“That can’t be. The right-handed bring berries, fruit, and flowers to the world. The left-handed, nettles and briars. The right hand made all the animals except the grizzly. The left hand made the grizzly to kill the rest of them.”
“A fairy tale!”
He shook his head. “Twins balance the world.”
“The world doesn’t seem very balanced to me.”
He looked troubled. “The Grandfathers never dreamed this world. Perhaps it is as you say, fairy tales.”
He seemed so dejected at this possibility that I said, “I didn’t mean everything, only that my twins are both right-handed.”
“Perhaps,” he probed the question, “it is different with white twins.” This explanation restored his spirits.
We were driving past some of the ugliest scenery I had ever seen, acres of nothing but railroad tracks, freight cars, and switch engines.
“Where are we?” I demanded.
“These railway yards are what keeps Montreal in business, and fed also.”
We were bound, he told me, for Ile Perrot at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa, with only primitive and deserted dirt roads.
“You picked a rough place to drive.”
“No,” he said, “it’s for you to drive.” He stopped the car and insisted I change places with him. “It’s your turn,” he encouraged.
“I don’t drive.”
“I thought so. I was testing you out on some of those curves back there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I purposely came up to them too fast. If you drove, you’d automatically press your foot to the floorboard like it was a brake. And that’s your first lesson. You don’t speed up approaching a curve. You speed up in the curve. That way centrifugal force gives you more traction, especially if the curve is banked.”
I thanked him for the lesson and wondered what was next. It turned out the second lesson was to get the feel of the car, know where it was on the road.
“Most drivers haven’t the faintest idea where their wheels are, how close to the shoulder, how close to the dividing line. They make left turns too flat, and they can’t back into a parking space unless it’s the size of an eighteen-wheeler because they don’t know where their wheels are.”
I began to protest. “This is supposed to be a fun date.” He replied there was nothing more fun in the world than driving, if you knew what you were doing. He said it was like dancing, only with wheels instead of feet.
I made a last attempt to get out of it. “If I’m going to learn, it ought to be on a regular car, not one with two gas pedals.”
He brushed this aside. “Start the engine on gas, and all you have to worry about is the kerosine pedal. The trick is to go slow, stay in first, and know exactly where your wheels are.” To practice this he fished out of the trunk some beat-up highway cones swiped from a construction job, and laid out a mille miglia on that country road.
Crazy Dancer was right. It was fun doing a slow-motion ballet with an automobile, knocking over cones in the beginning but finally squeezing through them. Until I got the hang of the clutch, I achieved some nasty jerks and stalls. However, I braced myself against the wheel and had the satisfaction of seeing Crazy Dancer get the bumps. He took it gamely, encouraging me with a soft patter of praise, and only when we were headed for a boulder did he grab the wheel.
“A little practice in the city, and you can get your license.”
He came by the following day to give me a short course in engine maintenance and how to hot-wire the ignition in case I forgot my keys. We disassembled and reassembled the two carburetors half a dozen times and checked the tubing before he was satisfied. The fuel pump was the next order of business, then how to jump-start a dead battery. Belts and hoses were Crazy Dancer’s particular joys, mainly because on this jalopy they were always slipping, wearing out, or leaking.
At the end of the session, with dusk settling in, he sent me back to take notes and draw diagrams. I’d become pretty good at this in my anatomy course and mentally substituted engine parts for body organs. The fuel pump was a heart. Air intake and carburetor were bronchi and lungs. Transmission was muscle, and electrical system, nerves.
Our next date I showed Crazy Dancer my sketches. He was delighted and gave me a crash course in sectioning and dimensioning. I got covered with oil and the muck under the hood, but that wasn’t much different from an operating table.
To crown my success Crazy Dancer announced I was ready for the last and final test. It turned out this was to drive an army truck, which a buddy of his had parked up a side street. Other than the fact that everything was outsized, I had no trouble. My reward was a big hug and an old grease-stained race driver’s cap which he set on my head.
Back at the wheel of his own car, he drove us out to the Ile Perrot.
“You know,” he told me, “I think you are three things: a spider, a turtle, and a lark.”
“Is that good?”
“Very good. A spider is industrious. You work all day at the hospital. A turtle is wise. You ask questions. A lark is sweet singing and happy. You are Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter.”
“Yes, but I have to remind myself that I am. That I should try to be.”
Crazy Dancer thought about this and did not like it. “No, trying won’t do it. You let yourself be joyful;”
“And if I’m not?”
“Then I’m here to help.”
He waited expectantly for my answer. “I don’t know, Crazy Dancer. We’re so different.”
“And so alike. We are more alike than you think.”
“I was raised white and I’m trying to learn to be more Indian.
You were raised Indian and you would like a piece of the white world.”
“I like their cars and their motorcycles. I like engines. But the whites themselves? Sometimes I think they hate everything. They hate the animals and move into their hunting grounds. They hate the forests and cover even the grass, paving it until not a blade shows. They hate water, and spill oil and wastes into it. They even hate air and make it thick with smoke.”
“They make war on everything,” I agreed.
He nodded sagely. “It is the reason we have two souls.”
“People have two souls?”
“You didn’t know that? One is linked to the body. The other is your free soul, the one you send into dreams.”
“I was sent a dream once, when Papa Mike died.”
“Did you know that a soul can get lost in a dream?”
In spite of myself I felt alarm. “Is that true?”
“Sometimes it runs away on purpose. Then a shaman goes after it to bring it back.”
“I can understand why it would run away. You can dream so many more beautiful and interesting things than just the ordinary everyday things around you.”
Crazy Dancer frowned at me with a stern expression. “Nothing is ordinary. Nothing is everyday. You need practice in how to look. I have taken you to where the forest comes down to the sea. Let’s walk awhile and I’ll show you what I mean.”
He stopped the car and gave it a little pat. “It did well, don’t you think?”
“Yes, very well. You could patent your invention—if it were legal, that is.”
He walked ahead of me. Here on the island the trees seemed to grow from bald rock. “We make an earth walk,” he said. “I will teach you how to look. First, at this.” He rubbed the frost from a boulder with his sleeve. “Once I found a shell in its deepest crease. At one time, I think, the sea covered it. And over here”—he sprang lightly, rock to rock—“here is a tracing, an imprint in the granite itself, made by a piece of fern in the before time. Observe the pines: each has its own pattern on its bark, made by winds, snows, rains, and flowing sap. See the down-drooping needles of the hemlock and the straight spurs of the pines. Now see last year’s nest in that one.”
“Where?”
Our feet crunched on the last snow patches. At the edges they were
melting.
“Where I’m pointing. It was a martin’s. Now,” he said, “close your eyes and listen to the voice of the forest. Hear the buzz of gnats, the crickets’ chirp, the deep note of the bullfrog, the rustling of baby quail. That raucous cry is a jay. These sounds tell you that the forest belongs to anyone who can see and hear and breathe it.”
“Is that true for the whole world? How rich I feel!”
He threw back his head and laughed. When he lowered his face to mine, I was conscious of him as I never had been of anyone before. Tamarack, pine, and hemlock were part of him, and a man’s scent. I knew I was going to be kissed in a way I never had been kissed.
My eyes closed. Somehow I knew his closed too as he tasted my return kiss. For my arms had gone around him. My free soul climbed out of me into him.
When he stepped back we looked a long time at each other. Each was thinking, Is this the person I love? I wanted it to be Crazy Dancer and he wanted it to be me. But was it?
“Let’s go back,” I said.
On the return trip we were both rather silent. That kiss I think had been as much of a surprise and shock for him as it had for me. And he too was trying to evaluate it.
He took me to the nurses’ entrance but didn’t kiss me again. I thought he would, but he didn’t. Of course, he was Indian; he had never heard of the custom of the goodnight kiss that white girls granted white boys when they had a nice time. I remember Mama Kathy telling Connie, “Some boys try to persuade you they’re entitled to more, but they’re not. They’ve had the pleasure of your company.”
I laughed at this, knowing Mandy had allowed Robert much more than the goodnight kiss. Before I was even in the door I was looking forward to next Sunday. And, what was best of all, all week I was Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter.
FOR SOME REASON the rich images Erich Helmut von Kerll stirred my imagination with no longer made an impression. The childhood he spoke of seemed remote and alien. In fact it seemed a bit artificial. Winters he skied at Cortina del Ampezzo just across the border, where the Hapsburgs’ hunting lodge had been. In his parents’ time it was turned into a fashionable hotel. He described the tiled stove going to the ceiling with beds built into it on either side to keep warm on winter nights, and fluffy eiderdown quilts to snuggle into.
It was vivid, as portraiture is vivid, but no longer real. A good book was more alive, and at night I turned pages, reading after lights-out by flashlight. Still, I enjoyed Erich’s account of the Lippizaners, which he rode in the fall. I could picture him stiff in the saddle, hard hat on his head. I’d seen a picture once in a magazine, a red jacket with black velvet collar, silk ascot, and shiny boots. He’d have a riding crop under his arm.
Then I pictured Crazy Dancer, bareback, bare-legged, hair flying, laughing wildly. And I placed myself behind him, holding him tight as I had on the motorcycle. That motorcycle had had some good features after all.
“You seem so distant,” Erich said, “so far away—so happy,” he added ruefully.
This brought me out of my daydream reminiscence. “You’ll be pleased to know that you’re doing so much better that the doctors are thinking of releasing you.”
“To prison,” was the morose reply.
“It’s not a prison. It’s a big warehouse that they’ve converted into a detention center. Lots of prisoners are coming in now. Italian as well as German.”
“More than before?”
“Yes, many more. If you count all Canada, there must be thousands.”
“So many? Has the tide shifted, then? I don’t ask you,” he added hastily. “I speak to myself. It’s the damn second front, the Eastern Front, just as that little French Canadian said. I am a patriot, Kathy, a good Austrian. Yet if it would shorten the war, even to lose is acceptable. . . . Gott im Himmel, my father would shoot me like a dog if he heard me talk this way. And he’d be right.” He turned away and flung his arm across his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Erich.”
He turned back then, the same unhappy smile on his face. “Tell me about yourself, Kathy. What’s it like to be an Indian in Canada?”
“You asked me that before.”
“Did I? Oh, God, I don’t want to be stuck in a warehouse full of Nazis.”
“The war won’t last forever, and you’ll be going home.”
His smile had disturbed me, but now that it was gone there were deep lines in his face. “If you meant to make me feel better, you haven’t.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s because the hard part will be not seeing you.”
“Thank you. That’s very nice.”
“I didn’t say it to be nice. I don’t speak from politeness. I look forward to your visits. They’re the only thing I have to look forward to.”
“I must tell you I’ve been criticized for spending so much time with you.” I had spoken impulsively. If I could have taken back my words, I would.
He regarded me with an intent probing expression. “And yet you do. Why?”
“Your stories. Mama Kathy used to tell me stories. Then I took over and told them too. But yours are much more interesting. I can picture it all—so elegant, so far removed from my own life or anything I know.”
“And that’s it?”
“What do you mean? Of course that’s it.”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” he said hoarsely. “I’m in love with my nurse. Just like all the others. How many offers of marriage have you had?”
I laughed, but I knew underneath we were both serious. “Less than a dozen this week,” I joked, realizing it sounded forced, that I was trying too hard to keep the conversation to something we could manage.
He tugged at a black onyx ring on his finger, pulled it off, and put it in my hand. “In case I don’t see you again.”
There was a diamond centered in the onyx. I drew away, leaving the ring between us on the covers.
“Think of it as a war trophy, like a German helmet.”
“Don’t be cruel,” I said, closing my hand because he had picked the ring up once more.
“Don’t you,” he whispered.
I turned away and somehow got out of the room. It wasn’t until that evening I found the ring in my pocket.
WHEN I CAME on duty next day I discovered Lieutenant Erich von Kerll had been discharged to the general war prisoner population. I flipped through his chart. The skin grafts had taken, and the areas on his hand, thigh, and abdomen were healed.
I didn’t know what to do about the ring. I’d planned on returning it to him that morning. Now I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t send a valuable ring through the mail. But I didn’t know when or even if I would see him again. Connie had described her engagement ring to me in detail, a raised center diamond surrounded by chips, one for each month they had known each other.
A soldier was brought in suffering from shock and internal bleeding. I transfused two pints of whole blood. And so it went.
I grabbed a bite of lunch with Mandy. I told her about the pneumonia case. We’d had to do a tracheotomy on him, and, as Dr. Bennett closed, the patient stopped breathing. “I wrote a letter for him last week, Mandy. He lived on the Bodensee.”
“I thought he lived on a farm with his mum.”
That gave me a jolt. Why had that slipped out? Why had I mentioned the Bodensee?
No one expected him to stop breathing; he hadn’t seemed critical.
The EKG went flat. I willed him not to die.
The floor was mopped, the mop ran over my shoe. Linens were changed; doctors continued rounds; nurses dispensed medicine; cot 9’s body, covered with a sheet, was lifted to a gurney. I helped in this and watched it wheeled out the double doors. It was happening in another plane, another slice of time. I wanted to take it up with Sister, complain to staff . . . no one should die when they’re nineteen.
By 3:30 my feet hurt and my back ached, and there were still two hours to put in. When my shift finally ended, I decided to forget supper, fall into bed, and sleep
the clock around.
Someone was sitting in shadows in the corner of my room. “Don’t put on the light,” someone said.
“Mandy?” I asked uncertainly.
A shaky intake of breath answered me.
“Mandy.” I crossed the room to her. She lifted her face and even in the dim light I could see her cheek was swollen and discolored, her eye puffing and closed.
I was so shocked I couldn’t speak.
“I hate him.”
I think that’s what she said, for she could barely articulate.
“Who, Mandy? Was it Robert? What happened?”
“I’m in terrible trouble, Kathy.”
“No, you’re not, I won’t let him near you.”
She shook her head and began crying. “It’s not that. It’s me. It’s what I’ve done. Oh, Kathy, I’m going to get pitched out on my ear.”
“What happened?” I asked again.
She tried to tell me, backed up and started again. My heart turned stone cold: It had to do with drugs. Mandy had been stealing drugs.
She was telling it between dry, hacking sobs, but I already knew. She’d tried to back out and he’d sent this goon after her.
“There was a message from Robert. I was to meet him. We always meet in the park, and he knew I took this shortcut through the alley. Well, this, this man sprang out at me. He had a stocking cap over his face, but I think he might be one of those guys that hang out at the casino. I thought he was going to kill me or rape me. Kathy, no one’s ever deliberately hurt me before. He punched me to the ground. . . .”
I tried to calm her. “What about the drugs? When did you start taking them?”
“It was such a stupid thing to do. It started with this osteomyelitis case, a patient Robert had grown fond of. I told you how he empathized. Well, he thought the boy needed more medication than was being prescribed. And the boy himself carried on. Nerve damage, you know, there’s no pain like it. Robert kept after me to pinch a couple of grams of morphine. So, stupid me, I saw an opportunity and took some. I thought it was just that once, that the boy would get better and not need it, or . . . you know, die.
“But Robert came to me again. I didn’t know what to do. I told him it was too risky, but he kept on and on about it. Finally I agreed and looked for another chance. I was almost caught. Sister Mary Margaret came in unexpectedly and I hid behind those sacks at the back of the storeroom. I was so scared. I swore never to do it again. But Robert convinced me it was humane, the right thing. Only, only . . . the boy was transferred to a neurological center in Boston.