The Antelope Wife

  “Why should I take the chance?” I asked, stubborn. “So what?”

  “The name goes with the beads, you see,” she said, “because without the name those beads will kill you.”

  “Of what?”

  “Longing.”

  Which did not frighten me.

  Still, I played her another game and yet another. That is how I won her names from her. My girl, that was my naming dream. Long version. Your name is a stubborn and eraseless long-lasting name. One that won’t disappear.

  CALLY WANTS HER to say it, the old name, the original.

  “Ozhaawashkmashkodikwe, Blue Prairie Woman.” she hears, but she isn’t satisfied.

  “And the beads?”

  Cally is surprised to hear the sharpness in her voice. She hasn’t even thanked her grandma, yet already the need is on her. She has got to know what the necklace of beads looks like, that blue. She can imagine it at the edge of her vision. A blueness that is a hook of feeling in the heart.

  “The beads.” Noodin’s whole face wrinkles, her thin lips slowly spread in an innocent smile. “Already, you want them, I know. But you will have to trade for them with their owner, Sweetheart Calico.”

  Who stands behind them suddenly, her gaze on Cally’s back like a cape of quills.

  The Blue Beads

  The twins have become been afraid of her. She is not just any woman. She is something created out there where the distances turn words to air and thoughts to colors. She wiggles the first bead from the broken place in her smile. Then she pulls bead after strung bead from her dark mouth out. That’s where she was keeping them all of this time, they understand. Beneath her tongue. No wonder she was silent. And sure enough, as she holds them forward to barter, now, she speaks. Her voice is lilting and flutelike on the vowels and sibilant between the jagged ends of her tooth.

  “Make that damn Klaus let me go!”

  “Okay,” says Cally. “First give me the beads.”

  Chapter 22

  Wiindigoo Dog

  SO THERE WAS this big canine rabies outbreak in the state of Minnesota. Here’s what happened. The state sent three dogcatchers to work day and night rounding up the dogs. The first dogcatcher was from a crack Norwegian dog-catching school, the second was Swedish, the third was an Indian dogcatcher. Each had a truck. They traveled together in a squad. They worked hard all morning and by noon each of the dogcatchers had a pretty-fair-sized truck full of dogs. About then, they were getting hungry, so they chained up the back of the trucks. But they forgot to lock the doors themselves, see, so by pushing and wiggling the dogs could open the doors behind the loose chain just enough to squeeze out, carefully, one at a time.

  When the dogcatchers came back from lunch, then, first thing they looked into the back of their trucks. The crack Norwegian dogcatcher’s truck was totally empty and so was the Swede’s truck. But the Ojibwe dogcatcher’s truck, though unlatched the same and only chained, was still full of dogs.

  “This is something, though,” said the Swede and the Norwegian to the Ojibwe. “How do you account for the fact all our dogs are gone and yours are still there?”

  “Oh,” said the Ojibwa, “mine are Indian dogs. Wherever they are, that’s their rez. Every time one of them tries to sneak off, the others pull him back.”

  “I DON’T LIKE that joke,” says Klaus. “My rez is very special to me. It is my place of authority.”

  “Geget, you filthy piece of guts,” says the Wiindigoo Dog. “I like it there, too. Don’t get spiritual on me.”

  “Why do you like it?” asks Klaus. “You have no spirituality whatsoever. What’s there for you?”

  “On the rez,” says the wiindigoo, “the ladies, they roam. Bye now. Gotta maaj.”

  “Good riddance.” Klaus turns over and sleeps.

  WHILE SLEEPING he remembers that he is really someone else with a life and a toothbrush and a paycheck. He lives a normal day in his sleep, rising in the morning to do a hundred crunches and fifty push-ups, then pours himself a bowl of cereal before he showers. That feels good! Next, he is shaving, just those few whiskers on the blunt end of his chin. He is walking away from his actual house. Locking his door. Getting into his car.

  Car! Once upon a time far away and long ago. These things were his. He earned them with work and money. His mouth waters. Coins and bills. He remembers the solid pack of his wallet in his left jeans pocket. He is left-handed, a lefty. What does that matter now? He is totally ambidextrous with the bottle.

  KLAUS IS SLEEPING with his head sticking out of the bushes in the park, and he is wearing a green baseball cap. A young man wearing thick earphones and chewing a piece of bread-tie plastic whips around the bushes, expertly mowing grass for the city park system. He rides the mower with sloppy assurance—the big red machine itself encourages reckless driving with its fat cushy seat and wide cramping whine of protest. That’s what his lawn mower is—one long scream of protest. the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. The young man rounds the corner and runs over Klaus’s head.

  There is no warning, of course. No chance for Klaus to prepare himself in his dream for getting his head run over by a lawn mower. Only the jagged earsplitting raucous blade shrieks, only the helmet of metallic motor sound, only the fact, lucky Klaus, that a powerful stray dog bolts toward the machine and gets hit, slams into the air. Bounces off a tree and vanishes. The impact jars the machine to a giant skip so that the accident leaves no more than a neat bloody crease down the exact middle of Klaus’s face.

  KLAUS DREAMS HE is a drum struck violently and rapidly. His drum face wears the sacred center stripe. Klaus blinks up into the sky. Sun shot and pearly. Leaves gleaming and tossing. His ears are suddenly unpacked of cotton and his thoughts run pure between his temples, open and sparkling. In the extraordinary light Klaus makes a thousand decisions. Two of them matter. Number one, he will finally stop. Just stop. And he knows, the way he has known so many times before, right down to his aching big toe, center of his soul, that he is done drinking. He can do that. The other of his important decisions is not so consciously settled. It is just that he knows, in vague detail but with overriding certainty, the next thing to do.

  Bring her back. Bring her back to us, you fool.

  Getting sober. Letting her go. The idea of it hurts so bad he momentarily wishes that the lawn mower had struck him full on, taken off his head, his thoughts.

  THERE IS A little bench down the street in a dogshit triangle of lawn. Some strangled dark red ambrosia-colored snapdragons are planted there by who knows who? Better go there, says a voice. Her dog, Wiindigoo. Get out. Don’t look back. Now, right now, attend to yourself and focus on the next fifteen minutes of your life. For you were never able to do it a day at a time, not you. An hour. Two hours. Half a day at a time. Or not.

  Klaus goes looking for her. Now and again they’ll ask him, what was so fucking great about her? What did she do, in bed for instance, or what did she cook? Was it something she did with her hands, her face, some way she had, perhaps? A love way. A food. Not one thing in particular, he says. She never cooked anything from a recipe. Potatoes, mac and cheese, that kind of stuff. It wasn’t that. They’ll ask did she have his children. No, he’ll say. No kids. Was she related to you? Was she from your own clan?

  Sometimes he thinks she was. Yes.

  In his worst down and outs, he gets comfort from the thought that she was just a fragment of his imagination, his pretty antelope woman. But he knows she is actual in every way. What scares him worst is this: The simple knowledge that his Sweetheart Calico is a whole other person. Lives in another body, walks in a different skin. Thinks different thoughts he can’t know about. Wants a freedom he can’t give.

  She dragged me in, he says greedily, can’t she handle it now?

  Yet he knows with bleak shame he is excusing his trapper’s appetite. He’s tangled in a net of holes. He doesn’t know how to stop wanting her in him, w
ith him, part of him, existing in his food and water and booze. He doesn’t know how to stop the circle of his thoughts.

  In the old days, they used to paint the red stripe of the drum down the middle of their faces. Right now, sitting on the carved bench in the hopeful little ugly park he closes his eyes. His face bears the blood-painted stripe. He tries to divide himself up equally—two parts. Send half of yourself to each direction. West, east. Let her go with the western half, free. But the part of Klaus that goes to the west reaches out and clings to his love like a baby, following her into sky-hung space.

  Giiwebatoon

  Klaus folds and unfolds the strip of cloth that he uses as his headband, traces the small buds and sprigs of pink unbudding roses and white roses, the sweetheart calico. Sweat and dirt, drunken sleeps, railroad bed, underpass and overpass dust, volleyball-court gravel, frozen snirt, river water, and many tears are all pressed into the piece of cloth. It holds the story of his wretched love. Though grit scored, dirt changed, and sun faded, it isn’t frayed. It is woven of the same toughness as his longing. He wraps the strip of calico around his wrist like a bandage and he waits. He becomes part of the scenery, a tree, or anyway a stump. He is waiting for her to appear.

  Red flash. A curtain drops away. She walks across the downtown concrete. His wife, his niinimoshenh, his Blue Fairy, his torture, his merwoman, mercy and love. She is walking along very slow and hesitant, waiting for lights to change before she crosses, reaching for her own hand. Her dark fall of hair hangs tatty and lifeless. She breathes in clear air and blows smoke out her nose. Looking over her shoulder at him, sensing his presence, her eyes are no longer living agates. Her eyes have turned the dead gray of sidewalk.

  Klaus steps toward her and flaps his hands.

  “Run! Run home. You can go now!”

  She starts nervously, but then shrugs, lights a cigarette from off the one she was smoking already, and doesn’t run away. She looks at him, through and through, weary. His dear love’s face is thin, the bones showing pure and stark, pressing just the right places under her skin. How he used to trace them is still locked in his hands. His fingers begin to move across the rips in his T-shirt.

  She steps closer. He reaches out and holds her long-fingered delicate hand. Then, pulling the cloth around their wrists, he ties her hand to his hand gently with the sweetheart calico. He has no plan to do this either. No plan for what happens next, but it is simple. They start out. Start walking.

  North and west, along the river until the herringbone brick path with decorative plantings becomes a common sidewalk. Eventually it turns to tar black as licorice at first and then lighter, lighter, showing stones in the aggregate, thinning, rubbing out, erasing, absorbed back slowly into the earth. Then earth itself is under their feet, a worn path for joggers and for bicyclists. It is clear at first and then grassier, fainter, grown over, traversing backyards or parkland. Back lots of tire stores, warehouses, malls, developments, wild mustard, polleny green-gold, a farm, then another one, all of a sudden undergrowth so thick along the banks they cannot enter.

  They turn from the water flowing off the edge of the world and start walking due west.

  They walk all evening, rest. Fall asleep in a grassy old yard just beside an abandoned shed that still shelters a hulk of metal that once was a car. Against the shed, still chained to the door, there is a cracked leather collar. Strung through it bones of a dog vertebrae. Scattered beside more bones and baked hide.

  That dead dog comes alive and is her dog. Coyote gray, grinning and slobbering, it trots just behind them.

  They keep walking. Next morning, too. They drink from a clean pothole lake and walk on until, over a slight rise, the sky immensely opens up before them in a blast of space.

  “Niinimoshenh,” he says softly. “Run home. Giiwebatoon.”

  He feels her start, tense, breathe the air in deeper gulps. A flowing fawn material, her grace comes over her. If he looks at her he won’t be able to do it. So he does not look at her face. Slowly, fighting his own need, dizzy, Klaus pulls at the loop of dirty gray sweetheart calico. He undoes the knot that binds her to him. At first, she doesn’t seem to know what her freedom means. She gazes at the distance until it fills her eyes. Then she shakes her hand and sees that she is no longer bound to Klaus. She stretches her arm out before her, turns her fingers over curiously, examines her blank brown palms.

  “You let me go,” she says to him. He’s shocked to hear her soft, raspy voice.

  “Yes,” he whispers. He sits down suddenly like a baby dropping to its seat. Sprawled in the grass, addled, his tears slowly pump. He throws down the strip of cloth that tied her to him and tied him to the bottle.

  When he does that, he imagines that she will bound forward in the lyric of motion that only her people have. But she does not spring from his shadow, only walks forward a weary step. Confused, broken inside, shaking her head, she stumbles over the uneven ground. The dog stays right at her heels. As she walks west, she begins to sing. Klaus watches her. The land is so flat. She is perfectly in focus. He can see her slender back, quick legs, once or twice a staggering leap, a fall, an attempt to run. Klaus thinks that she might turn around but she keeps moving until she is a white needle, quivering, then a dark fleck on the western band.

  Acknowledgments

  Nimiigwechiwi-aanaanig: Awanigaabaw (Dr. Brendan Fairbanks), also Netaa-niimid Aamoo-ikwe, Biidaanamad, Migizi, and Nenaa’ikiizhikok, my daughters.

  Thank you: Trent Duffy, my indefatigable copy editor, and Terry Karten, my editor at HarperCollins. Brendan Fairbanks was my consultant for most of the Ojibwe language in this book; any mistakes are mine. Thank you also to my sister, Heid E. Erdrich, who over the years helped me think about this book.

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction

  “Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208,” interview by Lisa Halliday, first published in The Paris Review. Copyright © 2010 by The Paris Review, used with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

  ONLY ONE PASSENGER TRAIN per day makes the Empire Builder journey from Chicago to Seattle, and when it stops in Fargo, North Dakota, at 3:35 in the morning, one senses how, as Louise Erdrich has written, the “earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers.” Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, but we met in the Fargo Econo Lodge parking lot. From there, with Erdrich’s eight-year-old daughter, Kiizh (Sky in Ojibwe), we drove five hours up to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, on the Manitoba border. Every August, when tick season has subsided, Erdrich and her sister Heid spend a week in a former monastery here to attend the Little Shell Powwow and to conduct a writing workshop at the Turtle Mountain Community College. One afternoon, participants took turns reciting poetry under a beside the single-room house where Erdrich’s mother grew up. The workshop is mainly attended by Ojibwe or other Native people from neighboring reservations, and is in its eighth year.

  Moving east with my mattress and writing table.

  Karen Louise Erdrich, born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, was the first of seven children raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, by a German American father and a mother who is half “a mixture of other tribes plus French” and half Ojibwe—Ojibwe, also known as Chippewa, being one of numerous Native American tribes comprised by the Anishinaabe (“Original People”). Both of Erdrich’s parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. For many years, her grandfather Patrick Gourneau, Aunishinaubay, was the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal chair.

  Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976, and returned in June 2009 to receive an honorary doctorate of letters and deliver the main commencement address; the same year, her novel The Plague of Doves, which centers on the lynching of four Indians wrongly accused of murdering a white family (and which Philip Roth has called “her dazzling masterpiece”), was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. After invariably classifying
Erdrich as a Native American writer, many reviewers proceed to compare her work to that of William Faulkner or Gabriel García Márquez: Faulkner for her tangled family trees, her ventriloquist skill, and her expansive use of a fictional province no less fully imagined than Yoknapatawpha County; García Márquez for her flirtations with magical realism. But so strange are Erdrich’s narrative rhythms, and so bonded is her language to its subject matter, that it seems just as accurate to call hers a genre of one.

  When the workshop was over, Erdrich drove us back to Fargo for walleye cakes at the Hotel Donaldson, and then to visit her parents, who still live in the modest house in Wahpeton where Erdrich grew up. The next day, while Erdrich attended a wedding in Flandreau, South Dakota, her sister took me the remaining two hundred miles to Minneapolis, where, three days later, Erdrich and I reconvened at her bookstore and Native American arts shop, Birchbark Books. Here, Erdrich’s eldest daughter, Persia, decides which children’s books to stock. Taped to most of the shelves are detailed recommendations handwritten by Erdrich herself. An upside-down canoe hangs from the ceiling, suspended between a birchbark reading loft and a Roman Catholic confessional decorated with sweetgrass rosaries. We linger at the store, but not until we make the long walk to Erdrich’s house do we finally sit down on the back porch and turn the tape recorder on.

  Erdrich was wearing her driving clothes: jeans, sandals, and an untucked button-down shirt. A Belgian shepherd named Maki dozed at our feet, and Erdrich’s youngest daughter came out a couple of times—once to ask whether we wanted Play-Doh ice-cream cones, later to report that a Mr. Sparky was on the phone. Then a neighboring buzz saw started up, and we moved inside: up to a small attic room pleasantly cluttered with photographs, artifacts, and many more Catholic and Ojibwe totems, including moccasins, shells, bells, dice, bitterroot, a bone breastplate, an abalone shell for burning sage, a turtle stool, a Huichol mask with a scorpion across its mouth and a double-headed eagle on its brow, and a small army of Virgin statuettes. Crowded into a bookshelf beside a worn armchair in the center of the room are the hardbound spiral notebooks in which, in a deeply slanted longhand, Erdrich still writes most of her books—sitting in the chair with a wooden board laid across its arms as a desk.