Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

There are weeks of dry warmth, which is bad for our wells and ponds but wonderful to see in the woods. The willows blaze in tender bud. Drifts of wild plum blossoms float among the cavern pines. The rapturous trilling of spring peepers begins, that electronic sexual whine. I keep the windows slightly open as I drive the back roads to the Tatro house, and breathe the watery air. The road’s final quarter mile is now almost impassable, the bedrock sunk against gaping holes, swamp grass and overgrown ponds to either side where the peepers warble and moan at a throbbing pitch. As I bounce along I quiet the frogs, momentarily, so that I seem to be continually piercing a wall of sound.

In the orchard, the tiny cold buds are deep pink at the base, white at the tip. The apple trees with their low, thick crotches are shooting out leaves from every node of trunk and every branch behind the cuts. I sit an afternoon away in the snow-drifted grass, the sun-blasted grass, the grass thrown back in long shines of wind, the new grass rising underneath in shy waves of power. I want to remember the orchard as cold, sleeping, wrecked, and still mine, before it happens.

One hot ninety-degree May afternoon throws the switch.

Full moon, a spring midnight. Over everything like clear glass the light falls evenly, a tarnished silver. I am awakened by something stealing up on me, creeping through the window screens, over the drum. A breath of orchard sweetness sails, curls into my room, and I remember the days when the orchard bloomed this way every spring.

My little sister was alive then. Over the years I’ve warped my life around her memory, I think, even though sometimes now I can’t picture her at all except from photographs. I cling to what I do remember of her—little incidents. The time she ripped my fairy book or squeezed the paint from my paint set, or left my clay out to dry. The times she crawled into bed with me after bad dreams—her telling me about them, her breath hot along the side of my face. She tickled spiders out of their webs and wore pink Keds with laces she colored blue with a ballpoint pen. She was a very good sister who loved me so much that she sacrificed herself for me without hesitation and for no use, no use at all. It happened out there in the orchard.

With their deadwood sawed away, the trees have come alive. Each is loaded with as many open blossoms as the live twigs can hold. I rise and walk to the window and sit there with my hand on the drum. I can see her, running in her checkered shorts, with her flag of brown hair flying. She is climbing, quick and nimble. I can just make out the dim shapes of the trees, their twisted arms that hold her. There is no wind and the odor of white blossoms is so profound that it makes steps into the air. Only old wood can bear such rapture, I think, but maybe you have to die first, like the trees, like her.

I am making eggs for breakfast the next morning when I hear the putter of the lawn mower. I’ve woken furious and self-berating. I dragged my heart around like an apple on a string. Dangled it, daring some man to take a bite. Now Krahe sinks his teeth into it and I’m terrified to be devoured. I jerk away and swing wildly out of reach. And now the lawn mower! I turn off the stove and charge outside, but when the mower comes into view Kit Tatro is behind it with his shirt off. Kit’s bare flesh. An unforeseen drawback. His skinny chest heaves as he cuts the rise. The arrowheads and amulets on cords around his neck tangle as he strains to round the bitten stump of an old elm. His arms are ropy and sickly pale. His tender skin is an affront. I want to tell him to put his shirt back on, but don’t know how I would say such a thing without hurting his feelings. He waves at me and then I have to wave back. He cuts the engine, walks toward me.

There’s a couple of things he wants to ask me.

“You should ask my mother,” I say quickly. “She’s the one with the cultural knowledge.”

“Well, this is about the grass.”

“Oh.”

We talk about whether to reseed some bald spots and how there are new shade-friendly varieties. For a man with a grown-over, junked-up yard, he is surprisingly critical of the quality of my lawn.

“Some of it’s just quack,” he states. “Around the back of the house you’ve been invaded by creeping charley. And there’s dandelions. I don’t even know where to start with those. What do you want me to do?”

“Just leave them.”

He looks dubious, skeptical, pained. To divert him I change the subject.

“Do you know how to install a new lock and key set?”

“Of course.”

I show him the back door to the stairway that leads to my room, and he tells me that he can drive to the hardware store for a new lock and that he’ll change it as soon as he finishes the lawn. Later, while I am working upstairs, I hear the whine of his drill and the fumbling and knocking of his tools as he sets about the task. Once, twice, I nearly go down and ask him to quit, but then I look out a back window onto the trees, the bursting clouds of blossoms.

The summer passes and I handle the sale of the Tatro collection to a Cincinnati museum, all except for the drum. I’ve grown very attached to having it in my bedroom; I touch or gaze upon it every time I enter. The drum exerts the most connective hold upon me, and it even starts to influence my dreams. Years ago, my sister stopped coming to me at night. I stopped dreaming of her, and I missed that because it was comforting to imagine that she lived a life parallel to mine and was not dead but merely somewhere else. I even wrote down things she said to me. She spoke in the form of poems. Now I am surprised to dream that she’s learned to play the piano. Her hands move with an alert grace, and she glances up at me and nods. She has a husband, a dark man walking at a distance. She is a woman, all grown up in spite of death. Bach’s Thirteenth Invention fills my dream with dark rigor, a precise contrapuntal tangle of notes. I confuse her fingers with the passionate mechanism of the spider, and I wake up sweating and cold again with loss. I lost myself along with her back there, I know it. When I touch the drum and think of her, though, I feel much stronger. I feel she has come back to help me. And so the summer, with my dreams of her that return, precious and specific, passes too quickly, as they all do here. The time of the year comes that I am always surprised to find so hard.

The orb spiders have taken up their posts in the unmowed fields of August. Just as things come ripe, the creatures always set their webs, sewn with perfect zigzag seams, across the swathes of grass, jewelweed, goldenrod, milkweed, and burdock behind the sagging barn. Last week, we were approached by a chain restaurant that specializes in false folksiness. Were we interested in selling the wide, weathered boards? Only if you’ll take the orb spiders, too, Elsie said. But they just wanted the barn board, and of course she would never destroy the barn. So the spiders wait. I am careful not to disturb their quiet weavings. I watch each spider closely, admire its curved and tapered legs. They are black with hot yellow death’s heads on their bellies. They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they’ve made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. Which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider’s, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

Today, my art is blackberry jam. I gather my equipment. It is time. Late summer builds to a steamy and forgiving lushness in New Hampshire. There is the crushing scent of heated earth. The audible drinking of taproots of white pines. Maples sucking deep. Best, there is the threatful joy of blackberries, bushes so lush with fruit that to pick them I brave the summer’s last ticks and stinging flies. We used to pick them, my sister and I, and because of the dreams I think of her with special intensity as I walk. Past the orb spider field, through the laden orchard, down a ravine, and into the boggy cutover land belonging to an absentee landlord, forty acres dense with bramble and slash. I’m heated up, sweating; my hair falls out of its tail and swings down my back. The first blackberries that I pick ring the bottom of the light old lobster pot of dented aluminum, which I’ve vowed to fill. As soon as the bottom of the pot is covered, a berry-picking stubbornness comes over me. I am a determined picker, lusting after the loaded branches, taking care not to knock off the berries so dense with sweetness they’ll let go if the bush is roughly bumped. While picking at the edge of a clearing, I am buzzed low by a helicopter, its loud ratchet an excitement. The metal creature dips so low I can see the features of the men inside of it, and then it veers off, over a fling of young maples. I search my way through the half-dried muck of hidden ponds, skirt the edges of our neighbor’s horse pasture, probe the deeper woods for an opening where sunlight has brought from the ground sweet berry bushes and burdened them with fruit. Everywhere, I find jewelweed, or touch-me-not, frail bushes of tiny, fierce, golden-mouthed flowers, spitting seeds.