by David Treuer
“Will he die? Is he dying?”
Mary shrugged grimly.
She set the metal handle of the ash rake in its socket and tumbled the grate and added some cedar shavings to the firebox. When that was done she opened the damper wide and put water to boil and limped out into the yard. She broke off some red willow growing near the swamp edge and took the shoots back into the house and peeled them and put the peelings in the boiling water.
She approached Gephardt again. He hadn’t moved. A large puddle of blood had collected on the oilcloth and dripped to the floor. She took off his flannel and eased his head back off the table and set him straight in his chair. The first pistol shot had passed through his arm without hitting the bone. The second shot had gone through his cheek. She felt his cheekbone with her fingers. He cried out. She grimaced but said nothing. His cries were not important.
“Bad?”
“Not bad.”
“Is it broken?”
Mary shrugged again.
“I can’t feel it.”
She soaked strips of flour sacking in the willow tea and cleaned his face. The wound in his cheek was black around the edges, as though smudged with pencil or soot. She could see a gray line running along the wound channel under the skin. Every time she pressed the wet rags to his face, dark red blood oozed down to his jaw and dropped onto his long johns.
She worked on his wound in silence. When she was satisfied, she packed his pipe for him and stuck it between his lips and lit it for him with a sliver of cedar from the wood box. He nodded in thanks and pulled at the corncob pipe, and with every suck on the pipe he winced but didn’t say much. Then she bathed and dabbed at his arm until it stopped bleeding.
* * *
When the stranger woke, he saw much the same scene he had left. Gephardt sat in his chair smoking, with his back to the door. His cheek was swollen and he didn’t use his arm. Mary stood with her back to the counter by the icebox, her arms crossed over her apron. The stranger sat up and scooted back until he rested against the wall. He looked at Mary. She handed him a tin cup of tea and then stepped back to observe him. He took a drink, but before the weak tea could settle in his stomach he retched and threw up on the plank floor.
“I am sorry.”
Mary said nothing. With great sighs and grimaces, she mopped up the vomit with more torn rags and then retreated next to the icebox.
After a while he tried drinking the tea again. This time it stayed down.
“Thank you,” he said. He reached back to feel the knot on the back of his head. His hat was on the table but he made no move to get it. Gephardt packed another pipe. He held out the tobacco pouch and papers to the stranger, but the stranger motioned them away with his hand.
“You sit in chair?” asked Mary after the stranger finished his tea.
He nodded his head yes, testing it. Mary helped him rise and walk the few steps to the chair. He sat down as he had before. His hat and his pistol rested in the middle of the table. Four .22 short cartridges glinted dully in the light of the kerosene lantern, which Mary had lit and set back on the small plank nailed to the wall above the table, next to a fillet knife and a spool of thread with a needle stuck through the outermost windings. The sun had sunk lower but the heat was still heavy on the land and in the house. The stranger took out his pocket watch. It was six thirty.
Mary stood again to the side and watched Gephardt. His wounds would heal. The boys from the village had gone off to war and come back with worse, missing legs and fingers, and they had healed. Maybe there was nothing that could kill except death.
“Mary,” said Gephardt, “our guest is hungry. You are hungry, yes?”
The stranger nodded.
Mary grabbed a fistful of starter from the bowl of sourdough setting in the warming rack and mixed it with soda and lard and flour and fried it. She set the plate of steaming bread between the two men, along with the jar of lard. With her fingernail, she broke the seal on one of the precious jars of raspberry jam she’d canned the week before, then broke the wax and extracted it. A few red seeds clung to the wax, and these she licked off before she set the wax in a bowl to be melted and used again.
“We eat,” said Gephardt.
The stranger said, “Yes. We eat.”
Afterward, the stranger stood, and Mary helped him into his coat and handed him his hat. She wrapped the rest of the pan bread in a grease-stained bit of flour sacking and handed it to him.
“I keep the gun,” she said. “We keep that but you go now. Your work here is done. You are done here.” She put the gun in her apron pocket along with the shells.
“Yes,” said the man, unsteady on his feet.
“No more trouble for us. You go.”
“Yes,” said the stranger. “Yes.” He turned to face Gephardt, who stood up to face him. They shook hands.
The stranger turned out of the shack onto the road. They watched him walk slowly down the road. It wasn’t long before he was gone.
Gephardt sat back down in his chair. Mary looked at him; his arm must hurt and his face, too, but they would heal. He would once again be the strong man, the man who fixed things and smiled at her. Whoever he might have been long ago and whatever he might have done in those times were not who he was now. Now and for as long as she was there he would be Mary’s husband.
Out the window, there was no longer anything to see. The man had gone, and with him everything he had known and the evil he had brought into their house, as though it were any old house and not hers, not the house that she had helped build and made into a home. Not just any home, but a place where such bad things would never happen, as they did when she was a girl.
The gun was heavy in her apron. She took it out and put it on top of the icebox, and the bullets she put with the others in the old Blue Tip matchbox, which held the stray shells that turned up around the house like seeds, in their pockets and pants and coats. They had a .22 rifle but it would be nice to have the pistol. In a few months the snow would come, and with it the ice; it would be a relief to bend the stove wire into snares and set them around the weeds and willows bordering the yard and down the tote road, where the hazel brush grew close, hiding all the many living things that were out there. With the gun she could check her snares, and if there were rabbits that were not yet caught, maybe sitting in the sun, maybe just sitting there out of reach, they might as well be miles away, because even a few feet off the trail, there was no way to catch them; but with the gun it would be different, because with the gun she could take them, yes, she could, she could level off and shoot them, and when they got shot in the head, they jumped and jumped, and their blood would be on the snow—yes, it would, it would be on the snow—and would slick up the brush; their blood was something not like ours, because their blood nourished us and made a fine brown gravy when she gutted them, but she would leave the blood sopping in their rib cages and set them carefully in the water. Their blood was not like ours because theirs was life for us and ours was not. With that gun she would be able to shoot them down, and their life would spray out on the snow, the bright red life waiting, like the raspberries in the jar, which she closed now, to be eaten.
PART IV
PRUDENCE
THIRTEEN
THE WIGWAM—AUGUST 3, 1952
My dear daughter I am going to do a terrible thing. That’s what they say it is, a terrible Sin, they say, but I don’t think so and it’s only because I love you that I am making my plans. Yes love there is no other word for it. No other way to describe it. Richard calls me Sweetums and Honeydrop but it is only the honey he is after he is such a simple man he confuses honey with the taste of honey but that’s how boys are—they don’t understand what it is to live in the world. They don’t know how it is to live in it but I do and let me tell you it is an awful thing. It is an awful thing to be torn between wanting it and hating it and the only thing to do is
to let it go and for that I am sorry so very very sorry because who knows maybe you would grow into a big good girl and a strong girl who would find everything I might have missed and could not see. But Such Is Life. I once thought I could steal life from life and have it be my own my very own. This is what I thought when me and Grace left out of _________ with nothing of our own and not a word of English to share between us. I was thirteen and this was 1938. The village was not a good place it weren’t much more than a gathering of drunks and when the veterans got their checks it was a constant party everyone putting on their finest vests and their clean trousers and the whiskey would pour and if it ran out everyone would make for the nearest logging camp and if there was no whiskey for them they would drink whatever they could find even kerosene and all these Indians would be lost in the woods and many would fall asleep there and when they came back they would be covered in mosquito bites and with great knots on their heads from when they ran into tree branches and tree trunks. It would have been funny but they were a rugged bunch and me and Grace had no one to take care of us no one to look after us and so sometimes we would sleep in the church but they found us there anyway. As I say I was thirteen and that was something they wanted because when they were drunk those village men thought of nothing other than what might be hidden between my legs which was nothing special then let me tell you. Nothing special at all. I was as plain as unbroken ground but this is the thing about men—they always think there is something valuable hidden down there where they cannot see and so they will endeavor to see it no matter what. That is what happened when me and Grace were staying in that cabin next to the store right under the nose of the BIA agent, but he couldn’t care less for us since we had no allotment to sell and no timber to lease and so we were beneath his notice and it was there the first time and it must have been spring because I was just thirteen and it was warm out and we had only one dress each I remember both they was dresses from the missionaries and I don’t believe in God or the Spirits they never done nothing for me but I believe in a dress, a pretty one, because then people see you as respectable. There was no windows in that cabin it was more of a storeroom than anything and there were sashes but no windows and the mosquitoes had quite a time with us till I took my extra dress and tacked it over the window and took yours and chinked it around the other window so at least we wouldn’t get eaten alive they were ever a nuisance and a plague and the heat was unbearable with the windows covered but it was easier to sleep in the heat that way and you complained and were still at an age when you wet the bed which is a funny thing because we didn’t even have beds and had to make do with flour sacks and feed sacks and it gives me some satisfaction now that when you peed the bed it soaked down into the corn and flour and so all of the proud men of the village and all their livestock such as they were which wasn’t much were eating our piss. They were awful people with no pride and no consideration for the desperate times that were our times such was our lot I remember it was around that time because our woolen dresses were thick enough to shut out the bugs and most of the light. Yes it must have been June because we would shut ourselves in the storeroom when it was still light out as I didn’t dare show myself when those village men were drinking and did our best to sleep and snuck handfuls of corn from the sacks but one of those old men came in he knew where we were and he was whiskeyed up and he was one of them who had been away to the Great War and he said in the dark you girls are in here I know it and he felt around with his hands and I thought then if I was quiet enough he wouldn’t find me and he stumbled over the sacks and then tripped on some iron hoops and said goddamn it all I can’t see a goddamn thing though I could see him plain through the cracks in the logs but that’s how whiskey works on a man it makes him blind and he said this here is a little shit shack and I’ll find you I swear and of course he did. I am glad to this day he found me first because you were only about nine and were sleeping just hard even with that stinking man tripping around in the dark and his hand found my ankle and he said there you are girlie there you are now and he did what he would and then staggered out when he was done and you never woke and I thank God for that because my sweet little sister I didn’t want you to be scared. I was able to clean up after he was done and in the morning I snuck out around dawn and made to burn my bloody underthings in the burn barrel behind the store but the owner was awake and he said you girls stay away from here I don’t want you stealing anything and I didn’t argue because I didn’t want him to see my clothes so I had to bury them along the north wall of the shack and if I ever went back to that village even now if I went back I imagine those rags are still there it’s funny how something rotten will always stay that way and so in the light of day I buried my underthings and I had no replacements no spares. I saw that man the next day. He had come in from the logging camps with his winter’s pay that’s why he was there and he was proper in his vest and his canvas pants which I saw he took a great care to mend and with you right behind me I walked up to him you wouldn’t even look at him but kept looking to the side and he was standing in front of the agency with our father and they said morning girls and I could tell neither had slept and I said father I need a little money for a dress just a little money and he said now you know I got no money for you why don’t you go look for some berries to sell or do what I say and go out and peel some pulp they’re always looking for pulp peelers and I said Grace needs looking after and then I got up my nerve and said to him but all the while I was looking at this man I need underthings mine are all wore out and I am practically a woman now aren’t I? My father were hardly a man he were more like a season, he came around once a year to do what he’d do to our mother while she was still alive and then he’d be gone again. Still if he knew what this man this friend of his had done there would have been blood and that man were quite the coward. Still our father didn’t say nothing and so I repeated myself ain’t I a woman now I can show you if I like. Right up there in the sun on the steps with the whole village to see. That man who came in the shack was turning red he wanted everything to stop. Well Jesus Christ ain’t you a little something-something said our father. The other man said aw look I got what the girlies need but he surely meant something else with those words though my father didn’t catch his meaning and he took a dollar out of his pocket and handed it over and my father says if you want to throw your money away at my kids I won’t stop you. And he snatched that dollar and didn’t look back but went right to the trader’s and bought me some cloth they surely didn’t sell underthings in the village and the peddler who came through with such items didn’t come but twice a year and only when the logging outfits had just paid out their rolls we didn’t have stores like you have nowadays and I figured I could make myself what I needed and with the extra I got us some lard and a bag of oranges and we ate all the oranges straight away and when everyone was good and drunk we cooked ourselves some bannock on sticks over the trash barrel and it felt good to have some fat in us there’s nothing like grease to make you feel you’re alive. But that man must have thought we had ourselves an arrangement because he came back two nights later and it was the same thing he was fumbling around in the dark and cursing he was even drunker than before and I didn’t want you to wake up so I kicked out my foot so he could find it and he said ahh there you is girlie there you is his English wasn’t any good and they say men are dogs but they aren’t even that smart. They aren’t any better than foxes who just follow the same paths no matter what especially when the going is hard which is why they are so easy to snare because he meant to do the same thing he done before but I wasn’t about to let him ruin my underthings which I had just made because I couldn’t be sure of getting any more money so I said just wait and I took them off so he wouldn’t rip and tear anything and he did his thing again and he was quite satisfied and he said sure I got what you want but how would he know what I want and then he was so drunk he retched up his whiskey in the corner of the shack before he left he might have been as dumb as a fox
but he more of a pig than anything else and he kept coming back and every time he did I was able to get a little more from him though I have to say he must have thought I liked what he was doing but I didn’t and that’s the truth though you can’t tell that to anyone without them nodding like sure sure they know that’s what I say but the truth is something different. It is the truth. I don’t expect that bastard understood it because after the first few times he came after me I learned the more I acted like it was something I wanted the faster he finished and it got so that I put a dab of lard down there so it wouldn’t hurt so bad not that he could tell the difference between pig fat and a woman’s pleasure which I never felt not once in my whole life. They say it’s a wonderful thing a thing that takes your breath away. Anyway this is how we got through the summer or the part of it when the bastard still had some money to throw away but so it came one night he showed up with another man and I knew what they were after and the bastard made to do like he usually did with me but then the other man was standing there and talking real loud saying so where is she then you said she’d be here and you were but you were ever a hard sleeper and you knew nothing about the hard choices life had forced me to make and I said don’t you touch her don’t you dare I’ll scream and I’ll raise such a fuss you’ll never be able to walk around the village again but for your shame and the bastard laughed and said it don’t matter none I don’t walk around as it is but his friend was quiet and he must have been thinking about it hard I knew who he was. He had a wife and kids and put on quite the show being such an important ceremony man but he was ever a man even though he was a ceremony man the bastard made rough with me and said just open your legs and close your mouth we got ourselves an arrangement and I did as I was told and while he was at his business I looked over at his friend who couldn’t take his eyes off us and I said let’s see you wipe your kids’ tears off while your fingers smell like my sister’s pussy and he walked out. My tongue was the only weapon I had the bastard slapped me hard then and told me to mind what I was doing and I did but I knew things would only get worse. The next day we packed up our stuff and went to the church and I told the priest a sad story about how we were practically orphans and needed to go to Flandreau and he said the salvation of our souls and our education were surely the most important things and in a short while we were on a wagon over to the railhead and from there we rode the train to Flandreau. It was exciting to be moving that fast across the hills and then the prairie and over the Red River and you squealed and laughed to see everything moving by so quick and said this is how birds must feel and I think you were right I felt like the master of the sky and that nothing could touch us if only my dear that were somehow true.
