Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

Land checkerboard was one gift of the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887, which dispossessed most tribes of 90 percent of the lands that were left after the red-hot smoke of treaty signing. The checkerboard. Their reservation which they drive to from the city is a checkerboard — white squares and red squares — denoting ownership. One red square still belongs to Klaus’s foremothers. On one white square a big farm stands, owned by a retired Norwegian couple who winter and sometimes spring and even fall in Florida. Richard has rented their farm under an assumed name. He and Klaus are now quickly filling the barn with carpet, which it costs a pretty penny to dispose of in an EPA-designated hazardous waste site or costs nothing to put in a barn.

“They won’t mind. They won’t even notice. They never go out to the barn.”

“You sure?” asks Klaus. They are unloading the ripped-up carpet. Roll after noxious roll. The rolls are bound with the same cord hanging from the hitching post next to Klaus’s bed. Klaus and Richard have made meticulously neat stacks, filling the cow stalls level. They make certain that each layer is completely solid, filling in the gaps between rows with carpet scraps.

We are doing a bad thing, but we are doing it well, thinks Klaus.

For his part, Richard uses compartmentalization. Its extreme usefulness cannot be overestimated. Richard first learned the term from Rozin. He was surprised to find there was a word for what he had been doing all his life to accommodate the knockings of his conscience.

Oh, on some level, he says to his conscience, this is certainly wrong. Not only will the old couple be stuck with hazardous waste, but the checkerboard is reservation board and thus eligible for tribal homeland status if the casino ever turns a profit. Theoretically there might be enough money in the tribal coffers one day to repurchase this old farm and add it to our reservation, only first there’d be the problem of disposing of as many tons of carpet as this barn will hold and it looks like it will hold an awful lot.

Wall. Wall. Wall. Compartment.

Meanwhile, Richard is pocketing the money paid him to dispose properly of righteous poisons. Some of it he pays to Klaus.

Even if this land is owned by Norwegians it is still Mother Earth, thinks Klaus. Nookomis, please forgive me. I am sorry. I am doing a very tidy job of hurting you, if that makes a difference.

He takes his gloves off and says that a beer would go down good.

“Let’s hit a bar on the way home,” says Richard. And so they do. And they are finished with Nitam-anokii-giizhigad.

Niizho-giizhigad

Life is hell without her tied up next to me. Klaus mourns all night and dismally wakes on the Second Work Day. All the Ojibwe do is work, you would think. Work and pray. Again the carpet ripping and the fetid stink of concrete underneath and again the thoughtful cerebral work of stacking in the barn. Stacking for the future so that the two can climb onto the neat floor from the stairs up to the hay loft and not die in a carpet quake or be swallowed up in a carpet-roll crevasse.

Sweetheart Calico, Sweetheart Calico. My bitter black heart is bursting open. Klaus whispers. His chest still hurts from the intense smoke-praying that he did two days before and from all the secular inhalations in the days since. There’s been no clue, no lead, no sighting of the woman he kidnapped — no, she went willingly, didn’t she? It’s all unclear. He put her in his van at the powwow and took her home and got addicted to her.

Your sex love should be declared a controlled substance, he thinks now. I am experiencing severe withdrawal. He shakes as he stuffs ripped carpet down the seams of the next layer of carpet-roll floor. He should not have done what he did — stolen her, gotten her drunk, loved her, tied her up — except she asked for it with her eyes. Which Rozin will tell him should get him ten to twenty years in Stillwater Pen.

“She never asked for nothing with her eyes,” Rozin says when she finds Klaus’s sweetheart. “Except for you to let her go. You compartmentalized. You put your mental processes in only part of your brain so you can enjoy yourself. Even when what you are doing is a crime.”

“But she tied me up, too,” says Klaus. “She tied me up with those same ropes.”

“And left you there, right?”

“Yes,” says Klaus in a small voice. “I thought something else was going to happen that time. She came back though of her own free will because she loves me.”

“She came back because she has nowhere to go. Where did you steal her from? Where are her people?”

“They are nomadic.”

“Tell that to the cops.”

“They roam Montana,” says Klaus.

Out where the barns are filled with hay, not carpet. Though he knows from the great rolls of carpet glued to floors of acres of malls all through Montana that this is not true and conceivably there could even be two Indians like Klaus and Richard out there disposing of old carpet on their own federal trust land where special rules apply.

Aabitoose

Halfway. How is it that with all the lovely names for the months and seasons and the lyrical possibilities in the origins of this most extraordinary language, the best that can be done for Wednesday is Halfway? To where? To the end of the week or to the day of fun where we wash the floors? Aabitoose is the day Rozin goes to the bakery owned by her cousin Frank. Frank’s Bakery is a real old-fashioned independent little bakery, the kind there used to be, with hand-fried doughnuts — not donuts — the ugh makes them Indian and heavier. Rozin goes to the bakery after the girls are on the school bus because she needs a coffee lift before her second job. There is also Frank himself, who has a crush on her. She likes pretending that his flirting annoys her. She doesn’t go because she wants to find Klaus’s girlfriend, whom he claims in his emotional confusion is part antelope.

But there she is. A dog lolls next to her.

Sweetheart Calico and the dog sit side by side on the curb just outside the shop. A car could run right over Sweetheart’s tiny feet. The dog is gray, shaggy like a coyote, nondescript. Sweetheart Calico is arrestingly graceful, but tired. She is a tired, tired woman with tangled hair, wearing a huge pair of jeans belonging to Klaus Shawano and a shirt that could belong to anybody in the neighborhood as it is a huge black T-shirt with an airbrushed buffalo stampeding away from an American flag and through a hoop of fire with an eagle screaming at its shoulder and beneath its hooves a wolf and bear also running for their lives and all of the animals surrounded by thunder and lightning. You see that exact T-shirt on every other person on the street but this particular shirt belongs to Klaus.

“Oh, my god, here you are. Are you all right, Sweetheart? Come and have a coffee with me.”

Sweetheart Calico holds in her hands a fragrant, tawny, puffed-up ball of dough with a saddle of lemon jelly that quivers when she takes a bite. She throws half the pastry to the dog, who snarfs it midair. Mouth full, she follows Rozin into the bakery, where there are three tables with two chairs each that fit right against the window. Frank has a Bunn coffeemaker — just decent old-fashioned coffee — one dollar a large mug or free with any pastry.

“You forgot your free coffee,” he says now to Sweetheart Calico, though he gave her the pastry too, free, and now gives her another lemon jelly doughnut.

The dog waits alertly right outside the door. Frank just smiles because all of the awkward semisuggestive lines about fresh buns and long johns were used up long ago.

“Niinimoshenh, what can I get for you?”

Rozin ignores that word, which means my sweetheart but which can also mean my sex-eligible cousin. She examines the trays of chocolate éclairs, bismarcks, long johns — no scones or lumpy vegan muffins here. She buys a cup of coffee and selects a loaf of bread. Gives it to Frank for slicing.