Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

“Please take care of them,” Augustus prayed to ruthless Time.

“Bring them home, please protect them,” prayed Peace to the spirits of her ancestors who had peered over their shoulders at her in the train station.

1918. END OF THE WAR. So many spirits out, wandering, including Augustus Roy, who looked down into the sum of money he was counting one day and saw a shade of blue he had never seen before roar open marvelously into another life. And so he died. His wives mourned him, but not as deeply as Peace, who really did cut most of her hair off and slash her arms before she felt any better. It helped when she found out all three of her brothers would return.

When the youngest, Shawano, came home from the land of the frog people he was half spirit, too. But that is often how warriors are when they return. Booch had served in the supply lines and come down with the Spanish flu. Charlie had spent the war in an army kitchen. Only young Shawano got decorated with a medal and a ribbon. Only he felt crazy. Ogichidaa, they called him, now, warrior. Ogichidaa had lost his best buddy, who in the warrior’s blood relation was more like another self and could not be adequately revenged.

“Sa tayaa,” he cried suddenly. They were sitting at Asin’s house. “I tried. I made his mark on every German soldier that I killed!”

“Was it a deep mark?” hissed wrinkled-up Asin. The old man had become so violent in his thoughts he seemed unhinged to most people. For instance his opinion was that the Americans should make all the Germans into slaves. Ship the whole country full of people here and teach them to be humble. That’s how they would have done it in the old days. He couldn’t get over how he had heard our government gave back most of their territory. Bagakaabi, whose name implied that he saw clearly, was more reasonable and said everyone was humbled by this war. He had heard it took a wheelbarrow full of money there to buy a loaf of bread.

“They get to eat bread?” cried Asin. “While the Indians must eat bannock?”

Bagakaabi shrugged. He loved bannock.

Ogichidaa was a slim and handsome boy when he left, but his look when he returned was reeling and deathly. His face was puffed up and his eyes were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare.

“My buddy, he took a stomach wound,” said Ogichidaa. “I had to stuff his guts in loops back into his body, and all the time he kept his eyes on me. He couldn’t look down. When I had them back in, his teeth were clicking together and he got these words out. ‘You sure you got them back in the right order?’ I said I did my best. ‘Because I don’t wanna be pissing out my ears,’ he said. His voice was real serious and I answered, ‘I checked. Your pisser made it. No damage, brother.’ He seemed real happy with that statement. The ground shook around us. Close one landed. I lost my hold and they all poured out of him again.”

Ogichidaa was exhausted and his brothers urged him to sleep. Before he slept, though, he gave Asin a funny look and repeated himself, “Old man, I did what you told me. I sent as many as I could with him after that to be his slaves in the land of spirits. It didn’t help.”

Old Asin looked at him long, deeply, watching.

“Maybe,” said Asin at last, “you need to do the next thing.”

“Which is what?”

Asin hunched into his gnarled body and then tapped a leathery bone finger on the pocket of his shirt just over his heart.

“Replace your war brother with a slave brother.”

The Capture

Ogichidaa mulled the idea over, took it in slowly. It was not a bad idea, he thought, a way to kill the rage that soured his heart and woke him in the night. A way to erase the picture of those guts. But he could hardly go all the way back to Germany, and the idea of taking revenge on a German immigrant who’d been turned into an American citizen seemed an act of weakness. In the morning he asked Asin where he could get a German.

“Oh, they’re all over the place here,” Asin said, sweeping at the air side to side with the flat of his hand. “All over here like frogs. Perhaps they are called Omakakii-wininiwag because they popped out of nowhere,” said the old man. “In the beginning, there were whole village tribes of them, we heard, shipped over here to tear up our land. They took it over. They killed it. Most of the land is now half dead. Plowed up.

“There is also a whole bunch of defeated soldiers who shipped over because of that money problem. They want to stay in this country now. They moved up north and work the timber, two on a cross-end saw. Ditch timber roads. Learn only swear English. Walk along piercing the earth with pointed iron bars, tamping in seedlings with their shoes.”

Asin smiled. “You could take one of those.”

ON A MOONLESS NIGHT then, Ogichidaa sneaked into the lumber camp.

The men were summoned the next morning to his house.

“I stole the German at night,” said Ogichidaa. “I crept right up to the barracks without detection.”

“Without detection.” Asin gloated. He was excited by this ancient working out of the old-way vengeance, pleased young Ogichidaa had taken his advice. He nodded at Booch and Charlie, grinning. The old man’s teeth were little black stubs — all except for a gold one. That tooth glinted with a mad sheen.

“I dropped the gunnysack over the Kraut’s head when he came outside to take a leak,” Ogichidaa went on. “Bound his arms behind him. Got him right back through the fence and from there, here.”

Silent, they looked at the figure sitting bound in the corner. Barefooted. Wearing a baggy shirt and pants of no particular color. The man, his head covered by the gunnysack, was quiet with a peculiar stillness that was not exactly fear. Nor was it sleep. He was awake in there. The men could feel him straining to see through the loose weave over his face.

Bagakaabi got spooked by the way the German composed himself, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it. He went over and ripped away the gunnysack hood. Maybe some expected to see a crazy eagle — how they stare mad into the air from their warrior hearts of ice — but they did not see an eagle. Instead, blinking out at them from spike tufts of hair, a chubby boy face, round-cheeked, warm and sparkling brown eyes. The men all reared back at the unexpected sense of warmth and goodwill from the German’s pleasant smile.

“Hay’, ” they exclaimed. Expectation was something more impressive than a porcupine man! His hands were chubby, his skin almost as brown as theirs. Around his circle eyes his stubby hair poked out like a quill headdress. His smell — that came off him too now — was a raw and fearful odor like the ripe armpit stink of porcupine. He moved slowly like that creature, his deep eyes shining with tears. He took them all in one by one and then cast his eyes down, bashful, as though he would rather be under the porch or inside his own burrow.

“Babagiwayaaneshkimod atoon imaa oshtigwaaning ji-gaajigaadenig omaji-dengway,” said Asin hurriedly.

“No,” said Ogichidaa, hurt and surprised at the meekness of his catch.

“Grüsse!” The prisoner bowed. His voice was pie sweet and calm as toast. “Was ist los? Wo sind wir?”

Nobody answered his words even though he next made known by signs — an imaginary scoop to his mouth, a washing motion on his rounded stomach — his meaning.

“Haben Sie Hunger?” he asked hopefully. “Ich bin ein sehr guter Küchenchef.”

“Gego bizindawaaken waa-miigaanik!” Asin’s attitude was close to panic. The kitchen window shed frail light on an old wooden table, the stove in the background of the room, the prisoner blinking.