The Night Watchman(49)
“They hurt like the devil,” she said. “I’m going to be lame at work tomorrow.”
He took the baby and the luggage while she removed her shoes at a turnoff through the woods. There were paths everywhere and this was one of many paths to get to her main path home. You had to wade through a bit of slough on the way but that was all right. Her toes loved muck. She took the baby back.
“Gwiiwizens,” she said, lifting him to her heart. It was what her people called a boy baby if they didn’t want bad spirits to find him. If there was disease or danger around. Nothing fancy that could attract attention, just Little Boy. Although he knew and approved of that, Wood Mountain also knew that Patrice not using his name for the baby meant something. It meant . . . he stuck on this as he waded through sucking slough mud . . . rinsed his feet and returned his shoes to his feet. Walked up a hill knocking pukkons into his hat. For her. It meant . . .
It meant she wasn’t having any of it.
Oh, but the colors were rich, the golds and yellows of the woods, the ochres, flare of orange and crimson, green and green, all shades of green, setting off the flamboyant shafts and sprays of color that poured through onto their hair and shoulders and walking bodies. Their young bodies free of pain except an aching cheekbone for Wood Mountain and a blister on Patrice’s right toe.
And why shouldn’t she want someone to walk her to her house and become thereby a couple since he might love her and certainly loved the child? He was strong built, good-looking, had prospects in life, and she was attracted to him in spite of that witless smile. Which he hadn’t tried on her again. To fall in love with him was the way of things. Wasn’t it? Still, she did not take his hand, which hung next to her hand, twitched toward hers, but she used her hand to pat Gwiiwizens.
“Pixie,” he said. “Oh, Pixie.”
“Patrice. I keep telling you.”
She gave him a look that would have shaved his face if he’d had whiskers.
He shut up.
She found herself doing the same things as with Barnes. Said things she knew would discourage him. Ignored the dangling hand, avoided the ready clutch, dispensed neutral glances when admiring smiles were expected. During the last mile, she admitted to herself that doing these things was easy with Barnes and far more difficult when it came to Wood Mountain.
*
Zhaanat was not like the teachers and the nuns and the priests and the other adults who showed Patrice the world. Zhaanat had a different sort of intelligence. In her thinking there were no divisions, or maybe the divisions were not the same, or maybe they were invisible. White people looked at Indians like her and thought dull stubborn. But Zhaanat’s intelligence was of frightening dimensions. Sometimes she knew things she should not have known. Where a vanished man had fallen through the ice. Where a disordered woman had buried the child who died of diphtheria. Why an animal gave itself to one hunter not another. Why disease struck a young man and skipped his frail grandfather. Why an odd stone might appear outside the door, one morning, out of nowhere.
“The stars sent a message to us,” Zhaanat had said.
Patrice had stared at her mother, who had certainly never heard of a meteor. Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.
Zhaanat was walking down the hill with an apron full of cedar when Patrice and Wood Mountain came to the house. She dropped everything and ran to them, her face wild.
“We didn’t find her yet,” cried Patrice as her mother ran toward them, skirts flapping, braids unraveling, arms out. Zhaanat held her, the baby between them. Wood Mountain lowered his eyes. Pokey came around the corner of the house, carrying an armload of wood. He stood there, frozen.
“I only brought Little Boy home, Mama.”
Patrice put Gwiiwizens into her arms and Zhaanat stared at the baby apprehensively, then critically, searching out Vera’s features. She sat down with the baby suddenly, plopped on the ground as if her strength had given way. She was silent and Patrice knew her mother would be somewhere else, unreachable, until she decided to return.
“You should go now, Everett,” she said to Wood Mountain.
She looked around, carefully. No sign of her father.
Wood Mountain walked over to the door and placed her bag there. He nodded significantly at Pokey, then turned and walked away.
Zhaanat eventually gathered up the baby and herself. Walked into the house. The first thing she did was sit down and nurse him at her breast. Pokey didn’t notice, but this made Patrice uneasy. She asked her mother why she was nursing the baby. Obviously it wasn’t like she would have milk. However, Zhaanat said that sometimes in the old days, when the baby’s mother couldn’t nurse, the older women were sometimes able to take over.
“And I’m not that old,” said Zhaanat. “My breasts aren’t yet hard dried-up old leather pipe bags.” In Chippewa, that was all just one word. They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.
The Torus
The next morning, Patrice waited on the road for Doris and Valentine, impatient to get away from the baby, who was desperately hungry. His bawl was like a tap turned on full blast. Zhaanat was still letting him nurse, but also trying to get him to accept the juice strained from boiled oatmeal. Pokey had walked to the school bus early. Nobody was on the road. Had they forgotten? Patrice paced in their direction. Her thoughts zipped around, landing here and there like flies. Skittering away. “I know,” she said aloud. “I know I may be crazy. But I have to believe that my sister is still alive.” She picked up a smooth piece of cloudy quartz and stared at it in her hand.