Patrice told her uncle she wanted to walk back from his house. She needed to think. The road to her house ran alongside water, and the cool air smelled of rain drying off the yellow leaves. The cattails on the sloughs were soft brown clubs, the reeds still sharp and green. On the lake, wind was ruffling up blue-black waves so lacy that foam rimmed the beach. The sun beamed from between dark scudding clouds. Vera had always wanted to stay where she could see the birches and sloughs. She had worked on an old cabin up the hill from their mother’s house. Vera had camped there, trying to reclaim it. She had cleared away some trees that were trying to grow up through the floor, and she had drawn out her plans to make the cabin into her ideal house. Patrice had helped her work out a large room with a kitchen and a dining table, even two private bedrooms. Every detail of the drawing was labeled. Vera’s penmanship was squared off and even, like on a real blueprint. There was a special close-up of a mullioned window with striped curtains. Patrice still had that picture. Vera, who dressed distinctively and was elegant rather than Pixie-cute, loved home economics class and had copied that window from a book called Ideal Home. She hadn’t wanted to leave, but she’d fallen in love. It was sudden, and Zhaanat hadn’t been in favor. Zhaanat had turned away rather than say goodbye to her daughter when she left for the Cities. Patrice knew this haunted her mother.
“Stay where you are. I’ll find you,” said Patrice, out loud. She snatched a stick from the path and struck at the grasses, sending out puffs of golden seed.
Patrice was nearly home when the clouds thickened to a dark sheet. She started running. Then quit. Her shoes. She couldn’t ruin them. She bent over, took them off, bundled them beneath her coat, and kept walking in the rain. Took the grassy turnoff that led through the woods. Going barefoot was not a problem. She had done that all her life, and her feet were tough. Cold now, half numb, but tough. Her hair, shoulders, and back grew damp. But moving kept her warm. She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song. Wait! She opened her eyes and threw her weight into her cold feet. This must be how Gerald felt when he flew across the earth. Sometimes she frightened herself.
Before the trail gave into the clearing around her house, Patrice heard the yowl of spinning tires. She thought of Gerald’s people, although he’d left before dawn. When she reached her mother’s house and stepped around the far wall, she realized that the stuck whine was coming from the narrow, boggy grass path that led to the house. The other cars would have weakened the wet ground that morning, when Gerald and the rest of them left. Another car might have broken through. From outside the cabin, she raised the window near her bed, tossed her shoes in. She considered climbing in herself, but instead stepped around the house, across the smooth mud. She passed the wet black ashes of the cooking fire. Continued out onto the brushy track. At the entrance of the path she saw the turquoise and cream Buick that belonged to Pokey’s teacher. Mr. Barnes was heaving at the front of the car, trying to push the left tire out of a watery hole. His large head of yellow hair was like a stack of straw. Hay Stack, they called him. Pokey was behind the wheel. She stopped. Tried to ease back into the leaves.
Juggie’s Boy
On the way to Minot they decided this would be the night that Wood Mountain would beat Joe Wobleszynski. They argued how.
“Decision,” said Thomas.
“KO,” said Rose. She was happy to get out for an evening. And she loved the fights.
“You’re a bloodthirsty woman,” said Thomas.
“Pokey’s fighting. Exhibition,” said Wade. “He’s wearing fat gloves and a rubber helmet.”
“His head is still growing,” said Rose, glaring back at Wade.
“C’mon. Why can’t I fight?”
“When your head is finished, you can fight.”
Sharlo laughed.
“Your heads aren’t finished yet either, Sharlo, Fee.”
Wade swiped at his sisters in the backseat. They gripped paws and sawed their arms back and forth, growling. Rose swatted at them from the front seat, laughing along. Then she fell silent and stared peacefully out the streaked window. Thomas sensed her pleasure, and didn’t speak. They were driving through rain. They passed the extraordinary round barn of Telesphore Renault. The yard where he kept his gigantic prize pigs. The road to Dunseith. Farther along, a coyote crossed the road and evaporated into a ditch. Snow geese were massing in a field, plumping themselves up on waste and weeds.
The ring was set up in the state teachers’ college gymnasium, with maroon-and-gold banners across the walls, and a few rows of folding chairs. Most of the crowd was in the bleachers or standing. The crowd cleared a path for the fighters to pass through, then closed again. By the time the Wazhashks arrived, the exhibition fights were over. They went to the bleachers. Pokey, Case, and Revard looked glum sitting next to Mr. Barnes. They had all lost their fights. Now the main card was about to begin. Tek Tolverson vs. Robert Valle. Sam Bell vs. Howard Old Man. Joe Wobleszynski vs. Wood Mountain.
Tek won the first fight with perhaps an underhanded low punch the crowd saw but not the referee. Half the crowd became indignant, the other half booed the first half, and nobody was happy with the outcome.
Howard Old Man won on decision. The Fort Berthold Indians quietly cheered and the Turtle Mountain Indians pitched in. Old Man had picked up their hopes.
Then Joe Wobble and Wood Mountain came through the crowd. Many years back, the first Wobleszynski had encroached on the land owned by Wood Mountain’s grandmother. Since then, the Wobleszynskis sent their cattle to graze on Juggie’s land so often that her family had finally shanghaied a cow. This happened during berry-picking time, when there were extra people camped out everywhere, so if the cow was stolen it was quickly absorbed into boiling pots. Nothing was ever traced or proved but nothing was ever forgotten, either. Over the years, resentment between the families had become entrenched. Then it so happened that a boy from each family began to box in the same weight category and provided the perfect focus.
Joe entered the ring first, head lowered, shy. He had thick milky skin, sandy eyes, and sandy hair. He was wearing a dark brown robe and when he shed it his body had a bull-like heavy pride. He weighed four pounds more than Wood Mountain, and was an inch shorter. He was a power fighter, but in tight control. He beat his fists together rhythmically, gathering energy, while Wood Mountain, Juggie’s boy, sauntered in wearing a blue robe he’d borrowed from Barnes. He shuffled to hide his nerves, danced a little as he shed the robe. Hopped up and down. His hair was thick and the waves were oiled back. He had brilliant, watchful, close-set dark eyes. A thin long nose. Cheekbones. Generous curved lips. His body was ropey and lean, all grace and force. But Joe Wobble was a year older, a more seasoned fighter, and had already beaten him once.
At the bell they moved on each other to jeers and cheers, both cautious and confident, pawing the air and dancing back, neither connecting. Then Joe slipped in a right and tapped Wood Mountain’s jaw. Wood used Joe’s momentum to slide around his body and land a solid blow to his midsection, which did no harm. Joe tiptoed back and feinted the same right, came around with a left, glancingly kissed at Wood Mountain’s cheek. Wood again used Joe’s momentum to thump his midsection, softening him up perhaps, or maybe Joe’s guard was too strict for Wood. He seemed to leave no other openings. But as the heavier fighter, he was also a fraction slower and in the second round Wood Mountain danced aside and deftly brought his left under Joe’s leading arm. He connected a surprise hook and followed with a strong right. Joe staggered back but the round ended before Wood Mountain could enlarge on the blow. In the third round they kept getting into clinches and practically nothing happened. Which brou
ght the crowd to a certain tension.
Patrice and Valentine were standing up in the back row. They could barely see the action. Valentine liked the fights and Patrice didn’t, much. But they were stirred by the crowd’s excitement and were making themselves heard. There were Indians who had come from all around—Fort Berthold and Fort Totten, from Dunseith and Minot, even Fort Peck in Montana. Juggie was up front, and loudest of them all. Still, they were much outnumbered by the crowd who supported Joe Wobleszynski. So perhaps the tribal supporters cheered a little harder than seemed right to the farming communities, who were used to deferential Indians. To most of their neighbors, Indians were people who suffered and hid away in shabby dwellings or roamed the streets in flagrant drunkenness and shame. Except the good ones. There was always a “good Indian” that someone knew. But they were not a people who had champion fighters. Anyway, it didn’t look like this Wood Mountain had the stuff. He became tentative, almost squeamish, guarding his head, opening up his stomach to punishment, then lowering his guard and barely missing the increasingly confident haymakers Joe began swinging his way.
Someone gave an incoherent shriek.
Valentine yelled, “Hit ’im hard!”
Patrice, using Chippewa in her excitement, screamed, “Bakite’o!”
She could see Thomas and Rose and their children a few rows in front of her, Thomas quiet, watching intently, holding Fee in his arms, Wade and Sharlo hopping around throwing rabbit punches. For a moment, she wondered about Thomas. There was something about his stillness within the motion of the rest of the crowd. As if he were watching something other than the fight. And it was true. There was a visceral quality to his watching.
Thomas was flinching mentally at the blows, but he was seeing something different than the rest of the crowd. The Wobble fans had begun to cluck and laugh. The Indians called desperately, hope sinking. Thomas saw that the blows that Joe Wobble landed slid away, harmless. He saw that Wood was accepting but deflecting the punishment. Then he saw three other people in the crowd were tense and quiet as he was—up front ringside, Barnes and his sidekick, the English teacher who directed all of the school plays. And Juggie Blue. They were anticipating something. There was one minute left to the round when Wood found the opening he’d been studying. He stepped away as if in fear, drawing a greedy swing. It would have been a knockout blow had it landed. All Joe’s strength was behind it, which put him off balance and open to Wood’s full-on left hook to the jaw. Followed swiftly by a right blow to the side of the head. Then a musical combination. Joe’s guard went to pieces and he stumbled. Wood moved in and the bell rang, too soon.
Barnes jumped into the ring shouting, “Foul! Foul! Fifteen seconds left!”
The referee fended him off, checked the clock, admonished the timekeeper, and restarted the round. Which went on points to Joe Wobble although anyone could see that the timekeeper had cheated for Wobble and interrupted the momentum, rattling Wood Mountain, who surged back twice in the next round but ultimately lost the fight.
Everyone filed out quietly, Indians shaking hands with Indians, farm people now satisfied. The fight had turned out as it was supposed to turn out and they, too, were muttering peaceably. The excitement had fallen out of everyone and nothing new had happened. There was a stiff black wind and people hurried to cars or pulled their coats close and hunched along quickly through the streets.
On the way home, the girls mourned. But Thomas had seen that Wood Mountain had improved to such a degree that he was becoming the faster, cannier, even better fighter. He’d come close on points. Thomas wondered if Barnes could fix whatever was holding back Juggie’s boy. Even with the cheating timekeeper, Wood Mountain could have triumphed.
Within the first five miles everyone but Thomas fell asleep. As usual, he was left to think. Wood Mountain’s father, Archille, had been well over six feet tall, powerful, with a beak of a nose and a broad smile. He and Thomas had train-hopped together, following the winter-wheat harvest through July, hiring on to threshing crews until finally the last crop, corn. In those days, corn had to dry on the stalk late into the season so the workers could pick by hand. One year, they started south and just kept going all the way down to where the desert began. Somewhere in Texas, in 1931, they were passing by a church on Sunday morning when the sheriff appeared. Squads of just deputized police agents pushed them toward the church, then surrounded the people who poured out of the church, all Mexicans.
“Damnitall,” said Archille, “they think we’re Mexicans.”
They were swept up in one of the hundreds of Depression-era raids in which over a million Mexican workers, many of them citizens, were rounded up and shipped across the border. Texas didn’t like Indians any better than Mexicans, so their papers didn’t help. Working on the harvest crews, both Thomas and Archille had learned to be elaborately polite to white people. The surprise worked better up north. Sometimes it set them off down here.
“Excuse me, sir. May I have a word?”
“You’ll go back where you came from,” said the sheriff.
“We’re from North Dakota,” said Archille. His easy smile didn’t work on the sheriff. “We’re not Mexicans. We’re American Indians.”
“Oh really? Well, consider this Custer’s payback.”
“Since my grandfather killed him,” said Archille, “there is a certain justice to the idea. Still, Thomas here is a bona fide American citizen. I’m Canadian. My brother fought in the trenches. My uncle was at the Somme.”
The sheriff’s neck enlarged and he bawled out an incomprehensible epithet. Then he gestured at a couple of the officers. Thomas and Archille were thrown in a truck with the others, trundled down to the border. Along the way, they learned some Spanish and Archille became infatuated with a girl who pinned up her elaborate braids and dressed in only white. This was the first time they had ever met a woman with a certain “look” and they talked about it after. How she, Adolfa, possessed this distinction. Maybe it was a discipline. She was doubtless poor, but the white dress and the hair gave her an air of wealth. Her father wore a straw fedora hat, suspenders, and a white shirt. The two of them, in the same truck but looking like they carried first-class tickets, were an inspiration to Thomas. When they were finally able to sneak back over the border, he bought a wide-brimmed fedora made of soft brown felt. They headed back up north on the freights. The people at the stations were whiter and blonder with every stop. And at each stop the hoboes in the yards were colder, wearier, sicker. They paid for the last tickets, on the Galloping Goose. The two got off at St. John. There was Juggie waiting at the station with her hands on her hips. How she knew they were coming in on that train was a complete mystery.
“Hi, Archie. Supper’s ready,” she said.
A month later they were living together. They never married. Juggie was too independent and wanted things her way. When the coughing started, Juggie brought Archie to San Haven, north of Dunseith, where he died within the year. It was still common, then, to die of tuberculosis. Lots of children at Fort Totten had been sent to the children’s sanatorium at Sac and Fox.
Roderick.
Thomas had friends on the other side. More and more friends. Too many. Sometimes he talked to them. Archille. Talked to them. Why shouldn’t he? It helped to think they had moved to another country. That they lived on the far side of a river you could only cross once. In the dark night, in the dashboard light, he spoke to Archille, but only in his thoughts.
“Your namesake’s got a job.”
“Howah, brother.”
“And you’d be proud of your own son. He never stops punching.”
“Of course not. As the great-grandson of—”
“That talk about killing Custer always got you in trouble.”
“True. How’s Juggie?”
“Still cooking pies for the chimookomaanag. This Barnes, a teacher, brings your son his dinner every night.”
“He always could eat.”
“So could you.”
/> Thomas stopped. The unlikeness of Archille at the end, wasted and beyond wanting. In the white bed. In the dry hills.
“I’m fighting something out of Washington,” he said. “I don’t know what, Archie. But it’s bad.”
Valentine’s Days
“You have three days total,” said Mr. Vold. He tapped his feet together underneath the desk. His shoes made an insectlike rasp. Betty Pye had started calling him Grasshopper. The nickname fit him distractingly well. Patrice watched his square mouth and jaw move like a grasshopper’s mandibles. He shifted papers, his long fingers grasping and plucking. His breath swam across the desk, strong and swampy, like he’d been eating wet hay. He pushed a sheet of paper toward Patrice. She picked up the paper and read it. She would have to work six months to accumulate three more sick leave days.
“It’s about my sister,” she said, “sir.”
Patrice explained the situation with Vera as best she could. She was the only person in her family who could possibly travel to Minneapolis. She showed her boss the letter from Betty Pye’s cousin. He pored over it, reading it several times, and Patrice understood that by pretending to read the letter many times he was sorting out the possibilities.
“Okay, Miss Paranteau,” he said finally, putting down the letter, “this situation you couldn’t call illness. I could give you a leave of absence, without any pay, see, no guarantee that you would keep your job if you had to stay on, say, over the allotted time.”
“How much time would that be?”
“One week is the most time allowed.”
“May I think about it overnight?”
“Go right ahead,” said Mr. Vold. “By all means go right ahead.”
He seemed excited at the false generosity of his phrase and kept chewing on the words even after they were uttered.
The Night Watchman Page 5