The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [74]
Grandfather Shaawano had also brought along a sandwich and a jug of water. He spilled a little water on the stone and tore off a bit of his sandwich and put it there too. He thought about the drum and about all that had happened. It seemed to him that since his daughter’s first dream visit he had been driven from one question to the next question. He’d worked hard on putting the drum together, piece by piece. He’d enjoyed the exhaustion and he had needed the concentration. The life force, the restlessness, the need to move and think and accomplish things that had grown in him since he stopped wandering, were all directed into the making of the drum. It felt good now to sit in the woods doing nothing. Letting his thoughts range free. Enjoying each bite of the bannock with the salted and peppered venison grease spread inside. There were puckoons growing in the woods, mushrooms, berries. He thought he might spend the day hunting and picking them. But he heard, behind his head, which was pillowed against the birch, a small rustling and whispering. He heard the bones click. Then he turned and saw that two long, graceful, curved bones had crawled from the nest.
Well, maybe an animal had pushed them out, he thought, but he was sure he hadn’t seen them before. He picked the bones up, cradled them in his hands. Then he knew what his daughter meant and why she’d visited. He knew what to do.
So that is why the drum that now sits in this room was made with the little girl’s bones. They are strung inside on a piece of sinew anchored to the east and west, for the drum has its directions and should always be aligned as the judge has done. That little girl’s bones gave the drum its voice. Everything else about the drum, all you see, was long considered, and the meanings debated by all of those who would learn its songs and take care of it. But the bones were my grandfather’s secret. He didn’t even speak of them to his son. It was me he told, long after the last time the drum was used.
I was born many years after the drum began its life, but my grandfather and eventually my father talked about it so much that it seems part of my first memories. When my mother was with my father, she made sure that whenever the drum came out for a ceremony, he was there too. My grandfather had my father sit at the drum just behind the other men, tapping a stick on his knee, learning the songs. My grandfather started taking him along with him even when it became clear that he was lost to the bottle. Even if my father was sleeping off a drunk, my grandfather kept him near the drum, hoping that the songs would do their work. I think it might have been, no I’m sure it was, those early years with the drum that protected him later on once my grandfather died and even, perhaps, protected me. Maybe those songs helped me to survive my father’s drinking rage. For in the rare times he was sober he sang those songs and made me learn them too. And later, I never did search out oblivion in order to forget my father’s harm. Something steadied me. Something gave me rightness in my mind. Something gave me an inside calm.
This drum was powerful. People searched it out. This drum was so kind that it cured people of every variety of ill. Because our family kept this drum, people came to us. All of the people who lived close to the drum and dreamed up its songs or helped the drum somehow—repaired it or gave it gifts or even helped the people who came to see it—we grew strong. That’s what the drum is about—it gathers people in and holds them. It looks after them. But like a person, things can go wrong in spite of all the best care. And this drum had its own history and sorrow.
When I was growing up, singing that drum’s songs, I heard things discussed. I listened in on the old men’s gossip. Some stories went on for months, even years. There was