The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [90]
“She said that she heard the drum,” Bernard said. “She said the drum told her where to go. It was pitch-black in the woods. My lights were out. She found me anyway.”
“So you were up at night, drumming in the dark, having your own little powwow,” Ira mumbled, dropping into sleep. She began to breathe deep and light.
“No,” said Bernard to himself, after a while. “No, I wasn’t. That drum is still covered up in the corner, where it always sits. I was asleep when they broke my window.”
7
A hospital is a world apart, running day and night by its own rules. Ira had stayed in the hospital for only a short time when her children were born. Her father had been in the hospital a few weeks but then he died at home. She hadn’t ever stayed overnight with him. So the way things worked at the Indian Health Service hospital was new to her. The first day passed in getting the children settled, in watching them, talking to the doctors, calibrating each step of their recovery. That night, Ira fell asleep on a plastic recliner in her daughters’ room. The chair was slippery and hard but reclined at a good angle. She’d certainly slept in worse places. The next morning, she woke stiff and sore, but that could have been from running through the snowy woods. Shawnee and Alice were in a double room and Alice still had the IV drip with the plastic catheter taped fast to the back of her hand. She was too weak to use the bathroom and the nurses had fixed an overnight diaper onto her, which humiliated her. She wouldn’t speak. She lay very still with her eyes shut, pretending to be unconscious. During the night, Ira had risen every time the nurses had come in to check the children. They used a finger tube to read their respiratory rates and oxygen levels. They checked pulse, temperature, and blood pressure. After she was sure that the nurses were satisfied, she had gone into Apitchi’s room. He had a fever. She had dragged her pillow and blanket in and stayed with him for half the night in a chair identical to the one in her daughters’ room.
Ira knew or was related to some of the nurses who had trained on special IHS scholarships and then come back home. One, her cousin Honey, had always said that she was going to be a nun, but ended up as a nurse. She was a strict Catholic. As Ira helped Honey and the other nurses tend to one and another of her children, they talked to her and got the story. No one blamed her outright. But the Indian Child Welfare was going to conduct an interview with her, no question, and then speak separately with each of her children. The head of that department had scheduled a case worker from ICW to come by the hospital.
Honey brought fresh clothes, and Ira showered in the bare tile bathroom next to Shawnee’s bed. The water washed down black at first, and Ira remembered the soot and it seemed very long ago. She turned the water up as hot as she could stand it. There was a big plastic bottle of all-over body-wash shampoo fixed to the wall of the shower. She used a lot of it, and then stood under the hot dribble like a grateful dog, she thought, just like a grateful animal. The bathroom was full of steam as she dried off with a tiny, thin hand towel. She hadn’t wanted to ask about getting a real bath towel. She skimmed her hair back in a ponytail and checked her purse, but she didn’t put on makeup. Looking plain was good, she thought. She never could look good again. She would never leave her children for a minute.
Once she was clean, it felt like she really lived at the hospital now. She still felt fuzzy—too much had happened. She wished she had a cup of coffee. A woman came into the girls’ room. She carried a briefcase and held a clipboard, and she wore a full-length down coat, mukluks, and St. James Bay woolen mitts. Looking straight at her, Ira’s heart jumped. It was the wife of John, the woman with the neat white scar that cut across her lips. Her name surged into Ira’s mind.