She shook her head as though she couldn’t have heard right, and then gave me a sour but still friendly look, as though my little joke had missed its mark. That was when I should have stopped. But then I tasted the potatoes. They were soft on my tongue, silken with gravy. I couldn’t remember where we kept the potatoes, whether we had potatoes, if potatoes had ever been inside our house, or within my reach, or if they ever existed anywhere on earth.
“Rotten to begin with!” My voice came out a shriek. Jealousy, that spider, sank its fangs in my heart. I jumped up and began accusing Margaret of small things and, when she laughed in contempt, of large and then outrageous things I knew were far beneath her. “And if you think that this stew will quench my fire,” I finished, “you are mistaken. I will definitely kill that greasy duck.”
Margaret calmly rose, took the stew outside, and dumped it. “For the dogs,” she said. “They deserve it more than you.”
I sat down, my face to the wall, trying to contain myself. I hadn’t thought that she would dump the stew, which was, after all, delicious. We so rarely had anything good to eat that her action shocked me back into my senses, as it was meant to. Only by exercising the utmost restraint did I keep myself from rushing outside with my spoon, beating off the dogs, scooping what was left into my mouth before it soaked into the earth. It took more effort yet to keep from expressing my regrets about my hasty words. To apologize to Margaret was to give her a sharper knife to cut me with, and since the whole thrust of my life was to dull her blade, I shut my mouth.
LOVE POWDERS sometimes double back and land upon their maker, which is why an expert is always required in their use. I learned what I know from the greatest of them all, Mirage, who peopled a tribe. The next day, I worked hard on a love medicine, smoked and thought over the ingredients. I had decided to put together the most potent batch I’d ever concocted, and use it. I’d lost all pride and only wanted a secure hold on my love, my Margaret, but something worked against me. Something or some person.
There was a pack of dogs that roamed the reservation, sometimes vicious, sometimes craven, and always starving. One of them was Shesheeb’s dog—the skinniest and saddest of them all. The dogs had gulped the stew. Of course, finding such good pickings, they came the next day for more and hung around watching with careful eyes. I sat on the bench beside the door, my ingredients beside me. As I worked on the medicine, they drew near. I suppose that my grinding up roots and burning off the ends of hairs and wetting and singeing leaves got their juices flowing, quickened their responses, made them pant. I turned away from my work, once, went inside the house to fetch something. When I came back outside again I saw that the leanest, saddest, runtiest-looking little gray dog of them all had leaped onto the stump just before the bench where I’d put the tray of finished medicine. That dog, Shesheeb’s dog, was licking up the powder.
“Awus!” I yelled and chased him off, but he’d been too quick for me. The stuff was gone. The dog had just eaten a batch of love powder stronger than any other I had ever made, and although the loss was hard I couldn’t help wishing that I could tell what just happened to Margaret. She would laugh. The poorest, weakest-looking, scroungiest, ball-headed mutt of them all had had the quickness and cleverness to make his move! I wondered for a moment what would come of it, but soon forgot. I had my own pressing troubles. Margaret. I wanted Margaret. I wanted to make her eye spark. To make her turn toward me like a plant toward sun, a child to the drum. She would be mine, I decided, and started all over with the preparations for the medicine. No dog would get it this time. But I couldn’t rely on medicine alone. I had to make up for the insult I’d delivered with my suspicions about the reasons for that stew. And I tried, but I think I was too close. Or perhaps I was trembling with an old man’s desperation. She was my last love, and the most challenging of all my life.
We were meant to face death together, Margaret and I, for what else is love in old age? On those occasions when our animosity melted and turned golden, I brimmed with such comfort that death lost a portion of its wretched power. I am an elder. Supposedly wise. Supposedly I am resigned to, familiar with, prepared for the end of my life. But the more I know of death, the more I fight death. I am at war, angry at death’s greed for the living. In fact, I’ve vowed to elude death as long as possible, to spite and despise death, along with Margaret. We are alike—tough, slippery, shrewd, unrepentant—though of course she showed a different face to the priest.
Perhaps my hand slipped as I ground up my powder, or my mind was distracted, and I got my proportions disarranged. For even as I was working a new medicine beneath the blade of a knife, and smoking off the ingredients with sage, I felt myself losing control. I felt the rage taking over, the poison, the sorrow over what Shesheeb had done to my sister long ago and what he was intent on doing now. A red fury seized me, heating up the marrow of my bones. I transferred the powder from the table to a twist of cloth. I had never before needed medicine to snag my women. They came to me! This humiliation was his fault, as was the anguish of my sister’s death.
I put down the powder, then stashed it away.
I’d had enough of him, too much for a lifetime, I decided. Before I was forced into the shame of putting a succession of love powders on my old lady, I would go out, hunting duck. I would find Shesheeb and kill him.
Only what method should I use?
I ticked off the most effective as I walked the wood. Poisoning was good, but I’d have to gain his trust, get near him, and that I didn’t think I could stomach. I wasn’t much good with knives— my arms had lost their strength and my grip was weak. I could shoot him, but killing with a gun wasn’t very manly and besides, it was a fast and undeservedly merciful death. I went through them all and wasn’t satisfied with any one of them until I chanced to remember that I had once snared a man—Clarence Morrissey. That snare had been effective, satisfying, cheap. True, I had let the dog live, but I would have no such pity on Shesheeb.
That day, my walk took me into the trading store to buy a good long length of wire for a snare. I put the wire on credit, which both Margaret and I paid up as rarely as possible, in the hope that if we did have to die we would go with a whopping bill. I looped the wire and carried it in my shirt. On the way home, I investigated all the paths I thought Shesheeb might walk, crept close enough to his place, his den, his lair of shame so I could smell the burnt grease of his cooking. It took some time.
I didn’t set my snare the first day, I didn’t set it the second day either. I waited and I thought, crept back to look for tracks and ascertain his habits. I knew that I’d have only one chance. The drop beneath the snare I had used on the Morrissey was made in winter, much easier to dig out from beneath. Much easier to hide. This would be difficult. I finally settled on a slim trail near his house, a straight bit with a bend just beyond. A natural place to look up, and pause, just in case a bear or who knows what might be coming around the corner. And after looking to step ahead freely. To brush through a fringe of leaves. In those leaves, the narrowest part, I would set the wire loop. But first I dug a shallow pan into the ground—here Shesheeb’s toes would dance, touch earth with a tantalizing desperation, twitch, die. My heart flinches in me now that I think of the strict care I took. How I made sure the noose slipped easily, shut lethally, squeezed, cut. How I calculated and removed all that his hands might clutch and made the hole extra wide and deeper than necessary. It was just a good thing I calculated heavy—for his potbelly and his fat head and his duck feet. Fortunate a wind dropped a light branch across my deadfall trap. Oh yes, very lucky!
FOR THREE DAYS , nothing. The sky was bleak and gray. I kept a strict watch and checked often. But maybe Shesheeb’s old bones ached and he’d stayed in the house. Maybe he was making some underhanded medicine of his own, maybe he was just smart. On day four a wind stirred and blew the clouds off. Through the scraps of white the sky blazed out, welcome and blue. I sat down on the little bench I had placed beside the cabin door and let the su
n hit me. The warmth baked my old bones. I smelled the calm freshness of the rain drying off the leaves. I let myself dream, as I do so often now, of the old days and old people. The women gambling beside the lake. The summer gatherings when we picked berries and made our babies. The winter fires and the aadizokaanag, the stories that branched off and looped back and continued in a narrative made to imitate the flowers on a vine. I thought of tracks, joyous, dense, when we camped along the river, and how our tracks were now scattered and few. I relaxed against the sun-soaked wood of the cabin’s southern wall. I lived in my thoughts. I remembered my sister’s gentle and indulgent laugh—she was never harsh—and I felt the light touch of her fingers on my hair. A sound penetrated my fog of memory, a high-pitched and prolonged squeak not unlike the death yell of a rabbit.
I jumped up, made my way into the woods. The sound wasn’t human, but I didn’t expect Shesheeb to die with dignity. Indeed, I’d made as certain as I could that he’d die in shame. As I ran through the woods, or at least hobbled fast as my old bones would take me, the squeal increased its penetrating intensity. The pitch grew higher, wilder, shaking me to the core, even though I’ve hunted all my life, and fought, and seen men die in difficult ways. It was not a man, however, whose death rang through the leaves. Rounding the corner, I looked and skidded to a halt in wild shock, for it was Margaret I’d snared.
She strained on perfect tiptoe, like a zhaaginaash ballerina dancer, on the flimsy branch that had fallen across the shallow square that I had carved in the path. Her hands were up around her neck attempting to release the tightening wire. Her face was dark red. When she saw me she went silent. For the first time, ever, I had her complete attention. Even in my horror I was somehow gratified, and of course I was on fire to save her. She looked at me with such appeal and in such a state of frantic desperation that I would have done anything, changed places with her if I could. I threw myself down, and crept forward. Terrified to lose her balance, she froze. I edged closer until I was crouched nearly underneath her. She understood my plan and stepped onto my back. Though it might break me, I intended to rise. I marshaled every bit of my strength and lifted her enough so the wire loosened and she was able to pull it over her head. Once she was free, she fell, retching and gasping, beside me in the ditch.
Now that I had saved her, now that she was assured of life, I had only a few moments in which to work on her logic. Because I had included young Nector in plotting and executing my long-ago revenge on the Morrissey, I’d never told Margaret that I was the one who’d set the snare. I positively didn’t want her to connect me with the snare now. Not that I really wanted to lie. I’d tell her later, I decided, when the memory of her experience had dulled. For now, I could see no harm in assigning blame where it would work to my advantage. Therefore, as I scrambled for my walking stick, I cried out, “Shesheeb! Can’t he stick to bad medicine? Must he also set snares all around his house?” Then I gasped, and wheezed, pounded the earth, and vowed I would tear into him right away, crack his skull with my diamond willow stick, beat him senseless for trying to snare my wife.
“Your wife?” said Margaret, rubbing her neck, tough-minded in spite of her near death. “Even now I am holding out for a church wedding, old man, so we’ll get to that ‘wife’ part later. For now, quiet down. Akiwenzii, I have had a vision.” Margaret dragged me to her, grasped my jacket, spoke face-to-face in an earnest and serious voice. “Bizindan. Listen to me, Nanapush.”
As we walked back together, dragging ourselves home through the woods, both weak and giddy with relief, Margaret told me the substance of her revelation. Many times we had to stop, for she spoke with great force, breathing hard. What she’d seen was
no less than a spirit gift, a revelation that could change her life and mine, too. I didn’t know whether to be horrified or proud that I had caused it, I only knew I should for once be quiet as she spoke.
“As the dark closed in around me, as I choked, as I was near death,” Margaret said, “here is what happened, old man. I saw my great-grandmother from the old days. You know the one. They used to call the old lady Medicine Dress. She came to me, looking different from when she died. In my vision she was young and strong. She wore her dress, the medicine dress that she was known for. That dress was powerful. That dress was known for its healing powers. And then she told me its secret, which she’d never told a living person. That secret had died with her but she was giving it to me now, she said, in order to save my life. Here is what she told me. Nothing upon that dress was ever touched by a human, much less a chimookomaan. It was sewn for her by the spirits, she said. Then she told me I must sew my own dress, just like it. Since she couldn’t get the spirits to do the whole thing, I had to follow the other rules she would set out. She said once I had made this dress, I would have great power. In this dress, I could heal anyone. I’d see things when I wore this dress. I’d know things beyond the reach of my mind. After she told this to me, blackness closed around my eyes. I could see no longer. I experienced great sorrow, believing that I would die before I could create this healing dress. I looked up into the sky, and there I saw a circle of women. I heard them dancing— their soft footsteps slapping the earth. I was pierced by the wish to live, opened my eyes, and then saw you! Old man, you have saved me to outfit this vision, to make myself the medicine dress!”
Margaret’s eyes widened and then softened to a deep maple color, and her gaze stuck to me, charming me close. “Dear old man,” she said softly now. “You saved my life and made it possible to sew my vision. Let me show you my thanks.”
As we walked down the path toward our cabin, she clasped my hand in hers and I decided there was no reason at all for her ever, ever, to know I’d set the snare.
TEN
If She Will Have Me Now
Polly Elizabeth
I FOUND THAT I liked living by my own laws, not Miss Hammond’s, and by my own law’s devising I saw at last that I should step out of place and speak to Mauser about the state that his household had fallen into since the birth of his son. With Testor in charge and Fleur indifferent to overseeing expenditures, what appeared at table was but a fraction of what was cooked and consumed. The monthly butcher’s bill was what one might expect for an outgoing steamship—to stock it for a transatlantic crossing. Veal chops might appear at dinner, perfectly cooked, but the rest of the calf from ear to split hoof was devoured by Testor’s family and by friends of the family and by the whole neighborhood, I wouldn’t be surprised. I hated to turn tattle on the woman, but after all, I had given her fair warning where my loyalties lay.
So that was how I made myself essentials again, even as the boy grew past the bounds of my care. It happened suddenly, with a bewildering rush, in fact. He seemed to enlarge by the hour, by the day. He burst from his clothes and could not fit into our laps. Sly hungers developed in him. I had to lock the cabinet where our new cook kept the sugar and all sweets, yet one night he pried into it with a butcher knife. He’d pour the contents of a sugar bowl straight down his throat. Weep wretchedly on those rare times he was denied. He began to frighten me. He was as big as some boy twice his age. Then suddenly he stopped growing upward and grew outward, became very plump. It was all we could do to contain him, and then we couldn’t contain him. Where before he had run the household on the whim of his charms, now he ran it by the strange dictates of his temperament.
Some days, I woke to the sound I began to dread, a rhythmical creak. A certain floorboard gave persistently in the corner of his bedroom where he liked to rock, sitting on the floor, his fist in his mouth. He stared at nothing then. He wouldn’t know me when I came in or be stopped or soothed out of his gross repetition by any means. Even Fleur couldn’t pull him from his trance, not that she tried. In fact, at those times, she would sit with him. Simply sit. At first I thought it a mistake—she would encourage his vacancies. But upon observing them both I revised my opinion. For I believe by the rapt expression on her face and the lightest movement of her lips and the
far focus of her eyes that she was praying.
THE BOY ’S CONDITION was diagnosed by Dr. Fulmer, at last, as the result of the father’s spermatozoal frustration too hastily released. The doctor himself had cautioned Mauser that he should forbear from procreative attempts for at least a year, and that he should cleanse his system by a regimen of sexual emissions and releases that would come to no fruition, or human result. Fulmer pronounced the boy a tragical mistake, the effect of an aberrant spermatozoa deformed by the long practice of Karezza. There it was again! The vile practice! How I wept to find that by a twisted path my own reading and advice was the source of such pain in the outcome. Were we to know, to anticipate, how grave an implication might arrive from the slightest of our actions, I suppose we would not act at all. Still, what occurred seems unholy, ungodly, and the fact that I saw it develop as a retribution upon the meekness of a child, a small boy quickly growing, hopelessly, oh, monstrous, took away my faith. I simply don’t have it anymore. Mauser ran to the church to beg forgiveness. Fleur prayed to what god or spirit she knew. But I rejected any deity who would so construct nature to fail. In fact, I cried shame. Shame on God! And I was not afraid to say it.
When the boy spun in circles for hours at a time. When his speech came out sideways. When his rage for sweet things overwhelmed us and especially at those times he went utterly tranced, void, blank, I made a calm promise to the deity that I should slap Him should we ever meet.
“So You’d best send me to the devil,” I said at night, instead of uttering my usual prayer, “for I’ll take You to task if You admit me to heaven. I’ll try my very best to exact an explanation. I’d like one. I won’t stop asking. Why did You do this? Why did You do this to a child?”
REINSTATED WITH the household, I had moved in my little Diablo, the Pomeranian who treated me with such contempt. Now I decided that I should train it to revise its attitude toward me and tried to withhold food, but that was impossible. The beast would starve before it would show affection. And I always thought dogs were incapable of turning face against one. So much for “merely” canine affection! I might have believed that I was too arduous a person to love, except that the boy had shown me different. He had changed my expectation and unlike Mauser I not only craved but understood that some return on my feelings should be mine.