Original Fire

  Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

  Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.

  Boxcars stumbling north in dreams

  don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.

  The rails, old lacerations that we love,

  shoot parallel across the face and break

  just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars

  you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.

  The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark

  less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards

  as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts

  to be here, cold in regulation clothes.

  We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun

  to take us back. His car is dumb and warm.

  The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums

  like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts

  of ancient punishments lead back and forth.

  All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,

  the color you would think shame was. We scrub

  the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work.

  Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs

  and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear

  a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark

  face before it hardened, pale, remembering

  delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.

  Dear John Wayne

  August and the drive-in picture is packed.

  We lounge on the hood of the Pontiac

  surrounded by the slow-burning spirals they sell

  at the window, to vanquish the hordes of mosquitoes.

  Nothing works. They break through the smoke screen for blood.

  Always the lookout spots the Indians first,

  spread north to south, barring progress.

  The Sioux or some other Plains bunch

  in spectacular columns, ICBM missiles,

  feathers bristling in the meaningful sunset.

  The drum breaks. There will be no parlance.

  Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves

  swarming down on the settlers

  who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds

  into the history that brought us all here

  together: this wide screen beneath the sign of the bear.

  The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye

  that the crowd cheers. His face moves over us,

  a thick cloud of vengeance, pitted

  like the land that was once flesh. Each rut,

  each scar makes a promise: It is

  not over, this fight, not as long as you resist.

  Everything we see belongs to us.

  A few laughing Indians fall over the hood

  slipping in the hot spilled butter.

  The eye sees a lot, John, but the heart is so blind.

  Death makes us owners of nothing.

  He smiles, a horizon of teeth

  the credits reel over, and then the white fields

  again blowing in the true-to-life dark.

  The dark films over everything.

  We get into the car

  scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small

  as people are when the movie is done.

  We are back in our skins.

  How can we help but keep hearing his voice,

  the flip side of the sound track, still playing:

  Come on, boys, we got them

  where we want them, drunk, running.

  They’ll give us what we want, what we need.

  Even his disease was the idea of taking everything.

  Those cells, burning, doubling, splitting out of their skins.

  Manitoulin Ghost

  Once there was a girl who died in a fire in this house, here on Bidwell road. Now she keeps coming back, trying to hitch a ride out of here. Watch out for her at night and do not stop.

  —Mary Lou Fox

  Each night she waits by the road

  in a thin, white dress

  embroidered with fire.

  It has been twenty years

  since her house surged and burst in the dark trees.

  Still, nobody goes there.

  The heat charred the branches

  of the apple trees,

  but nothing can kill that wood.

  She will climb into your car

  but not say where she is going

  and you shouldn’t ask.

  Nor should you try to comb the blackened nest of hair

  or press the agates of tears

  back into her eyes.

  First the orchard bowed low and complained

  of the unpicked fruit,

  then the branches cracked apart and fell.

  The windfalls sweetened to wine

  beneath the ruined arms and snow.

  Each spring now, in the grass, buds form on the tattered wood.

  The child, the child, why is she so persistent

  in her need? Is it so terrible

  to be alone when the cold white blossoms

  come to life and burn?

  Three Sisters

  One sister wore the eyes of an old man

  around her neck.

  Scratched porcelain

  washed down

  with the hot lye of his breath.

  One sister rode love

  like a ship in light wind.

  The sails of her body

  unfurled at a touch.

  No man could deny her

  safe passage, safe harbor.

  The youngest was shut like a bell.

  The white thorns of silence

  pricked in each bush

  where she walked,

  and the grass stopped growing where she stood.

  One year the three sisters came out of their rooms,

  swaying like the hot roses

  that papered their walls.

  They walked, full grown, into the heart of our town.

  Young men broke their eyes

  against their eyes of stone,

  and singed their shy tongues

  on the stunned flames of their mouths.

  It was in late August in the long year of drought.

  The pool halls were winnowed

  and three men drew lots

  to marry the sisters, all six in a great house.

  On the night of the wedding

  the wind rose on a glass stem.

  The trees bowed. The clouds knocked.

  We tethered our dogs.

  Some swore they saw a hoop

  of lightning dance down in their yard.

  We felt the weight toward dawn

  of lead sinkers in our bones,

  walked out, and caught the first, fast drops on our tongues.

  The Lefavor Girls

  All autumn, black plums

  split and dropped from the boughs.

  We gathered the sweetness

  and sealed it in jars,

  loading the cupboards and cellar.

  At night we went under the bedclothes, laden

  beyond what the arms were meant to carry alone,

  and we dreamed that with our shirts off

  in the quarry, the cool water

  came under to bear us away.

  That season our sleep grew around us

  as if from the walls

  a dense snow fell and formed

  other bodies, and the voices

  of men who melted into us,

  and children who drifted, lost, looking for home.

  After the long rains, the land gone bare,

  we walked out again to the windbreaks.

  White crown of the plum trees

  were filling the purple throats of the iris.

  We lay in the grass,

  the bees drinking in tongues,

  and already the brittle hum of the locust

  in the red wheat, growing.

  Again, the year come ful
l circle, the men

  came knocking in the fields,

  headfuls of blackened seeds,

  and the husking, scorched mountains of sunflowers.

  We went closed, still golden, among the harvesters.

  Shifting the load from arm to arm,

  they drove us into town.

  We shook out our dresses and hair, oh then

  There was abundance come down

  in the face of the coming year.

  We held ourselves into

  the wind, our bodies

  broke open, and the snow began falling.

  It fell until the world was filled up, and filled again,

  until it rose past all the limits we could have known.

  Walking in the Breakdown Lane

  Wind has stripped

  the young plum trees

  to a thin howl.

  They are planted in squares

  to keep the loose dirt from wandering.

  Everything around me is crying to be gone.

  The fields, the crops humming to be cut and done with.

  Walking in the breakdown lane, margin of gravel,

  between the cut swaths and the road to Fargo,

  I want to stop, to lie down

  in standing wheat or standing water.

  Behind me thunder mounts as trucks of cattle

  roar over, faces pressed to slats for air.

  They go on, they go on without me.

  They pound, pound and bawl,

  until the road closes over them farther on.

  The Red Sleep of Beasts

  On space of about an acre I counted two hundred and twenty of these animals; the banks of the river were covered thus with these animals as far as the eye could reach and in all directions. One may judge now, if it is possible, the richness of these prairies.

  —From a letter by Father Belcourt, a priest who accompanied the Turtle Mountain Michif on one of their last buffalo hunts in the 1840s, in North Dakota Historical Collections, volume 5

  We heard them when they left the hills,

  Low hills where they used to winter and bear their young.

  Blue hills of oak and birch that broke the wind.

  They swung their heavy muzzles, wet with steam,

  And broke their beards of breath to breathe.

  We used to hunt them in our red-wheeled carts.

  Frenchmen gone sauvage, how the women burned

  In scarlet sashes, black wool skirts.

  For miles you heard the ungreased wood

  Groan as the load turned.

  Thunder was the last good hunt.

  Great bales of skins and meat in iron cauldrons

  Boiling through the night. We made our feast

  All night, but still we could not rest.

  We lived headlong, taking what we could

  But left no scraps behind, not like the other

  Hide hunters, hidden on a rise,

  Their long-eyes brought herds one by one

  To earth. They took but tongue, and you could walk

  For miles across the strange hulks.

  We wintered in the hills. Low huts of log

  And trampled dirt, the spaces tamped with mud.

  At night we touched each other in our dreams

  Hearing, on the wind, their slow hooves stumbling

  South, we said at first, the old ones knew

  They would not come again to the low hills.

  We heard them traveling, heard the frozen birches

  Break before their long retreat

  Into the red sleep.

  The Potchikoo Stories

  The Birth of Potchikoo

  You don’t have to believe this, I’m not asking you to. But Potchikoo claims that his father is the sun in heaven that shines down on us all.

  There was a very pretty Chippewa girl working in a field once. She was digging potatoes for a farmer someplace around Pembina when suddenly the wind blew her dress up around her face and wrapped her apron so tightly around her arms that she couldn’t move. She lay helplessly in the dust with her potato sack, this poor girl, and as she lay there she felt the sun shining down very steadily upon her.

  Then she felt something else. You know what. I don’t have to say it. She cried out for her mother.

  This girl’s mother came running and untangled her daughter’s clothes. When she freed the girl, she saw that there were tears in her daughter’s eyes. Bit by bit, the mother coaxed out the story. After the girl told what had happened to her, the mother just shook her head sadly.

  “I don’t know what we can expect now,” she said.

  Well nine months passed and he was born looking just like a potato with tough warty skin and a puckered round shape. All the ladies came to visit the girl and left saying things behind their hands.

  “That’s what she gets for playing loose in the potato fields,” they said.

  But the girl didn’t care what they said after a while because she used to go and stand alone in a secret clearing in the woods and let the sun shine steadily upon her. Sometimes she took her little potato boy. She noticed when the sun shone on him he grew and became a little more human-looking.

  One day the girl fell asleep in the sun with her potato boy next to her. The sun beat down so hard on him that he had an enormous spurt of growth. When the girl woke up, her son was fully grown. He said good-bye to his mother then, and went out to see what was going on in the world.

  Potchikoo Marries

  After he had several adventures, the potato boy took the name Potchikoo and decided to try married life.

  I’ll just see what it’s like for a while, he thought, and then I’ll start wandering again.

  How very inexperienced he was!

  He took the train to Minneapolis to find a wife and as soon as he got off he saw her. She was a beautiful Indian girl standing at the door to a little shop where they sold cigarettes and pipe tobacco. How proud she looked! How peaceful. She was so lovely that she made Potchikoo shy. He could hardly look at her.

  Potchikoo walked into the store and bought some cigarettes. He lit one up and stuck it between the beautiful woman’s lips. Then he stood next to her, still too shy to look at her, until he smelled smoke. He saw that she had somehow caught fire.

  “Oh, I’ll save you!” cried Potchikoo.

  He grabbed his lady love and ran with her to the lake, which was, handily, across the street. He threw her in. At first he was afraid she would drown but soon she floated to the surface and kept floating away from Potchikoo. This made him angry.

  “Trying to run away already!” he shouted.

  He leaped in to catch her. But he had forgotten that he couldn’t swim. So Potchikoo had to hang on to his wooden sweetheart while she drifted slowly all the way across the lake. When they got to the other side of the lake, across from Minneapolis, they were in wilderness. As soon as the wooden girl touched the shore she became alive and jumped up and dragged Potchikoo out of the water.

  “I’ll teach you to shove a cigarette between my lips like that,” she said, beating him with her fists, which were still hard as wood. “Now that you’re my husband you’ll do things my way!”

  That was how Potchikoo met and married Josette. He was married to her all his life. After she made it clear what she expected of her husband, Josette made a little toboggan of cut saplings and tied him upon it. Then she decided she never wanted to see Minneapolis again. She wanted to live in the hills. That is why she dragged Potchikoo all the way back across Minnesota to the Turtle Mountains, where they spent all the years of their wedded bliss.

  How Potchikoo Got Old

  As a young man, Potchikoo sometimes embarrassed his wife by breaking wind during Holy Mass. It was for this reason that Josette whittled him a little plug out of ash wood and told him to put it in that place before he entered Saint Ann’s church.

  Potchikoo did as she asked, and even said a certain charm over the plug so that it would not be forced out, no matter wha
t. Then the two of them entered the church to say their prayers.

  That Sunday, Father Belcourt was giving a special sermon on the ascension of the Lord Christ to heaven. It happened in the twinkling of an eye, he said, with no warning, because Christ was more pure than air. How surprised everyone was to see, as Father Belcourt said this, the evil scoundrel Potchikoo rising from his pew!

  His hands were folded, and his closed eyes and meek face wore a look of utter piety. He didn’t even seem to realize he was rising, he prayed so hard.

  Up and up he floated, still in the kneeling position, until he reached the dark blue vault of the church. He seemed to inflate, too, until he looked larger than life to the people. They were on the verge of believing it a miracle when all of a sudden it happened. Bang! Even with the charm the little ash-wood plug could not contain the wind of Potchikoo. Out it popped, and Potchikoo went buzzing and sputtering around the church the way balloons do when children let go of the ends.

  Holy Mass was canceled for a week so the church could be aired out, but to this day a faint scent still lingers, and Potchikoo, sadly enough, was shriveled by his sudden collapse and flight through the air. For when Josette picked him up to bring home, she found that he was now wrinkled and dry like an old man.

  The Death of Potchikoo

  Once there were three stones sitting in a patch of soft slough mud. Each of these stones had the smooth round shape of a woman’s breast, but no one had ever noticed this—that is, not until Old Man Potchikoo walked through the woods. He was the type who always noticed this kind of thing. As soon as he saw the three stones, Potchikoo sat down on a small bank of grass to enjoy what he saw.