Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

Naano-giizhigad

Oh please, you wouldn’t name this day sacred to the now Ojibwe workplace just… Day Five. There are so many other good names for this almost-there day when you wake and think, Tomorrow I can sleep . The morning will bring the rainbows on again like the week before and Klaus can watch them cross the elegant wild structure of her face. Tomorrow for Cally and Deanna there will be drawing and a dog to play with and no more teacher’s dirty looks or locker-slamming-on-your-fingers boys who suck dead rats and pretend that Cally and Deanna are Chinese or Hmong or Mexican and sneer, go back where you came from.

“That’s just boys,” says Rozin. “Go back where you came from! How can you say that to a Native person?”

“I’ll fix ’em. I’ll go right in there,” says Richard.

But here it is Day Five and he and Klaus must pull up the last of the carpet.

“Go then,” says Rozin.

The girls watch for a kiss between them but are disappointed. They have noticed that their mother likes to talk to Frank at the bakery and that their father’s eyes follow Sweetheart Calico even though she is the girlfriend of Klaus. And all of these grown-up doings make them sick, sick, sick. They’d rather make the world over in girl image. The world would be only girls and animals and no boys or disappointing grown-ups except perhaps their mother visits bringing favorite food once every two weeks and long hugs but I could last a month, says Cally.

“Nobody mean can live on our planet,” says Deanna.

“And the dog will be our brother.”

“We won’t take husbands.”

“Obviously.”

WHY CAN’T THIS be the day of the otter, the kingfisher, the coot, the loon, the balsam tree, the moccasin flower, or the trout? The Ojibwe words for all of these lovely animals and plants are original and fluid words but in all probability some lackluster hard-assed missionary Jesuit like maybe Bishop Baraga the famous Snowshoe Priest put those names down in his Ojibwe dictionary in the hope of making the Ojibwe people into hard-assed lackluster people like him by forcing them to live every day of their lives working or praying or halfway to nowhere. Many days of the week in English go back to various ancient pagan gods (Thor’s Day, Frigga’s day, Saturn’s Day, etc.). Naano-giizhigad would be so much better as Nanabozhoo-giizhigad. As Nanabozhoo was a great teacher who taught lessons via foul hilarity and amoral idiocy, so the day could celebrate and commemorate the great lessons learned from fools like Klaus.

For he knows he is a major doof to work for Richard on this scam, which becomes every day more deadly and strange as the carpet mounts in the barn and the checks get written out and Richard signs his name on government paperwork.

“That’s government paperwork,” Klaus notices.

Richard winks a movie-star wink, an old-time black-and-white-movie lip-hanging-cigarette wink. Thank god it’s Naano-giizhigad and they can get the hell out of the barn before the ghost carpet swallows them.

“It’s all over, my friend,” says Richard. “Let us cash these obscenely fat checks and treat our wives to a fancy dinner.”

“My lady don’t sit still,” says Klaus. “She likes to take long walks. We buy food on the way. We keep walking.”

“C’mon, say it, Klaus. She likes to graze.”

“Shut up,” says Klaus.

“You should bring her back to where you got her. She’s trouble. She’s a goddamn ungulate.”

“I know,” says Klaus. “But I can’t let go.”

Neither of them remarks on Richard’s use of a high school vocabulary word, which he has carefully saved up until this moment. He had also saved what he thinks is a Zen saying.

“You can hold more water in an open hand than in a closed fist,” says Richard.

“That’s ridiculous,” says Klaus. “You can hold the neck of a bottle in your closed fist.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. You’re not tying her up anymore. ..”

“No, she’s got a dog now and it bites.”

“Well, okay.”

“Now she’s the one who ties me up.”

“I don’t think I’d like that,” says Richard.

“It’s pretty good though,” says Klaus. “Except when she runs away and leaves me there.”

They drive up to the divided house built twenty years after the murderous year when the starving Dakota were told that their dying children should eat grass and some lost patience with the settlement of their homeland by people who hated their guts and so killed some and were killed worse in return and their leaders hung and the rest driven out and the women and children hunted down and kept in a concentration camp which was the same Fort Snelling Scranton Roy started out from at the beginning of this book. The house now inhabited by the Whiteheart Beads and Roys and one antelope woman and a dog was built by another soldier who’d come home from the Civil War with a sickened heart that he could numb only by pounding nail after nail. Pain made the house solid. Klaus and Richard park the car on the beaten-down part of the yard that has become the driveway. Cally and Deanna, looking out of their window, watch them remove a case of beer each from the trunk.

“Let’s leave them out of our world,” they say in unison. “Jinx!”

They slap hands, spin hands, rap their hands up and down, and ruffle the air four times to seal in the luck of words spoken together. Rozin walks out the door and says to Richard, “Watch the girls. I have to go buy a loaf of bread.” The descendant of Sorrow slides along the foundation to the alley dense with buckthorn and mulberry. The dog ambles close to and settles down by Sweetheart Calico, who stands very still in the leaves, believing she is invisible.

KLAUS

When people ask me why I am no longer friends with Whiteheart Beads, I hedge around and come up with a neutral type of explanation. I say something innocuous, to keep things going on the surface. I have to do that. The reason is I’m afraid. My fear is this — if I ever begin to tell the story it will all flood out of me. It will be gone, unfixed, into the mouths of others. I’m afraid the story might stop being mine. Which would be dangerous. I rely on the story, you see. I keep it inside me because without it I might forget or dismiss the reason I no longer trust him. And once I did that, there is no telling what could happen.

Richard Whiteheart Beads, I’ve thought so often, foe or friend? I decided on the first because he cost me everything I had. I did manage to keep my life, but aside from that — my clothes, my savings, and even, yes, my wife, Sweetheart Calico. My Antelope Girl. Gone. Due to Whiteheart.

Now you’ll say to yourself there is no human on this earth with power of that magnitude. None. You wouldn’t believe it surely if you did meet him. He has a handsome, bland, forgettable face. Forgettable unless of course he has ripped out your heart. So me, I remember his face just fine.

SOME THINGS HAPPEN easy, and you feel like they were meant to be. And some things, oh god, they come so hard. The party we attended together, put on by the regional waste collection association, that was the easy part that led to the impossible.

I am standing before the salads and cheeses and deli meat with Richard Whiteheart Beads. We start loading our plates. While we are selecting food, he tells me about yet a newer truck he is thinking of buying — he’s always thinking of what he can acquire. This truck, it is just another example of Whiteheart’s imaginary surround. I know that. But I listen as though I believe in its pinstripes and refurbished engine, its Thirstbuster cup holders.

“Wish I could get an automatic sunroof, too,” Whiteheart Beads is saying. “Then you could travel with the wind in your hair.”