The Night Watchman(12)
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 lucky 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.