone back to Frank. He begins to talk in a wistful bantering tone and the girls wander off in their thoughts until he hangs up and says, excited, “I think she’s coming back here. Coming down here. What you girls did was wrong . . . oh so wrong . . . but so right. You didn’t mean to anyway. I’ll never punish you. What kind of doughnuts do you like?”

  And they are extremely confused as they eat a chocolate custard bun and a powdered doughnut and drink a glass of skim milk, which Cecille keeps in her refrigerator to make up for all the doughnuts. They are confused because they miss their father. And yet they like Frank. And they certainly like the unhealthy pastries that he lets them eat although just one, because of how the grandmas left to escape his cookies, which spiked their blood sugar. He knows about that. He sits and talks to them and tells them that he is going to put them to work. To work! They could not be more thrilled.

  Sweetheart’s Visit

  The next morning they start right in and learn the cash register, the prices, how to handle the pastries with a plastic glove or wax-paper tissue. Of course Frank does the real work. There are child labor laws, he says. I’ll pay you under the table.

  Now, that is an exciting thought! An exchange of money beneath a table. Grown-ups have strange customs. Even so, they sell doughnuts. Also maple long johns, hot pies, raised braids, and crullers. Things go fine until Sweetheart Calico.

  They are behind the display case with a spray bottle of lemon glass-cleaner when they get this tickly, hairy, sifty feeling they are being watched. The store is empty, that dead hour just after lunchtime. The air is quiet though the growl of motors on the street barges and recedes. A few passersby glance in, neutral, no interest in the display of breads or cakes or even the scent of fried dough that Frank has purposely vented where it will attract the casual customer. Deanna hears the scratch of nails on paint, twirls. Nobody. Cally turns back to rubbing the glass and then there is the tap, tap, tap of heels. The girls drop their polishing rags and spring to the door leading back to the ovens. They’re supposed to stay behind the counter, but there are tiny noises and a staticky feeling at the napes of their necks. Nobody is there, and they are about to turn back to arranging cookies when a light touch at Deanna’s shoulder spins her into the antelope gaze.

  Sweetheart Calico.

  She doesn’t speak. Her lean face is clear, smooth, pale milk-caramel, sweet as a hen’s egg; her tea-brown eyes are wistful, sad. Her hair is a powerful wing sweeping down her slim back. She has slender, jutting hips, long legs. On her feet black stiletto heels like shiny fork prongs. Perfectly honed features. The girls smile at her and open their mouths to talk. A mistake. For then she smiles back at them.

  When she opens her mouth, her eyes go black. Her grin is jagged, a tooth broken and as sharp as a nail. Her smile is fixed, frightful. Her gaze scrapes over them. The scariest thing of all is this: they can sense she is glad they are here, but not in a good way. Excited. She wants them near and as they stand quiet before her they feel it all—her hating need and eager sly wishing washes toward Cally and Deanna like an oily black wave. She wants them in her part of the world, Gakaabikaang.

  She wants to steal them again! They have come to believe as their mother says, that they were kidnapped by Sweetheart Calico. It has
all gone vague except for their dog who brought them home. It all goes vague now. Then the wave recedes. She is gone as suddenly as she appeared.

  Frank walks in, whistling, a tray of crullers on his shoulder.

  Their hands are clumsy as they rub the display glass, smearing it. They are not the same afterward, nor will they ever be until they understand the design. They don’t know how to take this, don’t know what to make of it, have never known and do not now want to know a person like Sweetheart Calico. For she alters the shape of things around her and she changes the shape of things to come. She upsets the girls, then enlightens them both with her truthless stare. She scatters everyone’s wits.

  SWEETHEART CALICO STILL lives secretly in Rozin’s house, which Frank is renovating. She does not break in, really, just melts through the walls and takes showers, endless showers for as long as she wants. She uses up so much hot water that Frank thinks there is a leak in the water heater. He is even thinking of getting a new water heater. Which would be a hassle. He would have to ask Booch Jr. to help him move the old one out. He never even suspects. She doesn’t leave her cloven tracks, now, she is too clever. Nobody is there at night so nobody knows. She hums in her sleep. Sometimes Frank notices the smell of prairie sage, but he thinks that is a wonderful smell and it reminds him of the old days of his youth when he wandered to the place where sky meets earth.

  Frank would not be surprised to see Sweetheart Calico in the shop, even though he doesn’t know she lives in Rozin’s house. Only Cecille knows that he felt sorry for this woman adrift, and hired her to work. Although work is not exactly what she does. If she is around, Sweetheart is sitting in the corner, down in the yard, poking through things in the basement, doing the shop chores somehow not quite right—sweeping with her broom between drags on her cigarette, but then forgetting to pick up the piles of dust. Washing pans but not rinsing them, so next day the maple long johns taste faintly of soap. Dusting the blackboard and the pictures of muffins onto the floor. Leaving them there. Washing the bathroom mirrors with toilet paper so the little papery bits are stuck all over. She takes hours in the bakery bathroom putting makeup on and hours taking it off. She lotions her face. Sits on the top of the toilet, at peace. Often, just before she leaves, she tries to get Frank or Cecille to go with her. Tries to pull them out the door. Frank and Cecille never go, though her face is desperate. They are pretty sure she walks and walks, sometimes for days, going places nobody knows. Returning with a silent, baffled, pitiful look on her face.