Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

“What made you bring back the drum?”

“I kept it for a time,” says the younger woman, thoughtful, “then I thought I should pass it on.”

I nod as she explains about keeping tobacco near it and taking care of it. She did things just the way they are supposed to be done.

Right then Chook and her son, John, the handsome one, drive up to the house. We fall quiet, not wanting for her to miss anything important. John walks her up the steps and she enters. Chook is round as a turnip and today she is wearing a hot pink rayon top with Japanese-like patterns of black flowers. Her skirt ripples all around her like a bush, and when I bend to focus my eyes I see it’s embroidered all over with tiny yellow roses and rust red twigs. She has her hair tied back in a blue headband and she is smoking a cigarette, which she puts out halfway and drops into her purse.

“They don’t taste so good anymore,” she says to the room of people watching her. “I think it’s because of this blood-thinner medicine that they got me on. So there it is, that drum which my husband helped out with at one time.”

Chook stands looking at the drum, then reaches into her big canvas purse. She takes out a package of cookies and a pair of scissors, then neatly cuts open the cellophane on the cookies. Then she pulls the plastic tray halfway out of the clear package and sets it in the center of Geraldine’s coffee table, pushing aside a fresh coffee cake that Geraldine has cut in squares. I’m glad we are at Geraldine’s, for to drink tea at Chook’s house is almost dangerous. She scours her mugs with Comet cleanser and there is always a faint, gritty taste of the stuff. Now Geraldine pours a fresh cup of tea for Chook and she talks, addressing the two women from the east.

“That old drum, it had a reputation. You can’t mess around—once you do keep that drum, you gotta keep it with respect.” She looks at us all with little blinking round eyes, and nods at the cookies she brought, which happen to be the kind of deadly, sweet, pink, waffle-wafers that I am forbidden to touch by my doctor.

“Bernard here,” she says, “he’s the one to tell you about this drum. He knows it well, too well. When that drum passed out of their family, people forgot about them. They got no attention. But you see, that is sometimes how things heal up. Now, I think, he don’t want that drum to resurrect old sorrows for him, eh?”

She looks at me with a searching expression, but I say nothing.

“We all got sorrows,” Chook hunches her shoulders and holds up her bony hands. “We got sorrows or if we don’t work them down, then our sorrows got us.” She rattles the cookie package at me, but I resist.

“What does that have to do with the drum?” says the older of the two Pillager ladies. She is polite and yet nobody to mess with, I see. But Chook is up to dealing with her.

“Take me for instance,” says Chook. “That old Mr. Bush sent John’s brother here off to the Desert Storm, and he breathed something that upset his system and now it’s maybe killing him. But he never yet got a medal for that. Anyway, what I’m telling you is you wear down these sorrows using what you have, what comes to hand. You talk them over, you live them through, you don’t let them sit inside. See, that’s what the drum was good for. Letting those sorrows out, into the open, where those songs could bear them away.”

She drinks her tea, blinking all around the room.

“Drums get their power from how they are treated, though,” Chook goes on. “You got to keep them protected. If someone comes in where the drum is, uses bad language, you got to put them out. As for getting the drum in the first place, if you get the right guidance you can make a drum. But otherwise a drum must be given to you. Someone must give that drum freely. You cannot buy the drum. You cannot steal the drum.”

She stops right then and stares at the younger woman and says, “So you bought the drum from an old man?”

The younger woman gathers herself, sips her tea, doesn’t meet anybody’s eyes. “His name was Jewett Parker Tatro,” she says.

Geraldine sits back on the hard chair she has brought from the kitchen. The judge, with his round cheeks and intelligent face, sits near to her. He touches his stringy little Indian mustache.

“I think that was the name of the Indian agent at one time. His name has come up on some old probate documents.”

I know who this Tatro was, of course, as he figured in the shameful episodes that my father needed to confess. Tatro had gone from being an unscrupulous Indian agent, when his job was phased out, to owning a bar. The reservation, which had been dry for many years, decided to allow alcohol in order to keep liquor revenue within its borders. But the bulk of that money passed into Tatro’s hands, anyway, since he was the first to open his doors, and later, made some exclusive deal with the area supplier. At any rate, Tatro was or became a collector by default—when the need is on, some people they will sell their own grandmas. Or her old moccasins or the cradle board she beaded for a grandchild or a jingle dress. At one time, the wall of Tatro’s bar was full of these things—some beautiful and sacred, like the drum.

“That’s all we know about it,” says the younger one.

“Where it ended up,” her mother adds. “Of what brought that drum into the hands of Tatro, and what it was before, who kept it and so on…”

She trails off. All of a sudden I can feel Chook’s amused waiting. I can feel Geraldine’s eyes on me and I know she knows, she’s known from the beginning, why I am here. She knows enough about things generally to know where the drum came from, but she doesn’t completely know its origin or kinship; she doesn’t know how it is tied into my family or why my grandfather brought it into being. I look at the two women sitting in the judge’s living room—so prim and intense. Their hands are folded in their laps, but I can tell they have long fingers. Their feet are tucked away from sight, but they probably have big narrow feet with long second toes. Those two don’t know who they are, what it means that they are Pillagers. They don’t know that they came from Simon Jack and they don’t know what he did to Anaquot, my grandmother, or to my aunt whose name is never spoken, or to himself. They don’t know what the drum did to him, either, what the drum knows, or what it contains. They don’t know why my father sold it in spite of the many persons it healed. They don’t know the whole story, but I do know it. So I tell them.

Among the Anishinaabeg on the road where I live, it is told how a woman loved a man other than her husband, and went off into the bush and bore his child. Her name was Anaquot, and like her namesake the cloud she was changeable, moody and sullen one moment, threatening, her lower lip jutting and eyes flashing, filled with storms. The next moment she would shake her hair over her face, blow it out straight in front of her, and make her children scream with laughter. For she had two children by her husband, Shaawano, one a yearning boy of five years and the other a capable daughter of nine.

When she brought the baby out of the trees late that autumn, so long ago, the girl was like a second mother, even waking in the night to clean the baby and nudge it to her mother’s breast. Anaquot slept through its cries, hardly woke. It wasn’t that Anaquot didn’t love her baby, no it was quite the opposite—she loved it too much, the way she loved its father, not her husband. This passion ate away at her and her feelings were unbearable. If she could have thrown that love off, she would have, but the thought of the man who lived across the lake was with her always. She became a gray sky, stared monotonously at the walls, sometimes wept into her hands for hours at a time. At last, she couldn’t rise to cook or keep the cabin neat, and it was too much for the girl child, who curled up each night exhausted in her brown and red plaid shawl, and slept and slept, so that the husband had to wake the girl to wake her mother, for he was afraid of Anaquot’s bad temper, and it was he who roused her into anger by the sheer fact that he was himself, and not the other.