The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [107]
“So your vision consists of a brand name. You are a brand name?” I can’t help myself.
Kit puts his hands up again as if to say, Don’t ask me. “I’m doing research now. I’ll tell you all about it if you like.”
Then Kit Tatro walks off into the woods just behind our house. He is carrying with him not a musket, this time, but his bow with the arrows fitted into a graceful outrigger-type rack. He is dressed not in the usual hunter orange or camouflage, but in a radiant buckskin jacket and black jeans. He is carefully shaved and the long hair he has been growing out all year tosses across his shoulders. Actually, he does not seem to have been tending a marijuana crop. And one wouldn’t like to see him gut a deer in that jacket without an apron—the unmarked leather is spotless and soft as caramel. He nods to me as he crosses the edge of our yard. As he disappears, striding along in his boots, hair flowing behind him, he looks less like the forlorn wannabe I am used to seeing. He has more presence somehow, more attitude, a new gravity. It really seems like he is someone.
Dear Faye and Elsie,
I have been meaning to write to you for a long time now. Please accept my apology on this delay. Things have been very busy with the drum ever since last winter. At that time an incident occurred.
A family of four—three children and their mother—have lived near me. Last winter, while the mother was gone, the house burned down with the children getting out in time. It was a subzero night and the oldest girl, named Shawnee, decided to take her little brother and sister through the woods to my house. There is a shallow ravine that fills up with snow just before you get to my yard. All three plunged down into it. They very well might have froze. Shawnee said that she was having a dream, and the others had blacked out and given up, when she heard the sound of a drum. As she describes it, the sound drew her up. It got louder and louder until she reached my house with her brother and sister. All of this time, I was asleep. The drum was with me as it always is. I heard nothing. To my ear, the drum was silent.
I wanted to tell you this as a way of thanking you. The drum is in regular use now, and you are always welcome wherever the drum is.
My father was the one who sold the drum to the old Indian agent, Jewett Tatro, shortly before he moved back east along with his collection. Selling that drum was one of the things my father most regretted having done in his life. When he spoke about it, he would hang his head and stare at the floor for a long time. It was as if he was looking right through the floor. You couldn’t talk to him at those times.
With the drum back, there is a good feeling here. People have come together around it. I am surprised. That young girl Shawnee has moved back with her mother to a house built on the site of the old one. Our housing authority did come through there pretty good.
Sincerely,
Bernard Shaawano
So who can say where we’ll find our rescue?
Still, this is not a story about the kind of revivals that occurred so long ago at the end of our road. For to suddenly say, I believe, I am convinced, even saved, and to throw myself into Native traditions as Kit Tatro wishes so sincerely to do, is not in my character. Salvation seems a complicated process with many wobbling steps, and I am skeptical and slow to act. We will travel back home to be part of what Bernard calls feasting the drum, and we also will learn the songs that belong to it. But I’m sure that in spite of my impulsive suggestions to Elsie, it will take us years of prudent thinking and financial juggling to actually change the circumstances of our life. Yet change they will. Even now, nothing is the same as it was before I reached out of my untested rectitude and stole the drum.
Then, too, sometimes things happen all at once.
I walk often in the woods in the early fall, before the hunters arrive from Concord and the suburbs of Boston and proceed to blast away at dogs and cows. Every year there is a goodly