“They don’t need to hear it,” she said.
“Hear what?” asked Mooshum.
“You know.”
“Ah, that, tawpway, my girl!”
Mama would usually have made sure that Mooshum left off, or given us each some task to ensure that her directions were followed, but she seemed distracted that day and simply walked up the back steps. The moment she passed into the house, we leaned close to Mooshum.
The Basket Makers
BIG STANDS OF willow grew around their cabin, so Asiginak taught Holy Track the art of making baskets. That spring, they cut willow and bundled it away in a cool place, then split the ash to make the framework of the baskets—some with carved handles, tikinaganan for babies, wide and flat baskets, even heart-shaped baskets for the farm women. Every day, they wove pliable willow into ash frameworks until their fingers were tough as sticks. When they had thirty or forty, as many as they could carry, they went out selling.
People readily bought baskets from Holy Track. The boy’s big childish teeth were white and crooked; his smile was shy and his eyelashes were so long they shadowed his cheeks. Asiginak had tried to give him a whiteman’s haircut and it got clipped so short in places that the hair stood out like brushy quills.
One day in early summer, when the little strawberries ripen along the edges of the field and the ducklings whisk across the sloughs, the two set off walking to the towns and farms off the reservation. They sold a basket or two everyplace they went. Only ten baskets were left when they met Mooshum and Cuthbert Peace coming down the road.
“Us two rowdies,” said Mooshum, winking at us, “were unhappily sober. We fell in with Asiginak and Holy Track hoping that we could persuade the old man to spare enough of his basket money to get his old friends drunk.”
“Gewehn!” Mooshum swiped his hand in the air, remembering. “Go home!” the old man told us.
“Ah, no, brother, I replied, let us carry these things for you!”
Mooshum put his hands out as if to help carry the baskets, but told us how Holy Track held tight to his baskets and tramped steadily beside his uncle.
Mooshum’s friend Cuthbert was dark as a bear, round, and his nose was like his nickname, Opin, a potato. Something had gone wrong with it after a fight and it had kept growing out of control on one side. It took up most of his face now and was an odd, lumpy shape. He spat tobacco and tugged at Holy Track’s arm.
“Leave him alone,” said Asiginak. “Your nose will sprout.”
Cuthbert took offense, dropped his hands away, and kicked his feet like a dog scratching dirt on its shit. Holy Track was still studying catechism with Father Severine, but he couldn’t help laugh at Cuthbert. The rascal pranced down the road, then stopped, jiggled his dodooshag and preened like a pretty girl. Mooshum showed us, doing a little dance in his chair. Then he sat back, laughing, and mimicked Cuthbert: “You’d be surprised what this nose gets me, and this belly, but it’s down here the women love the best!”
Asiginak tried to shut up the two other men, saying, “This boy is going to be a priest. He can’t hear things like that.”
Mooshum said that he and Opin walked in silence behind the two basket makers, still hoping, until Asiginak turned and warned them, “Don’t step in his tracks.”
Mooshum shook his head slowly back and forth, shifting his wad of chew, frowning as he did. “The old man meant that we were not worthy to step in the boy’s tracks. Evil had us in those days.”
The Lochren Farm
THEY WALKED DOWN the wagon path into a farmyard bounded by a scraggle of cottonwood. The farm was set near the town of Pluto, but the entrance was obscured by a low rise and the brushy tangle of a slough. When they got to the farm, Mooshum said he wished they had not followed the boy’s tracks. He said he knew there was something wrong from the beginning, with the smeared door to the house wide open and no smoke from the chimney. When they got close, the cows in the barn set up a sudden groaning to be milked. The desperation in their resonant bawls stopped the men in the trampled yard.
Asiginak set down his baskets. One of the cows screamed like a woman in pain, and everything went abruptly quiet. After a moment the frogs started up again, trilling and sawing in the slough.
“Let’s not go any closer,” said Asiginak. “The devil has this place.”
And then they heard the baby crying. It was a scratchy cry, a thin, exhausted wail from inside the house.
Asiginak picked up his baskets and turned to leave.
“That’s a baby,” said Cuthbert, and he grabbed Mooshum’s shirt and stood rooted, staring, his stained jaw working.
The baby continued to cry as if it knew they were out there, but they did not move and soon the little sound died away. The wind struck up in the leggy young cottonwoods. Bits of fluff whirled high above them. There was the clatter of stiff, new leaves. As Asiginak started to walk away, the cows started up even louder. Maybe the baby did, too, but now they couldn’t hear it over the vast moans from the barn.
“I feel the devil,” Asiginak cried. “Look there!”
But Cuthbert had gone through the door marked with blood. He vanished into the house. When he came out, he was carrying the baby and his eyes were bugging out—that’s how Mooshum put it, his eyes were bugging out. Cuthbert staggered to the barn with the baby. It wore a tiny white dress and a reeking diaper. The others followed. On the way there, they saw two boys curled on their sides, in the weeds, like they were sleeping, and then a man, his fingers clutched in the green black grass, his head up and still staring at the boys when he died crawling. His back was blasted out.
“Don’t look in that direction,” Asiginak told Holy Track.
The men cracked the barn doors wide and entered the mad wall of sound.
There were ten cows, one dead. Mooshum helped Holy Track put down the baskets somewhere in the dark, and blinked until he could see the nearest cow. He began on that one, then found another. Soon there was just the hiss of milk and a few last cows. The milked ones sounded like they were weeping, softly, in relief. Cuthbert cradled the baby in one arm and squeezed a teat to its lips—the bud of its mouth was hardly big enough, but he squirted the milk in deftly. At last the baby relaxed and its head lolled back. A smile played around its chapped scarlet lips. Mooshum turned the cows out to pasture and the men fled outside, rubbing their eyes, dazzled.
“I’ll carry this baby back,” said Cuthbert, peering anxiously into its face.
“Back where?” said Asiginak.
“To the sheriff.”
“The white sheriff?”
Asiginak saw that his nephew was gaping at the yard. He gently pushed the boy’s face so that Holy Track was facing not the sleeping forms but the watery blue line of the horizon.
Asiginak turned back to Cuthbert. “You’re not drunk, so why do you say this? We are no-goods, we are Indians, even me. If you tell the white sheriff, we will die.”
“They will hang us for sure,” said Mooshum. He picked up Holy Track’s baskets.
“It’s all right,” said Holy Track. “I know what to do. I will tell the priest.”
The other men looked at him.
“Do not tell the priest,” said Mooshum.
Cuthbert held the baby tight. “We cannot put this little one back. If we go, we take it with us.”
“We cannot,” said Asiginak.
“I will not go in that house again,” said Cuthbert.
“You know how to write,” said Asiginak to the boy. “You will write this down: One lives yet on Lochren. Tonight, I will place your message in the sheriff ’s box where he receives his papers. They will come for the baby in the morning.”
Cuthbert nodded slowly and gave the baby to Asiginak, who went back into the house. When he came out, he was looking at the ground. He noticed the tracks.
“We must brush your tracks out wherever we find them,” he said, in a serious, distracted voice. “Take your shoes off.”
The men walked around the yard
brushing out marks of the cross in the loose dirt. When they were satisfied, they left, melting down along the edge of the cow pasture, off into the woods, then down paths that raveled out for miles.
A Little Medicine
MOOSHUM QUIT. WE thought he’d had enough of talking, and as this was such a strange and awful thing that he was telling us, we just sat there. I twisted my hair around and around my finger and Joseph frowned at the rock-hard ground.
The door creaked open, and Mama leaned out to look at the sky. The blazing balls of clouds were getting sucked back into the dark, though the rain seemed far away yet. The wind had started up in the box elder grove and the laundry flapped on the line. She bent her head like she was shouldering a yoke, and let the door slam behind her. She strode over to the line to feel whether the clothing was dry enough. Something was definitely bothering her that day, but we did not find out until later what that was. Maybe if she hadn’t been so absorbed in her irritation she would have stopped Mooshum from telling us the whole story, or from sipping at the brown medicine bottle under his green zippered Sears work jacket. He drew the bottle out, swirled its contents round and round, and popped a small slug back into his throat. We caught a whiff of bitter, wild leaves. His eyes watered as he replaced the bottle.
Mama took down a couple of flat sheets, leaving some of her own nylon underwear on the line. I’d never seen her underwear right out there on the line. The pale blue and tissuey pink panties puffed with air and stayed true to her rounded shape. She walked past and said to Mooshum, “Geraldine’s coming and I know what she’s going to tell me already.” She went up the steps and shouted back down to Mooshum. “And I don’t like it.”
Mooshum popped his eyes out comically as the door slammed, and made an oooh, she’s mad ducking gesture.
“What happened to the baby?” Joseph asked.
“A man named Hoag came and got that baby,” said Mooshum. I thought the story was over and got up to follow Mama—she was going to want me to help her fold the clothing, or roll it for ironing. She was so perturbed already that I didn’t want to test her patience. But then Mooshum took another toot from his medicine bottle and said, “They came for Asiginak at night.”
“They?” I turned back.
“They who?” said Joseph.
“The town men,” said Mooshum. “That’s why I’m telling this to you. Wildstrand, the Buckendorfs…”
“The Buckendorfs?” I said.
“Oh yai! They’re the ones! They came for Asiginak at night, but he heard them first and bolted. Me, I had come to warn them and I dragged the boy out just in time.”
Confessional
THE LITTLE CABIN had a tiny window out back covered with a flap of hide. Holy Track and Mooshum were out that window in an iced second—blown by terror into the woods. They landed like leaves, sprang into the trees, and crept into a tangle of chokecherry and willow. Then they floundered into a slough and sank down among the reeds. There were dogs with the men, but they were cow dogs, not trained hounds, and they barked at everything. They smelled an animal or maybe Asiginak and started off in another direction. The men’s torches played over the surface of the water. There was more trampling, shuffling, the dogs’ mad barking, and they were gone. The noise got smaller and smaller. The two pulled themselves through the muck until they were on solid ground. There was no choice now but to run to Father Severine. Though he was unreliable and didn’t like Mooshum anymore, he very much loved Holy Track.
As the two made their way down the trail that led around the hills, along pastures, the birds started up singing in the alder and wild raspberry. Mooshum asked the little birds for help, and Holy Track said Hail Marys. As they walked along, they talked about the priest’s habits—how he took forever to fraction the Host and drawled his prayers out so it was nearly impossible to keep one’s eyes open and not pitch forward on the floor. How soft the floor looked while listening to Severine’s sermons and how dreadful it was when a louse or flea began to bite, or when a piss was necessary. They agreed that the most agonizing itches always developed while serving Mass. They revealed that both of their butt ends knew a sharp corner attached to the kneeler that afforded a merciful, secret scratch.
On the swelling side of a hill, along a small stream that ran slough to slough, they heard horses and rolled into the torn system of a tipped-up cottonwood tree. They hid in the cage of black roots and froze as the white men passed. Asiginak had not been caught.
“They might give up on us,” said Holy Track.
The air was still fresh with night dew when Holy Track and Mooshum pulled open the door to the church and slipped inside. There was the odor of rotting burlap and field dust from all of the potato bags placed down as rugs. One tiny lamp flickered before the carved wooden cabinet where the priest kept the Hosts. It was covered with a towel embroidered in red letters.
“I don’t like the taste of that bread!” Mooshum made a face. “You cannot call it bread! Not even a cracker. You could eat a thousand and not live.”
“You’re supposed to get everlasting life from it,” said Joseph.
“That did not work for Holy Track,” said Mooshum.
The boy knelt for a moment before the cabinet. Then he pushed aside the towel, opened the gilded door in its side, and ate all the wafers. He closed the door, and blew out the flame of the lamp. He told Mooshum that he hadn’t eaten for days—ever since Asiginak had come home raving with fear saying there was drunk talk and now the white sheriff and maybe some farmers, also, knew that Indians had been in the presence of the murdered family. Holy Track’s hands reached forward and he drank the rancid fat from the bowl of the lamp. His stomach immediately cramped up. He broke out in a sweat, ran outside, and leaned his head against the back wall of the church. He forced himself to keep down the spirit bread by breathing hard and concentrating on the presence inside of him. Father Severine had explained his soul to him. Now, he told Mooshum, it made sense that the bread he had eaten would feed this soul, this spirit, and increase its strength. He thought he would need this strength.
At last, when the boy felt better, Mooshum helped him creep back inside. There was an aperture of enclosed space in the church where the priest heard confessions. A sack curtain hung down the front. Holy Track ducked in and crouched on the dirt floor with his knees drawn up to his chin.
Mooshum left him there and sipped like an animal at the stale font of holy water. Then he fell asleep underneath a pew until morning sun filtered through the rough curtains. He peered into the brown light of the church. The door opened and a narrow band of white light struck across the floor. Father Severine approached the confessional with long, delicate, strides, and looked inside.
“My son!” he breathed. A dark cleft of anxiety formed between the priest’s eyebrows. “Are the others here too?”
“No,” said Holy Track.
Relieved, the priest let out his breath. The boy had formed himself into a ball on the floor. The priest’s face worked back and forth between expressions of pity and disgust, and at last settled on peevish disappointment.
“I suppose you are here to confess.” His voice was shaky and shrill. His breath was agitated. “You have done a monstrous thing!” He seemed to gather himself and stepped backwards.
“I will feed you, only that,” he said, and left. But when Father Severine returned, he had such food. There were tears in his weak eyes as he watched his favorite eat the tinned crackers and the dried peaches, cold fried venison, a jar of honey, and bread soft as flower petals. Mooshum kept quiet although his stomach yawned.
Holy Track ate with gravity, devotion, and lust. He spoke with his cheeks bulging.
“They were all dead but the baby.”
By the time he swallowed, there were men outside. The priest got up. His eyes were swimming.
“Nothing, we did nothing…we never,” said the boy, but his tongue was weighed down with honey and his mouth too dry to swallow the food.
“They led you to i
t,” said Father Severine, his eyes spilling over, the tears running down the furrows beside his beaky nose, splashing down inside his collar. “Stay hidden, I will talk.”
The Sisters
THE DOOR SLAMMED with a deliberate whack. Mooshum spat. Joseph started. I jumped up. Mama had Geraldine with her now and as they passed I heard my aunt say, “Who told you?” Then they were halfway down the yard, past the tangled brushy trees and the hanging clothes, which Mama didn’t bother to touch for dryness this time. They were lost in a conversation. Mama’s shoulders were hunched and her head was turned just a bit toward Geraldine. They looked a lot like each other from behind—their permanented black hair bobbed prettily just over their collars. Mama wore a green blouse and Geraldine’s was yellow. Their dark skirts were long and full, belted tight with elastic cinch belts. Their feet were dainty in Keds shoes and anklets. Mama painted her canvas shoes with white polish to keep them spotless. Their clothing was always secondhand but they still looked dashing. People thought they went to Fargo to shop when their clothes really came from the mission.
They walked to the end of the yard where the old outhouse stood, now cluttered inside with hoes and shovels. There, they folded their arms and faced each other, mouths moving, skirts whipping in the hot rain-smelling breeze. Mooshum began to talk again, knowing that Mama’s attention was absorbed. It wasn’t like he was talking to us, though, or even using his usual storytelling voice. He wasn’t drawing us in, or gesturing. This was different. Now it was like he was stuck in some way, on some track, like he couldn’t stop the story from forcing its way out. This was the one time he told the story whole.
The Party
OUTSIDE THE CHURCH, the men’s voices were a tumble. First the priest’s choked pleas, then a rolling barrel full of words. Mooshum made no sense of it, but dreamily shoved in the food Holy Track pushed over. He caught the back and forth of the talk. The words jammed together until the men and the horses made one sound, a heavy confusion of breath and stomping blood. Then a brief quiet in which the wind came up whining in the eaves. Suddenly Holy Track leapt up, stuffing bits of the boiled meat into his pockets, and rolled underneath the darkest bench with Mooshum.