Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

Bring her back. Bring her back to us, you fool.

Getting sober. Letting her go. The idea of it hurts so bad he momentarily wishes that the lawn mower had struck him full on, taken off his head, his thoughts.

THERE IS A little bench down the street in a dogshit triangle of lawn. Some strangled dark red ambrosia-colored snapdragons are planted there by who knows who? Better go there, says a voice. Her dog, Wiindigoo. Get out. Don’t look back. Now, right now, attend to yourself and focus on the next fifteen minutes of your life. For you were never able to do it a day at a time, not you. An hour. Two hours. Half a day at a time. Or not.

Klaus goes looking for her. Now and again they’ll ask him, what was so fucking great about her? What did she do, in bed for instance, or what did she cook? Was it something she did with her hands, her face, some way she had, perhaps? A love way. A food. Not one thing in particular, he says. She never cooked anything from a recipe. Potatoes, mac and cheese, that kind of stuff. It wasn’t that. They’ll ask did she have his children. No, he’ll say. No kids. Was she related to you? Was she from your own clan?

Sometimes he thinks she was. Yes.

In his worst down and outs, he gets comfort from the thought that she was just a fragment of his imagination, his pretty antelope woman. But he knows she is actual in every way. What scares him worst is this: The simple knowledge that his Sweetheart Calico is a whole other person. Lives in another body, walks in a different skin. Thinks different thoughts he can’t know about. Wants a freedom he can’t give.

She dragged me in, he says greedily, can’t she handle it now?

Yet he knows with bleak shame he is excusing his trapper’s appetite. He’s tangled in a net of holes. He doesn’t know how to stop wanting her in him, with him, part of him, existing in his food and water and booze. He doesn’t know how to stop the circle of his thoughts.

In the old days, they used to paint the red stripe of the drum down the middle of their faces. Right now, sitting on the carved bench in the hopeful little ugly park he closes his eyes. His face bears the blood-painted stripe. He tries to divide himself up equally — two parts. Send half of yourself to each direction. West, east. Let her go with the western half, free. But the part of Klaus that goes to the west reaches out and clings to his love like a baby, following her into sky-hung space.

Giiwebatoon

Klaus folds and unfolds the strip of cloth that he uses as his headband, traces the small buds and sprigs of pink unbudding roses and white roses, the sweetheart calico. Sweat and dirt, drunken sleeps, railroad bed, underpass and overpass dust, volleyball-court gravel, frozen snirt, river water, and many tears are all pressed into the piece of cloth. It holds the story of his wretched love. Though grit scored, dirt changed, and sun faded, it isn’t frayed. It is woven of the same toughness as his longing. He wraps the strip of calico around his wrist like a bandage and he waits. He becomes part of the scenery, a tree, or anyway a stump. He is waiting for her to appear.

Red flash. A curtain drops away. She walks across the downtown concrete. His wife, his niinimoshenh, his Blue Fairy, his torture, his merwoman, mercy and love. She is walking along very slow and hesitant, waiting for lights to change before she crosses, reaching for her own hand. Her dark fall of hair hangs tatty and lifeless. She breathes in clear air and blows smoke out her nose. Looking over her shoulder at him, sensing his presence, her eyes are no longer living agates. Her eyes have turned the dead gray of sidewalk.

Klaus steps toward her and flaps his hands.

“Run! Run home. You can go now!”

She starts nervously, but then shrugs, lights a cigarette from off the one she was smoking already, and doesn’t run away. She looks at him, through and through, weary. His dear love’s face is thin, the bones showing pure and stark, pressing just the right places under her skin. How he used to trace them is still locked in his hands. His fingers begin to move across the rips in his T-shirt.

She steps closer. He reaches out and holds her long-fingered delicate hand. Then, pulling the cloth around their wrists, he ties her hand to his hand gently with the sweetheart calico. He has no plan to do this either. No plan for what happens next, but it is simple. They start out. Start walking.

North and west, along the river until the herringbone brick path with decorative plantings becomes a common sidewalk. Eventually it turns to tar black as licorice at first and then lighter, lighter, showing stones in the aggregate, thinning, rubbing out, erasing, absorbed back slowly into the earth. Then earth itself is under their feet, a worn path for joggers and for bicyclists. It is clear at first and then grassier, fainter, grown over, traversing backyards or parkland. Back lots of tire stores, warehouses, malls, developments, wild mustard, polleny green-gold, a farm, then another one, all of a sudden undergrowth so thick along the banks they cannot enter.

They turn from the water flowing off the edge of the world and start walking due west.

They walk all evening, rest. Fall asleep in a grassy old yard just beside an abandoned shed that still shelters a hulk of metal that once was a car. Against the shed, still chained to the door, there is a cracked leather collar. Strung through it bones of a dog vertebrae. Scattered beside more bones and baked hide.

That dead dog comes alive and is her dog. Coyote gray, grinning and slobbering, it trots just behind them.

They keep walking. Next morning, too. They drink from a clean pothole lake and walk on until, over a slight rise, the sky immensely opens up before them in a blast of space.

“Niinimoshenh,” he says softly. “Run home. Giiwebatoon.”

He feels her start, tense, breathe the air in deeper gulps. A flowing fawn material, her grace comes over her. If he looks at her he won’t be able to do it. So he does not look at her face. Slowly, fighting his own need, dizzy, Klaus pulls at the loop of dirty gray sweetheart calico. He undoes the knot that binds her to him. At first, she doesn’t seem to know what her freedom means. She gazes at the distance until it fills her eyes. Then she shakes her hand and sees that she is no longer bound to Klaus. She stretches her arm out before her, turns her fingers over curiously, examines her blank brown palms.

“You let me go,” she says to him. He’s shocked to hear her soft, raspy voice.

“Yes,” he whispers. He sits down suddenly like a baby dropping to its seat. Sprawled in the grass, addled, his tears slowly pump. He throws down the strip of cloth that tied her to him and tied him to the bottle.

When he does that, he imagines that she will bound forward in the lyric of motion that only her people have. But she does not spring from his shadow, only walks forward a weary step. Confused, broken inside, shaking her head, she stumbles over the uneven ground. The dog stays right at her heels. As she walks west, she begins to sing. Klaus watches her. The land is so flat. She is perfectly in focus. He can see her slender back, quick legs, once or twice a staggering leap, a fall, an attempt to run. Klaus thinks that she might turn around but she keeps moving until she is a white needle, quivering, then a dark fleck on the western band.

Nimiigwechiwi-aanaanig: Awanigaabaw (Dr. Brendan Fairbanks), also Netaa-niimid Aamoo-ikwe, Biidaanamad, Migizi, and Nenaa’ikiizhikok, my daughters.

Thank you: Trent Duffy, my indefatigable copy editor, and Terry Karten, my editor at HarperCollins. Brendan Fairbanks was my consultant for most of the Ojibwe language in this book; any mistakes are mine. Thank you also to my sister, Heid E. Erdrich, who over the years helped me think about this book.