The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [13]
Sarah Tatro did not intend to let the house and its contents trap her. Over the cup of coffee—one of those thick diner-style white mugs surely swiped from a local café by one of the uncles—she told me that she was anxious to clear the place out and put it on the market. I found her forthrightness appealing and yet, at the same time, that the Tatro house should pass from Tatro ownership after nearly two centuries infected me with a faint melancholy. It is unusual for one place to remain so long in a single family’s hands—I was, surprisingly, tempted to try dissuading her from breaking with the past and carrying on with, of all things, her own life. I controlled myself. I took out my notebook and began to make a rough list of the contents of the house. Later on, I would be joined by two assistants, but I prefer to work alone at first, as does mother. I like to get a feel for the things in the house, a sense of the outlook or taste of the person who, though safely in the next world, still lingers in the arrangement and treatment of goods. I like to make peace with the dead.
Were I a traditional Ojibwe, I would have a special place in the community because of my line of work. According to a number of written sources from my collection, the objects left behind by a dead person were regarded with fearful emotion. They were never kept by family, but immediately gathered up by a person whose job it was to parcel the belongings of the deceased out to others. I assume things haven’t changed much, at least among people who live the old way. Possessions are thought to attract the spirit back to their loved ones, and so only persons unrelated to the dead are considered safe to handle them. Those persons who distribute the objects should not wear the color red—it is the one color the dead are thought to see clearly. It attracts them. They wander toward it. I avoid wearing red in my work, for somehow I find that idea compelling.
I tell Sarah that I am ready to begin a preliminary tagging and cataloguing of the main portion of the house, and then I ask if her uncles had any particular interest, field of study, or collection that might require special handling or appraisal.
“Oh, I don’t know, there’s just so much of everything.” She waves her hands. “So many old sets of dishes. Uncle John owned a number of guns. Some of those are old. And then the closets on the ground floor go way back behind the walls. They’re stuffed. That’s pretty much to say it’s anybody’s guess.”
I am on my own, and very soon I am immersed in the pleasures of my job. The sorrows of strangers are part of my business, and were I to examine my motives in continuing this work, I might find that from their losses I extract some bit of comfort—as though my constant proximity to death protects me and those I love. The furniture in the first two rooms on the ground floor is in adequate repair and quite good, though there are no “finds.” Predictably, the Tatros weren’t bibliophiles, nor is there much in the way of decorative little touches—lamps, vases, figurines. Yet the walls are hung with six nicely done paintings by local artists and there is one oil sketch, a sort of pre-painting drawing, by Maxfield Parrish. I am pleased to see it and I wonder if the Tatros were acquainted with him. That particular discovery would have made my day at any other time. In this case it also indicates the Tatro tendency to hold on to things, as the Parrish was well-known to have value and could easily have been sold. I try not to get my hopes up, but when I open the door to the first closet my fingers are clumsy with excitement. Quickly, I go through what I can see—the usual boxes of magazines. Piles of curtains and old and faded linen. A great many boots of all styles, reaching back for decades. Mothballed coats of everything from wool to skunk skins. The closet goes on