Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

One day she calls, my day off, of course, and has a peculiar mission for me to go on. Sometimes I think she steals a look at my schedule in the back room on the hospital wall. I’m yawning. I thought for once I’d sleep in. But Chook has other uses for me.

“Bernard,” she says, “have you got a pickax?”

Many of her requests begin like that. She’s got most of my tools and garden equipment at her house now.

“Yeah,” I say, “I still have my pickax. You haven’t got that yet.”

She gives a soft, sad little laugh. “When Mike died, he took all his tools with him, eh?”

Mike was her husband, whom I sometimes think died so he wouldn’t get pestered by Chook anymore. He needed the peace and quiet. He went easily, no fuss. Drove himself to the emergency room and was dead of a heart attack five minutes after he got there. In the ground three days later. With all of his tools, according to Chook. I don’t even want to know what she is talking about. But she tells me.

“He borrowed from everybody else, so they come here for the funeral supper and they end up taking whatever they lent my husband and more, too, I think, besides. Once that night was up I look around me and I don’t see half what we used to have. But I was too broke up to say anything about it, eh? Me, I never said nothing. Just let it go.”

“I’ve got quite a lot of business going on today, Chook, so if you—”

“Oh, Bernard? There’s something I gotta ask you!”

I shut my eyes, weary already, already anticipating one of her usual requests. “Let’s hear it.” But instead of a ride to the bank during which I will hear the state of her meager bank account, or a plumbing disaster where I’ll be confronted with a tangle of plugged pipes, she asks me something I can’t register at first. She asks me to come and help her dig up her husband’s body. She has to repeat it three times before I realize she’s serious.

“I can’t do that! I mean, I would never do that. Anyway, I think you have to get some kind of permit, or go through the church.”

“No,” she says, “I don’t have to do that. Remember, he had himself buried on the ridge with the traditionals.”

Well, I did remember that, for all it was worth; to me it didn’t matter if he was buried underneath my front steps. I certainly was not going to dig him up.

“And you know what Mike had buried with him, you remember that, don’t you?” Chook was going to needle at me until I did something.

“His own pickax.”

“No, haha! You’re funny, Bernard. No!”

“Then what was it?” She was going to tell me no matter what.

“He had the tobacco box, even the scrolls of all the songs that went along with that drum your grandfather made, the one that took the sickness out of people. Mike had that drum’s belongings, you recall, because his father was on that drum and one of its keepers. Mike never thought that the drum would come back here.”

“So what do you want the things for?” I said, not even then understanding.

“Because it has.”

I hung the phone right up on her. I’d never done anything like that before. My hand had done it for me, refusing to have anything to do with something so alarming as the drum still existing, even much less returning. She called back.

“We got cut off!”

“Yeah.” I was troubled. There was so much more to this, more than ever had been admitted to those not directly involved way back then. Many people were affected by this drum. Many people know part of the story. But I know all or most of the history of this drum. I know because my father talked once he got sober, talked like his own father had, endlessly, hoping to be redeemed by the story. And he was only one of those who could not forget. Once his mind cleared he had to contend, of course, with the shame of all he had done when he was boozed up. So he talked to try and wear down the edges of that shame. And I was the one who listened.

“So would you help me dig Mike up?”

“Chook, let me…let me figure out something else.”

“Okay, Bernard. It’s not like we have to do it today. Tomorrow maybe.”

“You said the drum came back.”

“The judge’s got it at his house.”

“Well, that’s the first good thing.”

“They brought it to the right person, eh?”

“Who’s this ‘they’?”

“Two ladies from out east. Those women had come across that drum, I don’t know how. It had to do with some old man. Geraldine has been trying to get ahold of you. Me, I am getting my boy to drive me.”

I knew I had to be there, right then, at the drum’s return. If Chook actually got a ride from someone else, this was a big event. And I had to be there not only for my own reasons, but to neutralize her presence. I said good-bye and got ready to go over to the judge’s house.

The judge lives on his uncle’s old land pretty much right where Nanapush’s old shack caved in one harsh winter. I don’t even know if the judge ever met his uncle or if old Nanapush, of whom my father told me stories, realized that he had a nephew, anyway, drifting along through the tribal records and the off-reservation families, and those who moved to Canada, like the judge’s people, who came here to powwow and felt back at home. People come and people stay. There is a strong pull. You return for one funeral after another and all of a sudden you don’t leave and you are picking up where someone else left off. So with those women who traveled cross-country with the drum. My phone rings again half a minute after I hang up with Chook. I hear from the judge’s wife that these women are a mother and a daughter. She says she thinks that they are connected to an old branch of the Pillagers through a girl who escaped the sicknesses here by going to that eastern school, Carlisle, where they took so many of us at one time.

The judge’s house is a pleasant, modest little prefab construction, brand-new, that has a full basement garage as it sits on a little hill. From that hill, I’m told, old Nanapush used to watch all who passed and to anticipate all that would happen. The judge could look out his picture window and do the same, I suppose, but he probably sees even more than his old uncle by sitting on the courtroom bench. A little driveway curves up to the house and makes a U so that a person can easily turn around and go back out. That’s a nice feature of the house. There’s a lot to like about it. Geraldine, his wife, the new Mrs. Nanapush, has hung about six bird feeders outside the double glass doors on her deck and when I drive up a flock of tiny gray birds starts up, silent, and disappears. It’s a good time of the year—most of the ticks gone, air cool, leaves just turning, school started but the kids still playing outside, exposed but not down with the viruses that will get them once they’re inside coughing on one another all day, which will then fill the hospital—a nice time of year.

“Piindegen! Come in!” Geraldine is such a pleasant woman, wavy black hair and fair skin, her brown eyes secret and quiet, her smile a delicate curve. I always wish I’d asked her out when we were younger. Who could have known when she was gawky and her ears stuck out and she hid behind strings of hair, that she’d turn out like this?

I’m nervous as I walk into the house, and I concentrate on wiping my shoes even though they are perfectly clean. I am relieved to see that they have kept the drum covered in the middle of the room, so I don’t have to look on it quite yet. I am not easy in a social setting so it is not a simple thing for me to introduce myself, and I am glad Geraldine steps in and gets me acquainted with Elsie Travers and her daughter Faye. I sit down in a chair that matches the couch. The two women are sitting on that couch. Talking requires an effort. Both of the women have long hair, the mother’s in a twist and the daughter’s clipped back in a tail. They are slim, and dressed in combinations of black and cream white with very plain metal jewelry—heavy chains, stoneless rings, round stud earrings. They don’t go in for patterns or any sort of trim on their clothes, I see, and their shoes are very simple with no bows or tassels or fancy heels, either. The effect of them is somehow classily monklike, or undertakerish. They seem very different from people here. The younger woman speaks out like a lawyer in a hard, suspicious, accentless voice. I think her features, sharp and definite, her eyes with a Chippewa slant to them, though, are very striking or even beautiful. From one side that is, but then just ordinary from another. And the older one, too, looks different from moment to moment. First she is all excitable and anxious, then she turns right off and sits back watching everyone else like a little gray sparrow hawk ready to strike. As Geraldine says, these women who found the drum are somehow related to the Pillagers, who have mainly died out, so it is quite interesting that they’ve surfaced. Geraldine, especially, who is always collecting and compiling tribal history, shoots questions at them in her pleasant, friendly, interested way. If they stop talking for a minute, she fills up their tea mugs and asks them something else.