Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

She was no Christian, certainly no Catholic, but she wasn’t of her father’s conviction, either. An odd thing came into her mind suddenly. She realized that her father’s ceremonial pipe, a sacred pipe, had survived the fire. It was the only thing besides what they were wearing, and the blankets on the ground outside the house, now under the snow. The pipe had survived exactly because she was so careless with these old beliefs. Her father had told her that when he died she should put his pipe in the woods, in a hidden place, and go and get it when she needed it. There were plenty of times since then she might have needed it, but the truth was she had forgotten all about her father’s pipe. Well, she’d go out there now and she’d find it, hidden in a hollow log under rocks in a place halfway to Bernard’s.

“I don’t know about these things,” she said out loud. “I don’t know.” This business about the drum sounding. This man with the eyes not closing. What, had Morris seen too much? Join the club. Was it the war maybe? Was it looking at himself in the mirror? But he had a kind face as long as he closed his eyes. Even, he would be called good-looking. Basically. Without the eyes, again. I’m starting to like him. Ira grabbed her hair. I hate looking at my face now. I don’t know. And I don’t know either about myself as a mother. No good, maybe. I know I love them. I know I give up things for them. I don’t have men. I don’t have lots of things. But why did I go in that bar on this one night of all fucking nights instead of going home? How did all of this get set into motion? Was it the oatmeal? The last pan of fucking slop? How come I didn’t walk to Bernard’s then, and borrow some food and catch a ride in and out with a trustworthy person? Was it because I never thought of it, or was it because I wanted—just for a moment, or one night, just an evening, really—to get away from my kids?

She had put her hands on her head again and tugged at and messed up her hair. After a while she smoothed it down and wiped her face. Stupid drama. She whispered to Apitchi, “I am going to take care of you real good when you get well.” She put her hand on his chest and felt his ribs go up and down. The regularity of his breath calmed her and she sat for a long time with him like that, just letting her hand rise and fall.

The sun blared down, slats of blinding white through the hospital blinds, the intense brilliance after a storm. Ira woke. Apitchi woke. The girls woke. Morris. Even Bernard, who got a nap in, woke. It was that disorienting day that always occurs after a storm, when there is no school so kids come in to work with parents, or the parents stay home and change shifts around. All routine is shot to hell, yet everything that needs to run, does run. The roads are not yet plowed out. Houses are covered. Or the ashes of houses. Snow blankets the whole reservation. The trees glitter. The open fields are long swoops of white. The reeds sticking out of the sloughs are spears of glowing frost. Under the whiteness the world looks perfectly arranged. Things look settled and planned and accounted for. The business of building and digging and tearing up the earth is halted. And yet, you will see that the roads that matter, the ones most necessary, are cleared between people. Just one lane at first. The plows push away the snow with a cheerful energy. By the end of the day there will again be a pattern of trails.

In the service bathroom, Bernard washed his face and combed back his hair. He smoothed his shirt down his arms and adjusted his belt, then brushed his teeth and stuck his toothbrush in his shirt pocket. He got some tea and talked to a few people, telling them that he was going to use the drum. He went back to the office area and punched his time card out. As he walked up the back stairs he sang low, under his breath, the first song that the little girl had taught to Old Shaawano. But he prayed his own prayer, and as he climbed toward the drum, he begged the guardians from the earth’s four directions, and the one from beneath, and the one from above, to draw close and listen.

Over the entryway of our local general store, the head of an eastern coyote is mounted, teeth set and bared in pink, plastic gums, yellow glass eyes fierce and wide. It pains me to look at the poor, snarling mask, such a misrepresentation of coyote nature. The two I’ve seen gave penetrating stares and were calm. They veered from my presence and disappeared into the cut over undergrowth. One of them carried a limp, brown mouse. People generally believe that our east coast coyotes are crossed with dogs, but that is not true. They have actually crossed with the Canadian gray wolf, and in the process have grown large or fallen mysteriously silent. Like many who have adapted to survive in the eastern seaboard states, coyotes have become reserved and self-contained. They almost never raise yipping howls of joy over a kill, nor do they cry out when returning to their dens. They know better. There is no closed season and no hunting limit on their lives.

Still, some nights when they feel secure in their presence, and are overjoyed and thrilled, or just need to talk, they pour looping yodels for hours from the cliffs in the game park and from that end of the road where Kit Tatro lives. Elsie hears them first, wavering above the Bach, and punches the pause button on the CD player’s remote control. If the howl persists we go outside to sit on the back porch and listen. In mid-September, as the nights and mornings are growing crisp and cool and the deer are retreating from the roads and orchards into the densest brush they can find, it seems to us that the music of the coydogs, as they are mistakenly called, is the music of all the broken and hunted creatures who survive and persist and will not be eliminated. For there they are, along with the ravens, destroyed and returned.

One night, almost a year and a half after changing the back door locks, we are sitting in wicker armchairs on the back screen porch, listening. Between coyote intervals, Elsie and I hear steps crunch down the cinders of the driveway and slap softly along the flagstone walk that rounds the corner of the house. Neither of us speaks a word, though I am astounded and disbelieving. We both know who it is, and also where he is headed. In addition, it is then that I know for certain that mother knew all about those visits to me in the night. Surely she would utter some startled challenge otherwise. There is a half moon out but the porch is in complete shadow, and Elsie and I are invisible. Kurt walks up the steps, the screen door whines softly open. He enters the porch and steps toward the door with the changed lock. The instant I realize that he is going to try the door I feel a pang of sympathy for him and scrape my foot on the painted floorboards. He freezes.

“Sit down, please sit down,” I say. “Elsie and I are listening to the coyotes before we turn in.”

He gropes for a chair, lowers himself into it right next to me. Krahe has quick social reflexes. Without revealing a trace of embarrassment and without acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation, he begins a polite conversation. Elsie answers his questions about her health in more detail than he probably wishes, but she is being game about the whole thing.

I have seen Kurt from time to time at a distance and even said hello to him once at the general store, beneath the snarling glass-eyed head. After I changed the lock, I stopped answering Kurt’s calls. To find that he has, perhaps, been intermittently trying the back door is disturbing to me, and also touching. He sits so close in the dark, perhaps without knowing exactly my position, that the warmth his body sheds drifts along my skin.