The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [54]
After she administered the medicine to her child, it stirred and became more eager, lifted its head, peered at her wailing to be fed. Its hunger grew uncontrollable after a while and it began to beg with small complaining noises and then to roar with despair. Anaquot could not bear it. Even though she believed the poison that the woman had given would harm her, Anaquot put the baby to her breast.
First, she knew the pleasure of solving its desperation. Next, with a deep sigh, they melted together as one. She closed her eyes and saw the two of them together as a dot of light and then they grew and grew until they had no edges at all and were the radiant center of an infinite wheel.
This vision frightened her with its strangeness, but when she opened her eyes they were still there in the ordinary afternoon. She realized her belief about the poison might be wrong; still, she couldn’t shake it from her mind. The winter sun had entered the window at a fierce angle and its red-gold light blazed across the blue cupboard in the corner, the table, the stove, the other piles of blankets and the pole bed and the chair where the woman sat counting the little boy’s fingers over and over with him. Bezhig. Niizh. Niswi. Niiwin. Naanan. This counting between a woman and a child had been happening since numbers began. The blazing light intensified. It burned a hole in her heart, as neat as a bullet hole, and then, just as the woman’s song meant to, it took away her desire.
She experienced her love’s absence as a gradual clarity. The light faded into the trees, the room grew cold. The woman set her little boy in the corner with a rind of deer meat to chew, and then set about perfecting the fire in the stove so that her bannock would cook evenly. By the way she did this, her movements careful and spare, Anaquot saw how many thousands of times she had made food for her family. She looked past the woman, saw the milk cans full of water in the corner, knew she’d hauled it from the river or melted fresh snow. So much work and care was apparent all through the little house. The logs were neatly tamped, the quilts clean and mended. The little boy wore a shirt of thick flannel and little pants sewn of deerhide. There was a rabbit-skin blanket laid over the bed the woman was now sharing with her daughter. Those blankets took long weaving, skill, as did the reed mats on the walls and the beaded vest that Anaquot now saw was set out for mending in the last light of the day.
It was this vest, exactly, that she remembered her lover wearing. She had traced the beaded flowers and the maple leaves, the curl of the vines, as she talked to him in the shadowy overhang of rich new leaves the previous summer. Now the sight of the vest filled her with a new feeling—not of longing, but of sorrow. How hard his wife had worked, placing each bead just so, and how many hopes she had sewn into the colorful centers of the roses! Even now, the woman bent above her stitching with a singular attention that revealed her love for the wearer of the vest. Anaquot saw that.