Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

I think I can take him now, is what I said.

And I know they were scared, but their faces, oh their faces rose up toward me in this beautiful reveal all full of hope and belief. So when he came in the door, and I faced him, I was not afraid.

He was big though, he hadn’t wasted from the alcohol or the long disease yet. His nose had got pushed to one side in a fight, then slammed back on the other side, so now it was straight. His teeth were half gone and he smelled the way he had to smell, being five days drunk. When he came in the door, he paused for a moment, his eyes red and swollen to tiny slits. Then he saw I was waiting for him and he smiled in a bad way. He went for me. My first punch surprised him. I had been practicing this on a hay-stuffed bag, then a padded board, toughening my fists, and I’d gotten so quick I flickered like fire. But I wasn’t strong as he was, still, and he had a good twenty pounds on me. Yet, I’d do some damage, I was sure of it. I’d teach him not to mess with me. What I didn’t foresee was how the fight itself would get right into me.

There is a terrible thing about fighting your father, I never knew. It came on sudden, with the second blow, a frightful kind of joy. Suddenly a power surged up from the center of me and I danced at him, light and giddy, full of a heady rightness. Here is the thing. I wanted to waste him, waste him good. I wanted to smack the living shit out of him. Kill him if I must. If he died, so be it. If I died, well, I wouldn’t! A punch for Doris, a blow coming back I didn’t feel. A kick for Raymond. And all the while me silent, then screaming, then silent again, in this rage of happiness that filled me with a simultaneous despair so that, I guess you could say, I stood apart from myself.

He came at me, crashed over a chair that was already broke, then threw the pieces, but they easily bounced off and I grabbed a chair leg and whacked him on the ear so his head spun. I watched, like I say, stood apart. Struck again and again. I knew what I was doing while I was doing it, but not really, not in the ordinary sense. It was like I was standing calm, against the wall with my arms folded, pitying us both. I saw the boy, the chair leg, the man fold and fall, his hands held up in begging fashion. Then I also saw that now, for a while, the bigger man had not even bothered fighting back.

Suddenly, he was my father again, as he lay there in his blood. And when I kneeled down next to him, I was his son. I reached for the closest rag, and I picked up this piece of blanket that my father always kept for some reason next to the place he slept. And as I picked it up and wiped the blood off his face, I said to him, your nose is crooked again. Then he looked at me, steady and quizzical, clear, as though he had never drunk in his life. He kept looking at me as though I was unsolved, a new thing, and I wiped his face again with that frayed piece of blanket. Well, it really was a shawl, a light kind of old-fashioned woman’s blanket shawl. Once, maybe it was plaid. You could still see lines, some red, the background a faded brown. He watched intently as this rag went from his face and as my hand brought it near again. I was pretty sure, then, I’d clocked him too hard, that he’d now really lost it and there wasn’t a chance. I mean, a chance of what? I suppose a chance of getting a father back. A thing I hadn’t understood I wanted.

Gently though, he clasped one hand around my wrist. With the other hand he took that piece of shawl. He crumpled that and held it to the middle of his forehead. It was like he was praying, like he was having thoughts he wanted to collect in that scrap of cloth. For a while he lay like that and I, crouched over, let him be, hardly breathing. Something told me to sit there still. And then at last he said to me, in the sober new voice I would hear from then on out, did you know I had a sister once?

There was a time when the government moved everybody off the farther reaches of the reservation, onto roads, into towns, into housing. It looked good at first and then it all went sour. Shortly after, it seemed like anyone who was someone was either dead, drunk, killed, near suicide, or just had dusted themself. None of the old sorts were left, it seemed, the old kind of people. It was during that time that my mother died and my father hurt us, as I have said. But now, gradually, that term of despair has lifted somewhat and yielded up its survivors. We still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, those to handle besides our own, and cruelties lodged where we cannot forget. We have the need to forget. I don’t know if we stopped the fever of forgetting yet. We are always walking on oblivion’s edge.

I do know that some get out of it, like my brother and sister living quiet. And myself to some degree, though my wife has moved to Fargo and I miss her, and miss my children between their visits. Before my father died, he found a woman to live with him. I think he had several happy years, and during that time he talked to me. Once, when he brought up the old days, and again we went over the story, I said to him at last two things I had been thinking.

First, I told him that to keep his sister’s shawl was wrong. Because we never keep the clothing of the dead, which he knew. Now’s the time to burn it, I said, send it off to cloak her spirit. So he agreed.

The other thing I said to him was in the form of a question. Have you ever considered, I asked him, given how your sister was so tenderhearted and brave, that she looked at the whole situation? She saw the wolves were only hungry, she saw their need was only need. She knew you were back there, alone in the snow. She saw the baby she loved would not live without a mother, and only the uncle knew the way. She saw clearly that one person on the wagon had to offer themself, or they all would die. And in that moment of knowledge, don’t you think being who she was, of the old sort of Anishinaabeg who thinks of the good of the people first, she jumped, my father, n’deydey, brother to that little girl, don’t you think she lifted her shawl and flew?

My father is a Shaawano and I’ve grown up in the range of those wolves, though I didn’t understand for a long while, of course, how it was that they related to our family. In summer that pack disappears on the far mainland where the shore is still wild and never was developed. I hardly ever hear them then. But in winter they come out onto the ice of the lake and hunt the islands. Then their howls travel through the frozen space and to hear them brings back all the tumult of my heart in younger days. I don’t know why their cries do that to me; perhaps it is because I’ve always had that longing, that need, to pierce through my existence. I am a boundary to something else, but I don’t know what. Mostly I have made my peace with never knowing, but when I hear the wolves that falls away. Unrest grips me. I have to leave my house and go out walking in the night, hungry to know what I cannot know and desperate to see what will always be hidden.

There was an old man once who wanted to be with the wolves and know their thoughts. He went out on the ice and sang to them and asked them to sink their teeth into his heart. I guess the singing kept him warm enough so he lived out there for three days and nights. On the fourth day, the wolves finally came to him, or rather, he realized that all along he had been looking straight at them and only when they were ready had they let themselves be seen. I know about this man because I sat with him in the hospital just a few years ago, and I talked to him while I was on night duty. I pulled a chair up next to his bed.

“Those wolves were curious,” he said, “just like anyone would be. What in the heck’s this young man—I was young then—sitting out here on the ice for? They came up to find out if I was dangerous or crazy or good to eat. Even then I was tough and stringy, so I guess they decided crazy. They sat and watched me for several hours to see if I would do anything and after a while they went away.”