The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [2]
When Davan Eyke was forced to leave home, he did not go far, just up to Krahe’s to inhabit the little cottage beneath the boughs of the beautiful, enfolding pine. It is a tree of an unusually powerful shape, and I have speculated often with the artist upon the year of its first growth. We are both quite certain it was small, a mere sapling, too tender to bother with, when the agents of the English king first marked the tallest and straightest trees in the forests of New England as off limits to colonists and destined for the shipyards of the Royal Navy, masts to hang great sails. A large pine growing now was a seedling when the climax growth, the pine canopy so huge and dense no light shone onto the centuries of bronze needles below, was axed down. This tree splits halfway up into three parts and forms an enormous crown. In that crotch, there is a raven’s nest, which is unusual since ravens are shy of northeasterners, having a long race memory for the guns, nets, and poisons with which they were once eradicated.
When Davan Eyke moved in, the ravens watched, but they watch everything. They are a humorous, highly intelligent bird, and knew immediately that Davan Eyke would be trouble. Therefore they dropped sticks upon the boy’s roof, shat on the lintel, stole small things he left in the yard, and hid them. Pencils, coins, and once his car keys. They also laughed. The laughter of a raven is a sound unendurably human. You may know it if you have heard it in your own throat as the noise of another of Krahe’s favorites, Schadenfreude, the joy that rises as one witnesses the pain of others. Perhaps the raven’s laughter, the low rasp, sounds cynical to our ears and reminds us of the depth of our own human darkness. Of course, there is nothing human in the least about it and its source is unknowable, as are the hearts of all things wild. Davan Eyke was bothered though, enough so that he complained to Krahe about the way the birds disturbed his sleep by dropping twigs and pinecones on his roof, which was of painted tin. End over end, the refuse clattered down.
“Get used to them” was all the artist said to Davan Eyke.
Krahe tells me this the day I bring the mail, a thing I do for him often, when he feels he is close to tossing himself into the throes of some ambitious piece. Then, he cannot or will not break the thread of his concentration by making a trip to the post office. There is too much at stake. This could be, I know although he will not admit it, the day his talent resurrects itself painfully from the grief where it has been plunged.
“I have in mind a perception of balance, although the whole thing must be brutally off the mark and highly dysphoric.”
He speaks like this, pompous, amused at his own pronouncements, brightening his eyes beneath harsh brows.
“Awkward,” I say, deflatingly. “Maybe even ugly.”
In his self-satisfaction there is more than a hint of the repressed Kansas farm boy he was when he first left home for New York. That boy is covered by many layers now—there is faked European ennui, an aggressive macho crackle, an edge of Lutheran judgmentalness about, among many things, other people’s religions. He says he has none. I can infuriate him easily by observing that, all the same, he is still Lutheran—a fire-breathing crank. Lapsed, maybe, but still tearing down hypocrisies. Still nailing his theses to the doors of cathedrals. He also descends at times to a strata of ongoing sadness over the not-so-recent loss of his second wife, who was killed on a road out west