The Night Watchman(31)

The wall looked spongy where Falon had walked through. Thomas went over, put his hands on the painted plasterboard. The dull green-gray was hard and cold.

“You got the best of us,” said Thomas.

He turned from the wall and glanced at the band saw. Roderick was perched there, grinning in a mad way, like he would bite into the doctor’s hand.

*

Thomas stood. He’d brought his shaving kit from home. It was an experiment. Perhaps holding a straight razor to his own throat would keep him awake in the final hour before dawn. He gave himself the closest and most perfect shave a man could manage, contorting his tongue in his cheek, finding every whisker. It worked. That morning, and every morning after, he greeted the morning shift perfectly shaved and combed, alert and smelling of Old Spice.





The Old Muskrat




“What did you all do in the beginning? To keep the land?”

“It was sign or die.”

“How did you keep the last of it?”

“First they gave us this scrap, then they tried to push us off this scrap. Then they took away most of the scrap. Now, what you are saying is they want to push us off the edge of the scrap.”

“How did you hold on?”

Biboon’s breathy wheezing old man’s laughter.

“I was young. But I was part of it. We did hold on. By our fingernails. And toenails. And teeth.”

“How did you finally make them agree to it? The last of the land? What we have now?”

“We got together on it. Stuck together on it. Aisens, Miskobiness, Ka-ish-pa, all of them, Wazhashk too, kept clinging on and clinging on. We had to confront those settlers when they came on our boundaries. We almost went to war on that, but we kept our heads. We knew what would happen if we killed any of those settlers. We confronted them. We stuck together on that. Then we put up a delegation.”

“How did you put up a delegation?”

“We petitioned for it. Don’t forget, we had to go through the farmer in charge and that there Indian Agent out of Devils Lake. But we convinced them anyway. We wrote a letter. We got a school Indian to write the letter. And when we went there, we had, what you call them, signatures.”

“A petition.”

“Eyah.”

“We could start there. Get everyone in the tribe to sign it.”

“That would be something.”

“Then we might have to put up a delegation.”

Thomas blew across the tin cup of scalding tea he’d just made for the two of them. Biboon took a drink of his.

“I’ll take the petition idea to the council. Emergency meeting tonight. Still, we’re just an advisory committee. We have to answer to the Bureau.”

“Look here,” said Biboon. “This thing is different now. Survival is a changing game. How many people lose out if the government breaks with us?”

Thomas stared at his father. Sometimes he came out with things. As if he’d had his eyes on the workings of the reservation without setting foot in town. His implication . . . other people need us for their own reasons. Neighboring towns need us. That or want nothing to do with us. That or they could be afraid they would be saddled with a lot of poor people. Thomas would have to think this out.

“We’re not nothing. People use our work. You got your teachers, nurses, doctors, horse-trading bureaucrats in the superintendent’s office. You got your various superintendents. You got your land-office employees and records keepers.”

All of these jobs and titles could be expressed in Chippewa. It was much better than English for invention, and irony could be added to any word with a simple twist. Biboon went on.

“Make the Washington D.C.s understand. We just started getting on our feet. Getting so we have some coins to jingle. Making farms. Becoming famous in school like you. All that will suffer. It will be wiped out. And the sick people, where will they go? They sent us their tuberculosis. It is taking us down. We don’t have money to go to their hospitals. It was their promise to exchange these things for our land. Long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.”

“I still see grass. I hear the rivers are running.”

“And they are still using the land,” said Biboon.

“Still using the hell out of it,” said Thomas. “But trying to pretend they didn’t sign a contract to pay the rent.”

The tea was cool enough to drink. The bitterness was comforting.



The community building had a room set aside for gatherings, and that night Thomas convened the meeting of the advisory committee. They used Robert’s Rules of Order, roughly translated into Chippewa. Thomas called the meeting to order and the secretary, Juggie Blue, read the minutes in both languages. Some members of the committee spoke Chippewa or Cree. Others spoke Michif—French and Cree. The languages had bits of English mixed in like salt. So they muddled along, passing the copy of the bill from hand to hand, reading bits of it out loud, arguing about the meaning. As they studied the language of the bill, anxiety seeped into the room.

“It looks to me like they want it all, finally.”

“Relocate us. Haul us out of here.”

“Want the ishkoniganan. Even the leftovers.”

“We had an agreement. They broke it. No warning.”

Louis Pipestone, whose son had barely survived the Korean War, and was still recovering in a military hospital, sat motionless. He stared down at the back of his hands, splayed on the table.