The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [0]
LOUISE ERDRICH
To my daughters
Contents
PART ONE
REVIVAL ROAD
1 Revival Road
2 The Painted Drum
3 The Orchard
4 Jewelweed
PART TWO
NORTH OF HOOPDANCE
1 The Visitors
2 The Shawl
3 The Wolves
4 The Little Girl Drum
5 The Ornamental Man
PART THREE
THE LITTLE GIRL DRUM
1 Shawnee sat her little brother down and pried the crayon…
2 “The dead are drinking here tonight,” said Ira as she joined…
3 Shawnee stared into the fire for a while, then suddenly…
4 At the lighted gas stop, Ira bought fifteen dollars worth…
5 Shawnee pulled herself out of her body and went up…
6 Morris found the pile of blankets and stepped into the…
7 A hospital is a world apart, running day and night…
PART FOUR
REVIVAL ROAD
LAST CHAPTER
The Chain
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY LOUISE ERDRICH
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PART ONE
REVIVAL ROAD
1
Revival Road
Faye Travers
Leaving the child cemetery with its plain hand-lettered sign and stones carved into the weathered shapes of lambs and angels, I am lost in my thoughts and pause too long where the cemetery road meets the two-lane highway. This distraction seems partly age, but there is more too, I think. These days I consider and reconsider the slightest of choices, as if one might bring me happiness and the other despair. There is no right way. No true path. The more familiar the road, the easier I’m lost. Left and the highway snakes north, to our famous college town; but I turn right and am bound toward the poor and historical New England village of Stiles and Stokes with its great tender maples, its old radiating roads, a stern white belfry and utilitarian gas pump/grocery. Soon after the highway divides off. Uphill and left, a broad and well-kept piece of paving leads, as the trunk of a tree splits and diminishes, to ever narrower outgrowths of Revival Road. This is where we live, my mother and I, just where the road begins to tangle.
From the air, our road must look like a ball of rope flung down haphazardly, a thing of inscrutable loops and half-finished question marks. But there is order in it to reward the patient watcher. In the beginning, the road is paved, although the material is of a grade inferior to the main highway’s asphalt. When the town votes swing toward committing more money to road upkeep, it is coated with light gravel. Over the course of a summer’s heat, the bits of stone are pressed into the softened tar, making a smooth surface for the cars to pick up speed. By midwinter, the frost creeps beneath the road and flexes, creating heaves that force the cars to slow again. I’m glad when that happens, for children walk this road to the bus stop below. They walk past with their dogs, wearing puffy jackets of saturated brilliance—hot pink, hot yellow, hot blue. They change shape and grow before my eyes, becoming the young drivers of fast cars who barely miss the smaller children, who, in their turn, grow up and drive away from here.
As I say, there is order, but the pattern is continually complicated by the wilds of occurrence. The story surfaces here, snarls there, as people live their disorder to its completion. My mother, Elsie, and I try to tack life down with observation. But if it takes a lifetime to see things clearly, and a lifetime beyond, even, perhaps only the religious dead have a true picture of our road. It is, after all, named for the flat field at its southern end that once hosted a yearly revival meeting. Those sweeping conversions resulted in the establishment of at least one or two churches that now seem before their time in charismatic zeal. Over the years they merged with newer denominations, but left their dead sharing earth with Universalists and Quakers and even utter nonbelievers. As for the living, we’re trapped in scene after scene. We haven’t the overview that the dead have attained. Still, I try to at least record connections. I try to find my way through our daily quarrels, surprises, and small events here on this road.
We were home doing