The Antelope Wife Read online

  The Hidden Knot

  A woman used to deception knows how to hide her stitches. The twins’ beadwork was tight and true. No visible beginning or end to the design. Impossible to find the starting knot, the final tie. Unseeable the place where the needle went in or out. Their maple leaf or prairie rose or vines twisting skeletal on black velvet were done with invisible thread. They used those threads on Augustus. He never saw the stitch work that kept him sewed to their side. He never saw the fabric upon which their passion was marked out in chalk. Or the inlay, one bead to the next, the remarkable interpenetration of colors.

  There was one secret way to tell the twins apart. Victoria had pity on Augustus one day and told him to check the whirlwinds at the crown of their heads. One swirled to the left, the other swirled to the right.

  Augustus had fallen in love with the enigma of duplication, and the hold had deepened. The confusion of sameness between the twins made him tremble like an animal caught in a field of tension. Sitting at the table, he’d feel the current of their likeness. Things even they did not notice. Mary pricked herself. Zosie muttered owey! Zosie started a legging and Mary, without even trying to copy, constructed another of an identical design. They got hungry at exactly the same time. Started humming one tune suddenly, no sign having passed between them.

  When making love, there was barely anything one did differently from the other. He could tell them apart only with the greatest difficulty, even in their nakedness beneath his hands, but this exploration, rather than daunting, excited him. He could always make certain which was which by touching the whirlwinds at the crowns of their heads—that is, until suddenly it seemed they started combing their hair in new ways. This way, that. Messing with his one sure proof.

  After they messed up the hair on their whirlwinds, he searched and searched for another way to identify them. Soon one of them would show her pregnancy. He had to know which one or he would be lost. For a time, as they beaded, he surreptitiously examined their fingers. Curled around the needles, each nail was just that slightest bit different from the next. He marked out the degree of growth, fixed in his mind a nick or a tatter.

  He was driven to noticing the tiniest things. Became a devotee of pricks and scratches. Sometimes, in his desperation, he tried placing a mark on one of them himself.

  You could say he started what happened next.

  The accident occurred as a stroke of luck. Augustus knocked a hot fry pan over and grease splattered Zosie’s wrist. Mary was so upset that she gasped out Zosie’s name. For several weeks Augustus had a certain sign of Zosie’s identity and this quieted him. He even gained a few pounds, for anxiety had thinned him terribly. But Zosie’s scar was fading. Just before it disappeared, he tipped the hot fry pan over once again, this time onto Mary, whose painfully burned foot had to be bandaged and unbandaged twice a day. Yet she, too, recovered and her skin stayed unmarred.

  How to leave a more permanent mark? He took a knife one day. Cutting a rope, he sliced through the air and nearly took off the tip of Mary’s right ear. She ducked in time, but it gave him an idea and that night when Zosie came to him he worked himself into a heat and climaxed with the lobe of her ear between his teeth.

  FOR THE REST of the pregnancy, he slept alone. The twins both feared he had gone wiindigoo. The child was born, but even Victoria was confused. The baby had two whorls of hair, clockwise, counterclockwise, on the crown of its head.

  “An unusual situation,” said Augustus, holding his little daughter, who clutched his finger and stared up at him in focused intensity. “I am your father, but we may never know the exact identity of your mother. Even if one tells us, she may be lying. I give up.”

  Augustus accepted that he was lost. That his predicament was insoluble now. Time was marked both ways on the crown of his daughter’s head. Time was moving forward with the clock, time was moving backward, against the clock. Time had judged his father. But perhaps time does not recognize the particulars of human identity, thought Augustus, and keeps track only of the magnitude of crime. If there were those yet living affected by his father’s murder of the old woman, then it stood to reason that punishment would also be carried out upon his father’s descendant.

  I am the one, Augustus concluded. The one who will answer.

  Chapter 3

  Answers

  WHEN SCRANTON ROY had explained his cracker tin dilemma so long ago, one of the twins had answered, You’ve come to the right place. Augustus thought the answer was a typically quick-witted response to the jingle of money. But he was wrong. That answer was the truth. Over time, he discovered that the women he loved were great-nieces of the old woman eagerly slaughtered by his father. The old woman who died had been high-spirited, a tease, always ready to laugh. She had suffered three days before she died of the wound. Raving, she had cried out exactly what was carved into Scranton’s arm. Augustus covered his face and breathed deeply when he learned what it meant. He also learned the name Blue Prairie Woman and understood that she was the mother of the women he loved.

  Zosie and Mary were the twins created of immoderation in the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. Perhaps, as they owed their origins to that haunting and ironic laughter, they tended to take their jokes too far. Augustus thought so. But just as he finally accepted that he would never tell one from the other, his child, their child, a daughter he named Peace, began to speak. She spoke Ojibwe, but eventually Augustus came to the exciting conclusion that she consistently called Zosie Nimaamaa, and Mary Inninoshenh. My mother and my auntie.

  The spell was broken. Augustus was astonished he’d ever thought them so exactly alike. One had a slightly crooked nose! The other’s eyes were wider apart. Mary even had a tiny permanent dimple in her chin. This entire realization presented a new problem.

  Knowing that Zosie was the mother of his child, he felt he should marry her correctly in the eyes of the law and the state of Minnesota. And if he married Zosie, then he could not, of course, sleep with Mary. He watched them with grief in his heart. They had sewn themselves new wash dresses out of the lengths of green flowered fabric he’d given them. They were combing out their long, wet, dark masses of hair. Sometimes they wore simple braids; other times pinned up their hair in charmingly untidy arrangements. He loved their smooth skin, handsome faces, their fine thin noses, and even their lips, cruel but perfectly formed. Their teeth were very white and sharp. Both were vain about their smiles and showed them off broadly when he bought them fancy boar-bristle toothbrushes and whitening tooth powder. He had softened them with his attention, he thought. For they treated Peace with utmost tenderness. He didn’t want to give either one of them up. Not only that, but it would cause such unthinkable discord.

  So Augustus spent the rest of his life pretending that he could not distinguish between them, even though as they grew older they also grew even more unlike. When Mary bore him a son, Augustus rejoiced and named him Charles. When Zosie bore him another son he rejoiced and tried to name the baby Arthur, but nobody would call the willful, cheerful ball of boy Arthur. They called him Booch. The last son came along the same year Old Shawano passed over to the spirit world, so that baby was named Shawano and the family was complete.

  The Train Station

  Peace, Charlie, Booch, and Shawano were all as fine-looking as their mothers, tall with clear features and thoughtful eyes. They were each a year or two apart in age and played together in isolation. The allotment land fiercely protected by Shawano, Victoria, the twins, and Augustus was prime lakeshore property. By the time Peace was five years old, all the land around them was lumbered to stumps. By the time Charlie was five, the lakeshore was filled with white people’s cabins. By the time Booch and young Shawano were five, the Indian agent came while Augustus was at work and their mothers out picking medicines. Only old Victoria was there.

  The agent, Hiram Talp, believed that he was doing the best for all concerned except the children. He had received a letter from a government boarding-school superint
endent informing him that in order to meet a certain quota at his school, he was willing to pay Talp good money for his assistance in persuading students from his reservation to attend. Talp collected the children by assuring Victoria that he was going to show them the newly built train station. It was the talk of the town.

  At the train station, the agent showed Victoria the fancy ladies’ restroom. He encouraged her to step inside. When she did, he locked the door. Then he tried to herd the children onto the train. When Peace saw that he’d locked their grandmother in the bathroom she took Charlie’s hand and they backed slowly away from the agent. Booch and Shawano slipped behind their sister and brother. This was the way they had been taught to treat a bear. They backed toward the ladies’ restroom door, which had a frosted glass window. A blurred version of their grandmother jumped up and down behind the window, screaming in an eerie tremolo. People gathered. Sound of the commotion reached the bank. Augustus walked across the street toward the familiar tone of distress. The children were silent. Victoria tore a piece of framing from a mirror and began to beat at the window. Still, Hiram Talp persisted, talking soothingly to the children and explaining the situation to the people who surrounded the scene. He tried to take Peace’s hand and she bit him. He tried to take Charlie’s hand and she kicked him hard enough to make him double over. When Talp staggered up she put a finger in his eye. She was not her mothers’ daughter for nothing.

  Augustus waded into the shocked little crowd surrounding Talp, who had doubled over in pain again. The people murmured warily at Peace, who did not look fierce at all in her neat blue dress, trimmed with a yellow collar, cuffs, and even a yellow ruffle. It was made by the screaming grandma in the frosted window, and lent to all of the children an air of respectability even though, well, they were clearly Indians.

  Augustus registered the crowd’s comments without surprise. Once they saw that the children belonged to him, the people hushed.

  “Give me the key,” said Augustus to the stationmaster, who pointed mutely at the agent. Augustus said to Hiram, again, “The key.” A woman looked at Hiram’s eye and declared he deserved to be blinded. Everyone was now on the children’s side. Hiram pointed at his shirt pocket. Augustus removed the key and released Victoria.

  As the children and their grandmother walked away with Augustus, the Indian agent called out, warning everyone that the children would now grow up to be illiterate and violent drunks. Augustus stopped in the door of the train station.

  “Hiram Talp,” he called, “what is six plus its additive inverse?”

  Hiram glowered out of one eye. His hand was still clapped over the other.

  “Zero,” said Peace.

  “What is the sum of 20,862, 39, 459, 66, and 7,088?” asked Augustus. He saw the answer spiral from soft yellow to a scorched orange, but Peace saw the sum as violently green. As she answered, they kept walking, adding and subtracting numbers as they went along. It was a game they played. Augustus looked at his daughter and noticed that the freckles just beneath her skin stood out like flecks of iron.

  The Storyteller

  After what Old Shawano and Victoria had told him about their days in boarding school, Augustus was determined to educate his children at home. He understood that the loneliness the elders had suffered in those schools remained forever within them unsolved. In the evenings, by kerosene lantern light, the children worked regularly at their lessons. During the days, their mothers educated their children in all that was Ojibwe, all that they needed to survive. In this way, the family escaped many of the harms around them. They kept to themselves, rarely walked into town. They spent their time together and made themselves mute around others so as not to draw unnecessary attention. Augustus was anxious also to preserve his privacy from any who might guess that he was not legally married to either one of the women he lived with. He feared that his standing at the bank would suffer. But since no white people ever visited, nobody really understood that Mary and Zosie were different people. The two of them never appeared in the town together.

  Occasionally, people did try to visit them. Old Shawano had placed his tar-paper house with a view to the small winding road that led up to it. Augustus had added a small white frame house to the same site, and so the family often had time to vanish before a visitor arrived to stand before their silent door. For a few people, though, the family stayed put. One visitor was a bachelor named Asin, Stone, and another was Bagakaapi, Sees Clear. They came originally to visit Old Shawano, but continued even after he entered the spirit world. They came for the remarkable bannocks and jellies that Victoria set before them, and they came because the children were curious and asked them questions, which they were only too happy to answer.

  Questions

  “What were we?” asked Charles. “Before this?”

  He looked down at his overalls and bare feet. Asin knew just what the boy was asking. It was summer. They sat behind the house, which did not face the lake the way white people’s houses did, but sat sideways to catch the calmer breeze and protection of the woods. There was a low bluff at the side of the lake and a path that led through it to a broad velvety beach, which today was hot and windy. The women had cut leafy poles to make a cooling arbor and an outdoor kitchen. Augustus had pegged together a plank table. The children could hear the waves from where they sat, and the searching cries of gulls.

  Zosie paddled out to an island and gathered two baskets of gull eggs. Now the eggs were boiling gently in a black iron kettle hung from a tripod on an iron hook. Zosie kept the fire low and even. Mary told her that the gulls would peck her eyes out when she was dead. Zosie shrugged and poured cups of tea.

  Asin repeated the question, with a nod significant of its complexity. Then he cried out.

  “What were we? We were warriors! The women too!”

  Zosie smiled. Asin went on. “We hunted and trapped for the fur companies. However, we understood they were trapping us the way we trapped the animals. They were using their goods as bait. They used their rum too. Rum cut with pepper, water, tobacco. One swig would make you crazy. We knew most of those traders were against us at heart, but of course we needed more territory to hunt animals. We fought our way out here from the east and encountered the powerful Bwaanag. We fought them hard and never would have beat them except the whites attacked them, too, from all sides. They had good warriors, those Bwaanag. We made a mistake not to band up with them to extinct the whiteman. Now like us they are forced to hide their eagle feathers. And it is no use to make any war parties against the Bwaanag for land, because the now the whiteman has our land and their land too.”

  Asin slapped at the cloth of his frayed pants. He looked down at his knees. “You know what we call these trousers? Giboodiyegwaazonag. Sewed up the butt. Sewed up the butt! We had freedom once!”

  “Freedom of the butt?” asked Booch, and the children rolled with laughter, the women too. Asin and Bagakaapi laughed, repeated Booch’s question, then variations of the question, and laughed again until they laughed all afternoon and it was time to go.

  Sugar Point

  Asin showed his ten fingers twice and told the boys only that long ago their people, the Anishinaabe, had turned back a horde of soldiers. Nobody intended for the fight to get so out of hand. But it had! It had! Asin twisted his fingers together. How he wished he were a Pillager!

  Those warriors of the Pillager hid among the trees when the soldiers marched in to take their leaders prisoner.

  Nobody intended it to start, they say. A boy stacked their rifles. One went off!

  Asin made an explosive sound and raised an imaginary Winchester. He shot and shot, pulling back at each recoil.

  One soldier down, another two. A wound to their head man and then another. He is killed. We don’t attack them—just kill the ones who stick their heads up. We could have killed them all! Asin’s face worked. We could have killed them all. But because we showed our power, they brought us food and blankets. They made us more promises. We were not pun
ished because they knew we were in the right. On that day, the only day we shot the whiteman, we won. We should do it again.

  Warriors

  The boys did every chore after that as warriors. If they were sent out to net fish, they worked as army scouts. The fish were the enemy. They netted and killed as many of the warrior fish as they could. The boys carried on their victory celebration far out on the lake, then came to shore and gutted all their enemies and put them up on drying racks.

  They snared rabbits, hunted muskrats, gophers, any animal, with ferocity of purpose. They pestered Asin and Bagakaapi about warrior ways, learned that a war party was signaled to assemble by a deadly symbolic red glove. They carefully sewed one of tanned deerhide, dyed it with mashed cranberries, stuffed it with sage and stolen pipe tobacco. They kept it hidden in their blankets. Each brother kept the red glove until he wanted to declare a war party, then it was sent to the others in turn and the time was set for them to convene. Sometimes they attacked fallen timber, reduced their enemy to stove lengths and kindling. Surprised, their mothers praised them. They gloated proudly. Peace, the only one of the children who had ever actually waged war on a whiteman, thought her brothers were ridiculous.

  Peace Roy

  She had authority, though she was shy. Her eyes quickened with understanding, and she moved with deliberation. She was meticulous. Her smile flashed ironically, her eyebrows lifted in amusement, but she rarely spoke. She was guarded because, like her father, she was emotional. She was precious because she was the only daughter. Her hands liked to stack, smooth, fold, and slice. Her brain counted everything her hands touched. Again, like her father. Her grandmother and namesake had given Peace a few of her freckles. A shade darker than her skin, they dusted her nose and cheekbones. They were truly visible only when she was angry or upset. When she laughed, as she often did at the absurd things her brothers did, her laugh was soft and breathy. Her brothers felt like they were being tickled with a brushy wand of grass.