The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [62]
The ghosts who did come to visit him were tiny skeleton children who flitted and zipped across his ceiling like spidery bats. Or they were shadowy, dull figures who seemed content to sit in the corner or slowly rock in his chipped green rocking chair. They usually did nothing but sigh and mutter, low, so he could never distinguish their words. That he could not make out their conversation or their complaints or whatever they were trying to tell him on these visits was maddening. He assumed they were judging him, blaming him, for letting his daughter die and his son run away. Their eyes raked over him. They sneered in his face. When he could stand it no longer, Shaawano would lunge from his bed and strike out right and left, in a frenzy, using whatever came to hand—knife, stick, board, belt. Driving them out usually put an end to his groaning need and he would totter, blinking, to the outhouse, and then return to sit by his door in the weak sun. He always felt so much better, once these hellish episodes subsided, that he often wondered why he dreaded them in the first place. But likewise, when he was curled in his bed, heart pumping with terror and longing, he could never remember how it felt to be at peace and so believed that his torment would last forever.
When he’d emerged, and was sitting in the sun, Shaawano would feel a remorse and calm so thrilling that tears might fill his eyes. He missed his son. There was so much that he wanted to show him! My grandfather noticed everything—the way wild raspberries had taken root in his torn and idle fishing nets and how young trees had grown through his junked wagon and the piles of his traps. Their prickling fronds, wildly spurting out the wood of the wagon box and through the jaws and knots of things that catch and kill, were a glorious signal. A chickadee pausing with a tiny worm in its beak, the blessed gurgle of a red-winged blackbird, the waves sounding on the lakeshore—anything, everything, caused Shaawano a happiness almost as unbearable as his pain. In this way, too, it was difficult to be so weakened. To wildly celebrate would have once been the appropriate response to any small light or joy. Now, standing up to the beauty, being small in it, taking one breath of sweet air after the next, often produced its own form of panic. This, he named after some time, guilt.
My grandfather said himself that he had been an evil person in his first season of random pain. He had done many things that were beyond the limits of decency. Things he dreaded bringing to mind. The worst things, of course, pierced into his brain with illuminating power. Those things were not the fighting or brawling or fucking or the stupid thefts. The scenes that came back vivid and sharp-edged were the cruel moments when he’d felt a black satisfaction, even a surge of glee in his throat, when he hurt his own son. He’d left the boy hungry and even ridiculed his grief over the loss of his mother. He had tampered with his son’s spirit and now the boy was lost to him. Someone else had stepped in, taken the boy home, and barred Shaawano from visits. But the damage to the boy was done and some things cannot be undone. It was as though what happened with the wolves had set loose one long string of accidents that seemed like fate. And now the guilt. Shaawano couldn’t get what he’d done out of his mind. He began to hate himself so much that the only relief he could obtain was to picture himself going back and savagely attacking the man he had been. He killed himself over and over in his mind. But when his bloody fantasies were exhausted, Shaawano was always left with Shaawano. The man who could never take back a single blow.
So there he was. He had started making pine pole furniture to get a living, and he could carve out and put together rough chairs and tables or bend more intricate