Mary Kashpaw wore a man’s shirt with the sleeves ripped out. Her arms were bare—hard and roped as the turned legs on a table. Her long skirt hung crooked and her great, solid feet were planted with monumental firmness below the hem. She had used a grapevine to tie her heavy black hair away from her face. From beneath a notched leaf, she regarded the two men with the indifference of all powerful creatures. Then, the blade honed to her satisfaction, she turned with a light motion, rose on the balls of her feet, brought down the ax, and split the length with a natural blow.
Agnes noticed, with some suspicion, that the great draft-horse Pillager, this Awun, took a jagged breath when the blow landed. Next, his eyes lost focus and drifted like the mist of his name. But the young man was no more than a giant boy and Mary Kashpaw, though innocent, a fully grown and mature woman. It took more—a strangled cry from Awun, a hot breath, obvious panic—to inform Agnes. She turned a close eye on the situation, now suspicious. Awun’s eyes followed the inflection of muscles in Mary Kashpaw’s arms and shoulders as she continued her work, and now, to Agnes there was no doubt. She sighed, knocked her chin lightly with a fist, and tried to divert Awun in conversation. But the young man’s verbs exploded like the caps off bottles. Go! Stay! His voice was hoarse with bewildered agitation. He wouldn’t leave and would not be argued by the priest into a cup of coffee, or shamed into leaving. Awun preferred to stand in the fragrance of wood chips, waiting for Mary Kashpaw to finish her work.
When at last she paused to lean for a moment on her ax, Awun walked over to her, mumbling, stood before her with his great hands revolving a crumpled hat against his chest. Although she gave no sign of awareness, she did not drive him off. Perhaps, as he was so much younger, he seemed harmless, beneath her notice. Awun was all the more taken with her unconcern. Being so large and grim, he had never found a woman at ease with him before. The fact that Mary Kashpaw did not notice him with surprise or suspicion charmed his heart. When she left him there, alone, he still did not move and stood waiting as the light went out of the day.
She walked straight past Awun on her way to the convent kitchen, but paused at the door and shrugged hugely, in distress. Some sense of his interest at last pierced the armor of her self-concentration. As though she’d passed a source of intense heat, the marks where the wagon nails were drawn from her flesh burned.
She entered the dim cooking space. Carefully, she washed her great face in water already darkened from the cleaning of potatoes. The silky brown water gave back a face so calm it seemed at once dead and ecstatic. She kneaded bread with rounded thumps, her arms dusted with flour, and then she set out plates for the nun’s table. At her own place, in the kitchen, Mary Kashpaw ate quickly, surreptitiously, as much as she could manage, and then she poured boiling water over the big kettles and began to scrub. It was dark by the time she left the pots drying on six meat hooks, and darker in the shack where she slept, sitting up in the sleigh. Most nights, she would have paced in the mosquito-haunted yard before settling, breathing cooler, fresher air and whittling twigs to whistles. Tonight she laid her ax beneath the seat and barred the double doors.
THE MIST
Mary Kashpaw did not pray aloud, but every night gazed upward into the dark of the lathe-and-tar-paper roof with a fixity that slowly became sleep. As always, once she dropped off she slept heavily, profoundly, and very loudly. Sinking immediately into her dreams, she groaned and spoke aloud as if, drugged unconscious, all the unspoken words of the day suddenly flew from her relaxed mind. Awun’s name was not among them, not that he could distinguish anyway, though he listened hard from his place, in the corner of the shack, where he’d crawled, crouched, and covered himself with bales of scorched ironing.
THE RIVER OF GRASS
The grass was long that year and slippery from rain. That is why it was possible for the Pillager boy, once he’d carefully unbarred the double door from inside, to harness himself to the sleigh that carried the sleeping Mary Kashpaw, and to tow it across the yard and along the margin of the road. This was before reservation lands were entirely fenced. He found it a simple matter to continue along the grass paths that led through the woods from slough to slough.
In a clearing where he paused, sword grass tall and iron black, Mary Kashpaw finally woke.
Awun jolted forward down an incline and his bounds gathered. Mary Kashpaw found herself traveling over grass, as in a dream, in a sleigh pulled along by a man with hair white in the moonlight. She looked to either side at the ghost arch of pale birch and the press of adamantine oak beyond. She breathed the slough’s low reek, the sweet grass, gulped again the summer rose air, and saw the laboring back of the man who pulled her, powerful as a draft horse, over ground, through the bending reeds, deeper into the tangle of the world.
And all of a sudden her amazed cry, her thoughts, the cast of her mind, her heart, as she lifted the ax.
AWUN AND MARY
When she carelessly regarded him from under the picture-puzzle leaf of a bloodroot plant, then turned, lifted on the balled muscles of her monumental feet, and split a stove length down the center with one dropping swift blow, Awun was lost to Mary Kashpaw. She seemed, to him, to connect the heaven of her leafy-haloed head to the earth in which her blade buried to the top of the shank. He didn’t know, of course, her history or how she had been stolen many years before, as a girl with a basket of roses, by horses muscled like himself. So when he took her from the shed in the sleigh, it was with an oaken innocence in which he could not hear the screams of panic or the branch surging through Kashpaw’s breast. Mary Kashpaw, of course, felt the thunder of fear and heard the shouting from all sides, just as she had as a child, only this time, unlike her father, she managed to cut the lines.
So it happened, many years later in the green of summer once more, Mary Kashpaw managed to sever the lines that her father’s hatchet had only scraped across. And once she did and Awun kept moving, walking, out into the sloughs and woods and farms that would gather to towns and disperse, like a spill of child’s marbles here and there across the plains, she too was set free.
An hour passed, during which she brooded on the sleigh bench. A world of consideration passed through her mind. She pictured Father Damien, though she had no words for an attachment so complete it was like breathing in and breathing out. Her heart stabbed and her brain hurt at the prospect of leaving the priest. She felt a great dullness, an iron heaviness settle into her limbs, and she decided she would remain still forever. So she sat in the sigh of slough grass, the resonance of searching owls. And then there was a curious pull. Was it the moon, or were the lines not really cut, but invisible? Was she still attached? Tugged behind as the Pillager walked? A thrill of anxiety gripped her, an anger to be with him, suddenly, coupled with despair at leaving the priest. Fear leaped in her and then a sensation of painful joy.
Mary Kashpaw jumped out of her cradling sleigh, took her bearings, and loped after Awun. She chased him down, came at him from behind in the dim moon’s surcease. He turned around in a weak wonder and she pushed at him like a boy in play. He pushed her back. She pushed him again, but this time the push was in quality slightly different, a leading give to her arms, perhaps on the far edge of barely coy. Awun took her broad shoulders under his broad hands, and then the two peered into each other’s steady eyes. Found there a mutual wariness, a nervous calm.
The ease of two equally matched beings came over them and they walked together into the night groaning, frog-quick dark. There, they began work on a tiny baby boy who would one day in their future drop from Mary’s body like a plum, and she hold him, hardly knowing what he was, so infinitesimal and severe and demanding. She would care for him until he was taken from her and she went mad, or perhaps she went mad and he was taken from her because of it. Who knows, who can set this straight? The weaving of this great woman was so crooked to begin with that no one would wonder when, ten years later, brain shocked and bearing the nerve deadness of confinement, she came walking back from th
e disastrous marriage with empty arms to care, as she always had, for Father Damien.
18
LE MOOZ
or
THE LAST YEAR OF NANAPUSH
1941–1942
By the time Nanapush and Margaret shacked up for good in the deep bush, they had lived so hard and long it seemed they must be ready for quiet. Over the years, they’d starved and grieved, seen prodigious loss, endured theft by the agents of the government and chimookomanag farmers as well as betrayal by their own people. They were tired for sure. At last, they should have courted simple comfort. A harmless mate. Companionship and sleep. But times did not go smoothly. Peace eluded them. For Nanapush and Margaret found a surprising heat in their hearts. Fierce and sudden, it sometimes eclipsed both age and anger with tenderness. Then, they made love with an amazed greed and purity that astounded them. At the same time, it was apt to burn out of control.
When this happened, they fought. Stinging flames of words blistered their tongues. Silence was worse. Beneath its slow-burning weight, their black looks singed. After a few days their minds shriveled into dead coals. Some speechless nights, they lay together like logs turned completely to ash. They were almost afraid to move, lest they sift into flakes and disintegrate. It was a young love set blazing in bodies aged and overused, and sometimes it cracked them like too much fire in an old tin stove.
To survive their marriage, they developed many strategies. For instance, they rarely collaborated on any task. Each hunted, trapped, and fished alone. They could not agree even on so little a thing as how and where to set a net. The gun, which belonged to Nanapush, was never clean when it was needed. Traps rusted. It was up to Margaret to scour the rifle barrel, smoke the steel jaws. Setting snares together was impossible, for in truth they snared themselves time and again in rude opinions and mockery over where a rabbit might jump or how to set the loop. Their avoidance hardened them in their individual ways, and so when Margaret beached the tough old boat and jumped ashore desperate for help, there was no chance of agreement.
Margaret sometimes added little Frenchisms to her Ojibwemowin just the way the fancy sounding wives of the French voyageurs added, like a dash of spice, random le’s and la’s. So when she jumped ashore screaming of le mooz, Nanapush woke, irritated, quick reproof on his lips, as he was always pleased to find some tiny fault with his beloved.
“Le mooz! Le mooz!” she shouted into his face. She grabbed him by the shirt so violently that he could hear the flimsy threads part.
“Boonishin!” He tried to struggle from her grip, but Margaret rapidly explained to him that she had seen a moose start off, swimming across the lake and here were their winter’s provisions, easy! With this moose meat dried and stored, they would survive the clutch of starving windigoog in fine style. “Think of the stew! Get up, old man!” She screamed in fretful incoherence now, grabbed the gun, and dragged Nanapush to the boat, forcing him in before he even properly prepared himself mentally to hunt moose.
Nanapush pushed off with his paddle, sulking. Besides their natural inclination to disagree, it was always the case that if one of them was particularly intrigued and eager about some idea, the other was sure to feel the opposite way just to polarize the situation. Contradictions abounded between them. If Nanapush asked his wiiw for maple syrup with his meat, she gave him wild onion. If Margaret relished a certain color of cloth, Nanapush declared that he could not look upon that blue, or red—it made him mean and dizzy. When it came to sleeping on the fancy spring bed that Margaret had bought with this year’s bark money, Nanapush adored the bounce and she was stingy with it so as not to use it up. Sometimes he sat on the bed and joggled up and down when she was gone, just to spite her. For her part, once her husband began craftily to ask for wild onion, she figured he’d developed a taste for it and so bargained for a small jar of maple syrup, thus beginning the obvious next stage of their contradictoriness, which was that each asked the opposite of what they really wanted and so got what they wanted. It was confusing to Father Damien, but to the two of them it brought serene harmony. So when Margaret displayed such extreme determination in the matter of the moose that morning, Nanapush was feeling particularly lazy, but he also decided to believe she really meant the opposite of what she cried out, and so he dawdled with his paddle and tried to tell her a joke or two. She was, however, in dead earnest.
“Paddle! Paddle for all you’re worth!” she yelled.
“Break your backs, boys, or break wind!” Nanapush mocked her. Over the summer, as it wasn’t the proper time for telling Ojibwe aadizokaanag, Father Damien and Nector had taken turns telling the tale of the vast infernal white fish and the maddened chief who gave chase all through the upper and lower regions of the earth.
“Gitimishk!” Margaret nearly choked in frustration, for the moose had changed direction and they were not closing in quickly enough for her liking.
“Aye, aye, Ahabikwe,” shouted Nanapush, lighting his pipe as she vented her fury at him in deep strokes of her paddle. If the truth be told, he was delighted with her anger, for when she lost control like this during the day she often, also, lost control once the sun went down, and he was already anticipating their pleasure.
“Use that paddle or my legs are shut to you, lazy fool!” she growled.
At that, he went to work, and they quickly drew alongside the moose. Margaret steadied herself, threw a loop of strong rope around its wide, spreading antlers, and then secured the rope fast to the front of the boat, which was something of an odd canoe, having a flat, tough, wood bottom, a good ricing boat but not all that easy to steer.
“Now,” she ordered Nanapush, “now, take up the gun and shoot! Shoot!”
But Nanapush did not. He had killed a moose that way once before in his life, and he had nothing to prove. On the other hand, his namesake, Nanabozho, had failed in the old moose-killing story, which began much in the same way as the event Nanapush found himself living out. He decided to tempt fate by tempting the story, for such was his arrogance that he was certain he could manage better than his namesake. He would not kill the moose quite yet. He hefted the gun and made certain it was loaded, and then enjoyed the free ride they were receiving from the hardworking moose.
“Let’s turn him around, my adorable pigeon,” he cried to his lady. “Let him tow us back home. I’ll shoot him once he reaches the shallow water just before our cabin.”
Margaret could not help but agree that this particular plan arrived at by her lazy husband was a good one, and so, by using more rope and hauling on first one antler and then another with all of their strength, they proceeded to turn their beast and head him in the right direction. Nanapush sat back smoking his pipe and relaxed once they were pointed homeward. The sun was out and the air was cool, fresh. All seemed right between the two of them now. Margaret admonished him about the tangle of fishing tackle all around his seat, and there was affection in her voice.
“You’ll poke yourself,” she said lovingly, “you fool.” At that moment, the meat pulling them right up to their doorstep, she did not really even care to pursue her husband’s idiocy. “I’ll fry the rump steaks tonight with a little maple syrup over them,” she said, her mouth watering. “Old man, you’re gonna eat good! Oooh”—she almost cried with appreciation—“our moose is so fat!”
“He’s a fine moose,” Nanapush agreed passionately. “You’ve got an eye, Mindimooyenh. He’s a juicy one, our moose!”
“I’ll roast his ribs, cook the fat with our beans, and keep his brains in a bucket to tan that big hide! Oooh, ishte, my husband, the old men are going to envy the makazinan that I will sew for you.”
“Beautiful wife!” Nanapush was overcome. “Precious sweetheart!”
They looked at each other with a kindling ardor.
As they were so gazing upon one another, holding the rare moment of mutual agreeableness, the hooves of the moose struck the first sandbar near shore, and Margaret cried out for her husband to lift the gun and shoot.
r /> “Not quite yet, my beloved,” said Nanapush confidently, “he can drag us nearer yet!”
“Watch out! Shoot now!”
The moose indeed approached the shallows, but Nanapush planned in his pride to shoot the animal just as he began to pull them from the water, thereby making their task of dressing and hauling mere child’s play. He got the moose in his sights and then waited as the animal gained purchase. The old man’s feet, annoyingly, tangled in the fishing tackle he had been too lazy to put away, and he jigged attempting to kick it aside.
“Margaret, duck!” he cried. Just as the moose lunged onto land he let blast, completely missing and totally terrifying the moose, which gave a hopping skip that seemed impossible for a thing so huge and veered straight up the bank. Margaret, reaching back to tear the gun from her husband’s hands, was bucked completely out of the boat and said later that if only her stubborn no-good man hadn’t insisted on holding on to the gun she could have landed, aimed, and killed them both, as she then wished to do most intensely. Instead, as the moose tore off with the boat still securely tied by three ropes to his antlers, she was left behind screaming for the fool to jump. But he did not and within moments, the rampaging moose, with the boat bounding behind, disappeared into the woods.
“My man is stubborn, anyway,” she said, dusting off her skirt, checking to make sure that she was still together in a piece, nothing broken or cut. “He will surely kill that moose!” She spoke in wishful confidence, but inside she felt stuffed with a combination of such anxiety and rage that she did not know what to do—to try to rescue Nanapush or to chop him into pieces with the hatchet that she found herself sharpening as she listened for the second report of his gun.