“I won’t. I’m scared who it might be.”
“Me too. Could you tell if it was a man or a woman?”
“It was wrapped in a blanket.”
“I think maybe I’ll get Uncle Thomas,” said Patrice.
The cold squeezed and burned as Thomas, Patrice, and Wood Mountain made their way up to the cabin. Wood Mountain pulled the toboggan that Zhaanat and Patrice used for dragging game over snow and which Pokey used for rushing down hills. Pokey wanted to go, but they made him stay with his mother, who sat absently by the stove, rocking the baby. Zhaanat had now been told what was in the house on the hill. She had lost her balance and fallen back onto the table, as if struck by a great blow.
They kicked away enough snow to open the cabin door, and entered. Patrice knew before Thomas pulled aside the blanket. Even before he briefly uncovered the face, she knew the shoes. Thin shoes with holes showing the pasteboard he wore inside. Her father’s shoes. And the liquor bottles. Empty pints, six or more. His death had probably been painless.
Both men stepped back and put their hands up to the heavy woolen hats with earflaps that tied underneath their chins.
“Don’t worry about your hats,” Patrice said, furious. “Let’s just get him down the hill.”
So the men loaded him up and she walked ahead. The fact that he’d chosen to come back and die in Vera’s house made her so angry that she became overheated as she tramped along. Now Vera’s place was stained by the death in its walls. Patrice’s eyes kept watering. Not tears. She wasn’t crying. It was the cold. And the terror that it might have been Vera. All she could think of when she thought of Paranteau were the times he’d arrived home drunk and dragged all of them into his ugliness. When he’d made Pokey fly into the wall. She knew there were other times, but she could not remember them. Good riddance, she thought. Nobody spoke. They were all on snowshoes and made it down before dark. Pokey came out of the house. His face didn’t change when he found out who it was. He helped put his father in the lean-to. The men stayed outside while Patrice went inside. Her mother looked away when she told her who it was. Patrice knew she didn’t want her daughter to see the relief on her face.
Now Pokey was the one throwing his emotions into wood chopping. Maybe he’d loved his father. Or maybe he thought he should love his father. Before the men left, they hauled a fallen tree out of the woods and sawed it into stove lengths. Pokey and the others would keep a fire going for Paranteau. They couldn’t tell how long ago he had died. But his spirit would still be wandering, said Zhaanat. They needed to send him on the path. She wanted him buried in a cleared spot behind the house. Where I can keep an eye on him, she said. Wood Mountain drew up that same night with a wagonload of wood. He made several fires on the burial ground. They would have to soften up the earth to dig the grave. Wood Mountain brought an ice pick, a shovel, and a big pot of Juggie’s boulette soup, generous balls of meat and soft potatoes and carrots in a peppered broth thickened with flour.
That night, Patrice was awakened by a sound that started low and gathered force until it became a high-pitched shriek. It came from inside the cabin, from where her mother was sleeping. Or was it from behind the wall, where her father lay frozen? Patrice dived blankly into sleep. At one point she realized that Pokey had crawled into her bed and was curled against her back.
It was hard to leave for work the next morning. As she walked out of the house, Patrice glanced into the lean-to. Her father’s corpse was still there, wrapped in a blanket, on the cot where he used to sleep off his binges. Which should make her sad, Patrice thought, but she wasn’t sad. She was just glad he hadn’t come back to life, which did make her sad. How sad it was not to be sad.
When the car pulled up, Patrice saw that Valentine was glowering out the backseat window. She opened the back door.
“Why are you sitting back there?”
“Doris told me to.”
Valentine folded her arms and glared straight ahead.
“Get in the front seat,” said Patrice.
“No,” said Valentine. “I’m just doing what Doris told me to do.”
Doris was pretending that nothing had happened. She wouldn’t speak. Whatever they’d argued about was stupid, thought Patrice, but she remembered the sorrow in Valentine’s eyes as she looked out the front window of the car, and she said, “Please then. Please get in the front seat. Whatever you argued about isn’t worth it. You two are best friends.”
“You are my best friend,” said Valentine, in a voice that was low but still loud enough for Doris to hear.
“Us three are best friends,” said Patrice. “And maybe while we’re at it we should add in Betty. Come on, get in the front seat. We’ll be late.”
“Yes,” said Doris, “we’ll be late. Come on.”
“Say you’re sorry!” cried Valentine.
“I’ll lose my temper,” said Patrice, surprising herself. Such authority in her voice. “Valentine. Get in the front seat.”
Valentine got out of the car and sat in the front seat, holding herself like an injured bird. She wore a slim brown coat with a plush collar. It looked very nice on her. In the backseat, Patrice closed her eyes. One fine day, she would have a car of her own. And a coat like Valentine’s. Anything could happen now. She remembered when she woke in the leaves—the tingling sense that something good would soon take place. Was that about her father? Was finding him dead the good thing that had happened?
Patrice, you are hard. So pitiful, he was so pitiful. Why didn’t she feel it more? He’d probably died while she slept in the leaf cave. The odd sense of that day’s buoyancy came back to her. She saw herself bounding along the bottom of the ravine. She hadn’t known that she’d been carrying a weight. Then it was off. Her father’s violent descent had hung over most of her life. Dread was gone. It had left when he died. She hadn’t realized it was so heavy.
She worked at the jewel bearing plant all day. Unable to fake sorrow, she told nobody about her father.
Cradle to Grave
Thomas worked on the grave house while Wood Mountain finished up the cradle board. They were working in Louie’s barn because he had all of the tools—the saws, planes, rasps, the splitter, vise, hammer, and the sanding rocks. Neither of them spoke. Thomas was using a sharp chisel to dovetail the ends of the boards. He didn’t like using nails in a grave house. He made a few small rafters for the roof and then planed out the necessary shingles. He’d seen them made with tar paper or bought shingles, but he felt close to Zhaanat as he worked—she had asked him to make the grave house because she knew he did it the old way. Except, Thomas wondered, was this the really old way? Biboon said that his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree. It seemed better. You were eaten by crows and vultures instead of worms. Your body went flying over the earth instead of being distributed to the tiny creatures living under the earth. This grave house probably came about after they had been forced to live in one place, on reservations. Mostly, they had Catholic burials. He wanted to ask Wood Mountain which he thought was better, tree or dirt. However, Wood Mountain was finishing the cradle board.
“I suppose we shouldn’t tell Zhaanat we were making the grave house and cradle board at the same time,” he said to Wood Mountain.
“You think it could be bad for the baby?”
“I’m not superstitious,” said Thomas, although he certainly was. Just not as bad as LaBatte with his fear of owls and his reading of random omens in everything. Wood Mountain said that he’d light some sage and bathe the cradle board in the smoke to take the whammy off.
“That’ll work,” said Thomas.
From the top of the cradle board, Wood Mountain was using Zhaanat’s finest sanding tool—horsetail plant split and glued onto a piece of wood. It was bringing out the narrow lines in the white cedar. He had a jar of tea and a jar of vinegar in which he’d left some pennies for a week. After he’d sanded the wood smooth, he painted the botto
m of the cradle board with the tea, which gave it a soft brown color. He painted the top of the wood with the penny vinegar, which tinged the wood with pale blue, including the head guard. He tied several pieces of sinew to the head guard. Sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields. Some were whorled; others were tiny grooved scallops. He drilled holes in them and hung them from the lengths of sinew.
“Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here,” he said to Thomas.
“From the endless way-back times.”
“Think of it. Vera’s baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here. Who could have known?”
“We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways. Maybe a way-back person touched these shells. Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt. Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now. We can’t know these things.”
“Us being connected here so far back gives me a peaceful feeling,” said Wood Mountain.
“That’s what it’s all about,” said Thomas. “And now we’re putting another man in the earth. Maybe a drunk, but he wasn’t always a drunk.”
“Sometimes when I’m out and around,” said Wood Mountain, “I feel like they’re with me, those way-back people. I never talk about it. But they’re all around us. I could never leave this place.”
The Night Watch
They had left a tree with strong branches standing near their house. You could hang a deer from that tree and dress it out. Or a bear. That’s what Zhaanat was doing when Patrice came back from work. Of course she’d gone after it. A bear was a walking medicine cabinet. When a bear was killed during hibernation, its meat was milder, sweeter. Patrice had been compelled to tell her mother, but she had hoped her mother would not kill the bear. Now Zhaanat and Thomas were working carefully on the hide. Skinned-out bears looked too human for Patrice and she hurried to the house. She could hear them singing to the bear in low voices as she stepped inside. It was warm and close. People were sitting around the stove, at the table. The baby was tucked away in Juggie’s arms and Rose was making bannock bread. People sat on Pokey’s bed and on her mother’s low mattress. Some had brought their blankets, thrown over a shoulder, so they could sleep on the floor. Patrice knew everyone, or almost. Her curtain was pulled aside and the one person she didn’t know was sitting on Patrice’s bed, alone, clinging to a cup of tea. She was perhaps a few years older than Patrice, with flat dark hair and cat glasses. She was wearing a confusing sweater with black and white lines. Patrice’s quilt was also mostly black and white. Who was she?
Someone had put up a blanket in a corner, for privacy, a place where Patrice could change her clothes. She put on long johns, overalls, and an old mission sweater. She took her fur mitts down off a shelf. She put on a knitted hat and when she came around the blanket the woman she didn’t know took in her transformation with surprise.
“Hello,” said the woman. “I’m Millie Cloud.”
She didn’t put her hand out, so Patrice put her hand out. Millie examined Patrice’s hand as if it were unusual, like Zhaanat’s hand, but then she grasped it almost with desperation. Millie’s grip was hard, like a white-person grip.
“Your hand has calluses,” Millie said.
“I like chopping wood,” said Patrice. “I’m going out there to chop wood right now.”
“I have never chopped wood,” said Millie. “When was your house built?”
“I don’t know.”
“And I see you’ve used tar paper to good advantage. Did your father work on that?”
“Him? That would be the day. He was a drunk,” said Patrice.
“You’re very forthcoming,” said Millie.
“Well, that’s my bed you’re sitting on,” said Patrice.
“I thought so. I noticed your stack of magazines. Do you mind if I’m sitting here?”
“What can I do about it?” said Patrice.
She amended her comment to say something pleasant, mumbled that Millie was welcome to read her magazines, and walked away. She would much rather have buried her father with just a few people around. Not this crowd and someone she didn’t know, but had heard of, for this was the Chippewa scholar. She should have been nicer. She remembered that she would have to get information on how to go to college. Patrice spoke to a few more people, accepted a few hugs, ate bannock and Juggie’s soup. Then she went outside. Pokey was still chopping wood.
“You can quit for a while,” said Patrice. “It looks like you’ve been chopping for a whole day.”
“Not really. I have to stop and warm my hands up all the time.”
Patrice shed her mittens and took up the ax. She ran warm. It took a long time when chopping wood for her hands to get cold. Pokey took a load of stove lengths into the house. Patrice got into her rhythm and everything else fell away. She forgot the strange woman on her bed, blending in with the pattern on her quilt. She forgot her complicated feelings, or got them out, down the ax and into the wood. She forgot the kindness of the bear and how she had betrayed it, although maybe, as Zhaanat always believed, the bear had intentionally given itself to her. It still seemed to Patrice that her fall had been an accident and that the bear had just accepted her presence in its sleep, or not noticed her, or maybe the bear dreamed of her because surely the bear smelled her in its sleep and knew she was there. What was it, to be dreamed of by a bear?
Not something that happened to most Homecoming queens, thought Patrice, or to most waterjacks. Surely it didn’t happen to many jewel bearing plant employees.
Wood Mountain was at the grave place using his pickax on the frozen ground. As she worked on the wood, they began to chop in alternating blows. Which was comforting. It gave her strength. It meant the work was getting done. Her father would soon be safe and she would be safe from him. They would all live easier. Never again would her mother have to go to sleep with a knife beneath her pillow and a hatchet at her feet. Never again would Pokey have to cringe. Never again would Patrice have to wipe her father’s piss and shit out of the corner. Or hear him weeping in the lean-to, calling for them like a lost soul. Although she did hear him one more time.
The First Night Watch
After she had worked for a while, Patrice went into the house and ate another bowl of Juggie’s soup. The sacred fire had been burning ever since her father had been found. She walked out to the fire holding a tin mug of her mother’s tea. She offered a few drops to the fire. The tea was made from aromatic cedar fronds and melted snow. It was her favorite kind of tea. There was something about the water that was swirled through the heavens, frozen, scooped up, and boiled with cedar. You couldn’t name it. But the hot tea, made of ingredients that joined earth and heaven, radiated its penetrating force through her body. The tips of her fingers stung and her stomach warmed. She could feel her blood awaken. She sat down with the men by the fire. They treated her differently when she wore her father’s boots and the big coat and overalls. She listened to them talking about her father’s basketball exploits. Pogo Paranteau. She had heard it all hundreds of times. Sometimes when, with a gesture, one of his old teammates imitated his distinctive jump shot, she even laughed.
The Second Night Watch
Thomas left to work on the grave house, hoping to finish it before morning. The other men took turns with the pickax and shovel, chipping the grave out of closely bound roots and glassine dirt. In the background there was always the sound of their effort. The blows were thin, strange, ringing out in the woods and bouncing off the trees. Gradually, as the diggers entered the earth, the sound was muffled. Finally the men left the fire and went in for food. Patrice was alone. Once, her back prickled. She looked around, but nothing. She turned back and fell into a fire-trance, staring at the way the wood whitened at the edges as the fire glowed from the center. Just at the corner of her vision, something moved again. She looked around. At the edge of the woods, at the bottom of the trail, something or somebody was slipping t
hrough the trees. She watched it flickering in and out of the branches.
The Third Night Watch
Again, in the deepest part of the night, Patrice was alone at the fire again. The men had finished the grave. A more profound stillness had fallen. She positioned a log at the hottest point. Then, watching as the coals sucked in air and arched flames seized at the new wood greedily, she fell into a state of exhaustion so profound that her body vibrated. Her mind unclasped. Again, something moved. She looked. Saw the slipping of the seen and the emergence of the unseen. A being stooped low and carefully peered out of the brush. It was her father, eyes gleaming from black hollows, wearing the same colorless raggedy clothes they’d found him in. He saw her. It seemed he wanted something from her. He opened his red weepy mouth as if to plead. Maybe he was thirsty. Or hungry. Yet there was something so pitiful and longing in the way he looked at her, dead now, called by the other dead people, violating the laws of being dead the way he always violated the laws of being a living man. Yes, he wanted to take her with him, just as he’d always wanted her before.
Patrice stood up, thinking he might move away if she moved, and sure enough, he began to lunge along through the woods again, through crowded black trees, toward the place where his grave was waiting. She could see the black slit in the earth. He stopped there, stood at the lip of darkness, looking down. That was when his voice began, low at first, then sharpening to a high whistle. His voice flew at her, whining and bending the air. She stood as it whipped the fire into tall flames. It thrashed the bare branches and drove clouds to scud like gray smoke across black space. His voice was trying to pull the life out of her. She shook, heart pounding in her throat. As the wind whirled around her, gripping her body, tearing at her face, she could feel herself beginning to hover. She threw her weight into her feet and began to laugh.
The Night Watchman Page 26
