The Night Watchman Page 4

  And the babies, oh the babies were always up to something. One was blubbering lightly in sleep and one was trying to get his chubby foot into his mouth.

  Rose had a kettle of hot water ready on the stove. She gestured at the basin. He poured a measure into the bowl, and she added a dipperful of cold from the water can. After Thomas washed, he whisked up lather in his copper shaving mug, dabbed the foam on his upper lip. The small square mirror in its carved wooden frame belonged to Rose. It was made of good thick glass, well silvered. She had brought it with her when they married. Thomas had about forty whiskers on his face. He stropped his razor, elaborately shaved them off. Then he stripped to his waist and used a cloth to wipe himself clean. He took the cloth and bowl into the bedroom to complete the job.

  Rose’s mother was dozing on a chair beside the washing table. Noko snored lightly, head bowed. Her fragile old skull was bound in a brown head scarf, tiny shell disks hung from the drooping petals of her earlobes. Her gnarled hands rested in her lap. She twitched, dreaming. Then her head jerked up, her lips pulled back, and she hissed like a cat.

  “What is it, Momma?”

  “Gardipee! He’s at it again!”

  “Gawiin, it’s okay, that was a long time ago,” said Rose.

  “He’s right there,” she said. “He busted in again!”

  “No, Momma. That’s Thomas.”

  The old woman glared suspiciously.

  “That man’s old. Thomas is a young man,” she said.

  Rose put her hand over her mouth to hide her laugh.

  “What, Noko, don’t you think I’m young anymore?” Thomas grinned.

  “I’m not a fool, akiwenzi. You’re not Thomas.”

  The old woman said this with firm indignation, and slowly folded her skinny arms. She remained like that, watching every move Thomas made. He sat down at the table.

  “What are you here for?” She narrowed her eyes as he ate the plate of fried mush Rose put in front of him. “Are you after my daughter?”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “Noko, I’m Thomas. I got old. I couldn’t help it.”

  “Rose is old too.” Noko widened her eyes and looked helplessly at her daughter, whose hair was nearly all gray.

  “Rose is old. Rose is old,” said Noko, in a wondering voice.

  “You’re old too,” said Rose, irritated.

  “Maybe,” said Noko, sneaking a crafty look at Thomas. “You gonna take me back home? I’m damn sick of this place.”

  “Stop talking like that to him,” Rose cried out.

  It was difficult for her when Noko became too estranged from this life. She yelled, as if that would jolt Noko back into the reality they’d once shared. Now, overcome, Rose picked up an armload of laundry and rushed out to the shed, where her wringer washer was set up. Thomas heard the gurgle of the last of the water and remembered how she held the washing back so he could sleep.The rain barrel was empty. He’d better hop to and fill the cans at the well by the lake. He touched Noko’s hand and said, “You’re tired. Can I walk you over to your bed, so you can sleep?”

  “I can’t get out of my chair.”

  “I’ll help you up,” said Thomas.

  “I’m stuck.”

  Thomas looked down and saw that Noko’s long thick white hair had wrapped around the doorknob. Sharlo loved to comb her grandmother’s hair and had left it loose.

  “Come here, Sharlo,” he called, and together they unwrapped the hair.

  “Oh, Noko,” said Sharlo. “I tangled up your hair!”

  “Don’t you worry, my girl,” said the old woman, stroking Sharlo’s face. “Nothing you can do could hurt me.”

  But when Sharlo went outside to get her mother, Noko despaired again and tried to surge out of the chair. Thomas caught her and held her hand.

  “Stay still, you could fall and hurt yourself.”

  “I wish I would,” said Noko. “I want to die.”

  “No you don’t,” said Thomas.

  She glowered at him.

  “You raised my sweetheart,” said Thomas. “You did a good job.”

  “Tell that to Thomas,” Noko said. “He don’t believe it.”

  Thomas reached around the chair and helped Noko to her feet. She collapsed. He pulled her up and they tottered stiffly to the bed. Rose had the sheets off. She was washing them today. Noko fell onto the bare mattress face-first. Thomas rolled her over and lifted her legs onto the bed. He arranged her there, stocking feet sticking straight up.

  “You can’t put her on our mattress like that,” said Rose, standing in the door. Her voice sounded almost tearful. “She needs a soft pad underneath. The mattress buttons will give her bruises. Her skin takes bruises so easy now. We should buy her a fancy mattress pad for her little cot.”

  “With what money?”

  “Your car money.”

  Thomas stood quietly under the raking heat of anger. It was coming off her in jagged waves. But then, as he stood there, he could feel it ease and the Rose with the funny little smile came back. She caught her breath and laughed.

  “Oh, Momma, look at you. Little feet sticking straight up.”

  Rose and Thomas eased a folded blanket underneath the old woman. It was the only thing they could think of to do and now Noko was slowly crossing the river of sleep, floating away from them on her sinking raft.

  * * *

  Thomas laid down an old canvas in the trunk of his car. On weekends, he used the team and wagon to haul water for drinking. For bathing and cleaning they had the rain barrels. In winter they melted snow. He didn’t have time to hitch up now. He was very careful. A spill in the trunk could freeze all winter and then, in summer, mildew. Although his caution meant an extra trip, he never hauled cans in the backseat. Of course Wade rode along with him. Smart, like all of his children, he had skipped grades. He was now in classes with boys who had got their growth.

  “I went up against that ol’ Albert, Daddy, gave him the one-two.”

  “No fighting.”

  “Then I gave him the ol’ three-four.”

  “Wade?”

  “Four words where three will do.”

  “That’s my boy. Always better to talk your way out of a fight.”

  “Running, too, you said running.”

  “Honorable running.”

  “I don’t wanta run, though. Get them callin’ me yellow-baby.”

  “You don’t have to prove yourself. I don’t want you to fight, but if you did, you’d be Golden Gloves material, like Wood Mountain.”

  “He has a fight on the Bottineau card next Saturday. Fighting Joe Wobble.”

  “Joe Wobleszynski! That’s my night off. I’ll take you kids. Take Mama too, if she’ll go.”

  Wade nodded in delight and put his dukes up. They filled the water cans. Bought the baking powder, sugar, oats, and tea on Rose’s list. Then they went home and Thomas lifted potatoes. He was fast and Wade scrambled to bag them. They raced each other until dark.

  Water Earth

  Rubbing the back of her aching neck, Patrice walked slowly down the grass road. She knew her mother’s people would be there, camped outside. There they were. A couple of frayed canvas tents, lean-to shelters streaked with dried mud. A cooking fire. Lake stones held up an ironwood branch from which a kettle was suspended just over tiny flames. The stumps that people would use to sit on were pulled away from the woodpile and arranged around the fire. At the edge of the clearing around the house, by the sweat-lodge frame, there was another tent with the open shape that signified that a jiisikid was among the visitors. Zhaanat had sent word to her cousin Gerald to come down across the border, and help her locate her daughter. That was one of the things the jiisikid did. Find people. Gerald, or the spirit who entered Gerald, would fly down to the Cities in a trance and see what was going on. He would find out why for the last five months Vera had not written, not reported in to the relocation program, not talked to anyone from the tribe who lived down there
now.

  Zhaanat kept a fresh bough of pine over the door. This morning, she had burned pine needles with cedar and bear root. The dim house was fragrant with the smoke. Gerald was sitting at the table with a few other people. They were drinking tea and laughing. In between jokes, they were discussing the ceremony with Zhaanat—how it would be run and who might show up with other questions, how long they should wait, if they should set up the sweat lodge too, what colors of cloth to tie in the branches and in what order. Who would lead on each song. They teased one another. Details. Patrice never talked about this part of her family’s life with those who would not understand. For one thing, they wouldn’t get how everything was funny. But the colors and the details reminded her of how the Catholics chose their colors and fixated on their sacraments. As if these things mattered to spirits or to the Holy Ghost.

  Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children. She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.

  “Uncle!” She hugged Gerald, and shook hands all around. Then, with a cup of tea, she slipped behind her curtain, only to find her mother lying in her bed, fast asleep.

  Patrice put her cup on the stool beside the bed, and lowered herself to sit on the edge of the mattress. She thought by sitting down she’d wake her mother, but Zhaanat slept heavily on her back, worn out by the long struggle with Patrice’s father, who had at last hopped a train or so they’d heard. Patrice glanced at the pepper can she kept on her windowsill. She had filled it with decoy money, and it looked like he’d found and taken it. A relief. Her real stash was buried underneath the linoleum floor. Her magazines and newspapers were neatly piled next to the bed. Look. Ladies’ Home Journal. Time. Juggie Blue saved whatever the teachers discarded for her niece Valentine, and when Valentine was done with them she gave the magazines to Patrice.

  The window faced west and the last of the sunlight, shifting through the golden leaves of birch trees, flickered across her mother’s finely made face. Pleasant lines starred out from the corners of her eyes. Arched lines set off her slight smile. Her hair was long and the smooth braids had accidentally, comically, swept upward over her head, so that it seemed she was falling. Her arms were bent at the elbows and her powerful small hands lay still across her chest. Her unusual hands that frightened some people. Patrice shared her mother’s tilting eyes, strength, and willful energy. But not her hands. They were Zhaanat’s alone.

  Zhaanat’s dress was made of midnight-green calico dotted with tiny golden leaves. The style was from the last century, but Patrice knew it was only a few months old. Her mother had sewed the old-time dress from over four yards of cloth. The sleeves were slim and ran down to her wrists. There were shell buttons in the front, and the dress had a sweeping gathered skirt. Beneath it, Zhaanat wore woolen men’s underwear, a dull red-orange color. Her moccasins were deerhide with rawhide soles, decorated with colored thread, blue and green. She often wore a brown plaid shawl. She had pulled the edges of it around her shoulders before she slept, as if for protection. Patrice smoothed her hand along the shawl’s fringes and her mother opened her eyes.

  Patrice could tell from her mother’s frown of confusion that she’d slept so heavily she didn’t know where she was. Then Zhaanat’s face sharpened and her lips curved away from her teeth. She pulled the shawl closer.

  “Damn if I know how I got here,” she murmured.

  “Gerald’s out there.”

  “Good. He’ll find her.”

  Patrice nodded. Gerald had found people now and then through the years, but sometimes he flew in circles. Sometimes their place was hidden.

  That night, he flew for a long time, inhabited by a particular spirit. After a while he did find Vera. She was lying on her back, wearing a greasy dress, a cloth across her throat. She was motionless, but she wasn’t dead. Perhaps she was asleep. Patrice would have thought that her uncle had found an image of her mother from that afternoon, except that Gerald said he had found her in the city, and there was a form beside her. A small form. A child.

  The next day, Patrice put aside the troubling, and yet reassuring, information from the jiisikid, and jumped into the backseat of Doris Lauder’s car. It was a rainy fall morning and Patrice was extremely grateful to be picked up and brought to work. She offered, as she had before, to contribute money for gasoline. Doris refused with a vague wave, saying that she’d be driving anyway.

  “Maybe next month.” She smiled into the mirror.

  “Maybe I’ll be driving next month,” said Valentine. “Daddy is fixing up a car for me.”

  “What kind?” asked Doris.

  “Probably an all kinds of car,” said Valentine. “You know. A car made of other cars.”

  The rain streamed in silvery bolts across the back window. Nobody spoke for a while.

  “I hear Betty Pye’s coming back to work today,” said Valentine.

  “Oh goodness,” said Doris, with an abrupt laugh.

  Betty had taken her year’s week of paid sick leave to get her tonsils removed. At her age! Thirty years. She’d gone to Grand Forks for the operation because it was apparently more serious to have them removed as an adult. But she’d been adamant about doing it. She’d insisted that her neck swelled up every November and stayed thick all through the winter and she was through with that. The doctors had examined her throat and told her that her tonsils were unusually large, “real germ collectors.” Everybody knew the details.

  “I can’t wait to hear how it went,” said Patrice.

  The two in the front seat laughed, but she hadn’t said it to be mean. Betty would certainly make her operation into a drama. Patrice didn’t know Betty very well, but work went so much faster when she was there. And Betty was, indeed, very much present when the women arrived at the jewel bearing plant. Betty’s round face was a bit ashen, and her voice box hadn’t healed yet. She spoke in a thready croak. But as always she was round and rolling, wearing green checks. A focused worker, she did her job. She had brought a large covered bowl of rice pudding for lunch, and when she swallowed her eyes watered. She was quiet all through work, whispering that it hurt like hell to talk. As they left for the day, Betty slipped a folded piece of paper to Patrice, and walked off. As Doris and Valentine spoke in the front seat, now pitying Betty for the pain she obviously suffered, Patrice took out the paper and read, I heard your looking for your sis. My cousin lives in the Cities. She saw her and wrote to you—with her L hand because she broke her R finger pointing out my faults. That’s Genevieve for you. Watch the mail.

  Patrice folded up the paper and smiled. She was drawn to Betty because she was so much like her sister in her ability to make life’s bitterness into comedy. Broke her right finger pointing out my faults. What did that even mean? She tipped her head back, closing her eyes.

  On Saturday morning, Patrice put on the swing coat she’d pulled from the piles of mission-store clothing. What a find. It was a lovely shade of blue, lined with flannel wool under top-quality rayon. The coat was tailored, and had a fine shape. She tied on a red and blue plaid scarf, and shoved her hands in the coat pockets. There was a path through the woods that would take her four miles, straight into town and the post office. Or she could walk the road and likely get picked up. Although the sky had cleared, the ground was still wet. She did not have overboots, and didn’t want to soak her shoes. Patrice took the road. It wasn’t long before she was picked up. And by Thomas Wazhashk. He pulled his car over slightly ahead of her and waited. A rope tied down the trunk lid, and she could see the dull galvanized tin of their water cans. One luc
ky thing about living so far back in the bush, their spring still ran. And it ran clear. Most people closer in, near town, or out in prairie land, had lost their water or cattle had ruined their springs. Even the dug wells were drying out.

  Thomas and Zhaanat were cousins—Patrice was unclear on exactly how they were related and “cousins” was considered a general word that covered a host of relationships. Thomas was an uncle to her and so his sons were also cousins. She sped forward and took the front seat when Wade got out and gave her the honor.

  “Thank you for stopping, uncle.”

  “At least this time you’re hitching on dry land.”

  Last summer, she had swum out to his fishing boat, surprised Thomas. She’d hitched a ride out of the lake. It tickled him to talk about it. He didn’t know exactly why she’d been swimming out there so far.

  Patrice was one of the only young people who addressed him in Chippewa, or Cree, or in a combination of the two. They didn’t speak exactly alike but understood each other. If Wade was puzzled, let him absorb the language out of curiosity, thought Thomas. They chatted for a while and Thomas learned that Zhaanat had set up the special tent. Gerald had seen that Vera was alive and that she had a child beside her. Patrice got out at the mercantile, which also held the post office. He would return to pick her up. While he and Wade filled the water cans, Thomas thought about how his grandfather had consulted with someone like Gerald, long ago, when they needed to find out about Falon. So it happened they knew Falon had died well before the official message arrived.

  On the way back, Patrice decided to read the letter from Betty Pye’s cousin again, out loud, to her uncle.

  I saw your sister down in the Cities, and something was wrong with her. Last I knew, she was at Stevens Avenue Apartments, number 206. I know because a number of Indians live there and I was staying on that floor too. Saw her in the hallway with her baby and she wouldn’t talk to me.