Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

I work the rest of the afternoon without thinking about what I’ve done. When my thoughts flicker toward the drum, I veer away from any further examination. What I’ve just done, or am about to do, is probably a felony and could ruin our business. The ease with which I have done it bewilders me. For a person who has not stolen so much as a candy bar in all of her life to walk coolly out of a client’s house with such a valuable object might signal insanity. The beginning of a nervous breakdown. But I don’t feel that way. I feel quite lucid. And I wonder whether others who suddenly commit irrational and criminal acts feel this calm acceptance of an unknown part of themselves.

Dusk is forming, blue and cold, by the time I arrive at home. I leave the drum in the car, wrapped in the quilt, underneath its stretched plastic curtain. I don’t want it in the house yet. I have to think—not about whether what I’ve done was right: I have decided that I wouldn’t have done it unless it was on some level right . And yet the explanation of this rightness swirls out of my reach. My real concerns are whether I can keep the drum hidden and whether I’ll get caught. I am pretty sure that Sarah Tatro hasn’t noticed the drum; in fact, she seemed indifferent to all of her uncles’ objects save the doll she played with as a child. I’m also fairly certain that she is the only one who’d have any possible knowledge of her uncles’ collection. And even she had forgotten it existed. I’d had to take the drum that afternoon, if I was to take it at all. Once I catalogue the objects and have them appraised, the drum will price itself out of reach of any but the wealthiest collectors, or a museum. Yet I don’t want the drum. What would I do with such a thing, where would I keep it? No, I didn’t take the drum for myself. I reassure myself of this again as I sit down to dinner with my mother.

“You have an odd look on your face,” she says. “So, how was it?”

I take the salad bowl from her hands and begin forking leaves onto my plate.

“Well, it was there,” I tell her.

“Oh!” She puts her fork down.

I’ve taken a mouthful of spinach leaves but suddenly I feel too tired to even chew. I slump in my chair, throw my head back, stretch my arms. “I’ve been crouched over the notebook all afternoon. It’s a real haul. Old—I mean old old —Tatro, walked away with everything—dolls, beadwork, cradle boards. You name it.”

“The thieving bastard!” she marvels again. “So he got away with the good stuff. He had an eye.”

We sit there with our food between us. Elsie’s hair, sleek and pulled back in a knot, is very white. I am always very proud when people tell me that she is beautiful. She bore me, and then my younger sister, in her thirties when she had given up on getting pregnant. I was a gift. It’s very nice being told, all of your life, that you are a gift to someone. We are very happy right then, although I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps it is just that our secret expectations or suspicions have been met.

“There was a drum,” I say to her.

She pushes her plate away and puts her elbows on the table, leans toward me, peering at me. Her eyes are narrow and slightly upturned at the corners. The iris, dark brown, has the milky blue ring of age but her gaze is still sharp. She is waiting for me to describe the drum.

“One of the big drums,” I say. Her fingers flicker on the table.

“Was it dressed?”

“What?”

“Decorated.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

I tell her about the figures and the cross.

“Not a cross, not Christian. That is either a star or the sign of the four directions. Was it painted?”

“There was a yellow line.”

She closes her eyes, presses two fingers to the space between her eyebrows. I watch her carefully because she does this when she is trying to form a thought. I am quiet. Finally, she speaks. She talks a long time, and I can only sum up what she says: The drum is the universe. The people who take their place at each side represent the spirits who sit at the four directions. A painted drum, especially, is considered a living thing and must be fed as the spirits are fed, with tobacco and a glass of water set nearby, sometimes a plate of food. A drum is never to be placed on the ground, or left alone, and it is always to be covered with a blanket or quilt. Drums are known to cure and known to kill. They become one with their keeper. They are made for serious reasons by people who dream the details of their construction. No two are alike, but every drum is related to every other drum. They speak to one another and they give their songs to humans. I should be careful around the drum. She is bothered by its presence in the collection.

“It’s more alive than a set of human bones,” she finishes, then hesitates. “Of course, that is a traditional belief, not mine.”

I nod with some relief, for although I am surprised by my actions this afternoon, I do not believe of course that the drum itself possesses a power beyond its symbolism and antiquity.

After my mother goes to bed, I clear a pile of my files and notebooks off a low table in the corner of my bedroom and then I bring the drum inside and balance it carefully on the table. I shove two chairs up against each side. Whenever I touch the drum, even to set it down, it makes a sound. A high, hollow note. An uncertain creak, like a question. A slight tap on its edge sets up reverberations. It is exquisitely sensitive for so powerful an instrument, and I wonder what it sounds like when struck with force, by many and in unison. I turn off the light, get into bed, and lie there in my room with the drum. I leave my windows open just a crack at night, even in the winter. I like my room chilly. The darkness crackles with March cold and from time to time, deep in the woods, a barred owl screams like a woman in pain. I imagine that I might have dreams—pragmatic as I consider myself, it has been a long, strange day. The realization that I’ve stolen the drum outright surfaces and sinks. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I’m glad that I have got the weekend to decide how to proceed with the estate—I’m not sure I trust myself to catalogue another thing. No matter how justified by history I feel, I tell myself that I will not evade my guilt or rationalize away my conduct.

Which is not the same as even considering that I might do the right thing and return the drum to Sarah Tatro.

All I have is other people’s lives. What I do belongs to them and to my mother—her business, her legacy, her blood. Even the box of tears in my closet belongs to another woman, L.M.B. But now I’ve stolen the drum. And it seems to me, as I am lying in the dark of my room, that my instinctive theft signifies a matter so essential that it might be called survival. I have stepped out of rules and laws and am breathing thin, new air. My theft is but the first of many I’ll accomplish—though not of objects. There are other things I need and will have to have, things I’ll take. Thoughts, plans, private rages, and even joys now secret to myself.

I am usually a devoted sleeper, but tonight I’m wakeful. All night, it seems, I am listening. Thinking. So many ideas float in half-formed and then veer off.

When things are very quiet, the old house ticks. Not regularly, like a clock, but softly all through itself as the slats in the walls change temperature or the plaster tightens or the earth shifts underneath the granite slab foundation. From time to time, the little sounds that the house makes reverberate inside of the drum. My breath does, too. I hear a rising, then a falling. In and out. A greatness, a lightness. I grow heavier, then so inert my body seems without life. Between breaths, I lose feeling. And then my chest fills, a resurrection.