The Night Watchman(5)

Watching the night sky, he was Thomas who had learned about the stars in boarding school. He was also Wazhashk who had learned about the stars from his grandfather, the original Wazhashk. Therefore the autumn stars of Pegasus were part of his grandfather’s Mooz. Thomas drew slowly on the cigar. Blew the smoke upward, like a prayer. Buganogiizhik, the hole in the sky through which the Creator had hurtled, glowed and winked. He longed for Ikwe Anang, the woman star. She was beginning to rise over the horizon as a breath of radiance. Ikwe Anang always signaled the end of his ordeal. Over the months he’d spent his nights as a watchman, Thomas had grown to love her like a person.

Once he let himself back into the building and sat down, his grogginess fell away entirely and he read the newspapers and other tribes’ newsletters he had saved. Subdued jitters at the passage of a bill that indicated Congress was fed up with Indians. Again. No hint of strategy. Or panic, but that would come. More coffee, his small breakfast, and he punched out. To his relief, the morning was warm enough for him to catch a few winks in his car’s front seat before his first meeting of the day. His beloved car was a putty-gray Nash, used, but still Rose grumbled that he’d spent too much money on it. She wouldn’t admit how much she loved riding in the plush passenger seat and listening to the car’s radio. Now with this regular job he could make regular payments. No need to worry how weather would treat his crops, like before. Most important, this was not a car that would break down and make him late for work. This was a job he wanted very much to keep. Besides, someday he planned a trip, he joked, a second honeymoon with Rose, using the backseats that folded into a bed.

Now Thomas slid inside the car. He kept a heavy wool muffler in the glove box to wind around his neck so his head wouldn’t fall to his chest, waking him. He leaned back into the brushed mohair upholstery and dropped into sleep. He woke, fully alert, when LaBatte rapped on his window to make sure he was all right.

LaBatte was a short man with the rounded build of a small bear. He peered in at Thomas. His pug nose pressed to the glass. His breath made a circle of fog. LaBatte was the evening janitor, but often he came in on a day shift to do small repairs. Thomas had watched LaBatte’s pudgy, tough, clever hands fix every sort of mechanism. They’d gone to school together. Thomas rolled down the window.

“Sleeping off the job again?”

“It was an exciting night.”

“Is that so?”

“I thought I saw a little boy sitting on the band saw.”

Too late, Thomas remembered that LaBatte was intensely superstitious.

“Was it Roderick?”

“Who?”

“He’s been following me around, Roderick.”

“No, it was just the motor.”

LaBatte frowned, unconvinced, and Thomas knew he’d hear more about Roderick if he hesitated. So he started the car and shouted over the engine’s roar that he had a meeting.





The Skin Tent




Someday, a watch. Patrice longed for an accurate way to keep time. Because time did not exist at her house. Or rather, it was the keeping of time as in school or work time that did not exist. There was a small brown alarm clock on the stool beside her bed, but it lost five minutes on the hour. She had to compensate when setting it and if she once forgot to wind it, all was lost. Her job was also dependent on getting a ride to work. Meeting Doris and Valentine. Her family did not have an old car to try fixing. Or even a shaggy horse to ride. It was miles down to the highway where the bus passed twice a day. If she didn’t get a ride, it was thirteen miles of gravel road. She couldn’t get sick. If she got sick, there was no telephone to let anybody know. She would be fired. Life would go back to zero.

There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent. She tried to forget that she could easily blow away. Or how easily her father could wreck them all. This feeling of being the only barrier between her family and disaster wasn’t new, but they had come so far since she started work.

Knowing how much they needed Patrice’s job, it was her mother’s, Zhaanat’s, task during the week to sit up behind the door with the ax. Until they had word where their father had landed next, they all had to be on guard. On the weekend, Zhaanat took turns with Patrice. With the ax on the table and the kerosene lamp, Patrice read her poems and magazines. When it was Zhaanat’s turn, she went through an endless array of songs, all used for different purposes, humming low beneath her breath, tapping the table with one finger.

Zhaanat was capable and shrewd. She was a woman of presence, strong and square, jutting features. She was traditional, an old-time Indian raised by her grandparents only speaking Chippewa, schooled from childhood in ceremonies and the teaching stories. Zhaanat’s knowledge was considered so important that she had been fiercely hidden away, guarded from going to boarding school. She had barely learned to read and write on the intermittent days she had attended reservation day school. She made baskets and beadwork to sell. But Zhaanat’s real job was passing on what she knew. People came from distances, often camped around their house, in order to learn. Once, that deep knowledge had been part of a web of strategies that included plenty of animals to hunt, wild foods to gather, gardens of beans and squash, and land, lots of land to roam. Now the family had only Patrice, who had been raised speaking Chippewa but had no trouble learning English, who had followed most of her mother’s teachings but also become a Catholic. Patrice knew her mother’s songs, but she had also been class valedictorian and the English teacher had given her a book of poems by Emily Dickinson. There was one about success, from failure’s point of view. She had seen how quickly girls who got married and had children were worn down before the age of twenty. Nothing happened to them but toil. Great things happened to other people. The married girls were lost. Distant strains of triumph. That wasn’t going to be her life.