Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

“I must let this pass,” he said to Geeshik, shaking his head. “I’m not the man for it.”

Geeshik smiled a nodding smile. A very little smile. The sun came slanting through the window and warmed the smooth old table. Far away, someone chopped wood. The ax made a rhythmic, high, knocking sound. My grandfather closed his eyes and could see the movements of the chopper, steady and practiced and resigned. Over and over, the wood split, dropping to either side of the stump. The chopper neatly lifted each half on the ax blade and split a stove length with one downward stroke.

“That’s how you’ll do it,” Geeshik said. “One stroke.” It was as though she could see what my grandfather saw in his mind’s eye. He went back over the timing of her words. It seemed that she was referring to the effortless fall of the ax and thoughtless grace of a good wood splitter. Maybe she was saying he had the same skill—in him, not evident, but ready to come out. Grandfather Shaawano made a groaning sound of bleak frustration. He lifted his hands and hung them in the air and put them down, an empty gesture. He didn’t even know how to start.

“Just do everything she tells you,” Geeshik said.

My grandfather thought of placing tobacco where his own father used to put his tobacco. At the side of the clearing around his cabin there was a birch tree stump. Over the years it had always worn a heap of tobacco. When my grandfather was little, his father used to hold tobacco every morning in his small hand with him and pray for a good life. When he grew older, Shaawano swiped some of the tobacco off the stump every now and then to roll his own cigarettes. But he had still had a good life, he thought now, up until he began to wreck it for himself.

“I’m not the man for it,” Shaawano said, then he laughed a little, feeling foolish.

“Come back sometime,” she said, standing up. A pretty clear signal that she wanted him to go.

My grandfather walked home and didn’t feel any better about things. He went to sleep and when he woke he stretched and felt no better and got up anyway and set about his day. First he fixed up a little iron woodstove that he’d traded with a farmer for two bedsteads. The nickel plating was chipped and ruined, but the stove still gave him a feeling of cheer on a cool morning. His water was boiling. He poured half the water into another pot for mush and dropped two handfuls of meal in and put it back on to boil. He’d thrown the leathery swamp-tea leaves into the first, dented tin pot when he remembered about the tobacco. With an ironwood stick, he stirred the mush, then wiped his hands on the pockets of his pants and took a bag of crumbled tobacco off the shelf by his door. He brought it out into the yard. There was nothing special about the day. A little cloudy. Light breeze. Grandfather Shaawano found the birch stump, which hadn’t rotted away like he imagined. He opened the bag and took some tobacco out and said to the twitching leaves of a popple tree or to anyone or nobody or to the Creator, “Thank you for my existence.”

He put the tobacco on the stump and waited for something to happen. A woodpecker tapped away, testingly, then paused, perhaps flew to another tree and began tapping, this time harder. The breeze was causing light waves to slap on shore. My grandfather forgot he was waiting for anything but his first taste of tea. He walked back into the house.

So it went like this, every day. The days began with putting out tobacco, then a breakfast of tea and mush. The day continued on and he cut poles or went to the sloughs for willow, and on yet some more as he worked on his chairs, and the tables, which he could now make because he’d bought a good hand plane. Late summer turned to fall and winter came and went and every day my grandfather put out tobacco. He picked up the tobacco and went outside half in a dream, but once he put his tobacco down and said his words he always noticed something—mouse tracks in the snow, impossibly delicate, the deep scent of wood smoke, clouds booming over the leafless trees. These sharp moments of seeing did not fill him with the wild joy that had been so frightening when he first quit wandering. He wasn’t swallowed up with fear or sadness, either, nor did he dream of the dead. If he was visited by spirits, they kept to themselves. For many hours, most of the day, he became lost in his work and forgot everything but what was before him—the feel of the tool in his hands, balance, the tension of fitting together his pieces, which he made with pegs and no nails, the critical shaving and adjusting that made his work stand level. He sold everything he made to a trader who came with a wagon to take it away, but he spent so much time on each that he never accumulated money. Sometimes he could afford oatmeal—zashi manoomin, slippery rice. He thought of tapping the stand of maple around him soon, in spring, so he could have pools of syrup in his gray bowlfuls of oatmeal. Then he found himself whittling the taps and spouts and making baskets or makakoog of birch bark with ash trim, to catch the sap. He surprised himself all the time. Where before he had talked endlessly of what he was going to do and never did it, now he only thought about things he was going to do and then found his actions carrying out his thoughts before he’d even given them words. One day in late spring, before the blackflies hatched and when the nights were still cold enough to kill off the mosquitoes, it occurred to my grandfather that he would go and see for himself whether that wood his daughter told him about in the dream was even in the place she described.

He found himself making his own lunch, first thing next morning.

These days, he bought a new substance called peanut butter and ate it instead of grease on his bannock. There was nothing in the world that tasted so good. He spread peanut butter on a slab of cold bannock, slapped another piece on top, and tucked it into his pocket. Then he began to walk, although he knew he could not get to the place he wanted to by walking. He would have to find someone with a boat to take him there, as it was far across the lake, where the people had lived in the old days, starting before the agents and missionaries, even fur traders, even rum, when life was no doubt hard and full of cruel tricks but at least the clans and families were together.

My grandfather went straight through the bush for a good while. It didn’t bother him. He had a hundred ways of getting places from his house. Ever since he was a boy, he had liked walking in the bush. No one could get him lost. Even when he was drunk, he had never once started off in the wrong direction or found himself somewhere and didn’t know how he got there. Most people are completely oblivious when blacked out, but my grandfather seemed to retain his sense of place even when the rest of him was howling crazy. So he knew just exactly at which cabin he would come out of the woods, and was there at the hour of the day when the fishermen who lived around there went out to set their nets.

Albert Ruse, Akiwenzi, Morton, Ningabianong—none would give him a ride in their jiimaanan or had an extra boat or canoe or old washtub for him to use. They knew what he was like, or thought they did, and assumed they would never see whatever scow they lent him in the same shape or maybe in this life. But then, just as they were all pulling away, Albert turned and yelled that he, Shaawano, was free to take and put back together an old wiigwaasi-jiimaan, his canoe made of birch bark, and to keep it if it hadn’t already disintegrated out in the bush behind his house.

All right, all right, thought my grandfather, if that’s the way you’re going to play it, I’m your man. Up surged his old belligerence and off he tramped to Albert’s house, where he located the broken hulk, hoisted it on his back, and without a word to Albert’s old lady or the gaping children trudged back off into the bush, where he didn’t let the damn thing down off his shoulders until he got home and eased it off into the patch of bright sun before his door.