Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

At the train station, the agent showed Victoria the fancy ladies’ restroom. He encouraged her to step inside. When she did, he locked the door. Then he tried to herd the children onto the train. When Peace saw that he’d locked their grandmother in the bathroom she took Charlie’s hand and they backed slowly away from the agent. Booch and Shawano slipped behind their sister and brother. This was the way they had been taught to treat a bear. They backed toward the ladies’ restroom door, which had a frosted glass window. A blurred version of their grandmother jumped up and down behind the window, screaming in an eerie tremolo. People gathered. Sound of the commotion reached the bank. Augustus walked across the street toward the familiar tone of distress. The children were silent. Victoria tore a piece of framing from a mirror and began to beat at the window. Still, Hiram Talp persisted, talking soothingly to the children and explaining the situation to the people who surrounded the scene. He tried to take Peace’s hand and she bit him. He tried to take Charlie’s hand and she kicked him hard enough to make him double over. When Talp staggered up she put a finger in his eye. She was not her mothers’ daughter for nothing.

Augustus waded into the shocked little crowd surrounding Talp, who had doubled over in pain again. The people murmured warily at Peace, who did not look fierce at all in her neat blue dress, trimmed with a yellow collar, cuffs, and even a yellow ruffle. It was made by the screaming grandma in the frosted window, and lent to all of the children an air of respectability even though, well, they were clearly Indians.

Augustus registered the crowd’s comments without surprise. Once they saw that the children belonged to him, the people hushed.

“Give me the key,” said Augustus to the stationmaster, who pointed mutely at the agent. Augustus said to Hiram, again, “The key.” A woman looked at Hiram’s eye and declared he deserved to be blinded. Everyone was now on the children’s side. Hiram pointed at his shirt pocket. Augustus removed the key and released Victoria.

As the children and their grandmother walked away with Augustus, the Indian agent called out, warning everyone that the children would now grow up to be illiterate and violent drunks. Augustus stopped in the door of the train station.

“Hiram Talp,” he called, “what is six plus its additive inverse?”

Hiram glowered out of one eye. His hand was still clapped over the other.

“Zero,” said Peace.

“What is the sum of 20,862, 39, 459, 66, and 7,088?” asked Augustus. He saw the answer spiral from soft yellow to a scorched orange, but Peace saw the sum as violently green. As she answered, they kept walking, adding and subtracting numbers as they went along. It was a game they played. Augustus looked at his daughter and noticed that the freckles just beneath her skin stood out like flecks of iron.

The Storyteller

After what Old Shawano and Victoria had told him about their days in boarding school, Augustus was determined to educate his children at home. He understood that the loneliness the elders had suffered in those schools remained forever within them unsolved. In the evenings, by kerosene lantern light, the children worked regularly at their lessons. During the days, their mothers educated their children in all that was Ojibwe, all that they needed to survive. In this way, the family escaped many of the harms around them. They kept to themselves, rarely walked into town. They spent their time together and made themselves mute around others so as not to draw unnecessary attention. Augustus was anxious also to preserve his privacy from any who might guess that he was not legally married to either one of the women he lived with. He feared that his standing at the bank would suffer. But since no white people ever visited, nobody really understood that Mary and Zosie were different people. The two of them never appeared in the town together.

Occasionally, people did try to visit them. Old Shawano had placed his tar-paper house with a view to the small winding road that led up to it. Augustus had added a small white frame house to the same site, and so the family often had time to vanish before a visitor arrived to stand before their silent door. For a few people, though, the family stayed put. One visitor was a bachelor named Asin, Stone, and another was Bagakaapi, Sees Clear. They came originally to visit Old Shawano, but continued even after he entered the spirit world. They came for the remarkable bannocks and jellies that Victoria set before them, and they came because the children were curious and asked them questions, which they were only too happy to answer.

Questions

“What were we?” asked Charles. “Before this?”

He looked down at his overalls and bare feet. Asin knew just what the boy was asking. It was summer. They sat behind the house, which did not face the lake the way white people’s houses did, but sat sideways to catch the calmer breeze and protection of the woods. There was a low bluff at the side of the lake and a path that led through it to a broad velvety beach, which today was hot and windy. The women had cut leafy poles to make a cooling arbor and an outdoor kitchen. Augustus had pegged together a plank table. The children could hear the waves from where they sat, and the searching cries of gulls.

Zosie paddled out to an island and gathered two baskets of gull eggs. Now the eggs were boiling gently in a black iron kettle hung from a tripod on an iron hook. Zosie kept the fire low and even. Mary told her that the gulls would peck her eyes out when she was dead. Zosie shrugged and poured cups of tea.

Asin repeated the question, with a nod significant of its complexity. Then he cried out.

“What were we? We were warriors! The women too!”

Zosie smiled. Asin went on. “We hunted and trapped for the fur companies. However, we understood they were trapping us the way we trapped the animals. They were using their goods as bait. They used their rum too. Rum cut with pepper, water, tobacco. One swig would make you crazy. We knew most of those traders were against us at heart, but of course we needed more territory to hunt animals. We fought our way out here from the east and encountered the powerful Bwaanag. We fought them hard and never would have beat them except the whites attacked them, too, from all sides. They had good warriors, those Bwaanag. We made a mistake not to band up with them to extinct the whiteman. Now like us they are forced to hide their eagle feathers. And it is no use to make any war parties against the Bwaanag for land, because the now the whiteman has our land and their land too.”

Asin slapped at the cloth of his frayed pants. He looked down at his knees. “You know what we call these trousers? Giboodiyegwaazonag. Sewed up the butt. Sewed up the butt! We had freedom once!”

“Freedom of the butt?” asked Booch, and the children rolled with laughter, the women too. Asin and Bagakaapi laughed, repeated Booch’s question, then variations of the question, and laughed again until they laughed all afternoon and it was time to go.

Sugar Point

Asin showed his ten fingers twice and told the boys only that long ago their people, the Anishinaabe, had turned back a horde of soldiers. Nobody intended for the fight to get so out of hand. But it had! It had! Asin twisted his fingers together. How he wished he were a Pillager!

Those warriors of the Pillager hid among the trees when the soldiers marched in to take their leaders prisoner.

Nobody intended it to start, they say. A boy stacked their rifles. One went off!

Asin made an explosive sound and raised an imaginary Winchester. He shot and shot, pulling back at each recoil.

One soldier down, another two. A wound to their head man and then another. He is killed. We don’t attack them — just kill the ones who stick their heads up. We could have killed them all! Asin’s face worked. We could have killed them all. But because we showed our power, they brought us food and blankets. They made us more promises. We were not punished because they knew we were in the right. On that day, the only day we shot the whiteman, we won. We should do it again.