The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  Peace was the first Indian to work in a bank. She cleaned the floors.

  Later, much later, she became a teller and then a manager. Indian people came to the bank just to look at her and see for themselves that one of them knew how to handle the whiteman’s white metal, zhooniyaa. It was this stuff, this material of no possible use, that their parents and grandparents had been forced to admit into their lives. Americans seemed glad to perish over pitiless coin and paper, which now controlled their destinies but seemed, still, in its essence a symptom of madness.

  Peace began cleaning floors at the bank when she was twelve. She got out the mop and bucket after everyone but her father had left the building. When she was done, Augustus taught her how the bank worked. When they went home, she was supposed to pass this knowledge on to her brothers. But although money and all that it represented in the world—territory, goods, religion—was the basis of war, they had no feel for it. They could write and calculate, those boys, but it was war stories that they fed upon.

  Despairing of their attention, Augustus read The Iliad out loud every night after they were finished with mathematics. That the translation was ornate and repetitive was so much the better—the boys sank into the drama and made their father read it many times. It became the only book that mattered. They chased one another around the house brandishing long sticks for spears; as either Hector or Achilles, they destroyed and mutilated each other over and over. Shawano, the youngest, got the hardest treatment. They pretended to burn him on a funeral pyre or even chopped him up with their hands to feed him, raw, to the dogs. He had to lie still and not laugh while he was gorged upon by vultures. Although Augustus had been careful to teach them the realities of carnage—even to the point of telling them about their own family tragedy—the boys gloried in Asin’s narratives, and in the glamour of the Trojan War, and they lamented that these conflicts were long finished. So it was with tremendous excitement that they learned, through reading their father’s newspaper, that a fresh, new war was being waged in France, against Germany. Real bloodshed, real valor, real killing, real heroes. Moreover, they were thrilled to find out they could join this war. There was also a recruitment notice in the newspaper.

  One day, without telling anybody but Asin, whose clouded eyes lit with supreme joy, the brothers went to the town hall, where the recruiter sat waiting in a corner, at a wooden desk. They signed up to become soldiers and were delighted to learn they would be given uniforms with round hats and pants with legs that puffed at the hips. They would also have tailored jackets, but only after they’d passed certain tests. Once they were trained, they would also be given new guns. After that they would be transported to the war.

  “How soon can we get there?” asked Charlie.

  ZOSIE AND MARY could not bear for their sons to leave. Both mothers threatened to cut their hair and slash their arms, but in the end they seethingly wept and packed lunches for their boys to eat on the train. They said good-bye in the road and told Augustus that their hearts were too full to go along. Actually their hearts were full of rage. Once their sons were out of sight, they took the path to old Asin’s house, where they drew their razor-keen fish knives and assured him that if any harm came to their sons they would carve him up and dry him on a rack.

  They had said nothing to Augustus the night before, however, for it was obvious that he was stricken when he threw the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad into the outdoor cooking fire. He intended to stamp the ashes of the book into the earth, but to his surprise Zosie plucked the book out before the cover was more than scorched.

  “I listen too,” she said. “We’re just like those people, never knowing what the gods or the government is going to do to us next.”

  AUGUSTUS AND PEACE walked into the train station with the young men. The freckles appeared on Peace’s face, dark points of distress. It appeared to Augustus that he had spent his life in error. He had protected his sons from the train station by educating them as best he could—still they chose the same inscrutably violent path as Scranton Roy. The boys already had their tickets, so Augustus and Peace sat down with them on a long bench. Silently, they waited. The floor of the train station was polished terrazzo based on a singular slate-green crushed marble. The walls were paneled with ancient oak worked into scenes of progress. There were wagons, valiant pioneers, oxen, plows, trains of course. As the Americans advanced counterclockwise around the great waiting room, Indians melted away before them, looking sadly back over their shoulders or turning their backs entirely as if to walk straight into the wood, which was carved into a simulacra of its origin as an unrepeatable forest. It is unnerving, thought Peace, to see my ancestors swallowed into the exact same wood that was stolen from us. She tried to divert her thoughts from her brothers living and breathing beside her not in fear but silent exaltation. She had to try and think of something other than the monstrous crack she sensed was developing in her father’s heart.

  The train arrived. The boys left. Peace and her father watched the train disappear and then watched the place into which it had disappeared. Augustus gestured with his open hands and dropped them to his sides. Time, he thought, has most certainly been a ruthless judge. He turned with Peace and they walked through the town, greeting and shaking hands with people, gravely, as they passed. People had found out that the three brothers had joined the war. When they got onto the road and began their walk home, Augustus felt the feeling that was too large for him. He dropped to his knees as though a great hand had struck him down. Peace helped him up and when he rose he held her arm, tottered forward, suddenly feeble. They began to sob. The road became a path and the surrounding half-grown scrub, rotting stumps, vigorous new popple and maple kindly closed over the two of them. They walked slowly, weeping. From time to time they held each other, or braced themselves against small saplings. Each had a handkerchief. They wiped their faces. But still their fears flowed down their throats and wet their collars and dampened their shoulders.

  “Please take care of them,” Augustus prayed to ruthless Time.

  “Bring them home, please protect them,” prayed Peace to the spirits of her ancestors who had peered over their shoulders at her in the train station.

  Chapter 4

  The Blitzkuchen

  1918. END OF THE WAR. So many spirits out, wandering, including Augustus Roy, who looked down into the sum of money he was counting one day and saw a shade of blue he had never seen before roar open marvelously into another life. And so he died. His wives mourned him, but not as deeply as Peace, who really did cut most of her hair off and slash her arms before she felt any better. It helped when she found out all three of her brothers would return.

  When the youngest, Shawano, came home from the land of the frog people he was half spirit, too. But that is often how warriors are when they return. Booch had served in the supply lines and come down with the Spanish flu. Charlie had spent the war in an army kitchen. Only young Shawano got decorated with a medal and a ribbon. Only he felt crazy. Ogichidaa, they called him, now, warrior. Ogichidaa had lost his best buddy, who in the warrior’s blood relation was more like another self and could not be adequately revenged.

  “Sa tayaa,” he cried suddenly. They were sitting at Asin’s house. “I tried. I made his mark on every German soldier that I killed!”

  “Was it a deep mark?” hissed wrinkled-up Asin. The old man had become so violent in his thoughts he seemed unhinged to most people. For instance his opinion was that the Americans should make all the Germans into slaves. Ship the whole country full of people here and teach them to be humble. That’s how they would have done it in the old days. He couldn’t get over how he had heard our government gave back most of their territory. Bagakaabi, whose name implied that he saw clearly, was more reasonable and said everyone was humbled by this war. He had heard it took a wheelbarrow full of money there to buy a loaf of bread.

  “They get to eat bread?” cried Asin. “While the Indians must eat bannock?”
/>   Bagakaabi shrugged. He loved bannock.

  Ogichidaa was a slim and handsome boy when he left, but his look when he returned was reeling and deathly. His face was puffed up and his eyes were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare.

  “My buddy, he took a stomach wound,” said Ogichidaa. “I had to stuff his guts in loops back into his body, and all the time he kept his eyes on me. He couldn’t look down. When I had them back in, his teeth were clicking together and he got these words out. ‘You sure you got them back in the right order?’ I said I did my best. ‘Because I don’t wanna be pissing out my ears,’ he said. His voice was real serious and I answered, ‘I checked. Your pisser made it. No damage, brother.’ He seemed real happy with that statement. The ground shook around us. Close one landed. I lost my hold and they all poured out of him again.”

  Ogichidaa was exhausted and his brothers urged him to sleep. Before he slept, though, he gave Asin a funny look and repeated himself, “Old man, I did what you told me. I sent as many as I could with him after that to be his slaves in the land of spirits. It didn’t help.”

  Old Asin looked at him long, deeply, watching.

  “Maybe,” said Asin at last, “you need to do the next thing.”

  “Which is what?”

  Asin hunched into his gnarled body and then tapped a leathery bone finger on the pocket of his shirt just over his heart.

  “Replace your war brother with a slave brother.”

  The Capture

  Ogichidaa mulled the idea over, took it in slowly. It was not a bad idea, he thought, a way to kill the rage that soured his heart and woke him in the night. A way to erase the picture of those guts. But he could hardly go all the way back to Germany, and the idea of taking revenge on a German immigrant who’d been turned into an American citizen seemed an act of weakness. In the morning he asked Asin where he could get a German.

  “Oh, they’re all over the place here,” Asin said, sweeping at the air side to side with the flat of his hand. “All over here like frogs. Perhaps they are called Omakakii-wininiwag because they popped out of nowhere,” said the old man. “In the beginning, there were whole village tribes of them, we heard, shipped over here to tear up our land. They took it over. They killed it. Most of the land is now half dead. Plowed up.

  “There is also a whole bunch of defeated soldiers who shipped over because of that money problem. They want to stay in this country now. They moved up north and work the timber, two on a cross-end saw. Ditch timber roads. Learn only swear English. Walk along piercing the earth with pointed iron bars, tamping in seedlings with their shoes.”

  Asin smiled. “You could take one of those.”

  ON A MOONLESS NIGHT then, Ogichidaa sneaked into the lumber camp.

  The men were summoned the next morning to his house.

  “I stole the German at night,” said Ogichidaa. “I crept right up to the barracks without detection.”

  “Without detection.” Asin gloated. He was excited by this ancient working out of the old-way vengeance, pleased young Ogichidaa had taken his advice. He nodded at Booch and Charlie, grinning. The old man’s teeth were little black stubs—all except for a gold one. That tooth glinted with a mad sheen.

  “I dropped the gunnysack over the Kraut’s head when he came outside to take a leak,” Ogichidaa went on. “Bound his arms behind him. Got him right back through the fence and from there, here.”

  Silent, they looked at the figure sitting bound in the corner. Barefooted. Wearing a baggy shirt and pants of no particular color. The man, his head covered by the gunnysack, was quiet with a peculiar stillness that was not exactly fear. Nor was it sleep. He was awake in there. The men could feel him straining to see through the loose weave over his face.

  Bagakaabi got spooked by the way the German composed himself, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it. He went over and ripped away the gunnysack hood. Maybe some expected to see a crazy eagle—how they stare mad into the air from their warrior hearts of ice—but they did not see an eagle. Instead, blinking out at them from spike tufts of hair, a chubby boy face, round-cheeked, warm and sparkling brown eyes. The men all reared back at the unexpected sense of warmth and goodwill from the German’s pleasant smile.

  “Hay’, ” they exclaimed. Expectation was something more impressive than a porcupine man! His hands were chubby, his skin almost as brown as theirs. Around his circle eyes his stubby hair poked out like a quill headdress. His smell—that came off him too now—was a raw and fearful odor like the ripe armpit stink of porcupine. He moved slowly like that creature, his deep eyes shining with tears. He took them all in one by one and then cast his eyes down, bashful, as though he would rather be under the porch or inside his own burrow.

  “Babagiwayaaneshkimod atoon imaa oshtigwaaning ji-gaajigaadenig omaji-dengway,” said Asin hurriedly.

  “No,” said Ogichidaa, hurt and surprised at the meekness of his catch.

  “Grüsse!” The prisoner bowed. His voice was pie sweet and calm as toast. “Was ist los? Wo sind wir?”

  Nobody answered his words even though he next made known by signs—an imaginary scoop to his mouth, a washing motion on his rounded stomach—his meaning.

  “Haben Sie Hunger?” he asked hopefully. “Ich bin ein sehr guter Küchenchef.”

  “Gego bizindawaaken waa-miigaanik!” Asin’s attitude was close to panic. The kitchen window shed frail light on an old wooden table, the stove in the background of the room, the prisoner blinking.

  Shawano picked up the gunnysack uncertainly, ready to lower it back onto the porcupine man’s head.

  “Nishi! Aapijinazh! Nishwanaaji’ a’aw maji-ayi’aawish ji-minonawe’angwaa gigichi-Anishinaabeminaanig gaa-onjigiyang.” Asin now spoke in a low and threatful tone. At his command, everyone fell silent. The old man was behaving in a way that did not befit an elder. Yet the younger men had been taught to respect him.

  “Why should we do that?” asked Bagakaabi. “He can’t be a slave if he is dead.”

  “It is the only way to satisfy the ghosts,” Asin answered.

  “Haben Sie alle hunger, bitte? Wenn Sie hunger haben, werde ich für sie einen Kuchen machen. Versuches mal, bitte.” The prisoner offered to bake for them. He spoke modestly and pleasantly, though he seemed now in his wary poise to have understood the gravity of Asin’s behavior. He seemed, in fact, to know that his life might hang in the balance. Although Asin had spoken his cruel command in the old language, his ferocity was easily translated. With a burst of enormous energy, the German tried to make good on his offer using peppy eating motions and rubbing his middle with more vigor.

  Booch, always eager for food, finally nodded. He knew the word kuchen. “Why not let him prepare his offering? We will test it and see if his sweet cake can save his life.”

  He said this jokingly, but Asin’s gleam and nod told that he took the baking test seriously and looked forward to the German’s failure.

  The First Metaphorical Cake

  The porcupine man drew a tiny diagram or symbol for each thing he needed. Little oval eggs, flour in a flour sack, nuts of a rumpled shape, strawberries, sugar, and so on. By now, even though the men had no money extra, they had to go along and so they all dug deep into their hands, socks, the liners of their shoes, and the rabbit fur inside their moccasins. They sent Charlie to the traders’ for these things and he returned with his lower lip stuck out and fire in his eyes. He thought this whole plan was wrong and yet he was curious about the cooking aspect, the baking, which would in time become his passion.

  The stove. The German seemed to have a problem with that. He fiddled and poked it and tried to figure out its quirks. The brothers picked red berries for him, though, ode’iminan, heart berries, from the clearings. So fresh and dewy and tender. The sweet red melted in your mouth. Charlie gave the prisoner a makak full of the berries, and was surprised by the emotional way he accepted the offering. The German lifted the container in his hand, inhaled the fragrance of the berries. His dark
round eyes filled again and this time spilled over with tears.

  “Erdbeeren,” he said, softly, with mistaken and genuine sincerity. “I fuck you thank you. Klaus. Klaus.” He pointed at his chest.

  The men stood there in the kitchen before the stove and looked down at their feet, at the floor. Charlie reached out and shook the German’s hand, or paw, which he saw with a certain fear had fur on the back.

  “Gaawiin niminwendanziinan omaamiishininjiin misawaa-go minode’ed,” he said.

  Charlie’s kindness was tinder to Asin’s low fury. Asin flared up, insisted that Klaus had just delivered a most clever insult veiled in ignorance, fixed Klaus with a crushing stare. Asin bared his black teeth and gave a startling snarl. Booch and Shawano stepped out the door. Klaus waved Asin and Bagakaapi away from the smoking woodstove abruptly and began his efforts. Charlie stayed.

  From inside the kitchen, then, where Charlie had stubbornly placed himself, the others got as much of the story as they could, or maybe as anyone was ever supposed to know.

  First, the prisoner pounded almonds to a fine paste between two lake rocks. Took the eggs, just the yellows in a little tin cup. He found a long piece of wire and cleverly twisted it into a beater of some sort. He began to work things over, the ingredients. Using the bottom of an iron skillet, he ground pods and beans and spices into the nuts. He added the sugar spoon by spoon.