Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

Bring her back, you fool!

I’m just a city boy, I answer him, slow, stark, confused. I don’t know what you people do, out there, living on the plains where there are no trees, no woods, no place to hide except the distances. You can see too much.

You fool, bring her back to us!

But how can I? Her lying next to me in deepest night, breathing quiet in love, in trust. Her hand in mine, her wicked hoof.

Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad

Klaus lives in exactly half of the bottom floor of a duplex built in 1882 and owned now by his friend and boss, Richard Whiteheart Beads. His main room, once the dining room, has a ripply old window topped with a stained-glass panel. Even though the old window looks directly into the window of a brand-new lower-income housing unit built smack on the property line of Andrew Jackson Street, just off Franklin Avenue, an occasional shaft of morning radiance sometimes stirs in the prisms of glass. When that happens, bands of colored light quiver on the mottled walls. The bed, a savage hummocky mattress laid on top of an even older mattress and box spring, which in turn is nailed right into the floor, sometimes catches the rainbows in its gnarled sheets and blankets. The rainbows move across the bodies of late sleepers. Klaus watches the sheaf of colors waver slowly through Sweetheart Calico’s hair and then across her brow. The rainbow slides down her face, a shimmering veil. When she wakes up, she doesn’t move except to sag with disappointment. Her eyes are dead and sad, killing the rainbow, catching at his heart.

“We are codependent,” he says. “I read it in a newspaper. We are at risk, you and I. Well, you most of all since you are the one tied to the bed.”

A curtain tieback solidly bolted into the wall acts as a hitching post for Sweetheart Calico. A web of makeshift restraints binds her ankles, wrists. There is even a cord around her waist, tied with complicating rosebud cloth and functioning as a sort of sleep sash. Klaus unties her and she rises, naked, yawning. She rubs one ankle with the side of her other foot and stretches her arms. She floats to the bathroom breathing an old tune — she doesn’t talk to Klaus but she’s always whispering songs much older and more powerful than any powwow or sweat-lodge or even sun-dance song he has ever heard. There are flushing sounds, water, a shower. She loves the shower and will stand beneath it smiling for half an hour and would stay longer if Rozin, wife of Richard Whiteheart Beads and monitor of hot water use in this joint living space, didn’t stop her.

“I need some hot water for cleaning,” she calls from the kitchen.

Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad is the Ojibwe word for Saturday and means Floor-Washing Day. Which tells you that nobody cared what day of the week it was until the Ojibwe had floors and also that the Ojibwe wash their floors.

We are a clean people, Klaus thinks. He knocks on the bathroom door. He opens the door and when he sees the bathroom window is wide open, in spite of the child safety locks he installed, he knows already without looking behind the shower curtain that she is gone.

SHE LOPES CRAZILY through the park. In the lighted shelter where the street people drag her, she curls up on a flea-funky pallet in the corner and sleeps, not forgetting all of her daughters but taking them back into her body and holding them.

At night, she remembers running beside her mother.

Her daughters dance out of black mist in the shimmering caves of their hair.

When she touches their faces, they pour all their love through their eyes at her. Klaus? She never dreams about or remembers him. He is just the one she was tied to, who brought her here. But no matter how fast or how far she walks, she can’t get out of the city. The lights and cars tangle her. Streets open onto streets and the highways roar hungry as swollen rivers, bearing in their rush dangerous bright junk.

Anama’e-giizhigad

Although the Ojibwe never had a special day to pray until mission and boarding schools taught how you could slack off the rest of the week, Sunday now has its name. Praying Day. Klaus spent all day yesterday walking the streets and bushwhacking down by the river and questioning. Questioning people.

“Have you seen a naked beautiful Indian woman hanging around here by any chance? Or she could be wearing just a towel?”

“Bug off, asshole.”

“She’s mine,” he says. “Don’t touch her.”

Yesterday he walked a hundred miles. At least he felt like it. Today on Praying Day he takes out the pipe that his father was given when he returned home safe from the war. Which war? The war so shadowed out by other wars that nobody can recall that it was the war to end all wars.

“I’ll be asking the Creator for some assistance,” he says to his father’s pipe as he fits it together and loads it while singing the song that goes along with loading a pipe. He takes from a slip of cardboard a feather that he uses to fan the ember at the heart of a small wad of sage. The smoke rises and rolls. He has disabled the smoke alarm.

“I pledge this feather to my woman if she returns of her own free will,” he says between smokes.

The feather is very special, a thunderbird feather, a long pure white one that dropped one day out of an empty sky.

Dropped into my life just like you, my darling sweetgrass love, Klaus thinks. The smoke curls comfortingly around his head. But he smokes his pipe too much. He smokes it again and again until his head aches and his chest is clogged. He will cough for the rest of the day and every time he does, a puff of smoke will pop from his lungs.

Dizzy, he breaks down his pipe, cleans it, puts it carefully away. He rolls the pipestone bowl in his father’s sock — all besides the pipe and his deaf ear that he’s got left from his father. Oh, wait, you could count his libido, too, and of course his lips.

“You got a lip line a girl would kill for,” one of his not-girlfriends had said to him. Those plush yet sculpted lips were his father’s lips. Many times they fit around this pipe stem, this okij. His father was so old that he died of old age when Klaus was six. Klaus is the same age as his nephews. He rolls the okij in a red-and-white buckshot bag. He puts the feather back into its fold of cardboard and stashes these sacred items on the highest shelf of the kitchen cabinet. He feels much better. He goes out to talk with Richard Whiteheart Beads. He coughs. A puff of smoke.

“Is that a smoke signal?” Richard says. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Have you seen a beautiful naked antelope lady running through the streets?”

“She escaped? That’s good. You can’t just keep a woman tied up in your room, you know. Rozin suspects. If she finds out she will get in touch with the women’s crisis hotline. I don’t want the police coming around here. Plus, my girls. What kind of example for them?”

Klaus coughs.

“Oh, I got that signal,” Richard says. “Me fucked.”

“That is the problem,” says Klaus. “She has enslaved me with her antelope ways.”

“You one sad mess,” says Richard. “Let her go.”

But Klaus goes out into the night and continues to search the streets, which are quiet and peaceful and empty.

Nitam-anokii-giizhigad

First Work Day. Proving that the names of the days of the weeks are the products of colonized minds. What a name for Monday. Rubbing it in that work starts early in the a.m. with Richard. Today they are ripping carpet out of the soon-to-be-renovated Prairiewood Rivertree Mall, next to the Foreststream Manor.

Carpets in malls are always the color of filth. In the petrochemical nap, the hue of every excrescence from shit to trodden vomit comes up beneath their prying and ripping tools. They carry roll after roll of the stuff out to Richard’s fancy yellow pickup truck. Even Klaus thinks it’s way too visible. They are being paid to dispose of a toxic substance and Richard has the perfect place.