Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

There is another thing that our old house does in the deep of night. I have heard it before and now I wait for it to happen. The house releases the whole day’s footsteps. All day we press down minutely on the wide old floorboards, moving about on small, regular errands, from room to room. It takes hours for the boards to readjust, to squeak back up the nails, for the old fibers of the pinewood to recover their give. As they do so, they reproduce the sounds of footsteps. In the night our maze of pathways is audibly retraced. I am used to it, as is mother, but sometimes a wakeful guest is frightened. I can understand this. For now, as I rise and I stand in half-darkness in the doorway of my bedroom, I hear the distinct creak of footsteps proceeding toward me, then past me, over to my bed. It’s very cold. My skin prickles. I feel the breath of my own passage, as though my dead self and living self briefly met in that doorway to sleep.

A disturbed hush has fallen upon our road. The two young people haunt it more than one would think. It is impossible to pull out onto the gravel without thinking of Davan’s rattling, red car or without imagining the long, slight form of Kendra trailing black scarves as she took her moody ambles, ears plugged with music. After the Assembly of God outpouring for Davan, which left Elsie and me in a daze, we attended the strangely shuttered memorial service for Kendra, along with Krahe’s sister from Vancouver, and seven or eight of Kendra’s drooping friends. Since then I have been afflicted with the pity and guilt that comes over one at the death of a person disliked. I now think of good things about Kendra, and there are many—her affection for her father, her goodness to Davan, even her self-absorbed dramas now seem so innocent: the searchings of an artistic child. I begin to wonder at my own antipathy—or jealousy—and as I do I wonder again at Kurt’s hostility toward Davan. These days Kurt looks stunned and confused, and I see that he’s turned inward, blamed himself for a purely emotional, fatherly mishandling of things, a tampering, a fatal clumsiness. His rage at Davan was disturbing, even brutal, but it was part of his protectiveness and Kurt castigates himself for it now.

Night after night, he comes to me. He never leaves the road. There are no trips to the city. No restless absences, unexplained. Kurt’s step is nearly silent, as he knows just where the stairs creak. When he pauses in the doorway to my room, my two selves stand apart and allow him to pass. Yet I am a realist. I know why he’s always here. One night he says, “You’re getting me through this, you know.” His voice is low and ragged. I can’t bear not knowing anymore.

“You had someone, before,” I say.

There is silence.

“Answer me.”

“Yes. Not anymore.” There is a lonely pause. “Never again.”

I stare at his face, all shadows in the silver dark, and the terrible, familiar wish to be nothing, to shatter to dust, moves me. His lie kills all feeling. I break along with him and go where he is. Our struggle goes on and on in the blackness. We are like feral children, with no rules. Pain and sex dull grief and we are both in grief, it seems. For me, this is old. I probably know what is happening better than he does because I’ve tried over and over to wreck myself on another human, and always failed. I fail now. For it seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I’d have to break every single one to let it out.

He falls asleep with his hand between my legs and his face in my hair. He is weeping in his dreams. I stay awake, considering. He said that he wants to marry me now, that we must always be together. But now that I know he can lie to me, what comfort can there be? His turning to me in such need is not a true statement of his feelings; there is nothing to make of it, really, except that I am near and willing to stay. After a short while, he wakes again, and turns to me and I am there. The night is very black, there is no moon, and I am glad that I’ve put the drum outside my room, on a table at the end of the hall.

When I wake in the morning, he is gone. I roll over, put on my robe, and go down the hall. Not until I’m brushing my teeth do I notice that my face is smeared with blood. Red-brown streaks mark the back of my hands, my arms, my body. I walk back into my room and see that the sheets are splotched and rubbed with signs. It isn’t, somehow, horrifying. I conclude he’s slashed himself, and it seems to me that this is what people do. Later that day, when I walk up the road to see him, and when I find him staring quietly at a certain stone he has been thinking about for years, I touch his shoulder.

“Where have you cut yourself?” I ask.

He shrugs.

“Kurt, I should look. They might be deep. You’re bleeding a lot.”

He raises his eyebrows and looks into my face.

“Leave it alone,” he begs.

I return to my house.

As in French novels when the scheming Marquis boasts of a lover I have made her my creature , so I begin to understand that Kurt Krahe is making me his own. His grief is sucking me into an old persona, one I have forced myself to leave behind. Yet I must admit, and this shames me, his tearing need is a thrill to me, and I am convinced that he is mine alone. I am reduced, but I need him, too. And as with all matters of too serious nature, there is absurdity. One morning, instead of contemplating the heft and soul of his sculpture, or driving twenty miles for his favorite dark roast coffee beans, or fixing his garage door, or sitting by his daughter’s grave, he is cutting the dead grass in my yard. Davan Eyke’s job once. Krahe is pushing the finicky red mower now.

I bought that mower for myself. The mower was the first birthday present I ever bought for which I would be the recipient. By which might be assessed the level of self-indulgence I commit. Who buys oneself a lawn mower for her fiftieth birthday? Shouldn’t I have given myself a spa package, a new bathrobe? Shouldn’t I have had someone else to give me a present, perhaps? Of course, I did get one from mother—a cameo strung on a velvet cord. Circa 1910. Italian, with exquisite detail, pink and white shell. I hung it over my bed and have never worn it. But I used my lawn mower last summer. It made me feel good, even when Davan nearly wrecked it, until now. I realize I am dismayed to see Kurt working on my lawn, though I am pleased to see that the machine is holding up well.

Kurt is cutting at a pretty good speed. He prefers the side-to-side strip pattern. I, on the other hand, am the type who cuts the lawn in ever smaller squares. He marches back and forth across the yard. But here’s the thing. The grass doesn’t need cutting. It hasn’t even started growing yet. It’s still practically winter. There is green beneath the unraked thatch, but not a shoot that reaches past the toe’s tip.

I call my mother to the window. We stand together watching our road’s resident artist. He is dressed out of character, like a student’s preppy dad, in dull orange pants, a white golf jacket, thick white socks, and cushiony walking shoes, also white, now mud-stained.

“How did this come about?” I ask.

Elsie gives me the suspicious and assessing look that she should be directing at Krahe. It is not my fault that he’s here. “I have no idea,” she says. “He just appeared.”

“Appeared?”

“And began to tinker with the lawn mower. Then he took it out.”

I nod. I think of saying to her, Don’t you know what this means? But then she would say in all innocence, Getting the grass cut? And I would have to tell her, No, cut by Krahe. Who has just lost his daughter. Who is not really cutting the grass at all, at least the living grass. He is perhaps shredding the tips of last fall’s dead grass, but that is beside the point. I would have to explain.