The Night Watchman(67)

Millie Cloud had a favorite table in the reference room at the Walter Library at the University of Minnesota. She liked to sit with her back to the oxblood-bound collection of the Diseases and Statistics Annuals of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She liked to keep on her left the great rectangular windows, shaded by massive trees in the summer, but bright now with only leafless branches twisting against the sky. To her right the card catalogs, librarian’s desk, a blue globe of the watery earth. Before her, the door. She never sat in a room where she couldn’t see the door, and she never chose a chair that wasn’t against a bookcase or a wall. She did not like people to brush by her or touch her by accident.

It was readily apparent that Millie was fond of geometric patterns. Today she wore double diamond checks. Her blouse in black and white, her skirt in bright teal. Around her neck she wore a scarf printed with random blocks of gray and gold. Out of sight, hanging in the tiny wardrobe of her room, were five striped blouses, two sweaters knit in intricate cables of intersecting colors. Also three tartan plaid skirts and one pair of unusual trousers, blue and yellow. She wore brown-and-white saddle shoes, which she constantly thought of decorating with fine black lines. The day was cold, and she wished that she had worn her striped trousers. Her legs were tucked beneath the chair for warmth. She had draped her light woolen coat over her shoulders as she studied. Already the coat was inadequate. However, she loved it because the box pattern could be seen two ways and she was a walking optical illusion. Still, the wind went right through the fluffy fibers. She’d have to buy a new one and was also saving up for winter boots.

Millie had a job serving on the breakfast line in the dining hall, a job typing up titles and Dewey Decimal numbers for the card catalog, which she did afternoons from one to three in the basement of this very library, and a weekend job serving drinks in a bar called the Purple Parrot. She had a large square pleasant face, wore black glasses that pointed up slightly at the ends. As well as necessary, the eyeglasses were fashion aids, supposed to take attention away from, and hopefully diminish, her short, powerful neck and thick shoulders, resembling her father’s. She was taller than Louis Pipestone, so the buffalo torso she’d inherited topped long gangly legs. She’d also inherited his hands, which were square and strong, but gripped a pen instead of reins. She didn’t have Louie’s good-natured attitude. She was irritable and forceful. Millie seemed to charge forward when she walked. Millie stated her opinions clearly. Millie spent most of her energy for fashion on combining patterns—she hated to purchase anything in a solid color and always found herself in a quandary. She kept her hair in a straight bob held to one side by a bobby pin. She didn’t use any makeup but lipstick, a bright carmine red that emphasized everything she said.

Eventually, she thought she might try to be a lawyer. She might be good at it because she never backed down on anything.

Also, she might be bad at it for the same reason.

People didn’t like her. Men were put off. She didn’t care, much. She was her mother’s only child. She had seen her father from time to time, and had even stayed with him when she conducted her economic and physical survey of the reservation, traveling from house to house.

Millie had noted the construction of each house, the condition of the roof and windows, if there were windows. She had noted how the house was heated, and how many people inhabited the house. Often she was asked inside, for, although she was brusque, she knew how to be friendly with strangers. There was, too, her very well-liked father. If she was invited in, Millie asked a number of questions about money and made a number of additional observations. On these trips she also met a number of relatives she hadn’t known about at all. The survey and her findings became her master’s thesis, and her long visit to the reservation was important to her. Having grown up in Minneapolis, she had wondered. Now she knew what it was like on the reservation and thought that living there would be quite a challenge for her.

For one thing, there were the horses. Everybody in her family rode them the way, in the city, she used to hop on a bicycle and travel around on a sidewalk or a street. They swung up and cantered around, here and there, even to the store or out on visits, with complete nonchalance. She couldn’t get over it. At last, she had tried to ride the calmest mare. But she hadn’t known how to start the horse.

“Just give her a kick,” Grace had said.

Millie had given the wrong kind of kick and the horse galloped off like a maniac, tried to scrape her off against a fence. When she kicked again, it whirled and tried to bite her with its long green teeth. So much better to be here, accumulating and comparing data in the library, a shaft of neutral sunlight falling across a long wide wooden table. And when the dark came down early, she happily switched on the reading lamp with its green glass shade. For a short while longer, she ignored hunger. At last, thinking about a cold shepherd’s pie she’d bought yesterday and left on her windowsill, she decided to go back to her room. She bundled her coat around her thick torso and thin hips, and she tied a heavy fringed scarf of plaid wool around her head. She put on her orange mittens. She had asked her mother to make mittens this specific color so that she could be easily seen as she crossed streets. They were thick and warm. She made her way out and squeezed her books to her chest. The heavy mittens and the textbook tomes acted as a windshield. On the way to her room she stopped in at the campus post office and unlocked her box. She had a couple of letters, which she slipped into her statistics book. She waited a minute behind the student union door, taking deep breaths, before making her way out into the wind.