Junesse fled her aunt’s sure beating and the endless drudgery of caring for six younger cousins, who were all to die the next winter of a choking cough. Mooshum fled the sanctified future that his half brother had picked out for him. The two children in white clothes melted into the wall of birds. Their robes were soon to become as dark as the soil, and so they blended into the earth as they made their way along the edges of fields, through open country, to where the farmable land stopped and the ground split open and the beautifully abraded knobs and canyons of the badlands began. Although it took them several years to physically consummate their feelings (Mooshum hinted at this, but never came right out and said it), they were in love. And they were survivors. As a matter of course they knew how to make a fire from scratch, and for the first few days they were able to live on the roasted meat of doves. It was too early for there to be much else to gather in the way of food, but they stole birds’ eggs and scratched up weeds. They snared rabbits and begged what they could from isolated homesteads.
The Burning Glare
ON THE MONDAY that we braided our blessed palms in school, braces were put on my teeth. Unlike now, when every other child undergoes some sort of orthodonture, braces were rare. I have to say it is really extraordinary that my parents, in such modest circumstances, decided to correct my teeth at all. Our off-reservation dentist in the town of Pluto was old-fashioned and believed that to protect the enamel of my front teeth from the wires, he should cap them in gold. So the next day I appeared in school with two long, resplendent front teeth and a mouth full of hardware. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d be teased, but then somebody whispered, “Easter Bunny!” By noon recess boys swirled around me, poking, trying to get me to smile. Suddenly, as a great wind had blown everyone else off the bare gravel yard, there was Corwin Peace. He shoved me and laughed right into my face. Then the other boys swept him away. I walked off to stand in the only sheltered spot on the playground, an alcove in the brick on the southern side facing the littered hulks of cars behind a gas station. I stood in a silent bubble, rubbing my collarbone where his hands had pushed, wondering. What had happened? Our love was in danger, maybe finished. Because of golden teeth. Even then it seemed impossible to bear such a radical change in feeling. Because of family history, though, I rallied myself to the challenge. Included in the romantic tales were episodes of reversals. I had injustice on my side and, besides, when my braces came off, I would be beautiful. Of this I was assured. So as we were entering the classroom in our usual parallel lines, me in the girls’ line, he in the boys’, I maneuvered right across from Corwin, punched him in the arm, hard, and said, “Love me or leave me.” Then I marched away. My knees were weak, my heart pounded. My act had been wild and unprecedented. Soon everyone heard about it, and my bold soap-opera statement brought fame even among the eighth grade girls, one of whom, Beryl Hoop, offered to beat Corwin up for me. Power was mine, and it was Holy Week. The statues were shrouded in purple, except for our church’s exceptionally graphic stations of the cross.
Nowadays, if you see them in churches, they are carved in tasteful woods or otherwise abstracted. But our church’s stations were molded of plaster and painted with bloody relish. Eyes rolled to the whites. Mouths contorted. Limbs flailed. It was all there. The side aisles of the church were wide, and there was plenty of room for schoolchildren to kneel on the aggregate stone floor and contemplate the hard truths of torture. The most sensitive of the girls, and one boy, destined not for the priesthood but for a spectacular burnout in community theater, wept openly and luxuriantly. The others of us, soaked in guilt or secretly admiring the gore, tried to sit back unobtrusively on our bottoms and spare our kneecaps. At some point, we were allowed into the pews, where, during the three holiest hours of the afternoon on Good Friday, with Christ slowly dying underneath his purple cape, we were supposed to maintain silence. During that time, I had decided to begin erasing Corwin’s name from my body by writing it backwards a million times, ecaepniwroc. I began my task in the palm of my hand, then moved to my knee. I’d only managed a hundred when I was thrilled to realize that Corwin was trying desperately to catch my eye, a thing that had never happened before. As I’ve mentioned, our love affair was carried out by intermediaries. That fist in the arm was the first time I’d ever touched him, and that now famous line the first words I’d ever spoken to him. But my fierce punch seemed to have hot-wired deep emotions. That he should be so impetuous, so desperate, as to seek me directly! I was overcome with a wash of shyness and terror. My breath tugged. I wanted to acknowledge Corwin but I couldn’t now. I stayed frozen until we were dismissed.
Easter Sunday. I am dressed in blue nylon dotted swiss. The seams prickle and the neck itches but the overall effect, I think, is glorious. Not for me a Kleenex bobby-pinned into a bow on top my head. I own a hat with fake lilies of the valley on it and a stretchy band that digs into my chin. But at the last moment, I beg to wear my mother’s lace mantilla instead, the one like Jackie Kennedy’s, and the headgear of only the most fashionable older girls. I am splendid, but I am nevertheless completely unprepared for what happens when I return from taking Holy Communion. I am kneeling at the end of the pew. We are instructed to always remain very quiet and to allow Christ’s presence to diffuse in us. I do my best. But then I see Corwin in the line for Communion on my side of the church, which means that returning to his seat farther back he will pass only inches from me. I can keep my head demurely down, or I can look. The choice dizzies me. And I do look. He rounds the first pew. I hold my gaze steady. And he sees that I am looking at him—dark water-tracked hair, narrow brown eyes—and he does not look away from me. With the host of the resurrection in his mouth, my first love gives to me a burning glare of anguished passion that suddenly ignites the million invisible names.
Mustache Maude
FOR ONE WHOLE summer, my grandparents lived off a bag of contraband pinto beans. They killed the rattlesnakes that came down to the streambed to hunt, roasted them, used salt from a little mineral wash to season the meat. They managed to find some berry bushes and to snare a few gophers and rabbits. But the taste of freedom was eclipsed now by their longing for a hot dinner. Though desolate, the badlands were far from empty, and were peopled in Mooshum’s time by unpurposed miscreants and outlaws as well as honest ranchers. One day, they heard an inhuman shrieking from some bushes deep in a draw where they’d set snares. Upon cautiously investigating, they found that they had snared a pig by one hind leg. While they were debating how to kill it, there appeared on a rise the silhouette of an immense person wearing a wide fedora and seated on a horse. They could have run, but as the rider approached them they were too amazed to move, or didn’t want to, for the light now caught the features of a giant woman dressed in the clothing of a man. Her eyes were small and shrewd, her nose and cheeks pudgy, her lip a narrow curl of flesh. One long braid hung down beside an immense and motherly breast. She wore twill trousers, boots, chaps, leather gaunt-lets, and a cowhide belt with silver conchos. Her wide-brimmed hat was banded with the skin of a snake. Her brown bloodstock horse stopped short, polite and obedient. The woman spat a stream of tobacco juice at a quiet lizard, laughed when it jumped and skittered, then ordered the two to stand still while she roped her hog. She proceeded to do so, then with swift and expert motions she tied him to the pommel of her saddle and released his hind leg.
“Climb on,” she ordered them, gesturing to the horse, and when the children did she grasped the halter and started walking. The roped pig trotted along behind. By the time they reached the ranch, which was miles off, the two had fallen asleep on the back of the companionable horse. The woman had a ranch hand take them each down, still sleeping, and lay them in a bedroom in her house, which was large, ramshackle, partly sod and partly framed. There were two little beds in the room, plus a trundle where she herself sometimes slept, snoring like an engine, when she was angry with her husband, the notorious Ott Black. In this place, my Mooshum and his bride-to-be would live
for six years, until the ranch was broken up and Mooshum was nearly lynched.
In Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud’s compendium of memorable women and men from North Dakota, “Mustache” Maude Black, for that was the name of my grandparents’ benefactress, is described as not un-womanly, though she dressed mannishly, smoked, drank, was a crack shot and a hard-assed camp boss. These things, my Mooshum said, were all true, as was the mention of both her kind ways and her habit of casual rustling. The last was a kind of sport to her, said Mooshum; she never meant any harm by it at all. She rustled pigs sometimes. The one in the bush had not belonged to her. Mustache Maude sometimes had a mustache, then sometimes not, when she plucked it out. She kept a neat henhouse and a tidy kitchen. She grew very fond of Mooshum and Junesse, taught them to rope, ride, shoot, and make a tasty chicken and dumpling stew. Divining their love, she banished Mooshum to the men’s bunkhouse, where he quickly learned all the ways that he could make children in the future with Junesse. He practiced in his mind, and could hardly wait. But Maude forbade their marriage until both were seventeen years old. When that day came, she threw a wedding supper that was talked about for years, featuring several delectably roasted animals that seemed the same size and type as many lost to the dinner guests. It caused a stir, but there were only bones left when the wedding was over and Maude had kept the liquor flowing, so most of the surrounding ranchers shrugged it off. But what was not shrugged off, and what was in fact resented and what fostered an undercurrent of suspicion, was the fact that Maude had thrown a big and elaborate shindig for a couple of Indians. Or half-breeds. It didn’t matter which. This was western North Dakota at the turn of the last century. Even years later, when an entire family was murdered outside Pluto, four Indians including a boy called Holy Track were blamed and caught by a mob.
In Mooshum’s story, there was another foul murder, of a woman on a farm just to the west; the neighbors disregarded the sudden absence of that woman’s husband and thought about the nearest available Indian. There I was, said Mooshum. One night, the yard of pounded dirt between the bunkhouse and Maude’s kitchen and sleeping quarters filled with men hoisting torches of flaring pitch. Their howls rousted Maude from her bed and she didn’t like that. As a precaution, having heard they would come to get him, Maude had sent Mooshum down to her kitchen cellar with a blanket, to sleep the night. So he knew what happened only through the memory of his blessed wife, for he heard nothing and dreamed his way through the danger.
“Send him out to us,” they bawled, “or we will take him ourselves.”
Maude stood in the doorway in her nightgown, her holster belted on, two cocked pistols in either hand. She never liked to be woken from a sleep.
“I’ll shoot the first two of youse that climbs down off his horse,” she said, then gestured to the sleepy man beside her, “and Ott Black will plug the next!”
The men were very drunk and could hardly control their horses. One fell off and Ott shot him in the leg. He started screaming worse than the snared pig.
“Which one of you boys is next?” Maude roared.
“Send out the goddamn Indian!” But the yell had less conviction, and was punctuated by the shot man’s hoarse shrieks.
“What Indian?”
“That boy!”
“He ain’t no Indian,” said Maude. “He’s a Jew from the land of Galilee! One of the Lost Tribe of Israel!”
Ott Black nearly choked at his wife’s wit.
“She’s got a case of books, you damn fool idiots!” He took a bead on each of them in turn. The men laughed nervously, and called for the boy again.
“I was just having fun with you,” said Maude. “Fact is, he’s Ott Black’s trueborn son.”
This threw the men back in their saddles. Ott blinked, then caught on and bellowed, “You men never knowed a woman till you knowed Maude Black!”
The men fell back into the night and left their fallen would-be lyncher kicking and pleading to God for mercy in the dirt. Maybe Ott’s bullet had hit a nerve or a bone, for the man seemed to be in an unusual amount of pain for just being struck by a bullet. He began to rave and foam at the mouth, so Maude got him drunk, tied him to his saddle, and set out for the doctor’s as she didn’t want him treated at her house. On the way, he died from loss of blood. Before dawn, Maude came back, gave my grandparents her two best horses, and told them to ride hard back the way they had come. That’s how they ended up on their home reservation in time to receive their allotments, upon which they farmed using government-issue seed and plows, where they raised their five children, one of whom was Clemence, my mother, and where my parents let us go each summer to ride horses just after the wood ticks had settled down.
Story
THE STORY COULD have been true, for, as I have said, there really was a Mustache Maude Black with a husband named Ott. Only sometimes Maude was the one to claim Mooshum as her son in the story and sometimes she went on to claim she’d had an affair with Chief Gall. And sometimes Ott Black plugged the man in the gut. But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with facts. Saint Joseph’s Church was named for the carpenter who believed his wife, reared a son not his own, and is revered as the patron saint of our bold and passionate people, the Metis. Those doves were surely the passenger pigeons of legend and truth, whose numbers were such that nobody thought they could possibly ever be wiped from the earth.
Mooshum slowed down that spring and had trouble putting in the garden. As he got more enjoyment out of his chair, our parents relaxed their boycott. More often now, our father fixed the magic circles of plastic onto their metal posts and twiddled them until the picture cleared. We sometimes watched the Three Stooges all together. The black-haired one looked a lot like the woman who saved his life, said Mooshum, nodding and pointing at the set. I remember looking at his gnarled brown finger and imagining it as the hand of a strong young man gripping the plow or a boy holding the candelabra, which, by the way, my grandparents had lugged all the way down to the badlands, where it had come in handy for killing snakes and gophers. They had given their only possession to Maude as a gesture of their gratitude. She had thrust it back at them on the night they escaped.
That tall, six-branched, silver-plated candelabra with the finish worn down to tin in some spots now stood in a place of honor in the center of our dining room table. It held beeswax tapers, which had recently been lighted during Easter dinner. The day after Easter Monday, in the little alcove on the school playground, I kissed Corwin Peace. Our kiss was hard, passionate, strangely mature. Afterward, I walked home alone. I walked very slowly. Halfway there, I stopped and stared at a piece of the sidewalk I’d crossed a thousand times and knew intimately. There was a crack in it—deep, long, jagged, and dark. It was the day when the huge old cottonwood trees shed cotton. The air was filled with falling down and the ditch grass and gutters were plump with a snow of light. I had expected to feel joy but instead felt a confusion of sorrow, or maybe fear, for it seemed that my life was a hungry story and I its source, and with this kiss I had now begun to deliver myself into the words.
A Little Nip
ON THE KITCHEN wall beside the black tin clock whose hands of poisoned radium glowed in the dark, three pictures hung. John F. Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, and Louis Riel. The first two were color photographs that my father and mother had acquired through school and church. The last was a newspaper photograph, yellowed and frail. My mother had clipped the picture out and placed it carefully into a dime-store frame. In the picture, Riel looked morose and disheveled, a little blurry. Yet he was the visionary hero of our people, and the near leader of what could have been our Michif nation. Mooshum and our mother venerated him, even though Mooshum’s parents had once lived in neat comfort near Batoche, Saskatchewan, and their huge farm would have passed to their sons, if not for Riel. That farm was put to the torch before Mooshum gained the power of speech, because the Milk family had harbored the genius of Riel, supported his cause with money, taken in his wife and child, fed his li
eutenants, fought beside him, and angered the priests who threatened excommunication to Riel’s followers and ultimately betrayed them to their killers.
After the rout at Batoche, the family had fled south and crossed the border in darkness, not knowing exactly where they were. As soon as they found an agreeable setting, they tried to homestead again, but the heart was out of them. They lost a baby, settled into a despondent subsistence, and were crushed when they heard Riel was tried and hanged. Riel went to his death wearing moccasins and holding in his hand a silver-worked crucifix. His last words to the attending cleric were Courage, mon père. Joseph Milk, our great-grandfather, had been particularly fond of the moody prophet of the new mixed-blood Catholicism, and he cursed the priests even though his son Severine had just been ordained.
Mooshum had a younger brother, a violin player named Shamengwa, who was neat and dignified as Mooshum was happily disordered and profane. Except for his folded-up arm, Shamengwa was stark elegance. The last of their generation, these two enjoyed each other’s company in spite of their differences. They had grown up in that melancholy house and the history affected them in different ways. Shamengwa was driven to music and Mooshum to stories. Both escaped as soon as possible but history followed them, of course, and now as old men they took comfort in chewing it over. When Shamengwa visited, he sat straight up in a hard kitchen chair, and often played the old tunes, while Mooshum liked to lounge or slouch beating time on his knee. Outside in summer, Mooshum claimed an old bench car seat that he refused to let Mama haul away. Inside, the nubbly, sagging, overstuffed couch was his. Sometimes the two brothers sat at the kitchen table drinking hot sugared tea into which Mooshum “slipped a little something.” But nothing made them happier than the chance to fling history into the face of a member of the hated cloth. And so, on days that the old retired priest, frail as dried flowers and all but forgotten up there on the hill, would laboriously totter down to pay the brothers a visit, or when he arrived in a kind of huge, makeshift baby carriage pushed by an obliging Franciscan sister, the brothers grew much excited. They took special pains to procure whiskey and badgered Mama or Aunt Geraldine for boulettes or the special high-risen and light galette they had learned to make from Junesse. Other foods sat heavy on their bowels, but all three of the old men claimed that the meat soup and bread unbound them wonderfully if soaked in sufficient grease. The old priest used a polished diamond willow stick to negotiate the rutted road, and would plant it hard between his feet as he lowered himself into the wine-dark billows of the couch. From there, nodding his eggshell-thin skull, he’d opinionate in whispery, gentle tones, which were maybe too agreeable to the brothers. Sometimes they fell silent in disappointment at the priest’s lack of opposition, but the visits always ended in polite toast after toast. But then the good priest died and the brothers had no ecclesiastic to play off until a big, whey-faced, pompous, and painfully hearty priest was transferred from Montana. He was nicknamed Father Hop Along because of his cowboy origin, his real name, Cassidy, and an unfortunate tendency to pop a bit too daintily along on his pointed feet when using his aspergillum to sprinkle holy water upon worshippers at High Mass.