The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [44]
She trails off. All of a sudden I can feel Chook’s amused waiting. I can feel Geraldine’s eyes on me and I know she knows, she’s known from the beginning, why I am here. She knows enough about things generally to know where the drum came from, but she doesn’t completely know its origin or kinship; she doesn’t know how it is tied into my family or why my grandfather brought it into being. I look at the two women sitting in the judge’s living room—so prim and intense. Their hands are folded in their laps, but I can tell they have long fingers. Their feet are tucked away from sight, but they probably have big narrow feet with long second toes. Those two don’t know who they are, what it means that they are Pillagers. They don’t know that they came from Simon Jack and they don’t know what he did to Anaquot, my grandmother, or to my aunt whose name is never spoken, or to himself. They don’t know what the drum did to him, either, what the drum knows, or what it contains. They don’t know why my father sold it in spite of the many persons it healed. They don’t know the whole story, but I do know it. So I tell them.
2
The Shawl
Among the Anishinaabeg on the road where I live, it is told how a woman loved a man other than her husband, and went off into the bush and bore his child. Her name was Anaquot, and like her namesake the cloud she was changeable, moody and sullen one moment, threatening, her lower lip jutting and eyes flashing, filled with storms. The next moment she would shake her hair over her face, blow it out straight in front of her, and make her children scream with laughter. For she had two children by her husband, Shaawano, one a yearning boy of five years and the other a capable daughter of nine.
When she brought the baby out of the trees late that autumn, so long ago, the girl was like a second mother, even waking in the night to clean the baby and nudge it to her mother’s breast. Anaquot slept through its cries, hardly woke. It wasn’t that Anaquot didn’t love her baby, no it was quite the opposite—she loved it too much, the way she loved its father, not her husband. This passion ate away at her and her feelings were unbearable. If she could have thrown that love off, she would have, but the thought of the man who lived across the lake was with her always. She became a gray sky, stared monotonously at the walls, sometimes wept into her hands for hours at a time. At last, she couldn’t rise to cook or keep the cabin neat, and it was too much for the girl child, who curled up each night exhausted in her brown and red plaid shawl, and slept and slept, so that the husband had to wake the girl to wake her mother, for he was afraid of Anaquot’s bad temper, and it was he who roused her into anger by the sheer fact that he was himself, and not the other.
At last, even though he loved Anaquot, the husband found their life together was no good anymore. So it was he who sent word to the other man’s camp. Now in those days our people lived widely scattered, along the shores and in the islands, even out in the plains. There were hardly roads yet, just trails, though we had horses and wagons and for the winter, sleds. And it was very hard when the other man’s uncle came round, in his wagon fitted out with sled runners, to fetch Anaquot, for she and her husband had argued right up to the last about the children, argued fiercely until the husband finally gave in, turned his face to the wall, and did not move to see the daughter, whom he treasured, wrap herself in her plaid robe alongside the mother in the wagon bed. They left soon after, with their bundles and sacks, not even heating up the stones to warm their feet. The father had stopped his ears, so he did not hear the cry when his son understood all of a sudden that he was the one who would be left behind.
As the uncle slapped the reins and the horse lurched forward, the boy tried to jump into the wagon, but his mother pried his hands off the boards, crying gego, gego, and he fell down hard. There was something in him that would not let her leave him, though.