The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [56]
As for Ziigwan’aage, she was by no means a simple woman either. She was born in spring, when the wolverine kits come from the den and proceed to sink their teeth into anything that moves. She grew up in the twilight time when her people, the Anishinaabeg, were battling great waves of disease. Those were the times when the entire force of a woman’s existence was focused on keeping her children alive. Ziigwan’aage kept her ear to the ground and took note of illnesses as they passed into the settlement. She kept her children home at the slightest hint of something dangerous and allowed no visitors. When they weakened, she made sure she had the plant medicines she needed, picked at the highest concentration of their power. Every morning, she checked her children’s eyes and tongues. She smelled their breath and sometimes even frowned over their stools to make certain that they were healthy enough to send out into the world. Her pharmacopoeia was the woods, and at the slightest hint of trouble—dulled gaze, white tongue, a sour heat in the lungs—she picked what she needed, rummaged in her stash for the ingredients to teas, burned a powder beneath their noses, or swabbed a tincture on their gums. There was no chink in her vigilance, no margin for error. She could not afford a distraction. So when her husband began to behave in a way she found all too familiar from other women’s reports of their husbands, she decided she would cut short this nonsense. She had no time for it. She wouldn’t tolerate it. Not when she had the lives of children on her hands.
Ziigwan’aage had deemed it most expeditious to get rid of the other woman, though she was still deciding whether to spare the baby and raise it as her own. But then Anaquot had startled her, and made her think. She had impressed Ziigwan’aage as a formidable opponent and, still better, as an invincible ally. Not that they’d actually decided what to do about Simon Jack. His fate was on a thread that they pulled between them, this way and that. Sometimes as they talked they laughed at his transparent ways and marveled, with deep irony, at the similarity of things he’d said to them both, promises he’d made, endearments even. They held nothing back in their dissection of his behavior; they continued on until both felt they had purged themselves of any pity or attraction. Of course, they both knew, they hadn’t any illusions—not loving Simon Jack in the abstract was much easier than not loving Simon Jack in the flesh.
In this regard, Ziigwan’aage had the advantage of living in the heart of her family. Her old mother and sisters, her aunts and uncles, and of course the brother she’d relied on, lived all around her and could be reached via endless networks of trails broken through the trees. These people were, in fact, the crowd of beings Anaquot had sensed leaving very early that morning, having already stayed the night. They had congregated in order to take a look at the woman who had tried to steal Simon Jack. While Anaquot slept in the grip of the sleeping medicine, they had gloated at her capture and admired her baby, then melted off into the blue morning air, leaving so little trace of themselves that Anaquot had wondered whether they