Louise Erdrich - The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

The day was warm. Late summer, Manominike-giizis, when the Anishinaabeg knock the wild rice. Our Pillager’s own lake, Matchimanito, was too cold and blue-black to grow rice and nobody even liked to fish it that much. We always offered tobacco for the fish. Once, in a fish stomach, my mother found a person’s thumb. She kept it in her medicine bundle along with the heart of that fish. There were all sorts of things in her medicine that I did not approach, but to walk behind her was to forget for a moment who she was from the front — the forbidding woman with the medicine. From behind, she was someone who didn’t know what kind of face I was making or how, mockingly, I copied the headlong force of my mother’s stride.

Arrogance, she had that. I never did, though some mistook it for my joy.

Now I could hear the sound of other people as we came through the woods, but as we crossed the clearing into town, I was surprised to see so many children. We continued forward, and it looked as though we would join the others. A crowd of so many was strange in the first place, but as we got closer, I was covered with an itchy blanket of feeling. I reached out for my mother’s hand and knew — that was it. The children weren’t running. They weren’t loudly playing, racing, teasing, apart from their parents. The children were clutching their mothers’ hands just like I did now. They were silent, close to their parents, bits of their mothers’ skirt squeezed tight, standing pressed against their fathers’ legs.

Around the front of the crowd, I now saw four big audoomobiig, as Grandpa Nanapush called them, waasamoowidaabaanag, the wagons that moved by themselves. The first one, audoomobii, was the white word. There were four of these big cars and they were drawn up together in a line. Next to each, there was a man with a piece of paper clamped onto a piece of wood. He was writing down the name of each family and each child. As soon as he wrote down the name — as if with his marks he somehow suddenly possessed the spirit of the child — abruptly the child climbed into the auto and was swallowed into the dark as into the body of a fish. I saw the children looking out through the windows, sad, vague, and indistinct as though gazing from underwater.

No! I tried to get my mother’s attention. Let’s go home, I said, I want to go home. But my mother was staring at the people with the boards and the paper, and at the other Anishinaabeg gathered around them. Her face was neutral and heavy. A sickness of fear seized me. I tugged and pulled my mother’s hand as if to bring it to life, but her hand was stiff, and cold, like the paw of a trapped, dead animal. And then she dragged me forward.

I had never cried before that day, not really, unless you counted my bawling as a tiny baby and that one time I froze my feet. My mother had always picked me up, given me what I wanted, rocked me, never let me weep. And why did she teach me all this tenderness, this love, if she then threw me in a pit? For that is what the school would be, and better if she slapped me from the first and taught me to be hard. Now, I cried. For the first time, I cried. In this squeezed mass of children, I was a birch-bark scrap. I was floating downstream in a roiling current, twisting and spinning. Tipping. Dark water rushed up through the center of me and leaked out of my eyes. The motor, like a throbbing strange drum, bore us off the reservation, in the direction that the birds went, zhaawanong. My mother told me to pray to that spirit, talk to that aadizokaan, but my throat was filling, filling. I was going down and a sick blackness overcame my vision, until, all of a sudden, this boy next to me nudged my arm, just a rude little push, the best he could do and still be a boy.

I dared to look, and it was Nector. Neshke, he said. In his fist he held a piece of lint-rubbed hard black licorice from his pocket. Licorice in the shape of a little curved pipe. He said take it and I took it; then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a licorice pipe just like the one he gave me. He turned his over and tapped out the imaginary old tobacco, then filled and pretended to light his little black licorice pipe. His movements were exactly that of a old man, of Nanapush. He gestured. I took my pipe, tapped it out the same way, and as I did so my tears stopped. I swaggered, clenched my pipe between my teeth. Nector pretended to have trouble lighting a match, and I started laughing. By this time I had my pipe going and I was smoking it, like Margaret, with a little squint in my eyes. Me and Nector Kashpaw were looking at each other, both laughing, blowing pretend smoke from our little black pipes.

I would grow to love that boy. I would get into trouble because of that boy. He would get into much worse trouble because of me. On the bus ride down, going south like the wild geese, we sat close, smelling the alien stink of burning gas, and each other, unwashed, washed, in fear. We ate food I would come to know — the strange, delicate, delicious cheese sandwiches on white flour bread and the toad-skin pickles, sweet and crunchy, fished from a huge gray crockery jar, and the fat olives with the pits. I had never eaten these big fleshy green seeds. Tears filled my eyes at the taste of them. I started to cry in earnest, unstoppable, because of the evil taste of this thing they called olive.

Nector turned to another boy and I was alone. Once I was alone it continued, the crying, for which I had no shame or remedy. It was a simple weeping in which the tears came up and flowered over. It wasn’t painful and it wasn’t unpleasant, this crying, it just was. It just was and it just was , I said once I became an adult woman known for never shedding tears. No, I never cried, not in love or in childbirth, not at death and not over any particular want or loss or piece of bad fortune. My tears had simply run out on that ride down to the school. That’s when I came to know that to be left, sent off, abandoned, was not of the moment, but a black ditch to the side of the road of your life, a sudden washout, a pothole that went down to China.

That’s what the kids did when they saw the globe of the world and put their fingers on either side and the teacher told them theoretically it is possible to dig to China. They started a big hole behind the girls’ dorm, in the sandy spot where water flushed down off the tall roof, out of the square metal drainpipe. They used their tin cups to dig. They got the hole down and then said, Let’s throw Lulu in! Then the matron came out ringing the big brass handbell and hollering little kids, little kids , and they all jumped away like rabbits and I was left in that hole.

It was cool, it was autumn by then, but I was wearing a jacket and the hole was warm. I was out of the wind. After I realized the others were not coming back, I tried once to pull myself out. But the top of the hole was crumbly and the collapse of sand scared me. So I dusted myself and sat, knees drawn to my chest, in the bottom of the hole.

Now I was glad for the ugly, big, brown-plaid wool skirt they gave me. Too long, it covered my ankles when I curled up tight. And the jacket was good, too, with its big raw wood buttons. It was quilted on the inside with a smooth fabric that felt slippery, but warm when I held myself close. I held my arms by the elbows and looked up from the bottom of the hole. Soon it got dark, then it was night. Maybe some of the big girls balled up their coats and put them in my bed so the matron would be fooled, so they would not get in trouble for throwing me down the hole. I was not afraid. I didn’t care. That’s how I survived, by not caring. I tucked my head into my collar like a bird, and went to sleep.

Then woke because the moon had stopped right above me. It was caught on the peaked corner of the dormitory roof and it was nearly full.