Prudence

by David Treuer

  The boathouse wasn’t much more than a shack—walls of rough-cut pine and a metal roof. He had been born in a wigwam. Bent poles covered with bark and tin and canvas, whatever they could find. They had a dirt floor and a fire pit in the center until his father had salvaged a small stove from an abandoned lumber camp. They hung all their possessions from the poles with cord, or wiigoob, so they wouldn’t get stepped on or mildewed. An old wool blanket served as a door flap, which they weighted down with canoe paddles or logs during the wintertime. When he visited his parents after the war, he was surprised to notice how everything—their clothes and blankets and cooking utensils and hats, even the pots—smelled like wood smoke. And though his mother swept the place out and cleaned everything all the time—she was a small, precise, fastidious woman—there was a sheen to everything, as if the whole place was covered in grease. He tried, after he was grown, to find in his memory the discomfort of growing up there, but he couldn’t. Just him and his brothers and parents, and the low light of kerosene, and the murmur of his brothers’ voices as they told jokes before going to sleep, his parents moving around the wigwam silently in the morning and evening.

  Felix and his brothers traveled a lot in those years. When they were in their teens they worked the lumber camps as far away as Orr and Big Falls. In the summer they guided for the tourists who came up to fish for pike. When he was sixteen, in 1915, he and his family were at rice camp on the Bowstring, where many Indians from farther north had come down to rice because their own had been rained out. He saw a girl from across the border there with her family. She was short and plump and she worked hard around her parents’ camp. She yelled at her younger sisters and brothers in a cheerful, ringing voice and got them, somehow, to help her jig the rice, put up wood, and haul pails of water from the lake for dishes and laundry. Felix didn’t say much to her. She had quick, deft hands. Her hair, in its tight braids, was very shiny. He tried not to look at her. But when her family laughed loudly at something, he couldn’t help himself and peeked over the rice sacks he was packing and caught her pretending she was fiddle-dancing in the rice pit, her dress held high in her hands, her jigging moccasins tied high just below her knees. He saw her thighs, which were thick and strong and smooth. And then the joke was over and she dropped her hands and got back to work.

  That night he lay awake till very late. The wind was blowing hard across the lake and he thought about how much rice was being blown from the stalks into the water and he thought, too, of her legs—how quickly they had appeared and then disappeared—and how he would give a lot to see more of them.

  The next morning, while his parents were out knocking rice, he walked over to the girl’s camp bearing his mother’s cooking pot filled with three yards of red flannel. “I thought you could use these,” he said. And not knowing what else to say, he turned and walked back to his family’s camp. When his mother and father came back and discovered Felix had given away their best pot and all their cloth, they didn’t say anything to Felix, not directly. But as he was going to sleep that night they talked back and forth to one another. “I’d like some soup,” his father said. “Yes,” said his mother, “soup would be good. Soup with rice and duck meat.” “That’s the thing to eat when you’re ricing,” said his father. “Maybe you could boil some up.” “I wish I could but I’ve lost the cooking pot,” said his mother. “It would taste so good,” said his father. And this is how they let Felix know they knew he’d given away their best pot. When ricing was over and Felix and his brothers sold their share, he bought two iron kettles, one for his parents and the other for the girl. He left one in his parents’ wigwam and with the other he walked all the way to Vermillion and found her and gave it to her. They were married and then they walked back to his village.

  He built them a shack with slab from the sawmill and tarpaper left over from a lumber camp that had cut down the easy trees and moved on. When he had built it he worried it was too small. His older brother, Ovid, had joked that it took a man to build himself a beaver house. And that is what it had felt like—a den in which he and his wife groomed themselves and emerged into the world only to duck back in, packed tightly into the four corners of the thing, their possessions stacked in baskets and hung in bundles tied with twine and wiigoob and hung from the few rafters, their food stored outside in a timber-lined pit in the summer and in a cache made of poles eight feet up in the trees in the winter. But his wife had been good at preparing food. She smoked the suckers and whitefish he caught in his nets and when they were dry and hard she rubbed the fish between her hands into a fine powder she tied in bundles. She did the same with deer meat. She jigged rice and picked berries. When he closes his eyes now he can still see her with her hands on the jigging poles, her feet deep in the pit, her moccasins tied high to her knees, looking back at him.

  He hadn’t been there long with his wife—round, smiling, hardworking, funny—before she got pregnant. The cabin suddenly felt very small, but no one he knew lived in more than one room. Still, they needed more space. They needed money, too. He looked around and saw a desert—all the big trees had been cut and the lumber camps had moved farther north. There was no other work to be had, not for an Indian. In the fall he and his wife got in the canoe and paddled across the lake to the drum dance. The second to the second stick got up to dance his song and afterward he spoke about the war overseas. He walked back and forth and spoke loudly about how he was going on the warpath as their grandfathers had done. Felix sat along the edge in the shadows with his wife. He listened and watched. He had had no position on the drum. All doors were closed to him. So after the dance he approached the singer and said he’d go with him. Ovid, drunk on whiskey, said he’d go, too, they’d all go. They all drank and boasted to one another about how they would find the enemy and take their lives. It was the talk of young men, and Felix supposed that young men were the same everywhere. Still drunk, their heads splitting, they filled their packs, stuffed batting in their hats, drank deeply from the lake, and set off to the north across the lakes to Canada to enlist.

  He returned in 1919 to an empty house. His wife and child had been killed by the flu in 1918. The house was as he had left it, but the cradleboard had been stuffed in the rafters and the old bed had been replaced with a bigger one—one big enough for his wife and child to sleep in. She had cut up his old pants and stuffed them in the walls for insulation but that was about it. Everything else was the same, except she was gone. They were gone. Maybe the old woodworker had been right—it had been too soon, too early, to make the cradleboard. He had invited his own bad luck to enter the house and reside there. The small shack seemed big, too big. Too big anyway, for him and his grief, which sat—hard, compact, uncomprehending—on his chest. He felt as an animal must feel in its pain.

  So he took their prized kerosene lantern and tipped it in the center of the wooden floor and struck a match to it. He stood outside and watched the shack burn. And when it was nothing more than a few charred logs, hissing against the snow, he shouldered his pack and left to find work in the lumber camps.

  * * *

  He took another sip of tea. It was cooling but not cool—almost the same temperature as the air. He leaned forward in his chair and stood and peered around the side of the boathouse. Emma no longer stood in the window gazing out at the camp. She must have gone back into the kitchen. It would be good to clean out the dock but he’d have to walk back toward the kitchen garden to get the rake, and Emma would see him and there would be a new round of requests and reconsiderations and second thoughts. He turned around and looked down at the dock. It really would be good to clean it. It was almost eleven and the train was due in at noon and he wanted as much as Emma did for Frankie’s return to be grand. But now, with the missing German, the Chris-Craft was gone and Frankie had no way to get across the river, so cleaning the dock wasn’t really the best thing to do, even if he could get the rake without Emma seeing him.

  He looked down a
t the dock. It seemed empty, expectant, without the Chris-Craft bobbing alongside it. The rowboat and two canoes were turtled over on the grass next to it. The boys would have to use a canoe. There was no other option. Felix set down his tea on the chair behind the boathouse and made his way along the riverside. He took one of the paddles from where it leaned against the boathouse and walked quickly across the lawn in front of the house. Emma wouldn’t be able to see him if she was in the kitchen or even if she had gone out the back door toward the kitchen garden looking for him.

  If Billy had been there he could have raked the dock and helped Felix deal with Emma. But Billy hadn’t come that morning. Felix had hinted that Billy would be needed but he had stayed in the village. Most likely he wanted to get ready in his own way for Frankie’s arrival. Felix could tell that Billy was excited from the way he had worked the past week. He started every chore in a frenzy, throwing the dirt like a badger as he dug a new hole for the outhouse, chopping wood shirtless and stopping to swat the deerflies from his back before he attacked the wood again. Emma had them move all the furniture out onto the lawn so that they could wax the floors in the big house, and at every pass Felix had seen Billy stop before the mirror in the lobby and look at himself. Now he was probably taking a bath and trying on that new coat he got at Niesen’s, along with his new hat.

  Felix walked across the lawn and down to the canoes. He flipped them both over and pushed them down the bank into the river. He looped the painter from the second canoe through the wicker seat of the first canoe and got in. He didn’t know how to paddle while sitting, so he knelt on the cedar ribs and pushed out into the slow current. He headed upriver and was soon screened by the cattails. Emma couldn’t see him unless she came all the way down to the end of the dock, which she wouldn’t do.

  He relaxed a little. He paddled slowly. This would be the last bit of daytime he had alone for the next two weeks. Frankie most likely would want to join one of the search parties. Felix had been the same way after that drum dance long ago, anxious to get going, full of talk about the war and the honors he’d secure for himself and his family. It was all so slow, too slow for him at the time. The long walk across the border to Canada. Enlisting in Fort Frances, the train ride to Winnipeg to join the 52nd Infantry Battalion and then back east over the Great Lakes to Toronto and from there to Newfoundland for training, then Nova Scotia, and across to Ireland for more training. From the time he left his wife in November it was nine months before he saw action. It had all happened so slowly.

  Frankie would be just as anxious, of course. Just as much on edge around Emma, too. Every Memorial Day when he’d been a boy, he had arrived excited and excitable. For the first few weeks he would go down to the boathouse just after first light. He never entered or knocked, but the walls were so thin, Felix could hear him scuffing his feet on the dock or throwing rocks into the lake as he waited. Felix would drink his tea and wash his face and eat a piece of bread, and the minute he emerged from the boathouse, Frankie would stop what he was doing and walk over to him and ask if he needed any help with anything. It took a week or two for the boy to learn to sleep in, to take things as they came, to shrug off the shawl of worry and anxiety that Emma seemed to place on his shoulders.

  When Billy started coming to help out at the Pines, Frankie had drifted toward him, slowly at first, and then more quickly and completely. He no longer waited outside the boathouse for Felix. But that was the way with children. That was proper. Felix turned the canoe across the river toward the opposite bank. The weeds largely covered the bottom of the river this time of year, but between them, here and there, he saw the sandy bottom seven feet down, covered with so many empty snail shells it looked like it was covered in gravel. He reached the far shore and coasted down in front of the camp. Then he turned the nose of the canoe into the bank and let the stern drift downstream as he untied the painter of the second canoe and brought it alongside his own. Without getting out of his canoe, he fed the second canoe up and onto the bank, and, grabbing the stern, flipped it over. Some water dripped out. There must be a leak. The canvas ripped. Another season and he’d have to re-cover it. The leak was small in any event, and high up the side of the canoe. He turned and paddled straight across the river. It was only when he got close to the dock that he remembered he’d forgotten to bring along paddles. He beached the canoe and stepped out to fetch them when he saw Emma coming around the side of the house.

  THREE

  Billy waited on the raised cement platform outside the station in his new jacket and driving cap. The train was due at noon and it was past due. It was hot and the sun, pretty much straight overhead, didn’t burn off the moisture so much as set the air to boil. It was sticky and there wasn’t much wind. The jacket was the wrong thing for the weather. Brown wool twill. Though anything else would have been ruined in weeks, if not days. And it had to last him through the winter. It was all they had at Niesen’s, anyway. The jacket had cost five dollars and the cap had cost two. Seven dollars for the getup. Through the spring, until breakup, Billy had gone out to Dick Bolton’s camp down Six Mile and peeled spruce for five cents a stick. Dick got ten cents from the boss but he gave Billy and the other kids five (even his own skin, Dickie Jr.), and so it had taken him 140 sticks to get that hat and that coat, 140 eight-foot balsam and poplar logs peeled with a sharpened leaf-spring for a spud and lifted over end into a neat pile for the skidder. And then Bolton would charge them ten cents for kerosene and a rag to get the pitch off before he and the other boys walked back to the village. Still, he had saved his nickels, and by summer he had a good bankroll. He added to it by gutting and filleting fish at Lyon’s Landing, a nickel a fish. On weekends he went out to the Pines and helped Felix get the place ready. There weren’t as many people coming up this summer because of the war. Only Felix and Emma for all of June and July. Ernie’s parents weren’t coming up this year, but Ernie was supposed to arrive with Frankie.

  Billy did whatever Felix and Emma asked of him: he unwrapped blankets and bedding for the cabins, beat the braided oval rug that lay in front of the split-stone fireplace with a canoe paddle, whitewashed the cabins, and knocked the swallow nests off the eaves of the big house with a broom. Emma spent her days gliding from room to room, changing the knickknacks, rearranging the chairs, making lists. Sometimes she spent the afternoons laboring under a vow of exhaustion in her room. When she moved the rugs, she didn’t like how the floor in the big house had been worn down by foot traffic and beach sand. She had Billy and Felix move everything out of all the rooms on the ground floor, including the Chickering upright. They scraped down the heart pine and rubbed it with tongue oil and finished it off with Liberon paste wax that she had ordered special from New York. And then they carried everything back in and she set to arranging again. She tried to pay Billy, as she had in the old days when he started working as the dock boy in 1930, but he refused. Frankie was his friend. He was simply helping his friend’s mother. The real payment, the real reward, would be Frankie himself and his reaction when he arrived and breathed in the smell—of wool and wood smoke and paste wax and cedar—of the Pines.

  So the money he saved, nickel by nickel, did not come from the Washburns, and that meant something to him. Everything seemed to pay a nickel. A pint of blueberries equaled a nickel, a peeled spruce log equaled a nickel, a walleye—gutted and deheaded and filleted—a nickel. The train was coming in.

  “Nice coat, Billy! Real nice!” Billy looked up and there he was. Frankie leaned out over the steps, his boater in his hand, his smile broad. Billy couldn’t keep himself from smiling because that coat had cost him 100 logs peeled and piled, and he was thrilled that Frankie had noticed. Of course he had. Billy didn’t move from where he leaned against the beam of the depot’s porch, in part because the coat was so hot he didn’t want to soak his shirt. He willed himself to stay put, his hands in his pockets, the brim of his hat just so. Like an actor in one of the movies they showed in the town hall on
Friday nights.

  The train was slowing down, nearly stopped, and Frankie said something to someone behind him and jumped off and turned to bow with his hat in his hand to whoever was behind him and ran over to Billy and stretched his arm out and shook Billy’s hand. Frankie’s hand felt small, smaller, in his, but it had the same cool, moist feeling that excited him. It was only then that Billy unleaned himself from the post and stood tall. He had grown a lot in the last year and his work in the lumber camps had broadened his shoulders and chest and he noticed, happily, that he was just as tall as Frankie was, and heavier through the shoulders and arms.

  “How you been keeping?” asked Frankie. Frankie had on some kind of suit—linen, maybe—with pleated pants and deep pressed creases down the front. He looked right at Billy, still shaking his hand, smiling, smiling, smiling, like he couldn’t believe it. Frankie’s hair was cut short on the sides and left long on top. He was as thin as ever but his cheeks were tanned and his eyelashes dusty-looking in that way of theirs. The sun shone through his ears and made them glow red a little. He seemed happy.

  “You look great, kid. Really great,” said Frankie.

  “Look what else,” said Billy, and he opened his jacket wide, like a flasher. He’d been rehearsing the move. Frankie’s eyes went mock-wide when he saw the corked pints sticking out of the inside pockets of Billy’s coat.