Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

“Cally knows everything about me. Deanna knows everything about everything.”

“What things, for instance?”

“Ridiculous things!”

Rozin lowers her velvet and the old twins’ eyes glide over at the swimming vines, the maple leaf in three blends of green beads, the powerful twist of the grape tendril, and her four roses of hearts that she’s finishing in a burst of dangerous pinks. Rozin is becoming tiny and bird-boned. She has developed a drooping eye. You could think this eye was giving you the curse. Or you could think it was giving you the come-on.

“So how, ridiculous?”

“Just listen!”

“My girls and I get confused about one another. It happens with mothers and daughters, you know it does. Deanna. Cally. We think the same things sometimes. They don’t mind if I am nine years old again. Will they even like me three years from now? Will I embarrass them? Will they hate me like the other girls all hate their mothers? Was I like that to you?”

Noodin and Giizis exchange a look that says, whatever they deal to her she’s got it coming.

“Eya’, indaanis,” says Noodin. “Don’t worry.”

CALLY AND DEANNA are always outside. It’s good for them, Rozin thinks. Cally stomps massive clearings out on her snowshoes and throws her jacket off, her hat, for me to run with and toss. We see a mink flash by. Deanna loses her mittens for me to find. The girls play hard then tear into the house, faces dark with joy, cheeks blazing, the raw cold and sweat of icy breezes swirling in their hair.

Rozin paints their fingernails a golden satin pink. Cally burns her mouth on hot bread behind her back.

“Ow, Grandma!”

But Cally is laughing, fanning off the tip of her tongue, taking the next piece of dough her grandma fries with more care. Instead of eating once it cools, however, my girl suddenly sets down the golden crust, unfinished. Cally coughs hard and then she is tired. She curls up by Deanna. They wrap together in one blanket beside the stack of old newspapers that the grandmas keep by their easy chairs. They don’t want to play with the dog anymore. I sneak under the edge of the couch-cover fringe. They usually don’t let me in the house — the girls have to hide me.

Just like her great-grandfather Augustus, Giizis reads all of the summer news through long winter nights. She calls out to Noodin or Rozin occasionally, exclaiming over a visit from the Pope, another shooting, the practices of cults and movie stars. Now she shades Cally and Deanna from lamplight as they curl into a knitted afghan. It is only later when the girls wake, flushed in their first misery, that anyone except me even knows they are sick.

Their fevers shoot up abruptly to an identical 103. Rozin takes the steel bowl and washcloth. She wrings the cloth reluctantly, sloppily, and bathes down the fever, wiping slow across her daughters’ arms and throats. Faster, faster! I think desperately, whining. She touches the girls’ stomachs and they both cry out. Their faces wrench suddenly.

“Mama!”

Rozin bundles off the knitted blankets, brings fresh sheets and remakes the couch. All that night they are up, then down. I am constant. Under the couch, I keep faith and keep watch. Rozin falls asleep on the roll-away in the next room and Noodin sleeps beside the couch in the recliner, covered up with an old hunting jacket and a giveaway quilt. Giizis sleeps down on the cold floor. Every hour, Cally or Deanna cries out and is sick with nothing in her stomach, her whole body straining, her face fiery with heat again.

There are eight inches of new snow on the ground next morning. Rozin wakes to a still brightness in the tiny bitterly cold closet where she slept as a child. She curls for a moment into the blanket, deeper, then rolls wearily over when she hears the girls. She closes her eyes, aching for the warmth again, waiting for Noodin or Giizis to respond. Cally and Deanna continue to cry softly. Rozin rips the covers down with an almost angry gesture and hops out, stretching. Shit, she mumbles, walking into the next room. Her hand, though, touches down gently on Cally’s forehead and cheeks as she strokes. She refills the basin, then sponges each daughter’s blazing gold forehead, throat. She lifts Deanna’s head and puts the cloth against the back of her neck and again rubs Cally’s chest, again waits out the dry heaving.

Noodin goes out to shovel. An hour passes, and then Rozin pours a little ginger ale into a cup and sits down, careful not to jostle her daughters. She feeds them teaspoon by teaspoon, waiting for each spoonful to settle. Their lips are dry. Rozin puts a bit of Vaseline on her finger, rubs their deep and punished color. Cally lies back in the pillows, impossibly still. Deanna turns over and stares dully at the wall.

When Noodin comes in the door, Rozin turns.

It’s no good, Noodin’s look says. The phones were unreliable anyway, now cut off.

Then the girls can’t keep down even those precious teaspoons of ginger ale and the whole miserable process begins again. They’ll get dehydrated, Rozin says. Now Giizis comes in from outdoors, from the old lean-to where she’s been searching through rolls and bags of bark for the best slippery elm, the strongest sage to boil to make a healing steam. Noodin goes back out and all morning they hear her shovel or the regular fall of her ax as she builds up the woodpile. I go out to encourage and guard her. Slip back in, dart under the couch. Hardly eat. By the end of the afternoon, Giizis’s eyes narrow, her lips crease with worry. The smell of cooking upsets the girls. More snow falls and all day they take turns sleeping and eat cold food.

Cally is shrinking, thinning, hardening on her bones, Deanna is coughing in explosive spasms that shake the springs just over my head. Weeping tiredly. Cranky. Then they lose the energy to fight and grow too meek. I lick the hand that hangs over the edge of the couch. I call upon my ancestors and their old ones for help. That night, the girls seem even worse. They stare blankly at Rozin, who takes a sleeping bag and sleeps in the chair and sends Noodin to sleep on the roll-away. Rozin coaxes her daughters back to sense after that odd stare. Falling instantly into my own sleep, I dream of hissing cats.

Bad omen! Bad things! I wake at Cally’s cry and Rozin jumps to her. Cally thrashes her arms and legs, but then silently and rhythmically. The regular movement of the seizure stiffens Rozin to a calm horror. She holds Cally as best she can until the climbing movements of her arms and legs cease. At last Cally sags, unknowing, her face at her mother’s breast, eyes staring out of the whited mask of her features.

“Cally.”

Rozin’s voice is deep, from a place in her body I have never heard. Cally. She calls her daughter back from a far-off tunnel path. Cally’s mouth opens and she vomits blood into Rozin’s hands, into a towel she holds beneath her daughter’s mouth. She calls until her daughter stops looking through her mother and brings her troubled gaze to bear. She regards her mother from a distance, then, with eyes that soften in a grown woman’s pity.

Rozin wipes her daughter’s mouth, her forehead, her twig wrists, the calves, so fine, burning, dry. The soles of her feet. She wipes and wrings and wipes again until Cally stops looking at the ceiling. Rozin keeps on stroking with the cloth, finds herself humming. Slowly singing, she wipes up and down the pole arms. The forehead, her daughter’s beating throat. She wipes until Cally says, I’m thirsty, I’m so thirsty, in a normal voice.

You have to wait. Just wait a little bit. Rozin’s voice shakes.

Cally falls back. Her eyes shut. Her lips have darkened, cracked in fine, bloody lines, and her skin dries the wet cloth. Rozin keeps on wiping the fever away. I know she feels it underneath her hands, swirling, disappearing, but always coming back. After a while, I can see the fever itself, a viral red-yellow translucence creeping behind the blue of the wiping cloth. The exact same thing happens to Deanna next. Rozin puts the fire out, all night she puts the fire out, wiping until the sweet blue trembles in her daughters and she herself is light, lighter, rising to her feet to get the teaspoon again, fetching the ginger ale, the cup. She adds more water to the boiling kettle on the stove, more bark. The air is steaming, the windows a solid black with frost, a heart-rent blue, a dim gray, then white when Noodin rises to take her place.