Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

Those great trees had been struck down by lightning, it was said. They never had been touched by a whiteman’s ax. In the morning the three walked out into the bush and after only minutes of walking a strange thing occurred. They burst into a clearing, or what seemed like one. As their eyes adjusted from the cool shade of the woods to a dazzling plain of light, they saw from the nakedness of ground that they had come upon an area of devastation. Trees had been snapped off like matchsticks and pulverized to splinters. Only a few of the toughest plants grew among the fragments of the trees. It was as if a giant had smashed its foot down and ground everything beneath his heel.

“What did this?” said the boy in awe.

“A whirlwind,” Albert told him.

“Do you think it smashed the drum trees?” asked my grandfather.

“It might be good to smoke the pipe here,” Albert said.

So they sat down in the glare of mild sun and Albert took out his grandfather’s pipe. My grandfather had never kept a pipe. He wasn’t the type to have been given one and he was glad now that by mistake he had never acquired one. If something had happened to a pipe of his during those bad years, he’d have that on his conscience along with everything else. It was good to smoke the pipe that Albert kept. All three soon felt their uneasiness lessen and a sense of admiring wonder take its place. Here was evidence of a casual, intentless power. It made and it destroyed. Grew trees and crushed them. Brought people to life and stood back as they made what they could of their time on earth. As my grandfather held the pipe in his hands, praying, his attention was drawn by a still patch of light behind and beyond Albert and Chickie. He looked at the patch of light for some time, as he spoke, before he made out its shape. A wolf was watching from the leaves, huge and gray. Its yellow eyes burned with an ancient calm but its tongue stuck out sideways between its teeth, as a dog’s sometimes will, so that along with inscrutable menace it also looked just plain goofy. My grandfather laughed. The others turned to see what he had laughed at but the wolf was gone, only a few disturbed leaves quivered. Through these leaves my grandfather Shaawano saw where they must go.

“The trees are around the bottom of that cliff,” said my grandfather, pointing as people pointed, silently kissing at an upwash of rock beyond the wolf and the crushed circle of trees. “We have to walk around the base until we stumble over them.”

“Giin igo,” said Albert, blowing the ash from his pipe. “I don’t mind what we do.”

“I’m ready,” said the boy.

The three walked halfway around the base of the cliff and saw nothing. Discouraged, Grandfather Shaawano rubbed his hands across his face. When he opened his eyes and squinted straight up before him, he saw that just past a tangle of willow, higher than he’d imagined, the logs were lying on a rock shelf, a stone bed where nothing would take root. The three climbed a tumble of washed-down, split boulders and edged out along a broken path that widened to the shelf. There were the cedars, four of them lying together in a row. My grandfather sat down next to one of the great logs and leaned against the curve of the wood. He could see far across the bay into the opening of the channel and through that to an island so far, blue, and cloudy that it seemed almost a mirage. Yet it was very real and Shaawano remembered it well. He and Anaquot had run away to that island from their camp, and there they had made their daughter in the first sweetness of their love. They had wanted to be alone together, just the two of them, feeding each other berries and touching whenever they wanted, in the open, underneath a limitless sky.

Perhaps the great trees had seen their fumbling, human, all too brief happiness and taken pity. Perhaps the trees knew all along. Perhaps the trees had decided to do what they could for the childish lovers, and for their daughter. The body of a drum is a container for the spirit, just as if it were flesh and bone. And although love between a man and woman can change and fail, overreach itself, fall prey to suspicions, yet the drum lives on. The drum waits with the patience of unliving things and yet it heals with life itself.

I was years away from my existence when my grandfather began the making of the drum sitting here before us in this room. As for the wife who had left him, and Ziigwan’aage, who had befriended her, they had long collaborated in the leisurely destruction of Simon Jack. During the making of the drum, my father was free to go wherever he willed. He sat with my grandfather, when he could sit still, and tried as best he could to be a son to the man who had left him in a cold house. But some things are only undone by the cruelest means. The ishkode wabo already had its hooks in my father’s gut. Every so often, he left my grandfather and got drunk. Still, he saw the making of the drum, or much of it. When there was something that he could do, he helped. At the same time, on his drunks, he learned all there was to know, and then some, about the goings-on of people near and far, even those across the lake. He learned about his mother, Anaquot, and the wife of the man she’d gone to, and about his half sister, the one they called Fleur, whom he’d hated for her innocent part in the killing of his older sister. All these things he told me at one time or another, or I heard them from other people closely involved, like old Albert. For the making of this drum, as you can imagine, given the caretaking of the wood and the advent of dreams and the tragic incidents and surprising redemptions surrounding its origins, made Anishinaabeg from miles all around both hopeful and curious. They came to visit my grandfather. Soon he had more help than he could manage, and more advice than he could trust.

My grandfather packed his tools into his canoe and outfitted himself to camp alongside those trees for as long as it would take. After he got to the place and set up his camp, he examined each tree for rot, chose one, and cut away branches from the smoothest and most symmetrical part of the trunk. He carefully marked the trunk all around and used ax, saw, and wedge to remove a section that would make the body of the drum. Once he had that section, he rolled it to his camp, where he would hollow it out. He already had a pile of smooth rocks heating in a blaze and he kept that fire going, feeding it hotter and hotter until the rocks glowed red when he rolled them from the fire with a piece of ironwood. He used a pair of antlers to place each rock exactly where he wanted it—on the heart of the wood. The stone burned itself in, leaving a shallow, charred hole. Once the stone cooled he replaced it with another, and so it went, a tedious, exacting process. The time it took seemed endless, but my grandfather needed that time now, because the drum could not be made with a wholly conscious plan. Parts of its making had to be dreamed.

When my grandfather fell asleep at night he looked forward to the possibility that something of the drum’s construction and character might be revealed. Wrapped snug in a woolen blanket, face covered with a light cloth, he drifted off in a state of comfort. He’d never rested so well. Spirits came to him, but not to torment; they were curious as their people, the Anishinaabeg, and wanted to know what Old Shaawano was doing and how the drum was progressing. Half-conscious, my grandfather heard murmuring and low arguments, tinkling bells and footsteps. Where before these sounds had frightened him, now he was lulled. He felt secure as a child snuggled up in the corner of the cabin while the grown-ups talk low and laugh around the stove.

When my grandfather had finished with the main body of the drum, he lashed it into his canoe and started paddling for home. His vision of how he would dress the drum was still incomplete—the colors, symbols, and type of ornament the drum required still evaded his dreams. He couldn’t get a picture in his mind. But on the way back, something happened that he was to describe many times after in his life. He reached the smooth waters of the bay across which stood his cabin, just as the sun threw red light off, going down. A great cloud had come up behind him and lowered a blue shadow across the water. Just where that cloud stopped and the clear red sky began, there was a line of brilliant space. A yellow line glowed across the earth and the lake with a startling radiance. As my grandfather paddled into that dazzling moment then, he heard a little girl’s voice calling from shore. From the south there was a clap of thunder. From the west a stiff breeze blew. My grandfather put his hand up to test the wind and the sun struck his hand a bright, startling red. He thought of the wolves and of the one that had watched him. He saw pictures. There they were. Little girl. Hand. Wolf. The bowl of reflecting water cut in half by the yellow strip of light would be the design on the head of the drum. All was still in the four directions. He saw the whole thing in his mind.