Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

“You’re kidding.”

“I’ll be young forever. I’ll have young eyes.”

Ira looked down at her hands.

“I don’t know what I’d do. I feel for you.”

“I’d rather you just feel me,” said Morris. “Up.”

“Sad.”

“I know it, I’m so out of practice.”

“Yes, you are. But that’s a plus in my mind.”

“Good.” Morris paused. “Are you used to your house being gone yet?”

“I am trying to get used to remembering that I have no house, nothing, just what I have on me.”

“Which is?”

Ira began to rummage in her purse. “A comb, a compact, a stick of gum, an extra diaper, some bills, food vouchers, old mascara, a bunch of toilet paper, photographs, which now I’m very glad I always carry, and lots of lint balls.”

“That’s in your purse.”

“Right. Oh, and I also have a beadwork clip and a bag of earrings I was hoping to sell. Here,” she handed him the clip, which was a sunburst design picked out in extra-small fancy cutbeads. “This is an example of my work. You can feel how I made it anyway.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah, I’m real careful. I do good, tight, work, me.”

Morris held the clip, running his fingers over it. “Can I keep it?”

Ira hesitated, “Well, I’d like to give it to you. But I could maybe get forty for it. I was gonna show the nurses.”

“I’ve got fifty.”

“Trying to give me money again.” Ira pushed the clip back at Morris. “Just take it. Keep it. I want you to have it.”

“No,” said Morris. He tried to give it back, but Ira had left the room. So he lay back with the beaded sunburst in the palm of his hand, running his fingers across the perfect, smooth, curved rows of beads.

“We’re none of us perfect,” said Honey. Ira’s cousin was round, cute, and full of satisfaction about her house and children and hardworking husband. She had it all. She was sitting in the girls’ room on the plastic recliner. Ira came in and sat on the end of Alice’s bed and wondered if Honey had found them a place to stay.

“You blame your mom,” said Honey to Shawnee. “But you shouldn’t. Your mother is a human being. She has her faults, as do all of us.”

Shawnee had been staring at the blank TV. Now she looked at Honey. She saw her so clearly. She saw her thin brown hair with the floss cut so it curled around her ears. She saw the heaviness in her face and neck, her strong little black eyes. She saw how Honey liked to visit them because they made her feel so much better about her own children and her situation in this life. She wondered if Honey went to school or just practiced until she got the job of nurse. Anyway, even if she’d learned all there was to know, she didn’t know her mother or have the right to tell Shawnee to blame or not to blame her. And her mother was a human being, that was true, anybody could see that. This woman had not been to the edge of life.

“I’m not stupid,” said Shawnee to her mother’s cousin.

After that, although Honey tried to talk to her, held her hands out, Shawnee did a thing she discovered she could do with her mind. She clicked the woman’s mute button. She had just learned about the mute button on the television’s remote control. So it was comical—nothing she said came through—just her mouth moving, her eyebrows wiggling up and down, her finger pointing, waving, her arms finally flapping at Shawnee’s mother, who went out the door with Honey and came back alone and said, “So much for that.”

“What?” said Shawnee.

“She hasn’t got a place for us.” Ira laughed suddenly. “You told her, I guess,” she said. “We’re not stupid. You got that right, baby girl.”

Ira sat back down on Alice’s bed.

“That woman came,” Shawnee said, “and Alice asked her how she got that scar on her face.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have asked that, Alice.”

“But it was interesting,” said Shawnee.

“It was?” Ira could not help it, she was curious and still could not remember.

“A matron,” said Shawnee. “What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s in boarding school,” Ira said. “I’m not going to send you kids to boarding school.”

“That’s good,” Shawnee said.

“Bernard came,” said Alice.

“He said to tell you he has our food. He’ll bring it to wherever we go,” said Shawnee. Then stopped. Bernard had patted her shoulder and told her that she was a strong little girl, a good sister. Her mother had tried to touch her only that one time, since the fire. Shawnee almost wanted to force her mother to get angry with her just to get it over with, but at the same time she hoped her mother would say that Shawnee had saved her brother and sister, that she had dragged them through the snow, that she had refused to let them fly away as black skeletons.

“Where do we go now?” Alice asked.

Ira leaned over and put her arms around Alice. As she held her, rocking, she looked over at Shawnee, and that was when Shawnee thought her mother was going to say, in a mean and low voice, maybe, How could you have burnt down the house? But Ira didn’t say it, she just kept rocking Alice, and looking at Shawnee, and looking back down at Alice. After a while her mother’s face seemed to open up like a flower. She smiled and a softness flowed from her and wrapped around Shawnee and held her.

Apitchi was burbling weakly, coming out of his long still sleep. This time he didn’t know his mother, he could get no comfort from her and each breath wheezed and rasped in his chest. Ira sat with him, holding him. She thought he seemed to be losing weight. Even as they sat there, he was growing less substantial in her arms. She put him down and he was motionless, hot, his skin dry and burning. Ira got a washcloth and rinsed it in cold water, squeezed it out, and began washing Apitchi down with it. With every few strokes of the cloth against his skin, the cold was gone. She had to rinse it again. She kept on rinsing and wiping and then suddenly his eyes, which had been wide open, went glassy and blank and stared sideways. His arms and legs moved in climbing motions. He grinned terribly, his baby teeth clamped tight, and he shuddered. Ira pressed the nurse call button, yelled for help, tried to hold his arms still but he was twisting, snaking along the bed. She clamped herself over him. His mouth was open and he was choking on blood and foam. She turned him over and at last the nurse came, and then more nurses and two doctors, until people filled the room. Ira stepped back into the corner, frozen to the wall. All she could see of Apitchi was his foot, still jerking, then his foot went still.

They kept working on him, calling for things she didn’t know the names of. Nobody noticed her. He couldn’t be dead, she thought, as long as there was so much activity. She fixed on the bustling of the nurses. The low-key, businesslike voices of the doctors reassured her. If the doctors were giving orders there was hope. At last, one of them said, “His mother?” A nurse said Ira’s name and beckoned to her. The doctor turned from the bed and took Ira’s hand, an act that made her gasp with fear.

“Ira,” the doctor said, quiet behind the mask, “your son is very sick. But we think we have him stabilized.”

Now the nurses were moving away from the bed and the other doctor went out of the room. Ira could see Apitchi in the bed. He seemed to have shrunk yet again, he looked like a tiny monkey. He was far, far away. Ira could tell he wasn’t in his body.

“We’ve got a problem,” the doctor said, taking off her rubber gloves and removing her mask. “This seizure is probably related to the fever, but it could have some other source. Normally, I’d have your little boy helicoptered out, but we’ve got bad weather out there. We’re going to have to keep him here until the blizzard clears up. You’re staying nights, aren’t you?”