We have lain next to our personal human shrouded in red calico. We have let our picked-clean ceremonial dog bones be reverently buried in bark houses. We have warned off bad spirits from their babies, and talked to the irritating ghosts of their suicide uncles and aunts. We have always given of ourselves. We have always thought of humans first. And yet, for me, when Fatty Simon went down I did not hesitate. I took to the woods. I had puppies, after all, to provide for. I had a life. Next time, there was a guardrail accident way up on the bridge and Agnes Anderson met her end that way. Again, not me. Not me tied like a five-cent bundle and tossed overboard. Nor when the lake took Alberta Meyer or the Speigelrein girls, not when old Kagewah fell through that spring sitting in his icehouse or even when our track star Morris Shawano disappeared and his dad’s boat washed up to the north. Not me. Not Almost Soup. That is my name and I refuse to give it up for human mistakes or human triumphs.
I refused, that is, until my girls weakened and got sick.
As I told you, a girl saved my life, but also saved me from worse—you know. (And now I specifically address my brothers, the snip-snip. The Big Fix. The words we all know and watch for in their plans and conversations.) Cally and Deanna hid me whenever their mother tried to drag me to the vet. Thus, they saved my male doghood and allowed me full dogness. I have had, as a result of their courage, the honor of carrying our dogline down the generations many times. For this, alone, how could I ever thank them enough? And then they got sick, as I say.
Visiting their grandmas for Christmas, it happened. One foul night in a blizzard they got sick with a fever and a cough. It worsened, worsened, until I sensed the presence of the black dog. We all know the black dog. That is, death. He smells like iron cold. Sparks fly from his fur. He is the one who drags the creaking cart made of sticks. We have all heard the wheels groan as they turned, and hoped they would keep on past our house. But on that cold late winter night, up north, he stopped. I heard his hound breath, felt the heat of his lungs of steam and fire.
Chapter 15
Lazy Stitch
ALMOST SOUP
Curled underneath the beading table with the shoeless feet of women, you hear things you’d never want to know. Or things you do. Maybe it’s the needles, Pony Number Twelve, so straight and fine they slip right through the toughest hide. Maybe it is my own big ears that catch everything, and more. Maybe it’s the colors of the seed beads that work up in stitches so intimate and small—collect, collect—until you have a pattern to the anguish.
We dogs know what the women are really doing when they are beading. They are sewing us all into a pattern, into life beneath their hands. We are the beads on the waxed string, pricked up by their sharp needles. We are the tiny pieces of the huge design that they are making—the soul of the world.
See here, Rozin says, holding out her work with a trembling hand. We dogs know already what happened down in Gakaabikaang and why she left for her mothers’ house. After her children ran off with Sweetheart Calico, after her lover, Frank, left boxes of cookies that the dog willingly wolfed, after Rozin was late the entire next week and the week after the trauma and the celebration of Cally and Deanna’s return into her arms, she was laid off. She applied for unemployment and was given enough to live on if she used her savings bit by bit as she looked for the next job. But not enough to pay the mortgage on that house.
Frank suggested that, as the girls were out of school for Christmas break, why not go up north and stay with their grandmas for a while? “I’ll fix up your house,” he said, “and we can live there when we get married. I’ll even help with the mortgage.”
That last line seals it (although Rozin ignores the when-we-get-married part). She takes the girls up to her original turf for a visit. And then she stays. And Frank travels up and travels back. Up and back. And whatever is happening down in Gakaabikaang just happens without Rozin. Her cousins up north, Jackie and Ruby, who figure they have a say in Rozin’s love life, counsel her to go back down and snap up Frank. He has a job, they say, fully employed! And pleasant enough looks and is maybe insecure but that’s a plus in an Indian guy. He doesn’t appear to drink to excess. Wow! He is also known to be one of those rare men who was faithful to his wife until he left her. So what is Rozin waiting for? Why the hesitancy? Why the chilled feet? Why enroll her daughters in the tribal school and disrupt their learning process? She even has a house down there! Is it that you miss the grandmas? They will visit you. Is it that you fear commitment after Richard? Just get over it. Do you guys lack chemistry?
“No,” says Rozin, “there’s too much of it.”
“There can’t be too much,” says Ruby, looking puzzled at Jackie. They are both large, happy women who laugh often and make anything, everything, into wild rice hot-dish.
ROZIN CAN’T SAY exactly what “it” is and so cannot be helped. She just wants to stay where she is, living out by the lake with her mother and her aunt. Even though they drive her crazy, she just wants to stay with them and learn things, oh, cultural and spiritual things, maybe, and she wants her daughters near and she does not want to rely on a man to make her happy. Frank. Though she misses him. Well, but she can live with it.
Here’s the real reason: Getting her children back feels like all the luck in her life is now used up. She doesn’t want to take any more risks.
But I could have told her that from a dog’s point of view life is nothing but risks.
Wild Rose Pattern
“Let me tell you about this flower,” Rozin rambles to her mother now, “this leaf, this heart-in-a-heart, this wild rose, these girls of mine.”
“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 s
hooting, 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.
Rozin sleeps, but her nerves are shot through with adrenaline. She lasts one hour and then rises strong with fear. She washes her face—the water icy from the tap—brushes her teeth. Her eyes in the mirror are staring, young and round. She slicks her hair back into a tail and chews a nail impatiently.
“Go to bed.”
Giizis sends her back, fierce, almost slapping at her. And so a day passes. Another evening. Another night in which Rozin and Cally and Deanna do as before, the same routine, no change, except that the girls are weaker, Rozin stronger in her exhaustion.
You get too tired, you’ll get sick too.
The grandmas send Rozin to bed with hard words, but their eyes are warm and still with a mixture of worry, sympathy, and something Rozin has not seen in their faces before. Drifting away she wonders at it, but then the dark well opens and she drops into an unconsciousness so profound she does not hear the four-wheel-drive winter ambulance finally groan and whine down the road that Noodin is killing her heart to shovel.
The ride down to IHS is complicated by new drifts and whiteouts. I jump in the back and hide just as they swerve off. No way that I’ll get left behind. The dark comes on quickly as the EMT drives along, silent. In the back Rozin holds our girls. Snowlight flicks through the branches as the wheels grind and tear and the ambulance swings patiently along. Rozin stares into her daughters’ faces and whispers. Cally’s skin goes white as wax. Deanna’s dark eyes bore into her mother’s face, intent and strange. Their skin is rough as velvet when cool, then slides up to the skid of wax again when hot. They finally get there, carry the girls into the emergency room, into the hands of the nurses and doctor.
One look at their blood pressure and the doctor orders IVs. Cally has surprising strength. I watch through the hospital window. Hear her yells and shouts. See Deanna tug away, or try to, but Rozin holds her close in a fixed and tender grip saying calm words, calm though wrenched inside out at her daughter’s feeble terror. They put a cot up right beside them in the hospital room. At last with Noodin downstairs on the phone, signing papers and arranging things, with Cally and Deanna on the IVs suddenly unhollowed, full of color, strengthening and falling into sleep, Rozin lies still, breathing calmly.
It is then, in the hospital room, halfway asleep, that Rozin feels me put her daughte
rs’ lives inside of them again. Unknown to her, I have taken their lives with me to keep them safe. Waiting for her daughters to return, Rozin feels some confusion, a fall of silver, a branch loaded with snow, the snow crashing through her arms. Then Cally and Deanna are back in their own beds and they are separate, drifting off under different cotton blankets, in sterilized sheets, into deeper and deeper twilight, entering new ravines.
ROZIN IS SEWING the roses onto a shawl of black velvet, a border of madder pink and fuchsia flowers, twining stems, fancy leaves that never grew on any tree except in her mind. She has an odd thought—Cover the whole world with lazy stitch! Then Cally and Deanna walk in the door and say in unison, There’s nothing lazy about it! Rozin rubs the corner of her one drooping eye, but she says nothing. It’s a small thing, this mind reading that the girls do on her these days, and it’s harmless except that sometimes her daughters get big feelings they are not ready for yet. The old, dead, angry love between her and Richard, unfinished sadness so big and devouring that she can’t understand it herself. The worry at what he has become. The lonely wish to walk small between her mother, her aunt again, their arms curving over her like tree branches, making a smooth dim path for her to travel.
She takes agonizing stitches. Uses harrowing orange. They almost shoot fire in the dark room, these pinks. The word for beads in the old language is manidoominensag, little spirit seed.
Though I live the dog’s life and take on human sins, I am connected in the beadwork. I live in the beadwork too. The flowers are growing, the powerful vines. The pattern of her daughters’ wild souls is emerging. With each bead she plants in the swirl, Rozin adds one tiny grain.