Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

I’m quiet and at a loss for a moment, then I ask, suddenly shy, “Did you love him?”

“Of course.” She is looking down at her hands. “Inordinately, foolishly,” she whispers, then looks up at me. “But that is the way people should be loved.”

We stare endlessly into each other’s eyes, which is a very hard thing to do with your mother. It is scarily intimate to gaze into the source of your life. But I know what freedom she is offering to me now. I am in that moment so truly alone that my breath goes out of me, and I feel a bit light-headed. I have to close my eyes and then I have a strange sensation. First, I feel her flowering above me, a leafed-out tree filling the sky with darkness, growing best at the expense of what’s beneath. Her guilt has been greater, deeper, and so black I’ve lived in its shadow. But suddenly, the sun is shining directly on me; I feel it. The brightness and steadiness and softness of light warms my skin and fills the room. When I open my eyes she is still there, but she isn’t forgiving me anymore. No, it is I who am forgiving her.

As a result of having his marijuana crop, the main source of his winter income, destroyed last summer, Tatro has finally discovered what kind of Indian he is. He has done this not by tracking his bloodline back through dusty genealogies, but by consulting a shaman. Broke, he decided to start over. Find a new path. My sly revenge has backfired, as most revenges do. Elsie actually likes him to bend her ear, she finds him entertaining. So it is my own fault that I learn, contrary to any expectation I might have formed, that there are a number of practicing shamans right here in New Hampshire. A sort of underground network surrounds each shaman—people who know people who know people…that sort of thing. Through these contacts a person who needs to consult a shaman can trace his or her way to the center of the web.

Later on that day, Elsie is talking to Kit, who has stopped by on his way out to hunt, though I’m sure it isn’t even bow or muzzle-loading season yet. Maybe he is putting his marijuana crop to bed or preparing a new spot for next year. I try to edge past them, but Elsie won’t have it.

“Excuse me, I’ve got to—”

“Stay here,” says Elsie. “Kit’s telling me something very interesting.”

“So they don’t advertise,” she goes on.

“Oh, some do. There are little newspapers that go in for that sort of thing.” He is very serious. “But of course the really good ones don’t need to, they are known by reputation.”

“Their powers, I suppose.”

He nods and tells us that the shaman he consulted gave him a blanket and a water bottle and then put him out in his backyard to fast for four days. The shaman made a circle around him and told him to stay in it. Then the shaman went back into his house and lived his ordinary life while Kit sat in the circle through a sunny afternoon, a cold night, a light drizzle in the morning, and so on. Four days of it. From time to time the shaman came out of the house and burned sweet grass or sage and fanned the smoke onto Tatro. During the four days, Kit was supposed to have a vision that would give him his financial bearings and tell him about his own tribal origins. But he didn’t really have a vision, it turned out. He ended his fast dizzy, sick, calm, but utterly miserable because he’d found no answers except, perhaps, that he should visit an employment agency. It was on the way home that it happened, though, like a thunderclap.

Driving the two-lane highway, Kit passed a sleek RV, only to find there were a line of them before him, all the same, going no more than 50 mph. Irritated and anxious to get home, he passed another RV and crept up behind the next one. Kit wasn’t the sort to putz along in the group and he was determined to travel at his own speed. He made it around six before he realized that they were all the same make—Winnebago. But that didn’t faze him. No, he said, he had to be hit on the head by the spirits to see it. As he passed another RV on a slight uphill, a red Jeep Cherokee came barreling at him out of nowhere. As Kit swerved, his first terrified thought was I should have stayed with the Winnebagos . Even as he wrenched back into the right-hand lane, he braced himself, sure he’d smash into one of them. But to his surprise a space had opened. The Winnebagos had seen his plight and parted to take him in. All of this happened in a second or two, the miss and entry each only cleared by inches. As Tatro floated on, driving, half out of his body, the terror left him and in its place there grew a singular joy. He was safe, he was at ease, taken in, accepted. He belonged.

We all gave that a long beat of silence.

“So you think you’re a Winnebago?” I ask.

Kit Tatro puts his hands up, and Elsie smiles and won’t speak.

“We prefer to be called Ho-chunks,” he says.

“There was a Cherokee. Why couldn’t you have been a Cherokee?”

“Remember, the Cherokee nearly killed me. I figure that we might have been traditional enemies.”

I hope he’s kidding when he says that, but he doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor about this.

“So your vision consists of a brand name. You are a brand name?” I can’t help myself.

Kit puts his hands up again as if to say, Don’t ask me. “I’m doing research now. I’ll tell you all about it if you like.”

Then Kit Tatro walks off into the woods just behind our house. He is carrying with him not a musket, this time, but his bow with the arrows fitted into a graceful outrigger-type rack. He is dressed not in the usual hunter orange or camouflage, but in a radiant buckskin jacket and black jeans. He is carefully shaved and the long hair he has been growing out all year tosses across his shoulders. Actually, he does not seem to have been tending a marijuana crop. And one wouldn’t like to see him gut a deer in that jacket without an apron—the unmarked leather is spotless and soft as caramel. He nods to me as he crosses the edge of our yard. As he disappears, striding along in his boots, hair flowing behind him, he looks less like the forlorn wannabe I am used to seeing. He has more presence somehow, more attitude, a new gravity. It really seems like he is someone.

Dear Faye and Elsie,

I have been meaning to write to you for a long time now. Please accept my apology on this delay. Things have been very busy with the drum ever since last winter. At that time an incident occurred.

A family of four—three children and their mother—have lived near me. Last winter, while the mother was gone, the house burned down with the children getting out in time. It was a subzero night and the oldest girl, named Shawnee, decided to take her little brother and sister through the woods to my house. There is a shallow ravine that fills up with snow just before you get to my yard. All three plunged down into it. They very well might have froze. Shawnee said that she was having a dream, and the others had blacked out and given up, when she heard the sound of a drum. As she describes it, the sound drew her up. It got louder and louder until she reached my house with her brother and sister. All of this time, I was asleep. The drum was with me as it always is. I heard nothing. To my ear, the drum was silent.

I wanted to tell you this as a way of thanking you. The drum is in regular use now, and you are always welcome wherever the drum is.

My father was the one who sold the drum to the old Indian agent, Jewett Tatro, shortly before he moved back east along with his collection. Selling that drum was one of the things my father most regretted having done in his life. When he spoke about it, he would hang his head and stare at the floor for a long time. It was as if he was looking right through the floor. You couldn’t talk to him at those times.