by Amy Espeseth
I feel a quick pull of my braid, and my head snaps back hard. My cousin Samuel is holding my hair and smirking. This boy should already be a man, but he plays too much and too rough. And he won’t be broken. Held up by his own daddy, our pastor, as a man with a call on him, my cousin won’t walk straight for nothing. Feigning like the angel his blonde curly halo makes them see, he’ll act for the elders and the ladies, taking his turn at passing out communion or praying and laying on hands for the sick. Samuel will sit at the front of the church facing his own father and hold his face just right for them, downcast eyes and serious lips. But he only wants the praise, never the toil: he won’t stack aluminum chairs after potluck supper and he won’t shovel snow from the sidewalk. Samuel walks in the light of the Lord when it’s warm but won’t sweat in labour or freeze in the cold. Tonight, he won’t even agree in prayer for Reuben. He’s held up at church while they push him down at school; none of us kids stand up to none of them — not to our parents, not to the kids at school. Samuel stands crooked: he only lets them think he ain’t strong.
‘Why you hiding, Ruth?’ Samuel crouches down and his face is below my waist. ‘Reuben telling them something he shouldn’t?’ He’s teasing but asking too.
I didn’t even think of that. ‘He don’t know nothing to tell.’ Now I’m wondering what my brother is saying, and if he does have something to say about me.
‘Maybe he’s guilty himself; that’s what I think.’ Samuel rocks back and forth on his haunches. The coats swing on their hangers. ‘But I do believe, you’ve got some reason to be hiding here.’
How he knows, I never know. Maybe he can smell it. Whenever I’ve got something to hide, Samuel always seems to see. Maybe it’s because when everyone else is moving and walking, Samuel watches and waits — like me.
I’m caught, so I’ve got to spread the blame. ‘Eat this.’ My stretched-out hand holds half a candy bar, the chocolate melted into my palm. ‘Christmas candy; you can’t tell.’
While everyone was praying, I stole into the storage cupboard and took one of the children’s gifts; we each get a store-bought candy bar on Christmas Day. Not like we don’t sometimes get candy, we do; but this is bought special and we’re supposed to wait.
Samuel winks one shiny eye and smiles wide; he gets up and takes a piece and slips it into his mouth. As much as he is sneaky, he is kind; to hold up under what they want from him takes more than I have.
While I’m part disappointed for having to share and part enjoying the secret, Aunt Gloria’s quick voice makes me straighten my back and swallow fast. She sees us; there aren’t enough coats in the world to blind Gloria’s eyes. Samuel is skinny, but he’s too tall. Wiping her hands on a dishtowel, she is more than angry.
‘And you wouldn’t stay and pray?’ she asks him. She’s looking at Samuel, not me. ‘Your father expects more than this.’
The boy knows better than to respond. He looks her almost square in the face, but lowers his eyes as she keeps scolding. In amongst the wool coats, I can feel Samuel’s heart beating, hands trembling as he takes the rest of the candy from my hands. He wasn’t praying, and I was hiding, not helping.
Aunt Gloria’s looking at me, inside me. I am a worm.
‘It ain’t Ruth’s fault.’ Samuel puts his hands out flat for his mother to see; he’s holding the candy bar wrapper and he’s stained his palms. ‘She was just waiting here, waiting quiet for her momma.’
Gloria’s eyes move from his eyes to the chocolate on Samuel’s hands. Now, she don’t look at me, thinking I’m lazy; she don’t ponder his lack of faith. He’s spun her head to candy. But his parents punish: he could lose hockey practice or what little television he gets over this. If my parents get told, my momma will have me copying out verses about thievery and greed. And my daddy don’t think I’m too big for a spanking either. Samuel’s pulling her attention to the little hard knocks to try and slide by with the big bads. Risky, but he’s ready to stand for me.
She looks at the creases in my worn dress and my messy braid. Gloria and Naomi always look like they’re on their way to a party, clean and neat. Maybe I am too far gone to worry over. Samuel wipes his chocolate hands on his pants, and his mother clicks her tongue and shakes her head. But she doesn’t have time for us tonight; there are cups to wash.
Gloria sighs and is still talking as she heads back to the kitchen. ‘The more he hopes for, the more you take away.’
I don’t know if she’s talking to God or Samuel. And I don’t know now what to do with my knowing, how to see or not see Samuel’s shame.
Turning to face him, I stare at the flatness in his eyes. I look away as soon as I can, but he sees I saw. It’s like staring at the sun and it burning spots on your eyes: those spots show even when glancing at something else. They aren’t really there — those spots. There’s nothing wrong with what you’re looking at, but everything wrong with what you’re looking with. I can’t watch him and his humiliated face, so I turn my face to the side and wait. Soon enough — before I can thank him — Samuel shuffles away. I remain alone with all the forgotten things, the extra Bibles and the coats that have been left behind.
It’s getting later than it should be, nearing almost nine and with school tomorrow. We have to be shivering in the snow at quarter to seven in the morning, waiting at the end of the driveway for the bus and the sun, so we’ll have to sleep fast. That is what Mom will say when she checks on me before I sleep. It isn’t that she still tucks me into bed, pulling up the quilts and such, but that she comes to see that all is well and if I want to pray with her or on my own. She’ll say ‘sleep fast’ with her hand paused on the light switch, waiting for me to pretend to blow out the light.
3
WE ALWAYS SIT ALONE TOGETHER ON THE SCHOOL BUS. Making believe I’m saving the seat, I’m lonesome all the way to town. First picked up in the morning and last dropped off at night, Reuben and me can choose wherever we want. But nobody wants to sit with us or near; they’d rather just laugh from behind, pointing and saying things. Reuben gets in his own seat, saving a spot for Samuel the same. After picking up some other town kids, the bus finally makes it to the parsonage. I’m so happy to see Naomi’s face. My cousin and I are enough, anyway, and don’t need others interfering.
Even though sometimes it seems that the Lord gave Naomi to me to grow my patience — she don’t care for hunting and can be on the whiny side — I am thankful for this girl. Sometimes our brothers spend the day helping our daddies cut wood, and we have to ride to school alone; this is when the trouble starts. Normal boys might pull our braids while their girls whisper and smile mean; we do our best to ignore them. Thankfully the boys are with us today, just across the aisle. We ride side by side all the way.
Our bus rumbles from town past the broken-down dairy farms and gleaming turkey barns. Rows and rows of metal pole barns stripe Failing’s fields now. About fifty or so years ago, a local boy’s county fair project grew into our town’s saving grace. Most folks don’t own their own farms anymore, and many wives have to stand in bloody boots on the kill line slitting throats and plucking scalded birds, but at least it’s work. Folks will do most anything when they’re desperate, I guess.
The children of these turkey farmers tease us for our ways, and it shouldn’t be allowed. We are more like them now than folks used to be. Our hair is long and we tie it back, but we can cut it or wear it loose if we want. We wear homemade but we also have store-bought. I like wearing dresses, but Naomi prefers pants. She can choose to wear pants on Fridays and she is; her parents let her pick. I can choose every day but don’t have a big pile of clothes like Naomi. It was harder when our parents were young; we blend more now.
Finally at school, the bus sidles up to the sidewalk. Samuel and Reuben run off ahead toward the far entrance. We all share the same brick building: elementary, middle school and high school alike. But the high schoolers — especiall
y the older boys, even our brothers — act like we younger kids aren’t there. Naomi and I gather up our book bags and I make sure to remember the brown paper bag that carries my lunch. Naomi walks the bus aisle before me and I follow.
The bus with the reservation kids is spilling out too. These kids are here until the Indians can get their own school. Seems like half of Failing’s students — us Pentecostals, the Baptists, the Mennonites, and the Indians — are only here temporarily, just until our families can find the money to keep us all apart.
It’s only recent that these particular Chippewas have been given their land out there for real. Before a city judge went and made it right, the locals always said that the tribe was just squatting on land that wasn’t truly its own. Legend had it that their old folks hundreds of years past had showed up at a meeting late, so they were a lost tribe without their names on the treaty. Even though the tribe was hunting, fishing and living in the same woods, lakes and fields that it had always hunted and fished and lived in, they didn’t exist on paper. I wonder if they are still mad about it, or if they’ve forgotten the wrong folks have done to them. I wonder how long it takes to forget that you didn’t exist.
Blood is important, and Wisconsin is making sure we know it. So far this week, we’ve made popsicle stick tepees, dyed cloth with sumac, and even beaded a rawhide leather rope. I knew enough to keep the necklace in my locker at school, but Naomi took hers home and her daddy took it away.
But today the Indians have come to our school to really give us heritage. In a rusted-out old Ford, six of them have driven thirty or so miles off the Ojibway reservation to teach us about their old customs and dances and such. One boy in my class saw them side-slide to a stop in the icy parking lot. He said they looked like too many clowns piling out of a squished car, only difference that the hood of this circus wagon had been on fire a time or two. He was the same kid who screeched through the hallway into the boys’ bathroom, laughing and screaming, ‘The Indians are coming! The Injuns are coming!’
Lots of kids started yelling and running around like they was scared too. Just a joke, but it made most of the teachers real mad. I could see the funny in it, but I could also see the rude. These Indians, with long black hair braided quiet down their backs and shining eyes that crinkle like Grandma’s when they half smiled, are our guests. You don’t scream at visitors, even if it is funny.
We are in the gym waiting for the program to start. Naomi is tracing a pattern on my back; I guess the letters she shapes. Everyone is very excited and nervous, giggling and not knowing what will come next. But all the Indian kids who are just plain there all the time don’t seem to think what’s coming will be funny or even special. They seem to sink down even lower in their bodies, barely speaking to each other.
And now the warriors dance. Do they ever dance! Dressed in tanned buckskin, beaver fur and eagle feather, the tall men who come out of the boys’ bathrooms are somehow not the same lanky guys that went in covered up in faded jeans and Green Bay Packers t-shirts. My own eyes see the glory of a vest of porcupine quills, layered and twined shiny brown and white; I see soft, puckered moccasins studded with blue and red beads. When that armoured vest jumps and jostles past me and the shoe stomps the beat right next to my knee, my legs quiver and I know that they know by heart everything that I don’t.
I tell myself to think of the dances and stories just as fables, not meant to be speaking of God and the like. I can enjoy them most that way without feeling like I am betraying my faith. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the gym next to Naomi, I look up at these men and feel I must believe them. Whatever they show me, I will believe.
They sing their screaming songs and they dance. What sounds like wailing at the start, ends up echoing like a high wind twisting the very tops of the oldest pines. Creaking and groaning and moving with the breeze, stubborn trees push back against the wind while still bending its direction. That is what I am seeing as they whirl around our little gym. I am watching farmers force rivers to water fields, weavers plait baskets with twisted reeds, and carpenters bend wood to build shelter. But I learn that it is only the very strong who move themselves. I’ll never know how the dancers avoid the lunch tables pushed up against the walls and ignore the hanging jump ropes and stacked dodge balls locked in their cages. Even the bigger boys acting bored and leaning against the walls — Samuel and Reuben included — don’t distract them. Dancing Indians don’t seem to need to look around to know where they are going. They sing their path before them.
The tallest man, wearing skunk and raccoon tails, speaks in his soft voice about the next coming dance. He explains that the dance tells the story of two brothers and a sister whose parents were real sick. The older brother and sister promised the dying parents never to forsake their little brother. After the parents died, though, the older brother tired and left, and then the sister got weary of doing right. In the middle of a hard winter, they both abandoned the little brother out in the woods. When he ran out of food, the boy had to pick berries and dig roots to survive. He even slept up in the crotch of a tree and ate scraps left by wolves.
After a while, that’s all he ate: bloody meat gnawed by wolves. Soon, somewhere he got the courage to crouch next to the wolves while they ate, and the animals showed him pity by always leaving something for him.
‘The sympathy of the wolves kept him alive until thaw. And when the lake was free from ice, the young boy sang, My brother: I am now a wolf.’
Except now, the little brother was howling because he had become a wolf. He ran into the woods with his new pack. The wolf boy’s older brother and sister carried guilt and grieved and wept until their deaths. It was a sad dance, but it seemed right in the end.
After the beginning, God took wolves and men on different paths, and so they have to stay apart. To let a dog witness a sacred ceremony could kill somebody, the dog or man or maybe both. We can make friends with dogs, but I guess they can’t make friends with God. It’s about knowing the right order of things. It is about keeping things straight in your mind. Animals can walk alongside you, but you can’t keep them; you can’t really hold their hearts.
We walk hand-in-hand toward the buses after school, Naomi and me. To look at us, you’d never know that we are two sides of the same person: I am blonde, blue and skinny; she is black, brown and not. For we don’t share blood; instead, we share a heart.
Naomi gnaws the corner of her lip.
‘You didn’t like the dancing?’ I don’t know what else to say.
She rolls her eyes at me and makes the same puckering noise Aunt Gloria makes. ‘That wasn’t dancing.’
‘I liked it.’ I did.
‘You like anything.’ She’s sore about something. I wonder if it’s about spending all day learning about things she’s supposed to just know, just feel inside her bones. Poking at it won’t help, so I start humming a chorus and she joins me. Down at the cross where my Saviour died, down where for cleansing from sin I cried. There to my heart was the blood applied, glory to His name.
We climb on the bus together and begin the long ride home.
After all the other children have been dropped off, we’re finally to the end of the bus route and it is just me and Naomi, Reuben and Samuel. Whooping and hollering, we bounce up and down at the back of the bus, riding the bumps and dips in the gravel like what I imagine a rollercoaster would be like. The driver doesn’t mind so much. She knows we have a hard time on the bus. And at the end of the ninety-minute drive, it’s just Rundhaugs — us and our cousins if they’re coming to stay — so nobody is going to make any trouble.
Samuel’s talking about the Indian dancers and their stories. He didn’t seem to pay much attention in the gym, but he sure is now. ‘Now, can a guy just shoot a wolf in Wisconsin?’
He and his daddy hunt, but not like the men in my house do. Ingwald is always at church and Samuel is usually at hockey; they don’t
take it as serious. But Reuben and Daddy do little outside of bloodletting.
‘No, you can’t shoot them no more; can’t even trap them. But it don’t take a real brain to know that bringing timber wolves back the same time you’re trying to build up the elk is a stupid idea.’ Reuben just repeats what our daddy says about them real big wolves that the Department of Natural Resources is letting kill folks’ calves.
Samuel just stares at his hands while my brother preaches. He hates that Reuben knows more about such things, but it’s true. Memorising Bible verses is one thing, but taking and talking game is another.
‘Up in Alaska, now up in Alaska, they got the right idea.’ My brother loves repeating my daddy’s stories about his hunting trip the year Reuben was born. ‘Some guys up there, they’ll take a roadkill deer. They’ll auger a hole in a good lake, stick the deer leg in, and then let it freeze back up. They’ll just sit back and let the wolves come to them.’
In my mind’s eye, I can see shaggy wolves — grey, silver and some near to black — pawing the ice for that meat froze deep in the water. Hunters crouching in the scrub, sitting in a hide on the lakeshore, can fire on them without slipping on the ice or even being close enough to smell the damp fur. I don’t so much like the idea of all that dark blood spread out on the ice and snow. But I do know I don’t ever want to meet those yellow eyes out in the woods alone.
The bus finally winds down the long gravel road that ends at my driveway. The boys jump out and run toward the house. They’ve always got big plans that are so secret. Naomi’s soft shape walks the bus aisle before me, and I follow like a dying-light shadow, longer and skinnier, pulled out of shape. The lady driver nods her grey head as she creaks open the bus door. Dusk has already come and gone when we step out into the cold air.
