The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [31]
I am making eggs for breakfast the next morning when I hear the putter of the lawn mower. I’ve woken furious and self-berating. I dragged my heart around like an apple on a string. Dangled it, daring some man to take a bite. Now Krahe sinks his teeth into it and I’m terrified to be devoured. I jerk away and swing wildly out of reach. And now the lawn mower! I turn off the stove and charge outside, but when the mower comes into view Kit Tatro is behind it with his shirt off. Kit’s bare flesh. An unforeseen drawback. His skinny chest heaves as he cuts the rise. The arrowheads and amulets on cords around his neck tangle as he strains to round the bitten stump of an old elm. His arms are ropy and sickly pale. His tender skin is an affront. I want to tell him to put his shirt back on, but don’t know how I would say such a thing without hurting his feelings. He waves at me and then I have to wave back. He cuts the engine, walks toward me.
There’s a couple of things he wants to ask me.
“You should ask my mother,” I say quickly. “She’s the one with the cultural knowledge.”
“Well, this is about the grass.”
“Oh.”
We talk about whether to reseed some bald spots and how there are new shade-friendly varieties. For a man with a grown-over, junked-up yard, he is surprisingly critical of the quality of my lawn.
“Some of it’s just quack,” he states. “Around the back of the house you’ve been invaded by creeping charley. And there’s dandelions. I don’t even know where to start with those. What do you want me to do?”
“Just leave them.”
He looks dubious, skeptical, pained. To divert him I change the subject.
“Do you know how to install a new lock and key set?”
“Of course.”
I show him the back door to the stairway that leads to my room, and he tells me that he can drive to the hardware store for a new lock and that he’ll change it as soon as he finishes the lawn. Later, while I am working upstairs, I hear the whine of his drill and the fumbling and knocking of his tools as he sets about the task. Once, twice, I nearly go down and ask him to quit, but then I look out a back window onto the trees, the bursting clouds of blossoms.
4
Jewelweed
The summer passes and I handle the sale of the Tatro collection to a Cincinnati museum, all except for the drum. I’ve grown very attached to having it in my bedroom; I touch or gaze upon it every time I enter. The drum exerts the most connective hold upon me, and it even starts to influence my dreams. Years ago, my sister stopped coming to me at night. I stopped dreaming of her, and I missed that because it was comforting to imagine that she lived a life parallel to mine and was not dead but merely somewhere else. I even wrote down things she said to me. She spoke in the form of poems. Now I am surprised to dream that she’s learned to play the piano. Her hands move with an alert grace, and she glances up at me and nods. She has a husband, a dark man walking at a distance. She is a woman, all grown up in spite of death. Bach’s Thirteenth Invention fills my dream with dark rigor, a precise contrapuntal tangle of notes. I confuse her fingers with the passionate mechanism of the spider, and I wake up sweating and cold again with loss. I lost myself along with her back there, I know it. When I touch the drum and think of her, though, I feel much stronger. I feel she has come back to help me. And so the summer, with my dreams of her that return, precious and specific, passes too quickly, as they all do here. The time of the year comes that I am always surprised to find so hard.
The orb spiders have taken up their posts in the unmowed fields of August. Just as things come ripe, the creatures always set their webs, sewn with perfect zigzag seams, across the swathes of grass, jewelweed, goldenrod, milkweed, and burdock behind the sagging barn. Last week, we were approached by a chain restaurant that specializes in false folksiness.