“N’dawnis,” I called out again from my place. “Come home with me, I’m begging you, now.”
But I might as well have been talking to the bottle itself. She laid down her cards.
“Wait!” she told the others in a hissing, slurred undertone. “Let me go deal with the gabby old man.”
Fleur reeled over to me and then stumbled into my lap. She gave a bray for a laugh, and dipped her head and spoke close to my ear. “Stay and watch what I have learned from you, old friend.”
Her voice was sober as a rock. I sat back to enjoy myself.
The first thing that happened was Fleur lost another hand. Now she owed. That was the quicksand of Tatro’s eternal game.
“I better fold and go home,” she blurted.
“You can’t,” said Tatro.
“I got no money.”
“Bet something else.”
“I got nothing but my car.”
“Bet that.”
Fleur studied that idea, squinting an eye at him across the table as though his features were going blurry. The toothpick in Tatro’s mouth jigged up and down. As soon as the car was mentioned, more people flooded in. Now the place was so crowded I had to creak up and stand on my chair to see the table. Fleur’s fingers began to tap a little, as if she was nervous, and then she cried out.
“I need a whiskey on the house to clear my head!”
“Double, on the house,” Tatro agreed. “Are you in with the Pierce-Arrow?” His toothpick now was tight-clenched. A light of panting greed was in his eye. The white of hubcaps. The chrome strip. The purring beauty of its expensive motor. From the beginning, from her first drink, he’d started to feel in his hands the steering wheel. Now his foot was pressing on the gas.
“What do you bet in return? What you got besides this place? I don’t want this place!” She laughed at her own wit. She was the only one though and there was now a gasp of breath around her as she slipped from her chair and fell onto the floor. She pulled herself up by gripping the table’s edge. “Oh, I’m a little shkwebii,” she sang in a dreamy slur. “What do you bet me?”
“She can’t play,” said a Kashpaw. “It’s taking advantage.”
“She got in the game she stays in the game,” said Tatro. Those were the rules. A player played a hand as long as fingers could hold cards. And as others had at times invoked this rule and profited by it, no one could really by rights make an issue. But the question remained what Tatro would put up. He pointed to the wall.
“Take your pick.”
“Nothing’s worth my car.”
“Then take all of it!”
“What else you got?”
Fleur asked and then she fell off her chair again, only when she did so this time she appeared to realize suddenly that she was too drunk to go on. “I ain’t steady enough,” she informed everyone around her. Then she made a move that clenched a triumph in Tatro’s mind.
“I’m gonna give my hand over to n’gozis.”
A perfectly legal move by the game’s long hammered-out rules. If a player couldn’t see the cards or had the wit to know his moves were stupid, it was acceptable to hand the cards to a relative. This was, in fact, the way the game sucked in more people. It had worked to Tatro’s long-term advantage, and he thought it was working short term now. He looked at the boy.
“Change chairs with me an’ play my han’,” Fleur said to her son. A hushed groan pushed out of people when the boy’s gaze wandered up. His round eyes were empty of all light of understanding, his face as blank as one of Father Damien’s china dinner plates. Wordless, he moved to his mother’s chair. Fleur took the stool beside him, holding herself upright by clutching his shoulder. She crooned dizzily.
“What you got, Tatro?”
Seeing a sure win now, Tatro smiled his gray smile.
“I have some land,” he said in a precise voice. “One hundred sixty acres on the lake. They’re worthless. No timber.”
“Throw in the island too!” I croaked from my perch on the chair.
“Yes, the island,” the others in the room took up my suggestion. A surge of anger went through them, for the hopelessness of memory bit into them each in a different way.
Tatro looked over at the boy again. Engrossed in a point in space just over Tatro’s head, he seemed in an idiot’s trance. His hands were folded in his lap. Now he brought one up and licked his palm and tried to touch the colorless swatches of his hair down. This childish gesture of embarrassment decided Tatro.
“All right, the land and the island for the car.”
“Get the deeds! Get the papers to both!” Others took up my insistence and the papers were soon fetched, the car’s from the glove box and the deed to the land from the black safe in the floor beneath the cash register. Now the papers sat on the table. Tatro and the boy cut for the deal. The boy got the deal and it was then that the life of him showed, Fleur’s part of him, the Pillager. His gaze raked lower so it rested with dead calm on Tatro’s face, but his hands! The boy’s hands swooped out from his sleeves like starved birds and the cards flew and gathered and divided themselves with a grace that made Tatro gasp.
I don’t know if it was then Tatro knew how thoroughly he had been taken, or when he realized that the foolish mask the boy wore was in fact both his real face and unreadable. But for sure he must have known it by the fourth hand and then the fifth. The bet was six hands out of ten and the boy took every one.
SIXTEEN
The Healing
Margaret
AFTER THE card game between the boy and the Indian agent was finished, after Tatro had staggered off gasping, after everyone had melted from the celebration that spilled out the bar onto the road and then followed my old man home, we slept, exhausted, and rose the next day. We sat together talking around the fire drinking morning tea and replaying the game, the foolish and foolhardiness of Tatro, the bitter twist of his luck, the surprised malice in his face. I could feel Lulu just beyond the firelight. I knew she’d vanish if I spoke, so I brought a plate into the bush and set it on the ground. My husband smoked an endless pipe and speculated.
“He will try to deny it, but there were too many witnesses. He will have to honor his signed agreement and transfer the land.”
“My land is no good anyway,” Fleur gloated, “according to him. Ishkonigan, the leftovers!” The pleasure in her voice was wild. Her movements were jerky, her face stark with exhaustion. She looked older and almost sick, yellow showed under the smooth sheen of her skin.
“You got what you came back for,” I said, reading her looks and knowing that she’d been drinking, long and hard, off in the Cities, and now here. “The agent is shrewd and heartless. You bested him and should be glad.”
“Geget. Mii nange.” Fleur emphatically agreed, but her eyes, as they rested on the spoiled child who sat mute as a stump at the edge of the yard, were anxious with sorrow.
“My son,” she called out. She never called him anything else but n’gozis. Addressed him as her son and never used his name— Christian or Ojibwe. As far as we were concerned, the boy was nameless. For sure, such a thing was no accident. I opened my mouth to ask Fleur to tell me his name, but then a thought stopped me, an answer. She had not named him. I knew this as sure as I knew my own name. Oh, he’d have a name for the records, for papers, surely. A name for chimookomaan law. He’d have a name for the whites to call him, but no name for his spirit.
“You haven’t named your own son,” I hissed at Fleur, outraged at her carelessness. “He’s strange in the head because the spirits don’t know him!”
“He’s not strange in the head,” Fleur said, but only half indignantly. She knew the truth. “How was I supposed to name him in that city? Who would dream a name for him? Who would smoke the pipe? Who would introduce his spirit to the name and help his spirit to embrace that name?”
“You,” I said. But she looked down at the ground.
“I tried, n’gah,” she said, calling me her mother, which hi
t me. Her voice was filled with tones of pain. “Nothing went right.”
“There’s more to it than that,” I said, and then I knew. I knew it all as I looked at her staring at the ground, she in her pristine white outfit, she of the old will, she with my childhood friend Anaquot’s bold eyes and Four Souls’s grin. I knew everything about who she came from and yet who Fleur was eluded me as much as it eluded all who felt the air stir and the leaves speak in her presence, those who could not look at her directly and yet could not look away from her. I had not known until that moment. But I know shame when I see it.
“Go away from here,” I said to my old man, “peel the fancy suit off that boy and take him out in your boat to fish.”
“It’s too early,” said Nanapush.
“Dunk your head in the cold water and go,” I insisted.
“No!” cried the boy, his teeth streaked brown. He stuck his red tongue out at me.
I leaned down, grabbed him by the ear, and spoke.
“I’ll gut you like a fish and throw your head to the dogs if you don’t obey me! Now get into the house. Change your clothes. There’s an old pants and shirt on the hook by the door.”
The boy was so surprised that he did as I told him, and Nana-push soon had the boat ready. They pulled away from shore, struck off onto the lake. When they were gone, I turned to Fleur. She sat on the stump by the door in her white suit, looking at the ground, her face almost as vacant of spirit and slack as her son’s.
“I can smell the liquor on you, n’dawnis,” I said. “You stay here. Don’t go anywhere.”
And so she sat quiet in the yard and let the sun beat down, let herself sweat and ruin the starch in the white cloth. The fabric wilted until it clung to her skin. I built up the fire underneath my big kettle. I went down to the lake ten times and filled a flour sack with water and hauled it to the kettle and dumped it in. I put fronds of white cedar into the water. I brought out my big tin bathing tub and set it up near the fire, filled it partly with more water from the lake. More cedar. When the tub was steaming full and fragrant, I went to Fleur. I raised her up.
“First the white-lady shoes and stockings,” I said. She nodded, neatly rolled the stockings down her legs, balled them up, and put them in the tips of her shoes.
“Next, the skirt.” That, she lowered to the ground. I picked it up and carefully folded it, set the skirt beside the shoes. Her slip was transparent panels with a hem of delicate lace. She took that off too, and the cleverly sewn satin-lined jacket, the blouse underneath, then everything. Fleur Pillager stood naked by the wash-tub, her hair down her back again but not so long as it was before, her slim legs reflecting the play of the sun in the cedar water.
Slowly, she lowered herself into the water. She sat in the tub and put both hands over her face. I used my copper dipper to pour the water over her. It fell in shining strings and rivers and streams. I wet her hair and soaped it, then rinsed every trace of soap from her hair and did the whole thing again. At last, I gave Fleur the final rinse with fresh hot water that I poured on her from a gourd dipper. I cleaned her face with a rag, washed her carefully, dabbing the cloth with great care around the beautiful shape of her eyes. I traced the curve of her ears, ran the rag down her neck then back up under her chin. I took her hand in mine, and then I washed up and down each arm. I washed each finger and polished each clear oval nail. Then I had her kneel in the tub as I scrubbed her lean back.
By then, Fleur Pillager was trying to hold herself back; but failing, she wept like a girl. Racking sobs built and died in her, violent and unashamed. “You should cry,” I said, “you deserve to cry.” I left her outside in the yard, let her finish washing herself with her own tears. I went into our cabin and I pulled the most precious thing I’d ever made from its hiding place under blankets, against the wall. I took my medicine dress from the box I had made for it out of birch bark.
I smoothed out the soft leather folds of the skirt, then lighted a braid of sweet grass, cleaned the dress off with the smoke. I brought the sweet grass to Fleur as she stood naked, drying off in the sun. The sun cast its warmth and leafy shadows across her back. The new young trees whispered and the waves slapped at the stone shore. I fanned the sweet grass smoke across her body with the wing of an eagle. I combed out her hair and fanned it also with the holy fragrance. As I purified Fleur, I sang to her. The song of return, the song of Four Souls, the song of her name. I sang an old lullaby that made her cry again as she’d last heard it from her long dead mother, Ogimaakwe, Anaquot, Four Souls—she was called all of those names. I sang the song belonging to the lake, which was taught to us in dreams by the lake itself, and I sang her mother’s song.
“You put the heart of an owl under your tongue,” I said. “You braved all the old wisdom. You scorned us. You did not listen. And yet we love you, n’dawnis. We have loved you all through this. Myself, old Margaret, who has the vanity to call herself Rushes Bear, loves you as does the crazy old man. Nanapush. Your mother’s spirit and her grandmother’s, all the way back through the generations, love you. Your father and his fathers, too. All of these spirits love you, and the spirits in the four layers of the earth and the four skies that exist above us. The crawlers, the fliers, the runners, the swimmers. You are loved in creation though you tried to destroy yourself.”
She held up her arms and I lowered my medicine dress upon her, helped her shrug into it, told her about the vision I had to make it and how I had followed that vision down to each detail. Then I explained to her what she must do.
“You can’t just drive back onto your home ground with a trunk of old bones,” I told her. “Yes, I know what you carried home in that whiteman’s car. Nor can you stab the earth with the high heels on your shoes or breathe your whiskey breath into home air. You know where the rock is by Matchimanito. That is the place where your mother’s people have suffered and cried out and fasted and begged for mercy from the spirits. You know your power and the earth in your Pillager blood is the result of generations of hard sacrifice behind you. The strength of your ancestors should not find an ending in your weakness.”
“Geget,” she said. “Mii nange. I know it.”
Her head hung to her chest and she looked tired, so tired. The racks of her graceful shoulders sagged hard. I felt a wash of pity for her. But there wasn’t enough human pity in the world to help Fleur Pillager. She needed more, from another source. She needed help from her neglected spirits, and would find it only by fasting on the dark rock eight days and eight nights with all of her memories and her ghosts. “You must suffer with your relatives,” I told her. “The living and the dead.
“I am putting you out on a rock on the side of the lake,” I went on, “with nothing to help you but my medicine dress. My daughter, the sun will bake and burn you and destroy your ability to see, but this dress will save your vision so that you’ll be forced to look within. It will get worse. Stinging flies will torture your skin and the zagimeg will suck your blood. This dress will allow them to bite right through. Then it will heal your wounds so that you’ll be fresh for the insects each morning. Those tiny spirits will drive you past your limit. At night the wind will rake you, cold off the lake. The cold air will clench around your heart and you will be devoured by the cold, but this dress will not let you die. No food will pass your lips for the eight days you will lie on this rock, but this medicine dress will not let you starve to death, nor will it feed you or give you water. Every night after the fourth day I will come to you with just enough water to keep life in your body. This dress will intensify your hunger and allow you the privilege to suffer. This dress will listen to you, Four Souls, crying out for kindness and mercy in spite of your terrible will.
“Again, you will remember every dear one you lost, those you have forced yourself to forget in order to survive. You threw your souls out. You lived. Now you must weep over those who died in your place. Mourn your dead properly so you can live properly, Fleur. Weep yourself sick. And then from your heart, from und
er your skin, and from the arrogant shell you call the surface of your mind will come the pain of understanding your loneliness. This dress will force you to enter the darkness of your spirit. Your empty spirit. Your angry, lost, devouring, last soul. You will be left there, alone, and you will not know why you are alone. For you are a beggar in this life, Fleur Pillager. Four Souls. All the power you were given and all the luck that drove you to the Cities, all the cruelty that lay in your heart toward those who wronged you, all the devotion to the land and to your stubborn idea comes to nothing before one truth—your first child does not love you and your second child doesn’t know how. How can they love a woman who has wasted her souls? How can they love a mother who forgot to guard their tenderness, and her own? How can they love a woman who can suffer anything and do anything? Forget your power and your strength. Let the dress kill you. Let the dress save you. Let yourself break down and need your boy and your girl.”
Your name was Four Souls, I said, and my voice was neither gentle or kind, but neutral in its observation, cold as I listed Fleur’s names. Four Souls, but you haven’t got four souls anymore. Your name was Fleur because the French trader’s wife favored you. It is not Fleur. No more is it Fleur. No matter what people call you. Your name was Leaves Her Daughter. White Woman. Zhooniyaa. Your name was All Wrong. All Too Different. Impossible. Your name was Sorrow like the dog your aunt slaughtered so her child should eat. Your name was Kills Him Once. Kills Him Again. Kills Him Over and Over. I’m not faulting you for your revenge, but what did it get you? Are you satisfied when you look into the blank eyes of your son and when your daughter turns aside from you in the road? When she won’t call you Mother? When she spits on the ground to hear your name?
You are loved to extremes, and you are hated to extremes, Fleur Pillager. Now is the time for you to walk the middle way.
If you make it through the next eight days, I will give you my medicine dress. Not only that, I will give you the name that goes with it. For the dress has its own name, which it told to me while I was making it. When you are finally brave enough to experience fear, you will ask the dress for its name and plead for it to help you. If you ask humbly enough, the dress will tell you, and if you have the strength to accept that name, then the dress will give its name to your spirit. You and I and the dress will know who you are. Maybe we’ll tell my no-good husband Nanapush, too. Your name will live inside of you. Your name will help you heal. Your name will tell you how long to live and when to give up life. When the time comes for you to die, you will be called by that name and you will answer. For you have been lonely so long, you nameless one, you spirit, and it will comfort you to finally be recognized here upon this earth.