The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich

  “Just a penny or two. A dollar, sweet face, and I will go. I will not be here. I will leave you alone. You will have your time to yourself without me the way you told me you want. I will stay away. You will never have to set your eyes on me.”

  On and on he went in this way as Patrice sipped her tea and watched the leaves turning yellow on the birch. When she had drunk the faintly sugared last sip, she put down her cup and changed into jeans, busted-out shoes, and a checkered blouse. She pinned up her hair and went around the blanket. She ignored her father—lanky shins, flapping shoes—and showed her mother the raw dough in her lunch bucket.

  “It’s still good,” said her mother, mouth twisting up in a tiny smile. She gathered the dough from the bucket and laid it out in her frying pan, using one smooth motion. Sometimes the things her mother did from lifelong repetition looked like magic tricks.

  “Pixie, oh Pixie, my little dolly girl?” Her father gave a loud wail. Patrice went outside, walked over to the woodpile, pulled the ax from the stump, and split a piece of log. Then she chopped stove lengths for a while. She even carried the wood over and stacked it beside the door. This part was Pokey’s job, but he was learning how to box after school. So she went on chopping. With her father home, she needed something big to do. Yes, she was small, but she was naturally strong. She liked the reverberation of metal on wood on wood along her arms. And thoughts came to her while she swung the ax. What she would do. How she would act. How she would make people into her friends. She didn’t just stack the wood, she stacked the wood in a pattern. Pokey teased her about her fussy woodpiles. But he looked up to her. She was the first person in the family to have a job. Not a trapping, hunting, or berry-gathering job, but a white-people job. In the next town. Her mother said nothing but implied that she was grateful. Pokey had this year’s school shoes. Vera had had a plaid dress, a Toni home permanent, white anklets, for her trip to Minneapolis. And Patrice was putting a bit of every paycheck away in order to follow Vera, who had maybe disappeared.

  The Watcher

  Time to write. Thomas positioned himself, did the Palmer Method breathing exercises he had learned in boarding school, and uncapped his pen. He had a new pad of paper from the mercantile, tinted an eye-soothing pale green. His hand was steady. He would start with official correspondence and treat himself, at the end, with letters to his son Archie and daughter Ray. He’d have liked to write to his oldest, Lawrence, but had no address for him yet. Thomas wrote first to Senator Milton R. Young, congratulating him on his work to provide electricity to rural North Dakota, and requesting a meeting. Next he wrote to the county commissioner, congratulating him on the repair of a tarred road, and requesting a meeting. He wrote to his friend the newspaper columnist Bob Cory and suggested a date for him to tour the reservation. He replied at length to several people who had written to the tribe out of curiosity.

  After his official letters were finished, Thomas turned to Ray’s birthday card and letter. Can it really be another year? Seems like no time at all since I was admiring a tiny face and tuft of brown hair. I do believe the first moment you spied me, you gave me a wink that said, “Don’t worry, Daddy, I am 100% worth all the trouble I just caused Mama.” You kept your promise, in fact your mama and I would say you kept it 200%. . . . His flowing script rapidly filled six pages of thoughts and news. But when he paused to read over what he had written, he could not remember having written it, though the penmanship was perfect. Doggone. He tapped his head with his pen. He had written in his sleep. Tonight was worse than most nights. Because then he could not remember what he had read. It went back and forth, him writing, then reading, forgetting what he wrote, then forgetting what he read, then writing all over again. He refused to stop himself, but gradually he began to feel uneasy. He had the sense that someone was in the darkened corners of the room. Someone watching. He put his pen down slowly and then turned in his chair, peered over his shoulder at the stilled machines.

  A frowsty-headed little boy crouched on top of the band saw. Thomas shook his head, blinked, but the boy was still there, dark hair sticking up in a spiky crest. He was wearing the same yellow-brown canvas vest and pants that Thomas had worn as a third-grade student at the government boarding school in Fort Totten. The boy looked like somebody. Thomas stared at the spike-haired boy until he turned back into a motor. “I need to soak my head,” said Thomas. He slipped into the bathroom. Ducked his head under the cold water tap and washed his face. Then punched his time card for his second round.

  This time, he moved slowly, shifting forward, as if against a heavy wind. His feet dragged, but his mind cleared once he finished.

  Thomas hitched his pants to keep the ironing crisp, and sat. Rose put creases in his shirtsleeves, too. Used starch. Even in dull clay-green work clothes, he looked respectable. His collar never flopped. But he wanted to flop. The chair was padded, comfortable. Too comfortable. Thomas opened his thermos. It was a top-of-the-line Stanley, a gift from his oldest daughters. They had given him this thermos to celebrate his salaried position. He poured a measure of black coffee into the steel cover that was also a cup. The warm metal, the gentle ridges, the rounded feminine base of the cap, were pleasant to hold. He allowed his eyelids a long and luxurious blink each time he drank. Nearly slipped over the edge. Jerked awake. Fiercely commanded the dregs in the cup to do their work.

  He often talked to things on this job.

  Thomas opened his lunch box. He always promised himself to eat lightly, so as not to make himself sleepier, but the effort to stay awake made him hungry. Chewing momentarily perked him up. He ate cold venison between two slabs of Rose’s champion yeast bread. A gigantic carrot he had grown. The sour little apple cheered him. He saved a small chunk of commodity cheese and a jelly-soaked bun for breakfast.

  The lavishness of the venison sandwich reminded him of the poor threads of meat between the thin rounds of gullet that he and his father had eaten, that hard year, on the way to Fort Totten. There were moments in the hunger he would never forget. How those tough threads of meat salvaged from the deer’s bones were delectable. How he’d torn into that food, tearful with hunger. Even better than the sandwich he ate now. He finished it, swept the crumbs into his palm, and threw them into his mouth, a habit from the lean days.

  One of his teachers down in Fort Totten was fanatical about the Palmer Method of penmanship. Thomas had spent hour after hour making perfect circles, writing left to right, then the opposite, developing the correct hand muscles and proper body position. And of course, the breathing exercises. All that was now second nature. The capital letters were especially satisfying. He often devised sentences that began with his favorite capitals. Rs and Qs were his art. He wrote on and on, hypnotizing himself, until at last he passed out and came awake, drooling on his clenched fist. Just in time to punch the clock and make his final round. Before picking up the flashlight, he put on his jacket and removed a cigar from his briefcase. He unwrapped the cigar, inhaled its aroma, tucked it into his shirt pocket. At the end of this round he would smoke it outside.

  This was the blackest hour. Night a stark weight outside the beam of his flashlight. He switched it off, once, to listen for the patterns of creaks and booms peculiar to the building. There was an unusual stillness. The night was windless, rare on the plains. Just inside the big service doors, he lighted his cigar. He sometimes smoked at his desk, but liked the fresh air to clear his head. Checking first to make sure he had his keys, Thomas stepped outside. He walked a few steps. A few crickets were still singing in the grass, a sound that stirred his heart. This was the time of year he and Rose had first met. Now Thomas stood on the slab of concrete beyond the circle of the outdoor flood lamp. Looked up into the cloudless sky and cold overlay of stars.

  Watching the night sky, he was Thomas who had learned about the stars in boarding school. He was also Wazhashk who had learned about the stars from his grandfather, the original Wazhashk. Therefore the autumn stars of Pegasus were part of his grandfather
’s Mooz. Thomas drew slowly on the cigar. Blew the smoke upward, like a prayer. Buganogiizhik, the hole in the sky through which the Creator had hurtled, glowed and winked. He longed for Ikwe Anang, the woman star. She was beginning to rise over the horizon as a breath of radiance. Ikwe Anang always signaled the end of his ordeal. Over the months he’d spent his nights as a watchman, Thomas had grown to love her like a person.

  Once he let himself back into the building and sat down, his grogginess fell away entirely and he read the newspapers and other tribes’ newsletters he had saved. Subdued jitters at the passage of a bill that indicated Congress was fed up with Indians. Again. No hint of strategy. Or panic, but that would come. More coffee, his small breakfast, and he punched out. To his relief, the morning was warm enough for him to catch a few winks in his car’s front seat before his first meeting of the day. His beloved car was a putty-gray Nash, used, but still Rose grumbled that he’d spent too much money on it. She wouldn’t admit how much she loved riding in the plush passenger seat and listening to the car’s radio. Now with this regular job he could make regular payments. No need to worry how weather would treat his crops, like before. Most important, this was not a car that would break down and make him late for work. This was a job he wanted very much to keep. Besides, someday he planned a trip, he joked, a second honeymoon with Rose, using the backseats that folded into a bed.

  Now Thomas slid inside the car. He kept a heavy wool muffler in the glove box to wind around his neck so his head wouldn’t fall to his chest, waking him. He leaned back into the brushed mohair upholstery and dropped into sleep. He woke, fully alert, when LaBatte rapped on his window to make sure he was all right.

  LaBatte was a short man with the rounded build of a small bear. He peered in at Thomas. His pug nose pressed to the glass. His breath made a circle of fog. LaBatte was the evening janitor, but often he came in on a day shift to do small repairs. Thomas had watched LaBatte’s pudgy, tough, clever hands fix every sort of mechanism. They’d gone to school together. Thomas rolled down the window.

  “Sleeping off the job again?”

  “It was an exciting night.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I thought I saw a little boy sitting on the band saw.”

  Too late, Thomas remembered that LaBatte was intensely superstitious.

  “Was it Roderick?”

  “Who?”

  “He’s been following me around, Roderick.”

  “No, it was just the motor.”

  LaBatte frowned, unconvinced, and Thomas knew he’d hear more about Roderick if he hesitated. So he started the car and shouted over the engine’s roar that he had a meeting.

  The Skin Tent

  Someday, a watch. Patrice longed for an accurate way to keep time. Because time did not exist at her house. Or rather, it was the keeping of time as in school or work time that did not exist. There was a small brown alarm clock on the stool beside her bed, but it lost five minutes on the hour. She had to compensate when setting it and if she once forgot to wind it, all was lost. Her job was also dependent on getting a ride to work. Meeting Doris and Valentine. Her family did not have an old car to try fixing. Or even a shaggy horse to ride. It was miles down to the highway where the bus passed twice a day. If she didn’t get a ride, it was thirteen miles of gravel road. She couldn’t get sick. If she got sick, there was no telephone to let anybody know. She would be fired. Life would go back to zero.

  There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent. She tried to forget that she could easily blow away. Or how easily her father could wreck them all. This feeling of being the only barrier between her family and disaster wasn’t new, but they had come so far since she started work.

  Knowing how much they needed Patrice’s job, it was her mother’s, Zhaanat’s, task during the week to sit up behind the door with the ax. Until they had word where their father had landed next, they all had to be on guard. On the weekend, Zhaanat took turns with Patrice. With the ax on the table and the kerosene lamp, Patrice read her poems and magazines. When it was Zhaanat’s turn, she went through an endless array of songs, all used for different purposes, humming low beneath her breath, tapping the table with one finger.

  Zhaanat was capable and shrewd. She was a woman of presence, strong and square, jutting features. She was traditional, an old-time Indian raised by her grandparents only speaking Chippewa, schooled from childhood in ceremonies and the teaching stories. Zhaanat’s knowledge was considered so important that she had been fiercely hidden away, guarded from going to boarding school. She had barely learned to read and write on the intermittent days she had attended reservation day school. She made baskets and beadwork to sell. But Zhaanat’s real job was passing on what she knew. People came from distances, often camped around their house, in order to learn. Once, that deep knowledge had been part of a web of strategies that included plenty of animals to hunt, wild foods to gather, gardens of beans and squash, and land, lots of land to roam. Now the family had only Patrice, who had been raised speaking Chippewa but had no trouble learning English, who had followed most of her mother’s teachings but also become a Catholic. Patrice knew her mother’s songs, but she had also been class valedictorian and the English teacher had given her a book of poems by Emily Dickinson. There was one about success, from failure’s point of view. She had seen how quickly girls who got married and had children were worn down before the age of twenty. Nothing happened to them but toil. Great things happened to other people. The married girls were lost. Distant strains of triumph. That wasn’t going to be her life.

  Three Men

  Moses Montrose sat calmly behind a cup of bitter tea. The tribal judge was a small, spare, carefully groomed man who wore his sixty-five years lightly. He and Thomas were at their meeting hall, Henry’s Cafe—a few booths and a hole-in-the-wall kitchen. Order of business: the one part-time tribal police officer was up north at a funeral. The jail was under repair. It was a small sturdy shack, painted white. The door had been kicked out by Eddy Mink, who usually spent the night singing out there in his fits of drunken joy. He needed more wine, he said, so he’d decided to leave. They talked about a new door. But as usual, the tribe was broke.

  “The other night I made an arrest,” said Moses. “I locked Jim Duvalle in my outhouse.”

  “Was he fighting again?”

  “Real bad. We picked him up. Had to get my boy to help shove him inside.”

  “A cold night for Duvalle.”

  “He didn’t notice. He slept on the shitter.”

  “Got to find another way,” said Thomas.

  “Next day, I put on my judge shirt, brought him to my kitchen court. I gave him a fine and let him go. He only had one dollar of the fine, so I took his dollar and called it square. Then I spent the day feeling so bad. Taking food from his family’s mouth. Finally, I go over there and give the dollar to Leola. I need to get paid. But some other way.”

  “We need our jail back.”

  “Mary was mad I put him in our outhouse. Said she almost burst during the night!”

  “Oh. We can’t let Mary burst. I talked to the superintendent, but he says the money is extremely tight.”

  “You mean he’s extremely tight. In the butt.”

  Moses said this in Chippewa—most everything was funnier in Chippewa. A laugh cleared out the cobwebs for Thomas and he felt like the coffee was also doing him some good.

  “We have to put Jim in the newsletter. So write down the details.”

  “He’s in the newsletter already this month.”

  “Public shame isn’t working,” said Thomas.

  “Not on him. But poor Leola walks around with her head hanging.”

  Thomas shook his head, but the majority of the council had voted to include the month’s arrests and fines in the community newsletter. Moses had a good friend in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Area Office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, who had sent him a copy of the proposed bill that was supposed to
emancipate Indians. That was the word used in newspaper articles. Emancipate. Thomas hadn’t seen the bill yet. Moses gave him the envelope and said, “They mean to drop us.” The envelope wasn’t very heavy.

  “Drop us? I thought it was emancipate.”

  “Same thing,” said Moses. “I read it all, every word. They mean to drop us.”

  At the gas pump outside the big store, Eddy Mink stopped Thomas. The matted blocks of his long gray hair were tucked into the collar of a sagging army coat. His face was starred with burst veins. His nose was lumpy, purple. He had once been handsome, and still wore a yellowed silk scarf tied like a movie-star ascot. He asked Thomas if he would stand him a drink.

  “No,” said Thomas.

  “Thought you was starting up again.”

  “Changed my mind. And you owe the tribe a new jail door.”

  Eddy changed the subject by asking if Thomas knew about the emancipation. Thomas said yes, but it wasn’t emancipation. It was interesting that Eddy had heard about the bill before anybody else—but he was that way. Brilliant, once, and still scavenging news.

  “I heard about it, sure. This thing sounds good,” Eddy said. “Hear I could sell my land. All I got is twenty acres.”

  “But then you wouldn’t have any hospital. No clinic, no school, no farm agent, no nothing. No place to even rest your head.”

  “I don’t need nothing.”