The Night Watchman(112)

Who’s waiting for you?





Thomas




He removed his thermos from his armpit and set it on the steel desk alongside his scuffed but no longer bulging briefcase. His light work jacket and battered old fedora went on the chair, his lunch box on the cool windowsill. He punched his time card. Midnight. He picked up the key ring, a company flashlight, and walked the perimeter of the main floor.

He checked the drilling room and tested every lock, flipped the lights on and off. He stepped through the reinforced doors of the acid washing room, shone his flashlight on the dials and hoses. He checked the offices, the bathrooms, and ended up back at his desk. A new lamp had been issued to him. Now a stronger power of light charged the surface of the desk. He sat down. He had missed a number of birthdays, which he kept track of in a tiny yellow spiral-bound notebook. He’d picked out a stack of flower embossed cards at Rexall for each grandchild, son and daughter, friend and relative.

At the bottom of each card, he signed himself “the muskrat” and drew a small supple little fellow writhing through the water, or curved over, cleaning its paws, or just sunning himself on a log. Thomas had taken to doodling now and then. It had started when he’d encountered some trouble finding his words. He’d been cleared, good to go, after the stroke he’d suffered at the train station. But sometimes his brain skipped. Sometimes his brain hid a tantalizing word from him in its folds. He had to relax his mind and sneak up on the word. The doodles were a way to win the hide-and-seek game he had now begun to play with his memory. Pictures occasionally dislodged a word. Also, sometimes now, a word failed to come to him when he was speaking, and in those times he substituted a descriptive phrase for the word, comically, and got a laugh. Just the other day he’d forgotten the word for car trunk, and said, “automobile cave with a hinge,” which was taken for wit. As with the time he’d asked Rose to wear her “namesake dress” because he couldn’t find the word for the color red in his mind. Rouge, scarlet, carmine. Rose. So many words came later. And from Sharlo he’d requested “a book of twisting ways,” when he’d meant a mystery. She liked his description. Nobody seemed to have caught on to the trouble he was having, and he certainly wasn’t about to make it known. But he knew, and he knew when he was beginning to think first in Chippewa, the language of his childhood. Was he going back? Sometimes, as when he sat in the circle of light drawing little muskrats, he felt the raw dread of further robbery. His mind was everything to him, but he hadn’t the slightest notion how to save it. He just kept diving down, grabbing for the word, coming back up. The battle with termination and with Arthur V. Watkins had been, he feared, a battle that would cost him everything.



Later, dozing in the lamplight, he saw muskrats everywhere. Their small supple forms slipped busily along the floor at dusk, continually perfecting their burrows. He saw them pulling soft weeds and holding juicy roots in their tiny paws to eat. “What is my name?” he asked one of the little creatures. “Wazhashk gidizhinikaaz,” it said.

His name. Would there be a time he wouldn’t know himself? Was this bit of paper given to him so that in an extremity he could retrieve his name at least? He put the scrap of paper into his mouth. All of a sudden he and his father were sitting outside the old man’s cabin. Thomas stared at the bright popple leaves, trembling and flashing as they swirled thickly off the branches. Frantic yellows and golden red and orange leaves filled his eyes. But it’s spring, he thought. I shouldn’t be here. Something’s happening to me again. He looked around and saw that the wild prairies were littered with bones thick and white as far as he could see.

The bones tipped and staggered, assembling into forms, and took on shaggy flesh. The grass rippled and billowed like a green robe and the animals crossed vast and vaster numbers. The earth trembled in a serpentine rush, blew away, and vanished into the sky.

Thomas remembered the jelly bun in his lunch box. Rose had made his coffee hot and strong. He shook his head, wiped his eyes, settled back into his task, underlining words in the birthday wishes and adding his own greetings, forming his letters with precision, until it was time again to punch his card and make the last round of the night.





*

The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was not terminated.

*

My grandfather recovered from his initial stroke and went on to work on improving the reservation school system, writing a Turtle Mountain Constitution, and writing and publishing the first history of the Turtle Mountains. He was tribal chairman until 1959. He was promoted to supervisor of maintenance and worked at the jewel bearing plant until his mandatory retirement in 1970.

*

In 1955 the women of the Turtle Mountain jewel bearing plant attempted to unionize. According to my grandfather, this raised a ruckus all the way to New York. “Accusations, allegations, fabrications of the imagination, rumors, prophecies, threats, and counterthreats flew thick and fast. Bribe in the form of dinners were offered from both sides—and accepted.” In the end, unionization was voted down. However, pay increases were immediately authorized. A cafeteria was completed. And the workers regained their coffee break.





Afterword and Acknowledgments





My Grandfather’s Letters


Aunishenaubay, Patrick Gourneau, was the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee during the mid-1950s, supposedly the golden age for America, but in reality a time when Jim Crow reigned and American Indians were at the nadir of power—our traditional religions outlawed, our land base continually and illegally seized (even as now) by resource extraction companies, our languages weakened by government boarding schools. Our leaders were also answerable to assimilationist government officials: as an example, just look at the “advisory committee” in my grandfather’s designation. He and his fellow tribal members had almost no authority. Their purpose was to advise the BIA, but they seized any opportunity to represent their people. The 1950s were a time when the scraps of land and the rights guaranteed by treaty were easy pickings. With the postwar housing boom, the fabulous Klamath and Menominee forests were especially coveted. It is no coincidence that those tribes were among the first five slated for termination.