The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [46]
There were three of us, me the oldest at ten and my little sister and brother twins of only six years. I was surprisingly good at taking care of them, I think, and because we learned to survive together during those drinking years we always have been close. Their names are Doris and Raymond, and they married a brother and sister in turn. When we get together, which we do when we can, for they live in the Cities now, there come times in the talking and card playing, and maybe even in the light beer now and then, we will bring up those days. Most people understand how it was. Our story isn’t that uncommon. But for us, it helps to compare our points of view.
How could I know, for instance, that Raymond saw it the time I hid my father’s belt? I pulled it from around his waist while he was passed out and then buried it in the woods. I kept doing it every time after that. We laughed at how our father couldn’t understand how when he went to town drinking his belt was always stolen. He even accused his shkwebii buddies of the theft. I had good reasons. Not only was he embarrassed, after, to go out with pants held up with a rope, but he couldn’t snake that belt out in anger and snap the hooked buckle end in the air. He couldn’t hit us with it. Of course, being resourceful, he used other things. There was a board. A willow wand. And there was himself, his hands and fists and boots and things he could throw. He’d never remember. He’d be furious and wreck us, wreck things, and then he’d talk about our mother. But it got so easy to evade him, eventually, that after a while we never suffered a bruise or scratch. We had our own places in the woods, even a little campfire for the cold nights. And we’d take money from him every chance we got, slip it from his shoe where he thought it hidden. He became, for us, a thing to be exploited, avoided, outsmarted, and used. We survived off him like a capricious and dangerous line of work. I suppose we stopped thinking of him as a human being, certainly as a father, after only a couple years.
I got tired of it. When I was thirteen years old, I got my growth earlier than some boys, and one night when Doris and Raymond and me were sitting around wishing for something besides the oatmeal and commodity powdered milk which I had stashed so he couldn’t sell it, I heard him coming down the road. He never learned to shut up before he got to us. He never understood we lit out on him, I guess. So he was shouting and making noise all the way to the house, and Doris and Raymond looked at me and went for the back window. Then they stopped, because they saw I was not going. C’mon, ambe, get with it, they tried to pull me along. I shook them off and told them to get out, be quick, I was staying.
I think I can take him now, is what I said.
And I know they were scared, but their faces, oh their faces rose up toward me in this beautiful reveal all full of hope and belief. So when he came in the door, and I faced him, I was not afraid.
He was big though, he hadn’t wasted from the alcohol or the long disease yet. His nose had got pushed to one side in a fight, then slammed back on the other side, so now it was straight. His teeth were half gone and he smelled the way he had to smell, being five days drunk. When he came in the door, he paused for a moment, his eyes red and swollen to tiny slits. Then he saw I was waiting for him and he smiled in a bad way. He went for me. My first punch surprised him. I had been practicing this on a hay-stuffed bag, then a padded board, toughening my fists, and I’d gotten so quick I flickered like fire. But I wasn’t strong as he was, still, and he had a good twenty pounds