Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

Rozin and Sweetheart Calico sit down with their coffees at a table in the sun of the window.

“Are you okay? Why did you run away from Klaus? Is that sucker mean to you?”

Sweetheart Calico shrugs and licks sugar off her fingers. I am lost , her look says. I don’t know how I got here.

She stuffs the jelly doughnut into her mouth. The lemon filling has real lemon in it, sweet and tart.

“Do you want to come home with me? I’ll let you in downstairs. You can sleep. You can shower.”

Sweetheart Calico glances out the window at the dog. Rozin makes a face. “Okay, it can come too.”

Frank gathers the slices from the machine into a tight transparent bag. He walks over to them holding out the loaf, so fresh it sags between his hands like an accordion.

HALFWAY DAY. If it was All the Way Day things might have gone much differently. But Rozin walks only halfway into the downstairs apartment. The dog, too, halfway in. Then it settles on the floor. Sweetheart Calico is halfway glad to get home. The twins, Cally and Deanna, do halfway well at school and make it halfway home on the bus before they sort of fight and pretty much make up. Rozin halfway wants to quit work as usual, but does not. Klaus and Richard work hard and the barn is half full when they leave. Unfortunately at home the meat is halfway cooked because the electricity has gone out and the crock-pot is cold when Rozin touches it. Then Richard and Klaus are cleaning up at the same time and you can hear them yell halfway through their showers when cold water hits their skin.

Later, Rozin is halfway through with sex with Richard when she thinks of Frank Shawano holding that bread. She tries to push the picture out of her mind. What’s he doing there? Get away, she thinks. No, come back. The picture makes her feel something she was not feeling before. Richard has been drinking with Klaus after work but he is not even halfway drunk. He has been patient about the half-cooked meat. He has listened with half an ear to all that his daughters did during the day. So Rozin should be at least halfway into sex, which is all it really takes to satisfy Richard. But she isn’t. She is somewhere else. Afterward she turns away with the sudden feeling that her heart is breaking right in… not half — it is shattering into golden infinitesimal fragments. It is bursting and the grains are flying fast against the sun. Her heart is pollen glinting on the wind. No, it is flour, blowing toward Frank’s bakeshop wanting to get mixed into his batter with eggs and sugar and formed into a doughnut. Her heart travels faster and faster, toward Frank’s deep fryer, and all the time Richard thinks she is asleep, weighted firmly in the dark that will become tomorrow.

Niiwo-giizhigad

Pragmatical disappointment! Day Four. And so many other choices for this poetic day — a day near the freedom of the weekend yet not the frantic rush to get your work done… not yet. A day that can almost stand by itself because of its special ceremonial associations in Ojibwe teachings. Anyway, Day Four. Day of new existence. Day of anything can happen. Day of pollen on the wind. Day of Klaus half awake tied to his own bed by Sweetheart Calico and thinking in his dream that he hears the clatter of her hooves as she runs wildly back and forth bashing into unfamiliar walls and believing that when he opens his eyes his sheets will be covered with her inky cloven erotic tracks.

Actually, she is outside playing with her new dog. Well, not new. That dog is definitely secondhand, thinks Klaus. It is a used dog, a thrift dog, at best a dollar-store animal with its skinny legs, big belly, scraggy pedigreeless fur. And its head is way big for the rest of it, like a sample fur toy that was never mass-produced but thrown into a discount bin.

I don’t like that dog, he thinks. There is definitely something sinister about its big, round, grinning head.

And it growled when he took the rope out last night.

Forget about locking me in the bathroom, its look said. I’ll shit on the floor.

Then it growled worse and worse until he handed the rope to Sweetheart Calico.

AT LEAST DAY FOUR is about four, the number that the Ojibwe love best of all. Every good and sustaining thing comes in fours — seasons, directions, types of people, medicines, elements. There are four layers of the earth, four layers of the sky, four push-ups to a song, four honor beats, four pauses of the great megis on the way to Gakaabikaang and hereabouts. So why shouldn’t today, which partakes of that exquisite number, be an extremely lucky day, thinks Klaus, eyes still shut, although I can feel the cords that bind my wrists and ankles tightly and I remember somewhere in the night that she wrapped her long tense legs around my body and used special antelope knots on me.

“Oh no,” Klaus speaks but still doesn’t open his eyes. He tries to move but can’t. He whispers, “Sweetheart? Are you there?”

DAY FOUR BEGAN so well for Cally and Deanna. Instead of iron-fortified and vitamin-enriched sugarless multigrain cereal flakes, instead of the stinky-boy cackling bus, their mom brings them to the bakery for anything they want and drives them to school in her car. And says, glowing happily, “Girls, we should do this more often!”

Blood sugar peaking from the cracked glaze on the doughnuts and the éclair custard, both of them swear thrillingly that they will become A+ not B- students if this regimen is followed by their mother. Twinklingly, she laughs. They stand on the sidewalk in front of the bank of school entryway doors, waving until her car is down the street.

They look at each other and both say at once, “Is Mom okay?” Then they say in unison, “Get out of my head.” They scream with laughter and walk to the doors doubled over. When the sugar wears off and smacks them to the harsh floor of the gym at 9:00 a.m. and they profess to be ill, both are sent to the school nurse, who takes their temperatures with fever strips and gives them each a plastic cup of high-fructose-enhanced orange juice. Jacked up for another few hours, they return to class and do a prodigious pile of pre-algebra equations, which they both love. An affinity for numbers! They were born on the fourth day of the fourth month, at 4:00 and 4:04. So no wonder they are not to be mistaken for ordinary twins at all. They are mystic twins, like the twins who created the world. Only those first twins inarguably messed it up and if Cally and Deanna had a chance they would make the world properly. In fact, they make the world up all of the time. It is their favorite thing to do when they get home from school.

Cally and Deana start to draw the world after school on Niiwo-giizhigad, but the dog brought home by Sweetheart Calico interrupts. It barks as it chases Sweetheart Calico around and around in the weedy yard. The antelope woman laughs silently as she leaps on high heels, evading its teeth and paws. The dog jumps and twists in the air looking like a big gray wind-tossed rag. It isn’t a very good-looking dog. Couldn’t be called any one particular breed of dog. Yet a sympathy for humans shines out of its eyes and the girls fall instantly in love, not knowing that this very dog is the fourth dog of the fourth litter of the forty-fourth daughter of the dog named Sorrow.

They join in running and playing tag with the dog and with the woman whose great-grandmother on her human side slit the throat of that ancestor dog and boiled its meat so that her daughter would have the strength to travel into the blue west, wearing the same blue beads that Sweetheart Calico hides now as she leaps away from the dog, laughing that wild and silent laugh. She screams noiselessly, even as poor Klaus, whom she has freed to go to work that morning, creeps into the apartment and showers off the greasy grit of random Minneapolis citizens whose shoes mashed every form of personal grunge into the mall carpeting and transferred that human scurf to Klaus, so that he’s covered utterly with the invisible populace — including refugees from every tribal and oil war in the world. And it won’t wash away. Twin Cities people have entered his very pores and he has breathed them in also, so that Klaus is now inhabited by the world’s thousands. Dead and living. Brand-new and ancient. Bargain-hunting ghosts inhabit Klaus on Day Four of the week as Rozin too returns from her work and says, what the hell is going on it this madhouse but wearily smiles as her daughters are whirling and chasing and full of life and if Rozin half closes her eyes and watches them through the blur of eyelashes, she sees the inutterable grace of antelope children galloping midair.