The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [80]
They knew exactly when the oil ran out because it got so cold, so fast. Shawnee dressed Apitchi in everything that she could find for him to wear, and then she made Alice put on her leggings and three pairs of socks and snowsuit and packs. She got herself dressed, too, in every warm piece of clothing that she had. But it was a restless, unrelenting cold and it was late afternoon. If the bill was paid they could have used the stove, it was electric. They could have opened the oven and sat around it as they had done before. Or used the woodstove. They should have kept the woodstove. Shawnee’s grandfather had been angry when they took it out. Now it was dumped behind the house and covered with snow. The hole in the wall was still there, sealed over with an aluminum pie plate. Shawnee knew the old stovepipe was propped next to the back door. She went outside and tugged it out of the snow, then dragged it into the house. It wasn’t that heavy, it was a hollow of thin sheet metal. She stood on two chairs and ripped the pie plate off the wall. She had Alice steady the pipe as she fitted it into the hole. Twice it fell out of the wall before Shawnee thought to drag another chair underneath the bottom half. The pipe stayed, propped up.
Now the thing was to make a fire right underneath the stovepipe, without burning up the chair. It was an old metal chair but had a plastic seat and backrest. Cement blocks and boards made a shelf in one corner. Shawnee took four blocks and laid them out underneath the stovepipe. She took four more blocks and set them on top of those. The blocks were heavy. By the time she’d got them all set up she was warm in all her clothing, but she was also dizzy. She took a deep breath, went over to the stove, and removed the rack from the middle. There were two cookie sheets underneath the oven and she took those, too. She put the rack on the blocks and the cookie sheets over it, and said, “Now let’s get some paper and some wood.” Her voice surprised her. It was scratchy and cold as the air.
First she crushed up old papers and movie-star magazines. Then on top of that she put shredded cardboard and tiny sticks. She took a book of matches from where Mama kept them, a bowl on the counter out of Apitchi’s reach. She lighted the crumpled paper, and when the flames were long she added more strips of cardboard and thicker twigs that had been lying outdoors on top of the snow. But the snow was too deep to get bigger pieces of wood and the old wood pile had been used up in the summer. Shawnee cracked apart an old stool and dragged over a laundry basket full of wooden blocks that a church group had given them—all different colors. When the fire was hot enough, she fed first the pieces of the stool, then a block, another block, into the flames. She thought Apitchi might cry, for they were his blocks, but though he opened his mouth in distress no cry came out. He clung tight to Alice. Some of the smoke went up the chimney pipe and some collected over them, but they could breathe all right. There were a lot of blocks, there was another chair, a lamp base, birch-bark baskets that her mother had started but hadn’t yet finished to sell, other things that could be burned. Shawnee dragged all those things around them and then she got into the blankets with her brother and sister. The fire gave off enough warmth and they all fit underneath the bear robe.
2
“The dead are drinking here tonight,” said Ira as she joined the man at the table. They were in a town bar where the hard-drinking people went, a tough place where everyone looked up each time a new person entered from the icy street. The drinkers didn’t look away once the door shut and the blast of cold air was absorbed into the bar’s steamy atmosphere—they just kept watching emptily the way the dead stare. Ira looked right back at them and narrowed her eyes.
“I don’t feel like going home.”
“You feel like coming with me,” the man, who was not drunk, stated, “but you can’t because if you