The Night Watchman(83)
“Say you’re sorry!” cried Valentine.
“I’ll lose my temper,” said Patrice, surprising herself. Such authority in her voice. “Valentine. Get in the front seat.”
Valentine got out of the car and sat in the front seat, holding herself like an injured bird. She wore a slim brown coat with a plush collar. It looked very nice on her. In the backseat, Patrice closed her eyes. One fine day, she would have a car of her own. And a coat like Valentine’s. Anything could happen now. She remembered when she woke in the leaves—the tingling sense that something good would soon take place. Was that about her father? Was finding him dead the good thing that had happened?
Patrice, you are hard. So pitiful, he was so pitiful. Why didn’t she feel it more? He’d probably died while she slept in the leaf cave. The odd sense of that day’s buoyancy came back to her. She saw herself bounding along the bottom of the ravine. She hadn’t known that she’d been carrying a weight. Then it was off. Her father’s violent descent had hung over most of her life. Dread was gone. It had left when he died. She hadn’t realized it was so heavy.
She worked at the jewel bearing plant all day. Unable to fake sorrow, she told nobody about her father.
Cradle to Grave
Thomas worked on the grave house while Wood Mountain finished up the cradle board. They were working in Louie’s barn because he had all of the tools—the saws, planes, rasps, the splitter, vise, hammer, and the sanding rocks. Neither of them spoke. Thomas was using a sharp chisel to dovetail the ends of the boards. He didn’t like using nails in a grave house. He made a few small rafters for the roof and then planed out the necessary shingles. He’d seen them made with tar paper or bought shingles, but he felt close to Zhaanat as he worked—she had asked him to make the grave house because she knew he did it the old way. Except, Thomas wondered, was this the really old way? Biboon said that his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree. It seemed better. You were eaten by crows and vultures instead of worms. Your body went flying over the earth instead of being distributed to the tiny creatures living under the earth. This grave house probably came about after they had been forced to live in one place, on reservations. Mostly, they had Catholic burials. He wanted to ask Wood Mountain which he thought was better, tree or dirt. However, Wood Mountain was finishing the cradle board.
“I suppose we shouldn’t tell Zhaanat we were making the grave house and cradle board at the same time,” he said to Wood Mountain.
“You think it could be bad for the baby?”
“I’m not superstitious,” said Thomas, although he certainly was. Just not as bad as LaBatte with his fear of owls and his reading of random omens in everything. Wood Mountain said that he’d light some sage and bathe the cradle board in the smoke to take the whammy off.
“That’ll work,” said Thomas.
From the top of the cradle board, Wood Mountain was using Zhaanat’s finest sanding tool—horsetail plant split and glued onto a piece of wood. It was bringing out the narrow lines in the white cedar. He had a jar of tea and a jar of vinegar in which he’d left some pennies for a week. After he’d sanded the wood smooth, he painted the bottom of the cradle board with the tea, which gave it a soft brown color. He painted the top of the wood with the penny vinegar, which tinged the wood with pale blue, including the head guard. He tied several pieces of sinew to the head guard. Sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields. Some were whorled; others were tiny grooved scallops. He drilled holes in them and hung them from the lengths of sinew.
“Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here,” he said to Thomas.
“From the endless way-back times.”
“Think of it. Vera’s baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here. Who could have known?”
“We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways. Maybe a way-back person touched these shells. Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt. Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now. We can’t know these things.”
“Us being connected here so far back gives me a peaceful feeling,” said Wood Mountain.
“That’s what it’s all about,” said Thomas. “And now we’re putting another man in the earth. Maybe a drunk, but he wasn’t always a drunk.”
“Sometimes when I’m out and around,” said Wood Mountain, “I feel like they’re with me, those way-back people. I never talk about it. But they’re all around us. I could never leave this place.”
The Night Watch
They had left a tree with strong branches standing near their house. You could hang a deer from that tree and dress it out. Or a bear. That’s what Zhaanat was doing when Patrice came back from work. Of course she’d gone after it. A bear was a walking medicine cabinet. When a bear was killed during hibernation, its meat was milder, sweeter. Patrice had been compelled to tell her mother, but she had hoped her mother would not kill the bear. Now Zhaanat and Thomas were working carefully on the hide. Skinned-out bears looked too human for Patrice and she hurried to the house. She could hear them singing to the bear in low voices as she stepped inside. It was warm and close. People were sitting around the stove, at the table. The baby was tucked away in Juggie’s arms and Rose was making bannock bread. People sat on Pokey’s bed and on her mother’s low mattress. Some had brought their blankets, thrown over a shoulder, so they could sleep on the floor. Patrice knew everyone, or almost. Her curtain was pulled aside and the one person she didn’t know was sitting on Patrice’s bed, alone, clinging to a cup of tea. She was perhaps a few years older than Patrice, with flat dark hair and cat glasses. She was wearing a confusing sweater with black and white lines. Patrice’s quilt was also mostly black and white. Who was she?