Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

I am not inexperienced in love, I just haven’t been successful at it, if you count long-term marriage as the benchmark. But the couples I used to envy have all broken apart. And marriage simply scares me. Perhaps I excuse my lack of courage in the matter by observing that those I do know who’ve stayed together have fused or discarded chunks of personality. Canada geese. Swans. Crows. Ravens. All creatures who mate for life. Perhaps they have an ancient genetic command woven into them that we now lack and long for in equal measure. The phone beside my bed rings. Krahe calls me at midnight, knowing I fall asleep shortly after. Sometimes he calls to say good night, and tonight I consider not picking up the telephone.

“Just called to say good night,” he says, and because his voice has always moved me with its resonance and depth, and because he is on the other end of the telephone, not here with me, I feel safe enough to be somewhat more direct than I usually dare. I actually tell him not to cut the grass because it makes me uncomfortable, because I can’t stand to see him doing something so mundane, and because I think it is a bad sign.

“A bad sign of what?”

“Your sorrow,” I say, wary of referring to our relationship. “Going around cutting people’s grass is so completely out of character that it signals, to me at least, how broken you are and how lost in your grief. Just to see you behind a lawn mower is disturbing.”

But he seems pleased about that, and he laughs a little.

“You don’t know me well,” he says. “You don’t know that I actually like cutting grass and that for me it is a sign of getting better. It represents new growth. Besides, it is not just anybody’s grass. It’s your grass.”

“Which you are shaving to the bare earth,” I say, then I soften, and drop my voice. “There wasn’t any grass there to begin with, Kurt, it’s too early in the spring. The grass has really not begun to grow yet.”

He’s very quiet. We breathe on the line. Eventually he clears his throat.

“Oh, fuck,” he says, “maybe I’m in bad shape. I didn’t notice that.”

Then he asks me to go out to dinner with him at Sweet’s Mansion, a grand house restored as a restaurant and considered quite romantic. He’s never asked me out or taken me anywhere in public before and perhaps out of sheer surprise I accept the invitation.

After I hang up I unplug the phone. I have brought the drum back in and covered it with my favorite old star quilt, but I am very conscious of it and I have developed more affection for it than I should feel for an object that I intend to repatriate—for we’ll find the rightful owner by inheritance, I’ve no doubt of that. At the furthest reaches of my doubt, I admit of possibilities. In dark hours, my mind creaks open and allows a sensation of comfort in the great drum’s presence. The house is quiet, the road still, even the wind in the pines a mere shiver. It is one of those hours when the world takes a breath. When for a moment there is peace, not desolation, at the heart of things. I turn out the lights and lie on my back, bunch a fat pillow under my knees, stretch out my arms, take up the whole bed, close my eyes. I try very hard to put Krahe out of my mind, and after a while I succeed in drifting into a delicious state of half-sleep. I love to fall through that transition alone, to feel the gentle prickling of my body lifting off, the fluttering of my mind as it releases images, talk, pictures that begin to lose reference until they take on a dream irrationality. Tonight there is the brilliance of Krahe’s white shoes and socks methodically striding back and forth across the dead lawn. There is my mother’s earnest and disquieting betrayal. Chocolate steaming in figured cups. The drum gradually falling asleep beneath its quilt. Then, as I am tumbling toward sleep through the brain’s dark, I see a tarp of battered canvas, frail seedlings, a painted bear and the white arrow at its heart.

I am much more familiar with the Sweet Mansion and its furnishings than are most who come to dine. The Greek Revival mansion was built by the New Hampshire mill owner Henry Sweet, who worked hundreds and maybe thousands of young women into early graves and created of their dead-hearted misery and the electricity generated by the millrace he owned an illuminated park for his children. The glow cast from the high plateau of Goodie Hill, the setting for the mansion and its grounds, could be seen far into Vermont and was used to guide aircraft down the Connecticut River well into the 1940s. The children kept up the property into the second half of the last century and then sold the place to a developer. Elsie handled the estate sale, which was surprisingly paltry as all of the furnishings and heirlooms had long been divided up among the many Sweet descendants. The developer speculated by building a dozen houses on five-acre lots on one end of the property, and used the proceeds to restore the mansion and open it as a restaurant, which was his dream. My familiarity with the contents of the place is the result of having scouted out and sold most of the nineteenth-century (we try not to use the word Victorian) furnishings to the owner. Almost none of them are original to the mansion, but they look as though they are because we took such care in finding good pieces from that period.

I am sitting across from Kurt, knees under a starched white cloth, in one of a set of Belter tiger-oak rococo chairs, in a corner of what was once a formal parlor. He is dressed as himself once again, a rumpled shirt of some rugged mixture of silks and cottons, a beautiful tweed jacket, jeans worn in for real, not distressed. He runs his fingers across the top of his head. His hair is longer than he usually allows it, and I notice as I always do when it is a bit too long that he has really got quite beautiful hair, thick and springy, with a wave to it. He is one of those men who’d turn heads if he let his hair grow out, become a streaked mane. Maybe he’d be insufferable, I think, maybe he’d never even look at me. Then I’d be safe.

“I can’t stop thinking about Kendra today,” he says. “I feel heavy.”

“What do you think of when you think of Kendra?” I ask.

His face freezes to a careful mask, but after a little while he smiles and his features soften. “You know what I think of? How she traced her hand and drew a beak on her thumb and made a turkey. You know, the turkey hands they make in kindergarten at Thanksgiving. She made one for me last year as a kind of joke.”

“A sweet joke.”

“I know.” His hand on the water glass trembles a little. He takes a drink. “What do you do with it,” he says. “What do you do?”

There is nothing to say to that.

“She was lucky to have you as her father. You were a good father” is all I finally come up with.

“Do you think so?” He searches my face, his eyes bleak, his stare endless.

“Yes, I think so.”

He nods. He keeps on staring at me. “Faye, I know she’s gone. And I sometimes feel you slipping away, too, please don’t slip away.”

“I’m not.”

But inside, I know I am and he knows it too, and it isn’t just the lie, unless the lie stands for everything I am afraid of. I do not know why it is happening.

“You can’t stand it, can you,” he says after a long pause.

“Can’t stand what?”

“What I’m going through. You think it’s catching.”

“No.”

“You think you’ll get sadness, grief, whatever, like a virus.”

“No.”

“Then what is it? I lied to you, I know I did, but I never will again. I have taken a vow in my very being that I will die first. No lies, ever.”

I nod, I want to say I believe him, I want to answer, but a nameless feeling close to dread sifts up inside me and covers my heart and takes away my words, leaving a kind of shame.