FLEUR’S CHILDREN
At first, no one thought that the boy Fleur brought back to the reservation could possibly be her son. He was so white, so soft, so strange. But then, said the old women, in the land of the chimookomanag she’d probably forgotten all the things that a pregnant Anishinaabekwe must do—for instance, never to roll over in her sleep. Had she twisted the boy up inside of her somehow? And when it was born, did the men of the father’s chimookoman dodem make loud noises to frighten off evil and give the boy courage? It did not appear so, nor did the women think Fleur had kept him long enough in the tikinagan—not that there was anything visibly crooked about him. Yet he did not look straight, either, so perhaps the crookedness came from the inside. Had she remembered to rub him with bear grease? with goose oil? to bathe him in strong cedar tea? Had she sung the old songs to him before and after he was born and had she done the right thing and introduced him to the drum? They doubted it. Some even came and whispered to Father Damien. It was the flesh of the boy—too pale and soft, like risen dough, that upset them. And the eyes. Sometimes blue, sometimes black. As if his whole being could not make up its mind, which gave them the answer, at last, to what was wrong.
They had seen it before in a child whose indis was lost, or even worse, thrown away. Maybe by a nurse in the chimookoman hospital. Maybe the father, who did not keep Anishinaabe ways. For the boy seemed both clever and foolish, huge and weak. Had Fleur dried the boy’s birth cord in tobacco, then wrapped it in sage, and sewn it into a bag made of fine skin? If not, the boy would be hunting for it ever after. And he did appear to be looking too hard at everything, the people thought, maybe searching, but with such a quiet oddness that it truly seemed to them he must have lost the center of himself. Anyway, who knew if she was ever a good mother, seeing her own daughter would not speak to her anymore? Fleur didn’t treat her son with affection, never set her hand upon his hair, never even told his name to anyone. Perhaps he didn’t have one. Nameless, then, the boy trundled after her, begging, always, for sweets. More sweets. They called him Sweets for a time, and then someone looked into his eyes. That name was dropped.
Of course, from the newspaper record, his origin was known. Here was the son she had borne with John James Mauser. This was the son of the ravenous man in the tuxedo suit, the one who had stolen her land. The truth came clear. Upon that Mauser, it appeared she had taken her revenge, an idea. This son she brought home was the visible form of that revenge. So was he, or was he not, human? Was he then not something concocted of a bad form of medicine, or at the least, her purpose gone wrong?
The mother and son went back to their land and camped there, even though it was a place nobody liked to go. She put on men’s overalls and tied her hair back, bought an ax and a few other tools, then the two started building out by the ruined shores of Matchimanito. Some said she returned her parents’ bones to the ground. Dodem markers soon appeared, thrust upside down into softened earth. If so, there were still more reasons to avoid the place. More ghosts. A reunion of the dead.
As for the great trees, over which Fleur’s force was narrowed, then stilled, they were gone forever. But although the son and mother could not bring back the trees which, quarter sawn and polished with beeswax, composed the stylish foyer of the grand house Mauser built on a tranquil ridge in Minneapolis, the peace of which Fleur destroyed, there were other trees. Fresh green saplings had grown in Fleur’s absence. Kind trees, popple trees, flourished on her land, enough for her to construct a neat cabin of poles and mud. Once she was living in her new popple-pole house, she sought out her daughter Lulu once again. But in her adamant refusal of her mother, the girl would not change.
As soon as he knew Fleur was there and settled in her cabin, Father Damien walked out to Matchimanito. The old ladies constructed invisible webs of signs of crosses when they saw Fleur passing near, but Father Damien felt simple eagerness to see her, friend of his first years, and he walked the grown-over paths eagerly. That first visit, as though she’d taken on some city ways, Fleur was surprisingly talkative. It was only once he’d gone that Father Damien realized she’d told him nothing. City ways again. After that, she grew increasingly quiet and the boy, tanned and suddenly fond of daily fishing and hunting, stomped in and out of the house in silent concentration. Father Damien found the quietness of Fleur reassuring, not threatening or even mysterious. Often, they sat in silence and considered that period of absence of talk a good visit.
Fleur was usually waiting when Father Damien arrived, for he had never learned to walk with any degree of discretion. Sticks snapped beneath his heels and he cheerfully blundered this way and that, making a zigzag harvest of berries or mushrooms along the way. He always showed up with something: once a tremendous fluted oyster bracket, tender and fluttering, pulled off a tree; another time a dead bird of a brilliant and iridescent blue so intense the color caused tears to start into his eyes.
As he gave the bird to Fleur, he was surprised to experience the sudden sensation that he was traveling swiftly through the air. The blue of its feathers seemed to span the spectrum of emotion. Fleur regarded the bird with her usual calm, though her eyes grew uncommonly gentle. He brought her hazelnuts, ears of fresh corn, old army blankets and heavy coats to piece into quilts. He brought her strings of cut-glass beads, sewing needles, tins of good tobacco. Fleur accepted these offerings with an artless pleasure. They were little enough, thought Father Damien, considering that he couldn’t help her to obtain Lulu. The girl, now a young woman, was stubborn as a rock.
That day, Fleur took her beading out and worked in the sun while Father Damien worried the concept of a word, jotting notes on a tiny pad of paper, asking her for confirmation. Suddenly, he stopped what he was doing and looked at her, watched her as though from far away, thought about her life and their connection. She had a fierce intelligence and nothing slipped by her, so he accepted that she’d known his secret from the beginning, and it hadn’t mattered. Not because she was so tolerant, but because certain details of other people’s personhood were not worth her notice. She simply didn’t care. Nor did she care about other things people usually found essential. The good opinion of friends and family were useless—she had none and lived with a son whose character would not have relieved loneliness. Or loneliness itself—if she ever did experience such a thing, and Damien was quite sure that she did not—she made no mention of it, even where Lulu was concerned. She never said she missed her daughter, she never asked where Lulu was, she did not even say Lulu’s name. And yet, there was no doubt she loved Lulu and yearned after her, for he knew that many times Fleur had tried to see her.
Before Father Damien left, she set a pair of beadworked makazinan into his hands. They were lined with the softest rabbit fur, the uppers were of a beautiful smoked hide. The flowers were worked of the finest grade of beads and flawlessly put together—except for the tiny black bead on the edge, the spirit mistake done on purpose so as to allow any bad spirits that may have been trapped in the foolishly arrogant perfection of the work itself a chance to escape. There was no question for whom these makazinan were intended, and Damien took them with a heavyhearted smile.
The gift was evidence of the bewilderment in Fleur’s mind, the confusion. She did not understand the reflected substance of her own revenge in her daughter. It was up to Father Damien to try to explain. But what can be explained when the stone meets the stone, when the earth mixes, when water flows into water? You are alike, he wanted to say, alike in your stubbornness. One will not ask forgiveness and the other will not forgive. What use is that? You sent Lulu to the government school and Lulu will never forget.
“The best thing to do is ask Nanapush to talk to your daughter, ask him to lay it out plainly. That is the only way.”
Fleur raised her eyes to Damien in a moment of unusual openness, and he gazed into their reflecting depth with an ease that he’d never known. Her sharply cut eyelids, so fine and enigmatic, were only enhanced by the dark upward sweep of two lin
es that had appeared in her age. Her skin was still perfect, taut, of a gold so deep it seemed the tawny cover of a fabulous metal. And her straight nose, the nostrils so artfully flared, and the charged symmetry of her mouth, all were unchanged. If anything, deepened. Her beauty had ceased to intimidate Father Damien, though some had forgotten and were awed by it all over. When she’d first appeared on reservation ground, wearing her immaculate and tailored white suit, she’d been taken for a film star or singer strangely dropped from the new movie screen in Hoopdance. Now, clearly, the suit, hat, and heels stored carefully away, the makeup washed off, the fancy car she’d arrived in sold, here was Fleur again—her fate to chase one thing to lose another. She had regained her land, but lost her daughter.
And the son, what of the son, Damien wondered.
“He will stay with me,” Fleur said.
But Damien could tell already that the boy would not.
LULU’S CANARY YELLOW
It was Agnes’s practice to try to control her irritations, to monitor her horror of certain dishes made by Mary Kashpaw—the strangely acidic pea soup, the leather venison, the weird maltish cake and soapy oatmeal. But sometimes she couldn’t help exclaiming over the strangeness of the food, or recooking it herself. At those times, Mary Kashpaw glowered and stomped off, yet she herself did not partake of the loving and sometimes nearly lethal feasts that she prepared for Father Damien. Sister Hildegarde’s picayune frugalities also upset Agnes. Why must she remember to collect old scraps of soap in a sock? As for socks, would the priest ever have a new pair, smooth, without the bumps and ridges of impatient darning? And then, there were more serious, heart-sinking times she believed that the black dog’s bargain was real. At those times, she could not help her pettiness from surfacing. Not only was Lulu’s practiced avoidance of her mother tiresome, but Agnes couldn’t help wishing that, as long as she had sacrificed her soul and was facing eternity in hell, Lulu would behave with a modicum of thoughtful decency.
It’s not that I’m a prude, thought Agnes, I can’t have changed that much, it’s just that Lulu is so careless with her charm, so bold. Can any good come of it? True enough, Lulu became a noticeably sensual young woman. She curled her hair with a permanent wave. She laughed with an irresistible intensity of mirth, shot jokes at people, tempted, and rejected. Returning from an off-reservation town, where she had paid a white woman to poison her hair, as the old ladies said, she was the talk in the church vestibule. People hushed when she entered, her curls tightly wound, glossy, rippling along the side of her head. After Mass, she was the centerpiece of a crowd of women who poked at the spirals, wondered, pinched their noses at the chemical smell. She wore face paint, too, and carried a little brown pocketbook. Her shoes were shocking. Toeless, heels like railroad spikes. Her shoes caused men to lick their lips and women to marvel at the odd, sharp tracks she left.
Her transformation presented Agnes with a small clutch of embarrassing resentments. Seeing the young woman’s tight-skirted sashay, she brooded on the distinct possibility of her soul’s entrapment all in order to save the very thing Lulu seemed intent on tarnishing. At last, she vowed to have a talk with Lulu.
“Bring her to the back of the church right after Mass tomorrow,” Father Damien directed Margaret one day.
The next morning, having fortified himself with Saint Augustine, who in his youth had stolen pears, who had gone to fleshpots of Carthage, Father Damien sat in back of the church, waiting. These last few pews, empty and quiet in the morning, were where Father Damien had many a long discussion with troubled members of the church. Saint Augustine, Nanabozho, whoever can hear me, give me a little help now, he prayed. The saint would have condemned the young girl’s self-display, and the notorious Nanabozho would have taken advantage of it. Such were Damien’s sources. His bedrock now was aggregate. The voices that spoke to him arose sometimes out of wind and at other times from the pages of religious books. Still, he was determined to help guide Lulu Nanapush. It was his duty to her mother, not to mention his old friend.
Just as he composed his purpose, Lulu entered and disarranged it. She wore a blouse of canary yellow that dazzled the eye. Her shoes had pieces cut from the sides and heels, and her skirt, though an appropriate length, was immodestly snug. She jingled a little memento bracelet on her wrist as she sat down beside Father Damien in the pew. Excitedly, she greeted him. He could feel immediately such a mild and innocent warmth that he was tempted to hug her as though she were a child. But she was most emphatically a woman, and lovely, so smiling and fresh that Father Damien’s irritations melted. Even with her lips stained the glossy purple of wild plums, she looked completely without guile. Father Damien took her hand and held her painted fingertips in his own.
“You have dipped your nails in the blood of the damned,” he sighed, hoping she could not tell that he admired the color.
“It’s called Happiness.”
From time to time, little things of this sort still pricked through the long years of Damien’s subterfuge. Even in his age, he was charmed by pure harmless feminine vanity. He knew immediately that she spoke of the color of the polish. He took hold of himself.
“Lulu, my child, that is only a label on a pot of lacquer. Happiness is more complex, as you know.”
Lulu nodded. The smile dropped abruptly off her face, and Father Damien now learned that this young woman he had known mainly as a child had inherited her mother’s lack of compromise, Margaret’s sharp sight, Nanapush’s unbiased curiosity, and perhaps his own natural sympathy.
“You are happy, I think,” Lulu said simply. “Without someone else.”
Her earnestness demanded that he truly consider an answer, not give her some pat ecclesiastic’s line. He put her fingers down gently and held his folded hands to his lips, as though praying.
“I have loved,” he said softly, “and yet the happiness of love is not the only thing. It is not even the most important thing. It is momentary, ungraspable, impermanent as the paint on your fingers, though I suppose the stuff is advertised as long-lasting.”
“Oh yes,” said Lulu, smiling sunnily again. “I think that I already know something about myself . . . it’s very sad.” She made an unconsciously flirtatious mockery of sorrow. “I am very bored with men. I get tired of them quickly. For a short time, I am insane, I can’t stop thinking about one or the other. And then, all of a sudden, I don’t want them around me. Just when I decide that I wish to do without him, any him, that one becomes most attached, Father Damien, and won’t leave!”
The color of her blouse, Father Damien thought, that blithe yellow, was the outward manifestation of the careless cheer and stubborn sensuousness of Lulu’s character. He immediately foresaw, indeed, exactly what came to pass in Lulu’s life. A series of passionate but inconclusive liaisons. Fatherless pregnancies. Children without support. He did not envision the number—eight sons, one daughter. Had he done so, he might have collapsed right there before her. Alarmed at what she told him, he turned practical. He had learned one truth in his work—there was no changing the true arrangement of a human heart. One dealt with the earthly exigencies.
“You need a profession,” he decided. “One that will support you here, for it appears you do not want to move to the Cities. And if you are as bored with men as you say, you will not marry one for long, no matter what the Church advises. You need an honorable profession,” he repeated. “What will it be?”
Partly as a consequence of Damien’s pragmatic approach, Lulu became a self-sufficient woman. Father Damien helped her from the beginning, so she didn’t falter. She survived the fires in her heart by using all of the skills she had developed—sewing, which she’d learned at the government boarding school, as well as knitting and beading, the making of gauntlets and makazinan, and feather bustles. She created quilts, dolls, vests, shirts. Sold eggs, bartered chickens, even horse-traded on occasion. As she could add and subtract quickly in her head, she left her children with a friend and worked for the trader’s
market. A few pennies here, a dollar there. She leased out some land. Kept a cow and shot her own deer, dressed it efficiently just like her mother. Taught her boys to hunt, work in the fields, pick rags, bead and sew as well as she could. It was in fact a surprise she had any time for men at all. Where did she fit them in? people wondered. The old hens and dried-up roosters gossiped in the sun.
A short time with men went a long way with Lulu. She liked the thrill of not-having, became impatient with their daily presence, as she’d confessed. One hour here on the way to work, another well after dark in her private room, the boys arranged in the rest of the house on roll-aways and sound asleep. She collected and she discarded, she used and she tossed. So Father Damien’s weak attempt at counseling her succeeded only insofar as he was able to help her support the one real true romance of her life—her children, to whom she was devoted.
Father Damien’s talk with Lulu did yield one other good, perhaps, for Lulu was never herself scourged by the evils of drink. It was a subject they discussed, though Father Damien was not sure at the time how he had come out of their small debate.
He asked her, point-blank, if she imbibed. He spoke suddenly, and rather forcefully, hoping to catch her by surprise. She did look startled by his penetrating tone.
“Why, yes.” Half-ashamed, she glanced down at the wood grain of the pew.
“You mustn’t.”
“Why not?” She raised her graceful head, looked Father Damien in the eye with her bold and gleaming gaze. “Christ changed water into wine in Cana, at the wedding. He could have changed it into water or milk, something else. Is a taste of wine so bad, Father? You drink it every day . . .”
Father Damien opened his mouth to answer, but she went on.
“I’m not like some, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t drink any more wine than you yourself at the Eucharist. No more than a swallow, now and then a glass.”