Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

“I don’t know what it is,” I whisper, after a time, and we sit there together in baffled silence, touching the bases of our wineglasses.

“I spent about six hours in the woods today,” he says at last.

“Looking at rocks?”

“And at stumps. There’s something human about them. I’ve decided that I hate them.” Kurt frowns and shuts his eyes, cocks his head to one side as though listening to an interior voice. When he opens his eyes, they are a smoky, soft color and filled with sadness.

“You know, I think I’ll have the halibut,” I say, then I look down at my hands, and am overtaken by a wash of despair at my clumsiness. The menu is slightly blurry and as I pretend to read it I am visited by the idea that even our most intimate sexual moments, when he sobs into my hair or I lose all sense of where my body stops or my pleasure and his begins, our nakedness, our imperfections bare to each other’s sight, our coarse humor, our dirt, lack of shame, our easy joy, have nothing to do with aspects of ourselves that, if we let them develop, become actual and other selves. The thief in me. The murderously jealous father in him. The wish I have to make him feel better, which seems so pure, may be selfish. I understand his tedious anguish.

There is very little said about how repetitious grief is.

“Why don’t you want me to prune the orchard?” asks Krahe.

A surprise darkness skims up my back. It is a prickle so unfamiliar that at first I do not recognize it as anger. And in fact, my voice emerges sounding different from how I feel. It is light, maybe girlish—a mature woman’s panic.

“I told you I like it the way it is,” I say, “dead and ruined.”

“It could be beautiful.”

“It is.”

Before he can speak again, I’ve risen and turned away. I thread among tables and chairs, and then up a set of stairs, gliding my hand along the smooth banister. The feel of old wood calms me a little, but I still feel like running down the back stairs and out what was once the scullery door. Instead, I continue down the hall. The ladies powder room is furnished with an exquisite Egyptian Revival dressing table that I remember as having gone very reasonably at auction. There is also a fainting couch upholstered in striped golden satin. I sit down on it and then tentatively lie back, close my eyes.

Perhaps it was easier to live with the longing for Kurt, the uncertainties, even to indulge the unnecessary, and maybe insulting, secretive precautions. To deal with him in the everyday world of sorrow and surprise takes the mythology out of the relationship, but it is more than that. I feel his suffering when he is near as a physical weight, crushing one heartbeat and the next, squeezing my breath. The madness of sorrow emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain. Unsolvable. Alive. Death has again brushed close, hurled Kendra and Davan off the bridge, tossed Tatro down a steep ditch and allowed him to die in the earliest spring growth. I am part of the chain of events that began when Davan gunned his engine on Revival Road. And the drum is part of it, too, and my taking of it. Kurt Krahe’s mowing of dead grass is part of it, as is his pledge to prune the orchard. For death has set changes into motion all up and down Revival Road, and there is no telling when one event will stop bumping into the next.

Returning to the room where Krahe is waiting, I pause in the doorway. I have taken another route back to the table and Kurt is staring at the place where he thinks I will appear. It seems a bit underhanded to watch him as he watches for me, but I do anyway. He is not talking on his cell phone, which actually gets a signal high on this hill. He is not even looking at the woman at the next table, who is beautiful. He’s not drinking wine or fiddling with his napkin. He is just waiting. Waiting for me. And the way he is sitting there, unaware and waiting for me, strikes me. Perhaps this is the last moment in my life I will be truly appreciated by a man. I stand there and take it in.

When finally he rises, anxious, I propel myself into the room. He doesn’t say “Where were you?” and I don’t make an excuse. We sit down slowly at either side of the table and proceed to order and then eat our food—everything is either tasteless or too rich. We speak about small things with calm detachment. I marvel at this. You would not think we ever slept together. You would not think he pulled my hair until tears filled my eyes or that I bit him so hard I drew blood. You would not think that sometimes we have gone so far into sex that we could not get out, that sex kept driving us, hurting us. You would not think we have looked into each other’s eyes, boundlessly at peace, or that we’d ever lain naked in the raining woods and laughed ourselves sick. I know he is on the brink of asking what is this the way people do, but I will not allow him to speak. So we talk about the rocks, the ravens, the trees, and all of the little things that happen on our road.

I’m home before eleven, like a good teen on a demure date. The light is on in the first-floor living room, where Elsie likes to sit and listen to music. She has Satie on. The master of punctuation. When I walk into the room she stiffens in her chair, casts her gaze upon me, and says, in that parental voice even grown children dread to hear, “Sit down, we have something to talk about.”

“Can it wait?” It must be that she has seen the drum, and although I know it is inevitable, I really don’t want to talk about it tonight.

Elsie stares at me, trying not to blink. The music has become the backdrop to a suspense movie. All jagged exclamation points. I turn it off and sit down across from her. She is wearing an old pink chenille bathrobe and elegant turquoise earrings.

“You left these in.” I tap my earlobes.

“On purpose,” she says.

“Oh?”

She pauses in an ominous way before she speaks. “Years ago, I nearly stole these earrings from a client.”

I turn away and busy myself examining the folds and stitches of one of her more complex afghans. She continues.

“I was very tempted. I happened to have recognized the earrings from a little-known Curtis photograph. It wasn’t that the earrings are so valuable, but that they’d lain close to the girl’s neck, the subject, and if I had them it seemed, I felt, as though I was part of his work too.”

“I took the drum for similar reasons.”

“Oh, no doubt.” Her voice is dry. After an empty pause, she prompts, “When are you planning to return it?”

“I’m not.”

She throws her hands up, lets them fall to her knees and hang down, limp rags of dismay.

“It would look odd if I just brought it back now. No one knows it’s missing.”

“Nonsense. You could say you had it repaired.”

“Well, I could. You’re right.”

“But you won’t. You don’t want to.”

“No.”

“What are you going to do with it?” she asks, and I respond before I’ve thought out my answer. The resolute note in my voice surprises me.

“For now, keep it. Later we’ll find the rightful owner.”

She shrugs and seems to think aloud. “Well, yes…it’s Ojibwe and the fact that Tatro spent his life as an Indian agent on our home reservation probably makes your guess as to its origin, maybe even your intention, fairly reasonable.” She opens her arms as though surrendering. “Good luck to you, then. Not only do I want no part of it, I’m thinking of bringing it back to the Tatros’ myself. You could purchase it, you know. I bought the earrings.”

“Before or after you told the family that they were in a famous photograph?”

I think I’ve got her, but she refuses to be embarrassed.

“Only a fool would have revealed that. Of course I got them for a good price.”