The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [40]
There is a person who asks a lot of me, a woman for whom everything goes wrong. She has tired out everyone else on this reservation. I think I am the only one who doesn’t find a dire excuse of their own to get rid of her before she makes a request. So this woman, Chook she is called because of her crackling thin hair and how she always wears a hat, this Chook must think everybody on this whole reservation except me is in a state of continual emergency. People tempt fate, even, when Chook calls them up, by inventing really awful things that nobody wants to happen.
“Mary Sunday’s stove blew up, so she can’t drive me into town,” says Chook. Or even, “Teddy Eagle has something called yellow fever that could turn into smallpox if he’s not real careful.”
She laughs. As she is no dummy she knows a stupid excuse when she hears one. But I just take it at face value.
“That’s tough luck,” I say, resigned. I wait to hear what she’s got in mind for me to do. I really don’t know why I always end up helping her out. She’s a hard person to feel sorry for because she has more pity for herself than another person could possibly muster, but perhaps I do these things because I know in spite of everything that Chook is a good mother. Her irritating requests and desperations end up benefiting her children and the grandchildren she is raising—the oldest two grown sons, Morris and John, and the two much younger, a boy and a girl, who, unlike Chook, are always well dressed and with whom she is strict. From being around them I know they get good grades, and are not allowed to drink soda pop or watch too much television or ride around on other kids’ ATVs without a helmet. Plus she is kind of hysterical about seat belts, which, really, a mother should be. Still, that doesn’t make her less annoying or cause my eyes not to roll up to the ceiling when I answer the phone and it is her.
One day she calls, my day off, of course, and has a peculiar mission for me to go on. Sometimes I think she steals a look at my schedule in the back room on the hospital wall. I’m yawning. I thought for once I’d sleep in. But Chook has other uses for me.
“Bernard,” she says, “have you got a pickax?”
Many of her requests begin like that. She’s got most of my tools and garden equipment at her house now.
“Yeah,” I say, “I still have my pickax. You haven’t got that yet.”
She gives a soft, sad little laugh. “When Mike died, he took all his tools with him, eh?”
Mike was her husband, whom I sometimes think died so he wouldn’t get pestered by Chook anymore. He needed the peace and quiet. He went easily, no fuss. Drove himself to the emergency room and was dead of a heart attack five minutes after he got there. In the ground three days later. With all of his tools, according to Chook. I don’t even want to know what she is talking about. But she tells me.
“He borrowed from everybody else, so they come here for the funeral supper and they end up taking whatever they lent my husband and more, too, I think, besides. Once that night was up I look around me and I don’t see half what we used to have. But I was too broke up to say anything about it, eh? Me, I never said nothing. Just let it go.”
“I’ve got quite a lot of business going on today, Chook, so if you—”
“Oh, Bernard? There’s something I gotta ask you!”
I shut my eyes, weary already, already anticipating one of her usual requests. “Let’s hear it.” But instead of a ride to the bank during which I will hear the state of her meager bank account, or a plumbing disaster where I’ll be confronted with a tangle of plugged pipes, she asks me something I can’t register at first. She asks me to come and help her dig up her husband’s body. She has to repeat it three times before I realize she’s serious.
“I can’t do that! I mean, I would never do that. Anyway, I think you have to get some kind of permit, or go through the church.”
“No,” she says, “I don’t have to do that. Remember, he had himself buried on the ridge with the traditionals.”
Well, I did remember