Louise Erdrich: The Painted Drum

Krahe walked over and bent to the bird. He snapped the arrow’s point off and drew the shaft tenderly, terribly, from the bird’s body. For a moment the raven sprawled, limp and addled, on the ground, and then it gathered itself. The two humans watched as the bird simply walked away from them and entered the woods to die.

All of this time, overhead and out of range, the other birds wheeled. For once, they were silent.

“Let me see the bow,” said Krahe conversationally.

Davan handed it to him, prepared to point out its marvelous and lethal features.

“And the arrows.”

Davan handed those over too.

“I’ll be right back,” said Krahe.

Davan waited. Krahe walked across the yard to his woodpile, turned, and fit an arrow into the groove. Then he raised the bow. Davan stepped aside, looked around for the target, looked uneasily back at Krahe, then touched his own breast as the sculptor lifted the shoulder piece. Shot. Davan leapt to the other side of the white pine and vaulted off into the brush. The arrow stuck just past his shoulder. Then Krahe walked over and removed the arrow and laid the bow on the block he used to split his firewood. He axed the weapon neatly in half. He laid the arrows down next like a bunch of scallions and chopped them into short lengths. He walked into his house and phoned me. “If you see that boy running past your house,” he said, “here’s why.”

“You shot at him?”

“Not to hit him.”

“But still, my God.”

Krahe, embarrassed, would not speak of this again.

Davan had saved enough money from his pay (we thought) to buy himself a small old Toyota, dusty red with a splash of dark rust on the door where a dent had raised metal through the paint. The car now spewed grit and smoke on the road as he drove it back and forth to town. He’d returned to his room in his parents’ house and he resumed, every day, his chore of feeding the dog, though he never untied it from the tree.

That dog’s maple grew great patches of liver-colored moss and dropped dead limbs. The dog was killing it. Shit-poisoned, soaked with urine at the base, and nearly girdled by the continual sawing and wearing of the chain, the tree had for years yellowed and then blazed orange, unhealthily first of all the trees upon the road. Then one day it fell over and the dog walked off, calmly, like the raven, into the woods, a three-foot length of chain dragging. Only the dog didn’t die. Perhaps it had been completely stark mad all along, or perhaps it happened that moment after the tree went down when, unwrapping itself nervously, the dog stepped one step beyond the radius of packed dirt within which it had lived since it was a fat puppy. Perhaps that step, the paw meeting grass, rang down the spine of the dog, fed such new light into its brain, that she could not contain the barrage of information. At any rate, the outcome of that moment wasn’t to be seen for several weeks, within which time Davan had successfully raised dust near Kendra on illicit visits hidden from her father, and secretly taken her out with him to local parties, where at first she enjoyed her status as a college-goer and the small sensation caused by her New York clothing styles. Then, at some point, something awakened in her, some pity or conscience. Before that I’d seen nothing remarkable about Krahe’s daughter, other than the clothing. Her lack of kindness, laziness, feelings of enormous self-worth, all typical of women her age. Then all of a sudden this urge to care for and rescue Davan Eyke, a sudden unblocking of compassion that made Kendra come clean with her father. Her humanity terrified Krahe more thoroughly than if they’d been trying to get pregnant.

I step out of the car with the mail and see Krahe standing square in front of Davan, who slouches before the older man with obdurate weariness. Locked in their man-space, they do not acknowledge me. Krahe is of course telling Davan Eyke that he doesn’t wish for him to see his daughter Kendra, in the course of which he probably calls Davan some name, or makes some threat, for Davan steps back and stares at him alertly, hands up as though ready to throw off a punch, which never comes. Krahe kicks him over, instead, with a rageful ease that astonishes Davan Eyke. From the cold ground, there suddenly, he shakes his head in puzzlement at Krahe’s feet. When Krahe draws his leg back to kick again I move forward. The kick stops midway. Davan rises. The two stare at each other in a spinning hatred—I can see the black web between them.

“You still owe me,” says Davan, backing away.

“Say you won’t see her first.”

Davan just starts to laugh, raucous, cracking, a raven’s laugh. I can still hear it through his car window as he revs and peels out.

I turn to Krahe.

“You should let Kendra see him,” I say.

He is as astounded at my temerity as I am. Not only am I not the sort to get involved in other people’s business, and this is definitely not mine, but he also knows that I’m not fond of Kendra.

“What’s it to you?” he says, more amazed than defensive.

“She’s got a right,” I say. “And besides, she’ll see him anyway.”

“No, she won’t,” says Krahe.

We hold each other’s gazes belligerently. “You’re the dad,” I finally shrug.

I suspect that he will learn soon enough just how much weight his objections carry with Kendra. Still, I don’t understand why Krahe detests the boy so much—it is as though Davan has tapped some awful gusher in the artist. Is it partly the fear we nonbelievers have for what Krahe calls “the fundamentally insane”? He adds holy rolling to the list of Davan’s undesirable Eyke-ish qualities when he sees the family truck pulled up at the unkempt church, which he calls a Quonset hut. Is he afraid that Davan Eyke will draw his daughter into the flock? Whatever else, his anxiety is also a productive, dark vein, for now in a welter of frustrated energy, Krahe starts working. He finishes Twenty . He produces, hardly sleeps. Hardly sees me.

It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother—somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to among other women in my generation. To join in the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother’s indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn’t enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is all right to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame.

Elsie and I are past the blame, and as she sits before me now we are listening to a CD of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in E-flat Major. It is a familiar piece, a thoughtful conversation between old friends. I am writing as usual in my daily journal, a red hardbound book that I order every year through the mail. This journal company has been in existence a long time and I have thirty-three of these books stacked among my other notebooks, shelved in my room. My mother’s eyes are closed. It strikes me that there is something in the nakedness of her face and shut eyes like that of a newborn animal. Her skin has always been extremely clean and fine. Always, she has smelled to me of soap, but now she’s added a light perfume.

I think that she knows he has been here. Last night, he came down off the manic high in which he hung, raven- or hawklike, between one uninspired month and the next. It is morning. Even to me the house seems different, more alive, alert, and with a comforting maleness, after Krahe has made love to me in the night. Still, openly becoming Krahe’s lover would upset the balance. As well, I believe my deadlocked secret love and unsecret contempt is the only hold I have over him, my only power. So things remain as they are. Elsie and I maintain a calm life together, the treasure of routine. I do not dread, as others might, her increasing dependence. It is only that I have the strange unadult wish that if she must pass into death, that rough mountain, she take me too. Not leave me scratching at the shut seam of stone.