When she came down the grass road, she saw that he was visiting again. The pale horse he liked to ride was tied to a stump, chewing away on what Vera had always wanted to be a lawn. Patrice stopped to pat his muzzle, scratch his ears. This was better than having her father come home anyway. Miles better. Inside the house, the baby was drinking from a bottle of Zhaanat’s fortifying rose hip tea. Wood Mountain was holding the baby and the bottle. He was the only one in the house.
“That better not have sugar in it,” said Patrice.
“Why not?”
“Sugar’s not good for babies.”
“It’s just the baby tea. Don’t worry. Your mom went out to get some cedar to make a special bath, I guess.
“Cedar makes a baby stronger,” continued Wood Mountain, as if she didn’t know.
Patrice stepped behind the curtain and changed into her jeans. When she came out, she poked up the fire in the stove and put on a kettle of water.
“You want to keep holding him? While I fill the woodbox?”
Wood Mountain nodded without taking his eyes off the baby.
Patrice went out and sharpened the ax, then split some wood to work out the aches in her back and shoulders. Wood Mountain felt each blow. When she came back in, Wood Mountain had the baby over his shoulder and he was walking around with a little pump in every step. The kind of jouncing walk that put babies to sleep. He patted lightly and sang an old tune, a lullaby, one of Juggie’s. He was instantly an old hand with babies, the boxer. He could tame horses too. But that didn’t mean she had to like him, though maybe, she thought, why not, a friend.
“Pixie? I mean, Patrice?”
Well, well. He was finally calling her Patrice.
“How about tea? Juggie sent some fresh-baked white rolls.”
“Sure. Patrice?”
“All right, what?”
“Don’t you think this baby might need a warm bag? And a cradle board?”
Patrice had discussed this with her mother. “He does need a warm bag. We were thinking of how to make it just yesterday.”
“It needs to be two layers of blanket, with cattail down between the layers. That’s how Juggie does it. And the cradle board, me, I can make that.”
He said the last part offhand, but it was a big thing to make the cradle board. With their people, anyway, it was the father who made it.
“Okay, you do the board,” said Patrice, as if it were just any old thing. “We’re getting the blanket for the cradle board. Otherwise we have to cut one of ours in half.”
“You each have one blanket?”
“Yes,” said Patrice, “of course.”
“Only one?”
She saw what he was getting at. How poor they must seem. But she was ready for that. As he must have noticed, she had taken some packages from her carrying sack. Some flour and bacon, some carrots and onions. Sugar in a twist of paper. Tea.
“As soon as I get my paycheck next week, we’re going to have two blankets each and one for the baby. I have been saving.”
“You can always get army blankets free at the mission.”
“I know,” said Patrice. “But Zhaanat doesn’t like those. She says they have diseases in them.”
“A lot of old people think that.”
“She’s not old.”
“But she’s from an older time.”
“She is,” said Patrice, pouring out the tea. That was as good a way as any to describe her mother. From an older time. The baby was asleep, but Wood Mountain kept holding him close to his body, inside his jacket, along his arm.
“Also,” said Patrice, touching the baby’s face, “Mama will bead the top blanket when she has the chance.”
“Patrice. I gotta ask. Do you think Vera’s coming back?”
Patrice turned and picked up the cup of tea. She gave it to Wood Mountain. Her hand began to shake. She’d had another dream, the same old dream. A small room. A dungeon.
“Yes, I know she will.”
“How do you know?”
“I keep seeing her. I want to go back for her. But I don’t know where to look for her. Do you know anything? Have you heard anything from Bernadette?”
“No, but something she said keeps bugging at me.”
“What?”
“I heard her talk to somebody in the kitchen that time, and she said something that sounded like ‘she’s in the wood’ or ‘she’s in the wall.’ I couldn’t remember after. I even thought for a while she was really in the wall. But that would be impossible.”
Patrice remembered the voices. The stillness in the house. Her sense that Vera was very close. Her mouth went dry, she didn’t think she could listen to another word. She put her hands to her ears.
“No, wait.” Wood Mountain gently pushed her hands away from her ears. “Listen. Then I remembered ‘hold.’ ‘She’s in the hold.’”
“Hold?”
“Right. So that didn’t make sense until Louie was talking with a buddy of his who was in the navy and he said something about the hold of the ship. So then I thought about what Bernadette said. ‘She’s in the hold.’”
“There’s no ships around here, or ships down there.”
“There’s the Mississippi River, Patrice. And way up there, in our old tribal stomping grounds, the Gitchi Gumi, the Great Lakes. They have all kinds of ships.”
Patrice sat down with her tea and stared evenly at Wood Mountain. It made no sense to her.
“Ships. They’re filled with men.”
Wood Mountain looked away, took sips of his tea. Kept patting the sleeping baby. Finally he put the cup down and said to her, quietly, as if he didn’t want to wake the baby,
“Patrice. That’s why.”
But she shut her mind to what he said and walked back outside.
A Letter to the University of Minnesota
Dear Millie Cloud,
You are perhaps surprised to hear from an old friend of your father, but Louis suggested that I write. Knowing that you recently conducted a study of economic conditions here on the reservation, I am writing to enlist your assistance. As you may know, a piece of serious news has reached us from Congress. According to House Concurrent Resolution 108, our tribe has been scheduled for termination. This is about the worst thing for Indians that has come down the pike. I firmly believe that this bill means disaster for our people.
I am writing to request your assistance in testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. We are told that this testimony must be presented in March, but haven’t the exact dates as of yet. Your information at the earliest moment, and assistance in presenting it, would be of the utmost value.
Yours very truly,
Thomas Wazhashk
Tribal Committee Member and Committee Chair
The Chippewa Scholar
Millie Cloud had a favorite table in the reference room at the Walter Library at the University of Minnesota. She liked to sit with her back to the oxblood-bound collection of the Diseases and Statistics Annuals of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She liked to keep on her left the great rectangular windows, shaded by massive trees in the summer, but bright now with only leafless branches twisting against the sky. To her right the card catalogs, librarian’s desk, a blue globe of the watery earth. Before her, the door. She never sat in a room where she couldn’t see the door, and she never chose a chair that wasn’t against a bookcase or a wall. She did not like people to brush by her or touch her by accident.
It was readily apparent that Millie was fond of geometric patterns. Today she wore double diamond checks. Her blouse in black and white, her skirt in bright teal. Around her neck she wore a scarf printed with random blocks of gray and gold. Out of sight, hanging in the tiny wardrobe of her room, were five striped blouses, two sweaters knit in intricate cables of intersecting colors. Also three tartan plaid skirts and one pair of unusual trousers, blue and yellow. She wore brown-and-white saddle shoes, which she constantly thought of decorating with fine black lines. The
day was cold, and she wished that she had worn her striped trousers. Her legs were tucked beneath the chair for warmth. She had draped her light woolen coat over her shoulders as she studied. Already the coat was inadequate. However, she loved it because the box pattern could be seen two ways and she was a walking optical illusion. Still, the wind went right through the fluffy fibers. She’d have to buy a new one and was also saving up for winter boots.
Millie had a job serving on the breakfast line in the dining hall, a job typing up titles and Dewey Decimal numbers for the card catalog, which she did afternoons from one to three in the basement of this very library, and a weekend job serving drinks in a bar called the Purple Parrot. She had a large square pleasant face, wore black glasses that pointed up slightly at the ends. As well as necessary, the eyeglasses were fashion aids, supposed to take attention away from, and hopefully diminish, her short, powerful neck and thick shoulders, resembling her father’s. She was taller than Louis Pipestone, so the buffalo torso she’d inherited topped long gangly legs. She’d also inherited his hands, which were square and strong, but gripped a pen instead of reins. She didn’t have Louie’s good-natured attitude. She was irritable and forceful. Millie seemed to charge forward when she walked. Millie stated her opinions clearly. Millie spent most of her energy for fashion on combining patterns—she hated to purchase anything in a solid color and always found herself in a quandary. She kept her hair in a straight bob held to one side by a bobby pin. She didn’t use any makeup but lipstick, a bright carmine red that emphasized everything she said.
Eventually, she thought she might try to be a lawyer. She might be good at it because she never backed down on anything.
Also, she might be bad at it for the same reason.
People didn’t like her. Men were put off. She didn’t care, much. She was her mother’s only child. She had seen her father from time to time, and had even stayed with him when she conducted her economic and physical survey of the reservation, traveling from house to house.
Millie had noted the construction of each house, the condition of the roof and windows, if there were windows. She had noted how the house was heated, and how many people inhabited the house. Often she was asked inside, for, although she was brusque, she knew how to be friendly with strangers. There was, too, her very well-liked father. If she was invited in, Millie asked a number of questions about money and made a number of additional observations. On these trips she also met a number of relatives she hadn’t known about at all. The survey and her findings became her master’s thesis, and her long visit to the reservation was important to her. Having grown up in Minneapolis, she had wondered. Now she knew what it was like on the reservation and thought that living there would be quite a challenge for her.
For one thing, there were the horses. Everybody in her family rode them the way, in the city, she used to hop on a bicycle and travel around on a sidewalk or a street. They swung up and cantered around, here and there, even to the store or out on visits, with complete nonchalance. She couldn’t get over it. At last, she had tried to ride the calmest mare. But she hadn’t known how to start the horse.
“Just give her a kick,” Grace had said.
Millie had given the wrong kind of kick and the horse galloped off like a maniac, tried to scrape her off against a fence. When she kicked again, it whirled and tried to bite her with its long green teeth. So much better to be here, accumulating and comparing data in the library, a shaft of neutral sunlight falling across a long wide wooden table. And when the dark came down early, she happily switched on the reading lamp with its green glass shade. For a short while longer, she ignored hunger. At last, thinking about a cold shepherd’s pie she’d bought yesterday and left on her windowsill, she decided to go back to her room. She bundled her coat around her thick torso and thin hips, and she tied a heavy fringed scarf of plaid wool around her head. She put on her orange mittens. She had asked her mother to make mittens this specific color so that she could be easily seen as she crossed streets. They were thick and warm. She made her way out and squeezed her books to her chest. The heavy mittens and the textbook tomes acted as a windshield. On the way to her room she stopped in at the campus post office and unlocked her box. She had a couple of letters, which she slipped into her statistics book. She waited a minute behind the student union door, taking deep breaths, before making her way out into the wind.
As soon as she was in her room, she plugged in her comforting Salisbury, the electric heater she’d bought with some of her scholarship money. It was her favorite winter possession, just as her electric fan was her favorite summer possession. She was sensitive to fluctuating temperatures and on a cold day like this, Millie looked down lovingly at the golden metal facing that surrounded the coil. Without taking off her coat and mittens, she put the kettle on for tea. She had a two-burner stove, gas, but she was always careful to make certain the burners were entirely off before she went to bed. Plus she always opened the window a tiny crack, even in the deepest cold. On the worst nights she had been known to get in bed wearing her coat over her sweater and long johns, and once, at minus 40, even a pair of winter galoshes. Tonight, the electric heater took the edge off the cold air immediately. She got the shepherd’s pie off the windowsill and put it before the heater. She poured hot water into the teapot, over the crinkled leaves, and when her tea was ready she poured herself a cup and stirred in half a spoon of sugar. She sat on her one chair, an old wooden kitchen chair. She rested her stocking feet on a stub-legged stool, close to the heater. The shepherd’s pie gently thawed on a saucer, next to her feet. When it was ready, she’d use her gas burner, her frying pan, a bit of butter to brown the crust. Outside, the wind kicked up. Snow scoured the window, but couldn’t get her. For Millie Ann Cloud, things didn’t get much better. Sitting in her warm room while snow filled the atmosphere, toasting her feet in front of the glowing Salisbury. Dinner thawing. And two letters to open.
The first one was completely normal. It was from her mother, who now lived in Brainerd. She always wrote copiously, mainly about the antics of the dog, the cat, and her gadabout friends, comforting tidings but never of much interest. The second letter was from Thomas Wazhashk, and this letter interested Millie very much. In fact, it was a truly startling letter. First, that she was remembered, or known to anyone in the tribe except her family. Second, that her findings might be considered useful. Third, this business of termination. Whatever it was, she didn’t think it would affect her personally. But to be considered useful by her father’s people warmed her even more than the Salisbury.
What She Needed
Vera had been sick for as long as she could remember—it wasn’t just the movement, the swaying, the stinking little aperture into which she was locked and where the men entered and used her body, day and night (though she could not distinguish day from night). The cook’s assistant, who was supposed to take care of her, was using what she needed on himself, and because of that Vera’s agony was continual. Her insides were being pulled out. Her brain was heaving in her skull. The cook’s assistant tried to taper her off, giving her diminished doses. Then what they both needed was gone. Vera itched, shrieked, moaned like a demon, threw herself against the walls. It got worse. She foamed and shat and made herself so horrifying that, one night, they dressed her in a dead man’s clothes and carried her out of the ship and up a dock. The man who’d used up what she needed knew how it was not to have what they needed. He advised the other men not to throw her in the lake, which was cold, anaerobic in its depths, and would preserve the body they had used. So two of them dropped her, unconscious in her own filthy blanket, at the end of a steep alley in Duluth.
Old Man Winter
Sometimes he thought that his spirit would fly from tree to tree like a curious bird. He imagined that he would watch the living, call and sing to them. But if he went too far with that idea, it made him lonely. The living wouldn’t know him anymore. No, he would walk on his four-day journey to the town of the dead. There, a
feast was going, always going, every dish he liked spread across a wide table of yellow stone. Everything in that town would be golden in color, except perhaps the food, which would have its usual tasty colors—blue and purple berries, roasted brown meats, red jellies and breads and bannocks. He would eat and eat. The food would be shared with all the people he had lost, the people he missed. When he saw his beloved niinimoshenh, what would she do? Whistle to him? They used to use the chickadee’s spring song. Yes, he would head to her straight off. He wouldn’t hang around the living. Let them do what they must.
It was hard to leave just yet.
The beauty of the leaves was gone again, another quarter off the great wheel of the year. The elegant branches were stark against the sky. He loved it when the true shapes of the trees were revealed. He slept and slept. He could sleep for an entire day and night. It seemed to him strange that with so little time left he would choose to so deliciously spend it unaware. He still craved to drink in the greatness of the world. When on warmer days he bundled up and sat outside in his little chair, he felt the roots of the trees humming below the earth. The trees were having a last bedtime drink of the great waters that flowed along down there. Like him, before they went to sleep. Beneath that layer of water he sensed beings. They moved so slowly that humans were usually not aware of their existence. But he did feel their movements down in those regions. And yet deeper, far deeper, below those beings, there was the fire of creation, which had been buried at the center of the earth by stars.
Biboon added more wood to the stove. He moved his cot a little closer to the warmth. Then he lay back and closed his eyes. He was warm under the blanket, even his feet. He watched a circle of silvery women dancing in an icy field. One of them turned to him, gestured with her little fan of spotted woodpecker feathers. It was Julia.
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