The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [77]
After that, my grandfather put the drum away. He kept it off the ground, in its own place, of course. He took it out occasionally to visit other drums. He fed it tobacco and water and he made sure that it heard no bad talk and saw no bad sights. But even when the desperately ill or those pleading for the sick begged him to take out that drum, he never would. And as I said, he told me why, he confided in me. He said that he couldn’t be sure of that drum anymore. He told me that the drum itself contained his daughter’s bones. He believed that she was subject, as children are, to rages beyond their control, and that she had caused what happened in the circle. She was angry at the man who took away her mother and caused her own life to end. She had no pity on pitiful Simon Jack.
In the end, though Simon Jack had nearly ruined his life, my grandfather was the only one to take pity on him. The men carried Simon Jack from the circle to my grandfather’s house and laid him out on a bed of pine boughs in the yard. There, the women who care for the dead made a fire that they would keep burning for three days to light the way for his spirit. They washed Simon Jack for burial. As they worked, the rain sprinkled directly down upon them from a clear sky, just as the dead man said it would.
I heard it whispered when I was young, then it was talked about more openly as people forgot who the Pillagers were or why so many had feared Ziigwan’aage. When they prepared Simon Jack, they found the reason he never took those clothes off. It was simple. He couldn’t. The clothes were stitched directly to him. His skin had grown around the threads and beads in some places. The clothes were molded to him in others. The women clipped the clothes carefully from Simon Jack and burned them in a great fire hot enough to consume even the glass beads. They tied his body in birch bark and laid him naked in the ground. He was buried at the entrance to the main path out to the Pillager camp, where those two women would have to step over him whenever they came to town.
Generally, it is, or was, not considered right for a woman to step over anything that belongs to a man. It supposedly gives her power over him. So I don’t know what the women had in mind when they put Simon Jack underground there—perhaps it was a warning or a reminder, or perhaps with the dead the old taboo is reversed. I really don’t know whether Simon Jack’s placement bothered Anaquot or Ziigwan’aage or whether his death made the least difference to them at all. They were to die in the appalling illness that shook our tribe apart. The child alone survived, my father’s half sister, Fleur. And of course there was Niibin’aage, lost into the east by then. As for the drum, it was cared for in the best way possible, as I have said, but it was never used again. I think my grandfather had a conflict in his heart over what to do with it. Once, he told me about the secret location of a cave and he asked me to make sure he was buried there, and the drum with him. Another time he said it should be burned. He also told me that he’d written down songs with some old men and that the drum should be restored to use after forty winters.
My grandfather died unexpectedly. He died before any of these options could be made definite. After his death, when the old men came together to discuss who should take over his songs and feed his guardian spirits, and who should care for his little girl drum, things were disposed of as the old men saw fit. They gave the drum to my father. Perhaps they thought its power would heal him up, sober him. Or maybe they knew he would sell the drum, as eventually he did, to the trader Jewett Parker Tatro for rum and beer. Perhaps they knew how it would happen and they thought that the drum needed to go east, to grow up a little