“These three angels told me,” the dying man went on matter-of-factly, “that this is a good time to make the sky journey. They told me to dream this news for you.” He patted Crazy Dancer’s hand. “Thank you for coming. I am in luck to have you here.”
“Make the trip in these.” Impulsively, Crazy Dancer stripped his moccasins from his feet and fitted them onto Sacred Arrow’s.
This signaled a new phase and the shaman took his place beside the old chief and began extolling his life, recalling the fine deeds he had done and bringing to the attention of the Creator his many acts of kindness and bravery. This commentary was intoned to the accompaniment of drums.
We listened respectfully for a quarter of an hour. Then, returning to his mother’s home, Crazy Dancer prepared for the responsibility laid on him by beginning a fast. “I must howl to the earth, and dance the map of the other world.”
“But you don’t know it yourself, do you?”
“That’s why I thirst and fast. I must be pure so the knowledge will be given to me.”
Toward evening Anne Morning Light returned with me to the old chief’s house. By now they had lit a fire in the cookstove, and it was swelteringly hot. Benches had been hauled in and the men sat around chewing tobacco. Tin cans were scattered here and there on the floor as spittoons, but one old-timer, more proficient and more accurate than the others, spat directly from half across the room into the round stove opening. It wasn’t a hundred percent, though; a glob of tobacco juice sizzled on the lip of the stove. Children kept running in and out, banging the door. A dipper of water was passed to the dying man, but he waved it away.
The audience waited, I assumed, for the dance to begin. But Crazy Dancer didn’t come as a dancer, he came to the accompaniment of mud-turtle rattles, which were pounded on one of the benches. He burst in like thunder, knocked over a bench, rushed to the stove, and, reaching in, scooped up a hot coal which he tossed from hand to hand.
Then, dropping it, he grabbed up handfuls of coal dust and began sprinkling everyone with it. “He is sending the Great World Rim Being on his way,” Morning Light whispered. From her tone of voice I imagined this must be the devil. It was a good idea to send such a being far away from where a good man dies.
I watched Crazy Dancer’s shadow on the wall. Anne said against my ear that it was the Doorkeeper’s Dance. Twirling, leaping, he seemed at times to fly. At others his feet pounded the earth, and he crouched—only to find strength to spring up again. He was a flame of the fire itself, dancing through that night and the next day and the following night. The morning of the third day Sacred Arrow died. He died quietly behind closed eyes.
The children continued to play around the corpse, but Crazy Dancer changed his rhythm. With his feet in the death dust of this world, he led his uncle to the shadow world. Now that Sacred Arrow was traveling west in his moccasins, his obligation was at an end and he danced to lighten the hearts of those who grieved, especially his mother, who was the old chief’s favorite niece. He jumped around and clowned and made faces. He was a delight maker and the children laughed their delight while old people blew smoke on him. But in seventy-two hours he’d had neither food nor rest. Still the drums beat. And still he danced.
That was one second; the next he collapsed on the floor, his heaving sides the only indication that there was life in him. I reached him first, going down beside him and laying my head on a rapidly pounding but steady heart. I raised my head, smiling. This man of mine had the heart of a grizzly. A glass of water was put in my hand and I tilted it against his lips. He opened his eyes at once, and they asked, “Have I done well?” Mine replied, “You were wonderful.”
We returned with Anne Morning Light to her house, and she busied herself being a mother. She brought food and, when we had finished eating, wrapped up what was left for our journey. Before letting us leave, she cut Crazy Dancer’s hair. I understood it was a sign of respect for his uncle. Crazy Dancer had grown up in this house, learned to dance and have fun here, learned the ideals of loyalty to the band and the family. And learned, I could tell by the attention to me, a guest, the strong Indian sense of hospitality.
Going from a wedding to a deathbed seemed ominous to me. But my feeling of premonition was not shared by any, least of all by Crazy Dancer. First Nation people danced and celebrated, almost without differentiation, the milestones of life. Death was simply a further journey.
The kids started a ball game behind the house. Perhaps the old chief stopped a moment to watch.
Anne Morning Light saw us off with something called moose milk, a homemade drink that had much the effect of bathtub gin. One swallow and you felt as though your eyeballs had come loose.
She took Crazy Dancer aside and told him he had chosen chaiwootcha, a good woman. I felt a rush of gratitude toward this sweet-faced scrapper, who thought I would be good for her son. She let us go with the assurance that she would dream us. Dreaming, Crazy Dancer told me, connects the world.
We left, swinging our arms and with a light step. He pointed out kinnikinnick, a little evergreen shrub growing by the side of the trail, whose leathery leaf, when dried, was their usual smoke.
“When we get back to Montreal,” he said, “we will marry in a church and get that piece of paper.”
The truth was I already felt satisfactorily married. I felt the excitement of our lovemaking and, underlying it, the comfortable feeling that we got on like a pair of old shoes.
“I never worked for money,” he said unexpectedly, “only at what I liked.”
“I know,” I teased. “If it had a carburetor, you loved it.”
“If I’d known I was going to be in love with you, I would have worked for money.”
“You’re poor because you chose freedom,” I said stoutly.
“But you’ll have nothing now but government checks, and they’re not much.”
“Whatever they are, they’re more than I had before.”
He stopped walking and looked at me intently. “There is sadness in you. Is it because I’m being shipped out? Because I can promise you no Nazi bullet has my name on it.” He laughed. “They never heard of Crazy Dancer. So I’ll come back.”
I smiled and said nothing. I had seen some of the boys who came back. Their body parts were disposed of with other wastes. To deflect the conversation I told him a story. Crazy Dancer loved my stories.
“This is a true one,” I began, because Indians love true stories best and generally begin their tales that way. “It happened last year, on Sister Egg’s birthday. You probably noticed there’s a marble statue of St. Francis of Assisi inside the main entrance to the left of the staircase.”
“Yes, I’ve seen it.”
“It’s large, isn’t it? I mean, more than life-size?”
“It’s large all right.”
“Well, we wanted to play a trick on Sister Egg, she’s our favorite Sister. We thought of it as a sort of birthday present. So we set about moving St. Francis to the other side of the stairs, the right side.”
“But it must weigh a ton.”
“That’s exactly right. The idea of the joke was to get a rise out of Sister Egg, have her cry out, ‘A miracle! A miracle!’ I must tell you it was very hard work. We rolled a rug around St. Francis and fastened it with belts. Then with a jury-rigged winch we loaded him onto a piano dolly. It took forever, but when we finally manuevered the saint into place and unwrapped the rug, he looked as though he had always been stationed there.
“When Sister Eglantine came down the stairs, she noticed nothing, so we rushed out, shouting, ‘A miracle! A miracle! St. Francis has walked to the other side of the staircase!’
“Sister Egg stood stock still, then went up to the statue and examined it, shaking her head in puzzlement. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘he was in his old location a hundred years. I imagine even saints want an occasional change of scene.’
“‘But,’ we chimed in, ‘it’s a miracle, Sister. Shouldn’t you notify Rome?’
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“‘The only miracle,’ she said, ‘is that none of you girls got a hernia.’”
Ten
NOW WE WERE back in Montreal things that should have been simple were difficult, and ultimately impossible. We had stayed longer than we intended. After all, one could hardly hurry a man’s dying. But it did not leave time. There wasn’t time to arrange for the church until a week after Crazy Dancer was due to sail. Of course, we didn’t need to rent the church itself. I suggested the little vestibule off the Father’s office. But there were other weddings scheduled, and several baptisms. Time grew short. And suddenly there wasn’t any.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ll do it when you come home. Connie will be the matron of honor, and you’ll get to meet Jeff. And Georges will be best man. You and Georges will be great buddies. And our mamas will meet and not know what to make of each other, and like each other. And they’ll both be proud.”
He listened with his head cocked in a look of skepticism. “It sounds good, but it doesn’t sound real.”
After he left, I remembered his saying that, I remembered how his face had clouded over. It sounded like fantasy to me too. But why shouldn’t it happen like that? By then the war would be over, and my family would come. And Anne as well. Why did our wedding seem so misty and unreal?
His orders were waiting. He was to sail on the large troopship in the harbor. The only thing he said about that was, “I don’t want you going down to the pier and waving.”
So I didn’t.
We didn’t say goodbye. We found a cheap room to rent. But since we wanted it for consecutive hours of day and night, we paid a ransom for it. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that it looked out on an alley, and trash, and empty beer cans.
In the morning I found he had filled my shoes with flowers. I put my arms around him. With his cheek to mine, he couldn’t see the sudden tears. That’s how his sweetness affected me. We put the flowers in a water glass and admired them. “Look, even when they’re the same variety, their faces are different.”
I made him breakfast of things that didn’t have to be cooked, and did the same for lunch. Dinner was a short foray, and then back to our cave. We had a whole marriage to pack into a couple of days. He washed my hair. I gave him a back rub. We lay on top of the bed and made lazy love. He pulled me down on the floor and we made frenetic love. I showed him the Twins’ Code. “Always let me know where you are.”
The idea of a code intrigued him, and he coded a love letter to me on the spot. “Every fifth word . . .” he said as he worked laboriously with a pencil stub.
He taught me Mohawk love songs and war chants. We sang the crazy tunes we heard on the radio:
Three little fishies
And the mama fishie too,
They swam and they swam
Right over the dam.
He told me he understood nursing because he had delivered puppies. “I put this soft, clean muskeg moss under the mother. It’s absorbent. We use it to diaper babies. You never see an Indian kid with a sore butt.”
I agreed that modern medicine could learn a lot from First Nation people.
Next thing I knew I was confessing one of my childhood tragedies.
“I don’t have a birthday. Not really. I was born in the forest somewhere. The closest thing I have to a birthday is the date Mama Kathy and Papa signed the adoption papers, August second.”
“No,” he decided, “that’s not when you were born. You were born when we were married.”
And so it went, down to the last minute.
He gave me a cheery grin when he left. There were no important last words. Crazy Dancer walked out of the room and closed the door.
I jumped up, ran across the room . . . and stopped. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t look after him.
It was my turn to close the door on our little room. It was necessary to take a short walk before returning to the hospital. As far as anyone there knew, I had just taken a leave. They knew nothing about my marriage. That was a good thing, as that part of our plan hadn’t worked. In their eyes I wasn’t married. Later, when I could talk about it, I might tell Sister Egg. But not now. It was too close, too dear, and too painful.
In the little chapel on the hospital premises I found the sanctuary necessary to reenter my life. One prayer I repeated again and again. “Don’t let the Germans discover there is such a name as Crazy Dancer.”
Back in my room I wrote my first letter.
Dear Crazy Dancer,
Guess how long you’ve been gone? An hour and fifteen minutes. There are so many things I didn’t get around to telling you. Elk Girl, for instance. She gave me the wolf pawakam when we were in grade school. Then somewhere in middle school she dropped out. She is a very strange person. She has powers. Sometimes I dream her.
I stopped. My thoughts had taken me down a wrong avenue. Elk Girl had said some disturbing things about our marriage. I crossed out the part about Elk Girl and started my letter again.
I went about my duties writing letters in my head. At night I got down on paper the thoughts I’d had during the day. Silly things, like the time Connie, Georges, and I spent the afternoon gathering bright stones to outline the garden path. We soaked them overnight to bring out their colors. In the morning we hurried to look at our acquisitions. They were gray and ugly, all color leached out of them. Why didn’t he write?
Of course he couldn’t. He was stuck on that damned ship. I wondered if he’d remember the Twins’ Code. Of course he would. Every fifth word represented a letter and he could spell out where he was. If I knew that, if I had a setting to put him in, it would be easier.
Everyone complained about the mail. It came when it came. I told myself I’d probably get a dozen letters all at once. I woke in the morning, my face wet with tears.
By noon there was an extra on the street, the news was all over—the troopship that left our harbor ten days ago was torpedoed in the North Atlantic. All hands were lost. How could a German torpedo find Crazy Dancer? Then I remembered, he was listed as Charlie Smith.
My soul, my being, that inmost self fought the printed word, the many words that buzzed about me in the hospital and on the radio. I rejected them. I rejected the possibility that he could be dead. He wasn’t dead—he’d promised me. We’d gone under the blanket together. I’d know if anything had happened.
Then I recalled the tears on my face.
I wonder if the dead know they’re dead. Maybe they just keep on, frozen in their bit of time, doing the same things in another reality. I kept to my schedule. If anything, I was more efficient than before. The only thing I had to be careful of was the concern I read in Sister Egg’s eyeglasses.
“You’re working too hard, Kathy.”
“No, I’m not.”
She shook her head, and I could tell she wasn’t satisfied. “Hear anything from Mandy?” she asked.
“No.”
“And what about that young Mohawk, the one who used to pick you up in those odd conveyances?”
“Oh, him. He went away.”
“He was called up?”
“He’s dead,” I said. I jammed my hand in my mouth, but it was too late. The word was out.
Egg took both my hands in hers. “Sit down, Kathy. There. Now tell me.”
“He was on his way to the war. He didn’t even get there. He was on that troopship.”
“Oh, Kathy. I think you were fond of him?”
“There’s a big wad of undigested feeling stuck in me.”
“My poor girl. How difficult it must be.”
“I loved him. I loved him, Sister. But what good was it, our loving each other? No good at all, it didn’t mean anything.”
“Of course it did. Love is the dearest feeling there can be. You were fortunate to experience it, and so was he. If he knew your love, you gave him a great gift.”
I fumbled in the pocket of my uniform. “Here. Here he is. We’re sitting on the moon.”
She didn’t ta
ke the picture from my hand but bent over it. “Imagine that,” she said.
I replaced the snapshot carefully.
“He was a fine-looking young man.”
Was, was, how I hated that word.
“You are right, Kathy. Keep busy.”
She must have passed the word on. The charge nurse kept me hopping. Once I snapped back, “Can’t you see I already have two patients to clean up?” Instead of reading me out, she gave me a look of such tender concern it almost broke my heart. “I’ll send Adele in to finish up,” she said. “By the way, there’s an Indian woman asking for you at the front desk.”
It was Anne Morning Light. She had a telegram.
The telegram should have come to me. But of course the Canadian government didn’t know about our marriage, and if it had, would have taken no notice of a couple of dumb Indians under a blanket.
Anne Morning Light soothed me with stories of Crazy Dancer as a boy. He had always been fiercely independent, disappearing into the woods for days at a time. He had a ragged paperback, 101 Ways to Live Off the Land, and built his own wigwam in the woods behind their house. His father made good money as a structural steel worker on high-rise buildings. “He danced too,” Anne told me, “at the end of a girder, twenty stories up. He died in an accident. Not falling—a Mohawk never falls. And not from the machinery—machines never betray a Mohawk. No, he did something much more dangerous, he joined the union.”
Thinking of that death brought her son’s. She broke down, and in that cold, antiseptic, whitewashed waiting room I tried to comfort her. Together, we mourned our loss.
“I don’t suppose you’re pregnant,” she asked.
“No.”
“A baby, now. Some part of him. That would have been a comfort.”
When she left I went with her. Sister Egg arranged it. It didn’t matter much where I was or what I was doing. I moved through empty spaces. Sounds reached me, though, and scenes passed before my eyes. The sun was warm, the sun was good. I registered that. I knew everything that went on around me, yet it was remote, an alien universe.