The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  “But she tied me up, too,” says Klaus. “She tied me up with those same ropes.”

  “And left you there, right?”

  “Yes,” says Klaus in a small voice. “I thought something else was going to happen that time. She came back though of her own free will because she loves me.”

  “She came back because she has nowhere to go. Where did you steal her from? Where are her people?”

  “They are nomadic.”

  “Tell that to the cops.”

  “They roam Montana,” says Klaus.

  Out where the barns are filled with hay, not carpet. Though he knows from the great rolls of carpet glued to floors of acres of malls all through Montana that this is not true and conceivably there could even be two Indians like Klaus and Richard out there disposing of old carpet on their own federal trust land where special rules apply.

  Aabitoose

  Halfway. How is it that with all the lovely names for the months and seasons and the lyrical possibilities in the origins of this most extraordinary language, the best that can be done for Wednesday is Halfway? To where? To the end of the week or to the day of fun where we wash the floors? Aabitoose is the day Rozin goes to the bakery owned by her cousin Frank. Frank’s Bakery is a real old-fashioned independent little bakery, the kind there used to be, with hand-fried doughnuts—not donuts—the ugh makes them Indian and heavier. Rozin goes to the bakery after the girls are on the school bus because she needs a coffee lift before her second job. There is also Frank himself, who has a crush on her. She likes pretending that his flirting annoys her. She doesn’t go because she wants to find Klaus’s girlfriend, whom he claims in his emotional confusion is part antelope.

  But there she is. A dog lolls next to her.

  Sweetheart Calico and the dog sit side by side on the curb just outside the shop. A car could run right over Sweetheart’s tiny feet. The dog is gray, shaggy like a coyote, nondescript. Sweetheart Calico is arrestingly graceful, but tired. She is a tired, tired woman with tangled hair, wearing a huge pair of jeans belonging to Klaus Shawano and a shirt that could belong to anybody in the neighborhood as it is a huge black T-shirt with an airbrushed buffalo stampeding away from an American flag and through a hoop of fire with an eagle screaming at its shoulder and beneath its hooves a wolf and bear also running for their lives and all of the animals surrounded by thunder and lightning. You see that exact T-shirt on every other person on the street but this particular shirt belongs to Klaus.

  “Oh, my god, here you are. Are you all right, Sweetheart? Come and have a coffee with me.”

  Sweetheart Calico holds in her hands a fragrant, tawny, puffed-up ball of dough with a saddle of lemon jelly that quivers when she takes a bite. She throws half the pastry to the dog, who snarfs it midair. Mouth full, she follows Rozin into the bakery, where there are three tables with two chairs each that fit right against the window. Frank has a Bunn coffeemaker—just decent old-fashioned coffee—one dollar a large mug or free with any pastry.

  “You forgot your free coffee,” he says now to Sweetheart Calico, though he gave her the pastry too, free, and now gives her another lemon jelly doughnut.

  The dog waits alertly right outside the door. Frank just smiles because all of the awkward semisuggestive lines about fresh buns and long johns were used up long ago.

  “Niinimoshenh, what can I get for you?”

  Rozin ignores that word, which means my sweetheart but which can also mean my sex-eligible cousin. She examines the trays of chocolate éclairs, bismarcks, long johns—no scones or lumpy vegan muffins here. She buys a cup of coffee and selects a loaf of bread. Gives it to Frank for slicing.

  Rozin and Sweetheart Calico sit down with their coffees at a table in the sun of the window.

  “Are you okay? Why did you run away from Klaus? Is that sucker mean to you?”

  Sweetheart Calico shrugs and licks sugar off her fingers. I am lost, her look says. I don’t know how I got here.

  She stuffs the jelly doughnut into her mouth. The lemon filling has real lemon in it, sweet and tart.

  “Do you want to come home with me? I’ll let you in downstairs. You can sleep. You can shower.”

  Sweetheart Calico glances out the window at the dog. Rozin makes a face. “Okay, it can come too.”

  Frank gathers the slices from the machine into a tight transparent bag. He walks over to them holding out the loaf, so fresh it sags between his hands like an accordion.

  HALFWAY DAY. If it was All the Way Day things might have gone much differently. But Rozin walks only halfway into the downstairs apartment. The dog, too, halfway in. Then it settles on the floor. Sweetheart Calico is halfway glad to get home. The twins, Cally and Deanna, do halfway well at school and make it halfway home on the bus before they sort of fight and pretty much make up. Rozin halfway wants to quit work as usual, but does not. Klaus and Richard work hard and the barn is half full when they leave. Unfortunately at home the meat is halfway cooked because the electricity has gone out and the crock-pot is cold when Rozin touches it. Then Richard and Klaus are cleaning up at the same time and you can hear them yell halfway through their showers when cold water hits their skin.

  Later, Rozin is halfway through with sex with Richard when she thinks of Frank Shawano holding that bread. She tries to push the picture out of her mind. What’s he doing there? Get away, she thinks. No, come back. The picture makes her feel something she was not feeling before. Richard has been drinking with Klaus after work but he is not even halfway drunk. He has been patient about the half-cooked meat. He has listened with half an ear to all that his daughters did during the day. So Rozin should be at least halfway into sex, which is all it really takes to satisfy Richard. But she isn’t. She is somewhere else. Afterward she turns away with the sudden feeling that her heart is breaking right in . . . not half—it is shattering into golden infinitesimal fragments. It is bursting and the grains are flying fast against the sun. Her heart is pollen glinting on the wind. No, it is flour, blowing toward Frank’s bakeshop wanting to get mixed into his batter with eggs and sugar and formed into a doughnut. Her heart travels faster and faster, toward Frank’s deep fryer, and all the time Richard thinks she is asleep, weighted firmly in the dark that will become tomorrow.

  Niiwo-giizhigad

  Pragmatical disappointment! Day Four. And so many other choices for this poetic day—a day near the freedom of the weekend yet not the frantic rush to get your work done . . . not yet. A day that can almost stand by itself because of its special ceremonial associations in Ojibwe teachings. Anyway, Day Four. Day of new existence. Day of anything can happen. Day of pollen on the wind. Day of Klaus half awake tied to his own bed by Sweetheart Calico and thinking in his dream that he hears the clatter of her hooves as she runs wildly back and forth bashing into unfamiliar walls and believing that when he opens his eyes his sheets will be covered with her inky cloven erotic tracks.

  Actually, she is outside playing with her new dog. Well, not new. That dog is definitely secondhand, thinks Klaus. It is a used dog, a thrift dog, at best a dollar-store animal with its skinny legs, big belly, scraggy pedigreeless fur. And its head is way big for the rest of it, like a sample fur toy that was never mass-produced but thrown into a discount bin.

  I don’t like that dog, he thinks. There is definitely something sinister about its big, round, grinning head.

  And it growled when he took the rope out last night.

  Forget about locking me in the bathroom, its look said. I’ll shit on the floor.

  Then it growled worse and worse until he handed the rope to Sweetheart Calico.

  AT LEAST DAY FOUR is about four, the number that the Ojibwe love best of all. Every good and sustaining thing comes in fours—seasons, directions, types of people, medicines, elements. There are four layers of the earth, four layers of the sky, four push-ups to a song, four honor beats, four pauses of the great megis on the way to Gakaabikaang and hereabouts. So why shouldn’t today, which partakes of that exquisite num
ber, be an extremely lucky day, thinks Klaus, eyes still shut, although I can feel the cords that bind my wrists and ankles tightly and I remember somewhere in the night that she wrapped her long tense legs around my body and used special antelope knots on me.

  “Oh no,” Klaus speaks but still doesn’t open his eyes. He tries to move but can’t. He whispers, “Sweetheart? Are you there?”

  DAY FOUR BEGAN so well for Cally and Deanna. Instead of iron-fortified and vitamin-enriched sugarless multigrain cereal flakes, instead of the stinky-boy cackling bus, their mom brings them to the bakery for anything they want and drives them to school in her car. And says, glowing happily, “Girls, we should do this more often!”

  Blood sugar peaking from the cracked glaze on the doughnuts and the éclair custard, both of them swear thrillingly that they will become A+ not B- students if this regimen is followed by their mother. Twinklingly, she laughs. They stand on the sidewalk in front of the bank of school entryway doors, waving until her car is down the street.

  They look at each other and both say at once, “Is Mom okay?” Then they say in unison, “Get out of my head.” They scream with laughter and walk to the doors doubled over. When the sugar wears off and smacks them to the harsh floor of the gym at 9:00 a.m. and they profess to be ill, both are sent to the school nurse, who takes their temperatures with fever strips and gives them each a plastic cup of high-fructose-enhanced orange juice. Jacked up for another few hours, they return to class and do a prodigious pile of pre-algebra equations, which they both love. An affinity for numbers! They were born on the fourth day of the fourth month, at 4:00 and 4:04. So no wonder they are not to be mistaken for ordinary twins at all. They are mystic twins, like the twins who created the world. Only those first twins inarguably messed it up and if Cally and Deanna had a chance they would make the world properly. In fact, they make the world up all of the time. It is their favorite thing to do when they get home from school.

  Cally and Deana start to draw the world after school on Niiwo-giizhigad, but the dog brought home by Sweetheart Calico interrupts. It barks as it chases Sweetheart Calico around and around in the weedy yard. The antelope woman laughs silently as she leaps on high heels, evading its teeth and paws. The dog jumps and twists in the air looking like a big gray wind-tossed rag. It isn’t a very good-looking dog. Couldn’t be called any one particular breed of dog. Yet a sympathy for humans shines out of its eyes and the girls fall instantly in love, not knowing that this very dog is the fourth dog of the fourth litter of the forty-fourth daughter of the dog named Sorrow.

  They join in running and playing tag with the dog and with the woman whose great-grandmother on her human side slit the throat of that ancestor dog and boiled its meat so that her daughter would have the strength to travel into the blue west, wearing the same blue beads that Sweetheart Calico hides now as she leaps away from the dog, laughing that wild and silent laugh. She screams noiselessly, even as poor Klaus, whom she has freed to go to work that morning, creeps into the apartment and showers off the greasy grit of random Minneapolis citizens whose shoes mashed every form of personal grunge into the mall carpeting and transferred that human scurf to Klaus, so that he’s covered utterly with the invisible populace—including refugees from every tribal and oil war in the world. And it won’t wash away. Twin Cities people have entered his very pores and he has breathed them in also, so that Klaus is now inhabited by the world’s thousands. Dead and living. Brand-new and ancient. Bargain-hunting ghosts inhabit Klaus on Day Four of the week as Rozin too returns from her work and says, what the hell is going on it this madhouse but wearily smiles as her daughters are whirling and chasing and full of life and if Rozin half closes her eyes and watches them through the blur of eyelashes, she sees the inutterable grace of antelope children galloping midair.

  Naano-giizhigad

  Oh please, you wouldn’t name this day sacred to the now Ojibwe workplace just . . . Day Five. There are so many other good names for this almost-there day when you wake and think, Tomorrow I can sleep. The morning will bring the rainbows on again like the week before and Klaus can watch them cross the elegant wild structure of her face. Tomorrow for Cally and Deanna there will be drawing and a dog to play with and no more teacher’s dirty looks or locker-slamming-on-your-fingers boys who suck dead rats and pretend that Cally and Deanna are Chinese or Hmong or Mexican and sneer, go back where you came from.

  “That’s just boys,” says Rozin. “Go back where you came from! How can you say that to a Native person?”

  “I’ll fix ’em. I’ll go right in there,” says Richard.

  But here it is Day Five and he and Klaus must pull up the last of the carpet.

  “Go then,” says Rozin.

  The girls watch for a kiss between them but are disappointed. They have noticed that their mother likes to talk to Frank at the bakery and that their father’s eyes follow Sweetheart Calico even though she is the girlfriend of Klaus. And all of these grown-up doings make them sick, sick, sick. They’d rather make the world over in girl image. The world would be only girls and animals and no boys or disappointing grown-ups except perhaps their mother visits bringing favorite food once every two weeks and long hugs but I could last a month, says Cally.

  “Nobody mean can live on our planet,” says Deanna.

  “And the dog will be our brother.”

  “We won’t take husbands.”

  “Obviously.”

  WHY CAN’T THIS be the day of the otter, the kingfisher, the coot, the loon, the balsam tree, the moccasin flower, or the trout? The Ojibwe words for all of these lovely animals and plants are original and fluid words but in all probability some lackluster hard-assed missionary Jesuit like maybe Bishop Baraga the famous Snowshoe Priest put those names down in his Ojibwe dictionary in the hope of making the Ojibwe people into hard-assed lackluster people like him by forcing them to live every day of their lives working or praying or halfway to nowhere. Many days of the week in English go back to various ancient pagan gods (Thor’s Day, Frigga’s day, Saturn’s Day, etc.). Naano-giizhigad would be so much better as Nanabozhoo-giizhigad. As Nanabozhoo was a great teacher who taught lessons via foul hilarity and amoral idiocy, so the day could celebrate and commemorate the great lessons learned from fools like Klaus.

  For he knows he is a major doof to work for Richard on this scam, which becomes every day more deadly and strange as the carpet mounts in the barn and the checks get written out and Richard signs his name on government paperwork.

  “That’s government paperwork,” Klaus notices.

  Richard winks a movie-star wink, an old-time black-and-white-movie lip-hanging-cigarette wink. Thank god it’s Naano-giizhigad and they can get the hell out of the barn before the ghost carpet swallows them.

  “It’s all over, my friend,” says Richard. “Let us cash these obscenely fat checks and treat our wives to a fancy dinner.”

  “My lady don’t sit still,” says Klaus. “She likes to take long walks. We buy food on the way. We keep walking.”

  “C’mon, say it, Klaus. She likes to graze.”

  “Shut up,” says Klaus.

  “You should bring her back to where you got her. She’s trouble. She’s a goddamn ungulate.”

  “I know,” says Klaus. “But I can’t let go.”

  Neither of them remarks on Richard’s use of a high school vocabulary word, which he has carefully saved up until this moment. He had also saved what he thinks is a Zen saying.

  “You can hold more water in an open hand than in a closed fist,” says Richard.

  “That’s ridiculous,” says Klaus. “You can hold the neck of a bottle in your closed fist.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re not tying her up anymore. . . .”

  “No, she’s got a dog now and it bites.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “Now she’s the one who ties me up.”

  “I don’t think I’d like that,” says Richard.

  “It’s pretty good though,”
says Klaus. “Except when she runs away and leaves me there.”

  They drive up to the divided house built twenty years after the murderous year when the starving Dakota were told that their dying children should eat grass and some lost patience with the settlement of their homeland by people who hated their guts and so killed some and were killed worse in return and their leaders hung and the rest driven out and the women and children hunted down and kept in a concentration camp which was the same Fort Snelling Scranton Roy started out from at the beginning of this book. The house now inhabited by the Whiteheart Beads and Roys and one antelope woman and a dog was built by another soldier who’d come home from the Civil War with a sickened heart that he could numb only by pounding nail after nail. Pain made the house solid. Klaus and Richard park the car on the beaten-down part of the yard that has become the driveway. Cally and Deanna, looking out of their window, watch them remove a case of beer each from the trunk.

  “Let’s leave them out of our world,” they say in unison. “Jinx!”

  They slap hands, spin hands, rap their hands up and down, and ruffle the air four times to seal in the luck of words spoken together. Rozin walks out the door and says to Richard, “Watch the girls. I have to go buy a loaf of bread.” The descendant of Sorrow slides along the foundation to the alley dense with buckthorn and mulberry. The dog ambles close to and settles down by Sweetheart Calico, who stands very still in the leaves, believing she is invisible.

  Chapter 8

  Why I Am No Longer Friends with Whiteheart Beads

  KLAUS

  When people ask me why I am no longer friends with Whiteheart Beads, I hedge around and come up with a neutral type of explanation. I say something innocuous, to keep things going on the surface. I have to do that. The reason is I’m afraid. My fear is this—if I ever begin to tell the story it will all flood out of me. It will be gone, unfixed, into the mouths of others. I’m afraid the story might stop being mine. Which would be dangerous. I rely on the story, you see. I keep it inside me because without it I might forget or dismiss the reason I no longer trust him. And once I did that, there is no telling what could happen.