The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [76]
Ahau! said the old men. It happened this way. He walked into the dance circle one afternoon early in the summer, and he sat down next to my grandfather. They should watch out for the rain! He pointed his chin up to the clear sky and the men remembered, as much as his smell, thinking that it certainly was not going to rain. That much they thought they knew. Rain required clouds. But my grandfather took no issue with the pitiful being and only offered Simon Jack his open can of chewing tobacco. Simon Jack took a pinch, made a little wad of the stuff, and stuck it in his lower lip. His teeth were green fangs. His long narrow jaw snapped like a fox’s. People were fascinated with his fingernails—long and twisted, gnarled like gray turtle shell. Of course, they also looked at the fancy beadwork designs that flowed all over him. He wore two bandolier bags with white backgrounds fully beaded. He folded his legs crosswise and people noted that the bottoms of his makizinan were beaded. The old men said that those makizinan were only worn by the dead. Simon Jack nodded critically at my grandfather when he rose to go sit near the drum.
“They are singing those songs backwards,” he said. “They shouldn’t do that.”
The other men thought he was wrong, and who was he to criticize? But it turned out Simon Jack knew what he was talking about, for my grandfather was very troubled by what was happening. He knew the songs that had appeared in people’s minds when the drum came into being, knew them like he knew how to breathe, but all of a sudden, when Simon Jack came into the circle, there was a shift. Grandfather Shaawano described it afterward as someone talking in his ear so he couldn’t think. The men were distracted. The songs got jumbled.
All we crave is a simple order. One day and then the next day and the next after that, if we’re lucky, to be the same. Grief is chaos. Death or illness throw the world out of whack. The drum’s order is the world’s order. To proceed with and keep that order is a gesture of desperate hope. Protect us. Save us. Let our minds remain clear of sorrow so that we can simply praise the world.
When the songs go backward, when they won’t stay in place, when the men strike the drum out of time, things should stop. We should ponder the event. Later, my grandfather was to make clear what he should have done when things went haywire. But until that day he had never lost the order and thought that he could recover it by force of mind, so the men kept on playing and singing.
Simon Jack stood and danced in place, then he danced into the circle and rounded the drum. There was nothing wrong with what he did, at first. He was showing respect. Except that soon there were no pauses, no relief. One song now led straight into the next and it was as though they all were caught—drummer, singers, dancer, drum itself—in a dark outpouring of energy. The others in the circle were disturbed. They didn’t know what they were hearing, or seeing, but they knew what they were feeling. One man said his breath cracked in him. Their hearts stopped, then raced. A sickness in another man’s belly became an ache. Someone’s legs itched, but he knew he shouldn’t dance. It was enough to see Simon Jack out there, stamping and bobbing with a terrible intentness, close-stepping as if he was flattening the grass with his dead, dead makizinan. It was enough to understand that moving toward the drum at this time would be a mistake. Those in the circle didn’t know what they felt or whether they were possessed; but nobody stopped the drummer and nobody stopped the dancer. It was as though they were all suspended, frozen, as though nothing about the scene was moving. Although everything was. And it was moving faster. The beat was. The men. Their high-pitched voices. And even faster and faster until—and my grandfather saw this, for he was staring at Simon Jack—he turned around, a flash of beads and fur and tails, and he began