Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

“How did you kill him?” she asked Ziigwan’aage.

“Around the bend, past that rock, he stood before us. So I shot him. It was a good shot.”

The bullet had drilled the heart. When Anaquot saw the wound she put her fingers into the blood and before she knew what she was doing she had put her fingers into her mouth. Some old women say that by tasting wolf blood you will know the shape of things, but Anaquot had never known that to be true. The blood tasted like any other blood, but sharper. They would probably eat the wolf, because they ate everything, but the meat would have to be boiled in seven waters and seasoned heavily. As the women worked on the wolf, skinning it, Anaquot thought she heard someone singing; then later on a small voice whispered in her ear.

This is the one who ate my heart, mother.

With a strange cry, Anaquot dropped the knife. Ziigwan’aage picked it up. But Anaquot’s hands were shaking and she could not continue to work.

“What is it?” asked Ziigwan’aage.

“My daughter speaks to me,” said Anaquot.

Ziigwan’aage knew immediately just whom she meant, and put down her knife and sat with Anaquot.

“I knew there was someone else with you when you came here,” she said. “She has been here all along.”

Anaquot nodded. “But she hasn’t spoken to me for almost two turns of the moon. I thought she’d left.”

“I don’t think she will ever leave,” said Ziigwan’aage.

They both stared at the carcass of the wolf. After a while, Anaquot said, “We will make hoods and mitts for the children, fur on the inside to keep them warm.” Without another word the two set to work, disposed of the wolf perfectly, and set its bones to boil on the stove. That night, they ate the creature, whose meat was bitter.

Now, let us not forget that Anaquot left behind a man grieving in the snow. The stricken husband, my grandfather, Old Shaawano. I knew the old man well because he’d keep me sometimes when my father and mother hit the bottle. When I was small, he tried to hold me close to him, and that’s when he taught me all about the drum. Still, there are many things I know from sources other than my grandfather. I was friends with the old men who were close to him, and the old ladies too. I was the kind of boy and then young man who always felt old, maybe because my father’s beatings made me old. I never wanted to be young because the young suffer. I always liked to listen to the old people. So it was through them that I know what it was like for my grandfather when Anaquot left him, and after he had picked up his daughter’s scattered bones.

During that time, a sick uneasiness of grief afflicted Old Shaawano and sent him wandering. Whenever the need to tell the sad events panicked him, starting with an ache like cold and spreading outward until it squeezed his heart and prickled in his throat, he left the house. He left my father, just a little boy, to fend for himself. He could not be still. Weeks or days of wandering and talking might go by before he returned, exhausted, and collapsed in his cabin. Then, absurdly, he was enraged to find his son gone. But he always fell into a sickness and forgot to look for the boy, but instead lay helpless, his brain on fire. At the merest touch he felt his hair crackle. He hated for the wind to graze him as it fanned the heat all through his body and caused a bloody coughing that would not stop for days. He stayed indoors, usually in bed, and waited in sick trembling for the cup of despair to pass.

At these times, during the days when he was alone, my grandfather often heard things or saw things that he definitely knew were not there. His low, dark house was only one room with a small window on three sides. It still stands in the bush behind my house, used for chickens, so I know it well. The door on the fourth side opened out where it shouldn’t have, west, where the dead go. From his cot, on good days, Shaawano could see out the door into the woods, but he usually kept the door shut to block the ghosts. Even so, some got by, squeezing underneath the sill or sliding through the cracks between the door and its casing. The ghosts were all strangers. He didn’t know why that should be. He kept asking for his little girl, but none of them paid attention. Many were from the other side of the lake, and he’d made it a point to avoid people from there ever since that demon Pillager had stolen away his wife. That these unknown ghosts came, rather than his daughter or his own relatives, was a disappointment. My grandfather told me that our family, my ancestors, were clever people, while these strangers didn’t seem very bright. He would have liked to see his grandparents, such generous, kind people, or his parents, who had died a few years before, disappointed that they couldn’t cure his grief. He was even sure they would provide him help. Only, they never came.

The ghosts who did come to visit him were tiny skeleton children who flitted and zipped across his ceiling like spidery bats. Or they were shadowy, dull figures who seemed content to sit in the corner or slowly rock in his chipped green rocking chair. They usually did nothing but sigh and mutter, low, so he could never distinguish their words. That he could not make out their conversation or their complaints or whatever they were trying to tell him on these visits was maddening. He assumed they were judging him, blaming him, for letting his daughter die and his son run away. Their eyes raked over him. They sneered in his face. When he could stand it no longer, Shaawano would lunge from his bed and strike out right and left, in a frenzy, using whatever came to hand—knife, stick, board, belt. Driving them out usually put an end to his groaning need and he would totter, blinking, to the outhouse, and then return to sit by his door in the weak sun. He always felt so much better, once these hellish episodes subsided, that he often wondered why he dreaded them in the first place. But likewise, when he was curled in his bed, heart pumping with terror and longing, he could never remember how it felt to be at peace and so believed that his torment would last forever.

When he’d emerged, and was sitting in the sun, Shaawano would feel a remorse and calm so thrilling that tears might fill his eyes. He missed his son. There was so much that he wanted to show him! My grandfather noticed everything—the way wild raspberries had taken root in his torn and idle fishing nets and how young trees had grown through his junked wagon and the piles of his traps. Their prickling fronds, wildly spurting out the wood of the wagon box and through the jaws and knots of things that catch and kill, were a glorious signal. A chickadee pausing with a tiny worm in its beak, the blessed gurgle of a red-winged blackbird, the waves sounding on the lakeshore—anything, everything, caused Shaawano a happiness almost as unbearable as his pain. In this way, too, it was difficult to be so weakened. To wildly celebrate would have once been the appropriate response to any small light or joy. Now, standing up to the beauty, being small in it, taking one breath of sweet air after the next, often produced its own form of panic. This, he named after some time, guilt.

My grandfather said himself that he had been an evil person in his first season of random pain. He had done many things that were beyond the limits of decency. Things he dreaded bringing to mind. The worst things, of course, pierced into his brain with illuminating power. Those things were not the fighting or brawling or fucking or the stupid thefts. The scenes that came back vivid and sharp-edged were the cruel moments when he’d felt a black satisfaction, even a surge of glee in his throat, when he hurt his own son. He’d left the boy hungry and even ridiculed his grief over the loss of his mother. He had tampered with his son’s spirit and now the boy was lost to him. Someone else had stepped in, taken the boy home, and barred Shaawano from visits. But the damage to the boy was done and some things cannot be undone. It was as though what happened with the wolves had set loose one long string of accidents that seemed like fate. And now the guilt. Shaawano couldn’t get what he’d done out of his mind. He began to hate himself so much that the only relief he could obtain was to picture himself going back and savagely attacking the man he had been. He killed himself over and over in his mind. But when his bloody fantasies were exhausted, Shaawano was always left with Shaawano. The man who could never take back a single blow.