The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [70]
“What?” His son rubbed his side. “Know what, n’deydey?”
“About the old man,” Albert laughed harder. “My grandfather.”
“What?” said old Shaawano.
“Friend,” said Albert, “you’ll like to hear this. The old man, my grandfather, the one who made that canoe in his age and cared for it until he died, he was the keeper of that wood. He smoked his pipe with it.” Albert lifted his pipe, which was long with a smooth okij, golden red. “This very pipe. This is the one he smoked with those everlasting trees.”
By the end of the evening it was settled. Albert and my grandfather and the boy—whom Albert had sent to the mission school, but who kept running home, so that Albert was educating him in the old ways as best he could—would go out together and visit the old cedar trees. Albert would tell Geeshik what was happening. She would nod, my grandfather imagined, blink her grave, wide, owlish eyes, and smile her hidden smile. She knew everything, she knew it anyway, said Albert, she had learned all there was to know by sitting quietly and humbly in the corner.
“She knew you were going to find your way toward this,” he told my grandfather. “This was the fourth generation, this is the time, and it was said that our drum would be brought to us by a little girl.”
“It is an honor,” said my grandfather, after a while. “Still, I would rather that my little girl was grown up and standing before me now in the fullness of her own life.”
Albert put his hand on my grandfather Shaawano’s shoulder and they stood together.
“Even this does not bring her back to you, I know. Still, it is something.”
“Yes, it is something,” said my grandfather.
The day that my grandfather, Albert, and his boy, whose nickname was Chickie, went out to visit the trees, new leaves were just unfurling. A light breeze gave no hindrance. There was warm sun, a clear sky. Best of all, no zagimeg and no biting flies. The three paddled all morning, ate their lunch of grease and bannock and tea on a flat gray rock, and continued on into the afternoon, until they reached the place where they thought the trees were. Albert had gone there with his grandfather when he was young, but his memory was a little off. My own grandfather’s ideas had been formed by the dream, but they, too, were faulty. The three tramped around in the bush until it grew too dark to see, then they made a fire for the night, boiled more tea and roasted a duck that Albert had plugged on the way there. After they had eaten, they talked of small matters and then rolled up in their blankets.
As they were falling asleep, my grandfather heard a far-off pack of wolves raise their howl. For a long time the wolves spoke of all they’d seen and felt and eaten that day. Shaawano stayed awake listening. He had never blamed the wolves for what they had done. He had never gone to war with them. The wolves had only acted according to their natures, after all. Only humans can choose to change what they are, and change is treacherous. Even now, the first drink that Shaawano had taken still haunted him, as did the other first drink in his life—the first drink he had refused. In the howls of the wolves, full and gurgling, he saw that full glass, the one he had mystically pushed away, and even in the holy dark somewhere near the great old trees, he dreamed that instead of pushing the drink away he reached for it and put it to his lips, and as its fire entered him, he sighed and began to weep.
Those great trees had been struck down by lightning, it was said. They never had been touched by a whiteman’s ax. In the morning the three walked out into the bush and after only minutes of walking a strange thing occurred. They burst into a clearing, or what seemed like one. As their eyes adjusted from the cool shade of the woods to a dazzling plain of light, they saw from the nakedness of ground that they had come upon an area of devastation. Trees had been snapped off like matchsticks and pulverized to splinters. Only a few of the