Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

“Put on your spectacles, old liar,” she said in a softly charged voice.

Immediately, I hooked them around my ears and in the burst of radiance I saw the raised letters I had missed in the tin, now the center of the star, which had marked the bottom of the can. Red Jacket Beans. I lifted my eyes to hers with the hopeless shame and contrition of a dog caught halfway in the stew pot. Nothing would get me out of this now. She glared back at me and for a long time our gazes held over my bean-can star. I saw something building in her, something gathering, a storm, and my heart sank down into my feet. But when it came, it was not the bitter scorching, not the fire I feared. It was not the horror of sarcasm. Not the scrape of reproach. Margaret did something she had never done before in response to one of my idiot transgressions. Margaret laughed.

A S THE SNARE my old man had set tightened around my neck, I felt my life squeezing out. A haze of yellow spots covered up my vision, but I wasn’t gone yet, for through that awful radiance I saw the dress. Transparent at first, then made of impossible materials. Even though my life ebbed, I couldn’t help planning. Wondering. How do you make a dress of water? How do you make a dress of fish scales and blood? A dress of stone? I saw a dress of starvation worn meager. I saw an assimilation dress of net and foam. A communion dress worn by my mother, who tried to live white and then abandoned her attempt. I saw a dress made of bear’s breath. A dress of lake weed and fury. A dress of whiskey. A dress of loss. I had been working on that dress all my life. The noose jerked. My heart cracked. I was filled with a terrible sorrow to know that I would not be able to finish that healing garment.

Then the fool man saved me, or so it seemed, but really, I knew it was the dress wanting to be sewed.

To sew is to pray. Men don’t understand this. They see the whole but they don’t see the stitches. They don’t see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman’s eye can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.

So the medicine dress wanted me to make it. A privilege I might have had no use for twenty years ago. Or forty. But now that I have lived upon this earth and seen what I have seen, I was ready. And so I began where all things begin — with the death of something else.

The power of the dress lay in the strict rules of its making, so I got my boys to drive a young cow moose into the water, then they roped and knocked her out while she was swimming across the lake. They killed her without the use of any whiteman’s weapon, and dragged her in by hand, lay spent on shore marveling at how the old-timers managed to do these things. Meanwhile, I went to work. To skin the moose, I used an ancient chipped spear point I had found one day while digging my squash vines under. The edge was still sharp, but I ground it sharper on a flint. It took me a good, long, bloody while to skin the moose, but I did it. When I was finished, I distributed the meat and took the hides. Removed the brain to tan the hides. Soaked the hides in ashes and water, then carried them dripping to the log bench I set up behind the cabin. I began rolling the hide, scraping it with the shoulder blade, pulling it across that log, manhandling it all one day and the next day, until I got it where I wanted it. Softer than chimookomaan velvet, softer than a hopeless touch, strong and long wearing but open to the needle. Which I made from a fish bone. I smoked that hide butter-brown and then I sat down to begin. I figured how the hides would cover me and talked as I sewed. Told the dress things I hadn’t remembered for fifty years.

I told the dress all about who I was as a child. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, I said, but I was not only very pretty but stronger than all of the boys. My mother hid me from the agents at the government school for as long as she could. Where did she hide me? A place they would never look. Under my great-grandmother’s skirt, behind the two stony posts of her legs. She was so old that she could not be moved from the corner of the cabin. All day, she sat on her little wooden chair with the curved back. Her mouth moved and her blind white eyes flickered. She chewed willow bark tobacco, and sucked constantly on chokecherry pits. Sometimes she passed me down a strip of jerky, where I hid underneath a balloon of calico broadcloth, a tent that smelled of sweet grass and stale piss, of potato-cellar dust and crushed mint pillows, of smoked moosehide, safe. School agents tramped around looking for me. Kookum closed her eyes and snored. When they awakened her, she screamed louder than a magpie, began to snarl, clawed the air until they retreated from the cabin in alarm.

“There, my girl,” she would say, patting my head. “Now you are safe for another year. Did you see something under my dress?”

“Oh no, kookum,” I would tell her. I would call her Gitchinookomis. I would offer her respectful thanks. But in truth I had seen something as I looked out from under her leg posts, from my place underneath her where it was darker than darkness. That something was not anything my husband’s dirty mind would invent. I’d seen something else, invisible and sacred. Time opened for me. I saw back through my gitchi-nookomisiban to the woman before, her mother, and the woman before that, who bore her, and the woman before that, too. All of those women had walked carefully upon this earth, I knew, otherwise they would not have survived. I saw back through a woman named Standing Strong to her mother named Fish Bones to her mother named Different Thunder. Yellow Straps. Sky Coming Down. Lightning Proof (Gitchi-nookomisiban told me she was struck and lived, but people next to her were sometimes scorched). I sat with my great-grandmother every night after that. She was my school. She told me all about the women reaching back into the darkness. How people always avoided Steps Over Truth when they wanted a straight answer, and I Hear when they wanted to keep a secret. As for Glittering, she put soot on her face and watched for enemies at night. The woman named Standing Across could see things moving far across the lake. The old ladies gossiped about Playing Around, but no one dared say anything to her face. Ice was good at gambling. Shining One Side loved to sit and talk to Opposite the Sky. Rabbit, Prairie Chicken, and Daylight were all friends of Gitchi-nookomisiban when they were little girls. She Tramp could make great distance in a day of walking. Cross Lightning had a powerful smile. When Setting Wind and Gentle Woman Standing sang together, the whole tribe listened. Stop the Day got her name when at her shout the afternoon went still. Log was strong, great-grandmother remembered, Cloud Touching Bottom was weak and consumptive. Mirage married Wind, and then married everyone. Children loved Musical Cloud, but hid from Dressed in Stone. Lying Down Grass had such a gentle voice and touch, but no one dared to cross She Black of Heart.

After the priests came among us, my great-grandmother said, She Knows the Bear became Marie. Sloping Cloud was christened Jeanne. Taking Care of the Day and Yellow Day Woman turned into Catherines. I became Margaret, but I always knew that would happen. The year they carried my great-grandmother out the western window, wrapped in red cloth and then tied into birch bark, the school finally got me. The girl who was named Center of the Sky became Margaret, then Margaret Kashpaw and then Rushes Bear. But I had already seen far back in time by then. I knew who I was in relation to all who went before. Therefore, although I went to school I was not harmed, nor while I was there did I forget my language. Not Margaret. Every time I was struck or shamed for speaking Ojibwemowin, I said to myself, There’s another word I won’t forget. I tamped it down. I took it in. I grew hard inside so that the girl named Center of the Sky could survive. Some think that I am mean, but that is why I’m with the living yet. My husband outwitted death by talking. So did I. Only when his talk was comical, kind, and obscene, mine was cutting and angry. I’ve been that way. The dress may change me. Or my talking to it, much the same.