Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

It’s no use, and I hate being at odds with her. Still, the idea that she would actually take it upon herself to return the drum makes me regress a little. “Don’t you touch that drum!”

“You exasperate me.” She closes her mouth in that tight, straight line that means we’re finished arguing. This is as angry as we ever get, and we both know it won’t last. Sure enough, over breakfast, Elsie tells me that she’s decided, upon reflection, that the fact that the drum was stolen from our own people is a piece of sychronicity so disturbing that she now understands how I was motivated. I, on the other hand, am moved to tell her that I am sorry to have possibly compromised her also in the theft, as it is both of our business reputations at stake, and even (now that I know she won’t hold me to it) that I’ll consider returning the drum. But she says that she wouldn’t think of returning it, that she’s always wondered exactly how it was that Jewett Parker Tatro acquired his hoard, and that maybe in discovering more about this particular drum we will find that out. She’s willing to help me, in fact, learn its origins.

Elsie has ideas. She is spilling over with ideas and with lists of people and with plans to see them. “I’m thinking of old Shaawano, gone now,” she says, “and Mrs. String. Her first name is Chook and she’s related to the old man and married to Mike String. Lots of the people have passed on, of course, the ones who would know. But to lose or be swindled out of a drum like this is no small thing.”

We are sitting together over our usual spare female breakfast of coffee and whole grain toast. Sometimes we add yogurt or fruit, but I haven’t grocery-shopped yet this week and we are even down to the last of the bread. Elsie has toasted the heels for herself and given me the last two regular slices. I didn’t like the heels as a girl, and that little forgiving sign of her motherly attention, a tiny thoughtfulness, touches me. But I say nothing about it. I only agree that we should hire some extra people this spring or summer so we can travel as we choose. I know that the Shaawano family is of the original people who either moved south and returned, or who originally came from the south and were named for that direction. I remember Mrs. String, a round woman shaped more like a knot than a string. She is a vivid, little, lumpy-bodied lady with dark, age-freckled skin and a fluffy halo of dandelion white, permanented hair. She tends to dress in outfits of bright, flowery rayon separates that mock each other and yet somehow make their peace. I remember admiring how a skirt blazing purple iris and a burst of roses on her vest oddly complemented her poppy-dotted blouse and gave a kind of whirling effect to her, as if she were always in motion. Mrs. String’s voice is extremely gentle, marked by the old sweet accent of a person who grew up speaking Ojibwe and whose English is forever rounded and shaped so that all of the words seem kindlier. Mother tells me that Mrs. String’s mother would have known some of the original signers of the treaty that provided for the reservation. She probably spoke about them to her daughter. Those people were the holdouts, the ones upon whose stubbornness the land claim is based. She might have known about the ones who famously would not sign the payoff later, as well, like Old Nanapush, whose formal portrait by a government photographer around the time of his death by old age features a discreet but unmistakably obscene gesture. As she speculates, I can see that Elsie is becoming so intrigued with the hunt for the drum’s origins that she really may have forgotten, already, that it is stolen property.

“Not so fast,” I break into her schemings. “We should wait for a while. I don’t want the drum resurfacing so closely connected with Tatro’s death that it gets back to his surviving family…well, his niece.”

Elsie agrees and goes off, muttering, to comb through her files of letters and old papers. There is more to it, though. Even then I know it. I want the drum for myself, at least for a while. I’ll keep it off the ground. Already I’ve got a wooden tobacco box set on the windowsill beside it. I don’t know much, but I’ve got this certainty: That for the time, at least, the drum should stay with me.

Who in all of this time mourns for Davan Eyke? His mother took no more than a few days off of work and still drives the school bus. Every time I see her grim face high in the driver’s seat I imagine that she is aching for Davan, but perhaps it’s also true she’s yearning for a cigarette, for instance on the Monday morning I pass her on the way to the Tatros’. She is standing beside the parked and empty school bus, smoking with calm determination, stoking herself with nicotine. She lights a new cigarette from the still burning stub of the old one and gestures to me as I draw near. I stop in the road and roll down my window. It would be rude to do otherwise. “Hello,” she says, and offers me a cigarette. I get out of my car to accept, though I rarely smoke. She lights it for me. I ask how she is.

“I am not so fine,” she answers.

“Has your church been supportive?” I ask, because I can’t think of anything else to say.

That’s when she laughs, in surprise or derision. And her laughter is exactly like Davan’s laughter the last time I heard him. It is the laughter of ravens. Grating, unreadable. I stare at her and nod in sudden understanding. The reeking blue smoke curls around us. We are silent. After a few moments, I feel we have entered a nameless and intense mental engagement, that Davan’s mother in her sorrow has become savagely herself, and so needn’t speak again. Yet she communicates perfectly. She knows. She knows that her son’s death had something more to do with Krahe than the eye or facts can tell. She stands with me to try to absorb in words what it is she senses in images. But nothing comes clear.

We grind out the cigarette stubs with the ends of our shoes and then she nods and steps up into the bus. She settles into the driver’s seat and looks away from me as she starts the engine. She is an oddly put together woman, with exquisite black eyes and a big white dumpling of a chin. She wears no makeup and cuts her dark hair in a boxy helmet. As she shifts the bus into gear, she lifts her face keenly forward and moves down the bumpy road. She knows all about me, as people on this road do who have known my family since my grandparents came here. Most of all, she knows what happened. She would never wonder why the orchard is forsaken, or try to fix it. I suppose she pities me in some abstract way, as they all do. But that is neither here nor there.

I get back into my car. Driving toward the Tatro place, I am stricken with a familiar and weary repulsion. Everything around me is ludicrously, suddenly, worthless. The Assembly of God sign is even blank. Mrs. Eyke’s black laughter and the hard edge of her grief have invaded my thoughts, and I even feel complicit in the death of her son because of my uneasy relationship with Krahe. I am too tangled in what happened, it disturbs me. Perhaps it started on the day I tried to unwedge the Eyke car from the V of birches. Or it started when I looked too long at Krahe, and he at me, and we knew that we were going to sleep together.

Later that day, as I am taking notes on the contents of the Tatro kitchen, I remember the orchard. It occurs to me that I must develop a more serious plan to thwart Kurt in his next helpful policy. I’m not sure our conversation at Sweet’s Mansion persuaded him to leave those trees alone, and I plan to call him that night. I practice several ways to let him know, again, why his attentions aren’t wanted in the orchard. I plan to tell him my reasons for leaving the place unkempt, blowzy, unproductive. I want to make sure he lets those apples rot. Fewer blossoms every year, the apples crabbed with thrips and worm-riddled. Branches down, dying, silvered in the heavy sun. I want the long grass to shield the starving mice who gnaw rings around the bases of the apple trees, girdling them, choking them off, bringing them down. But even as I’m thinking this, I am too late. My imaginary conversations and persuasions are a waste of time. For he is revving up his chain saw, macho New England accouterment. He is striding into the orchard and lopping off deadwood with furious ease. Even as I am leaving the Tatro estate, he is piling brush. As I drive home he is putting a cone of fire to the driest twigs. I see the white spiral of smoke as I turn onto Revival Road, and breathe the scent of burning apple wood.