The Night Watchman(85)

The Third Night Watch


Again, in the deepest part of the night, Patrice was alone at the fire again. The men had finished the grave. A more profound stillness had fallen. She positioned a log at the hottest point. Then, watching as the coals sucked in air and arched flames seized at the new wood greedily, she fell into a state of exhaustion so profound that her body vibrated. Her mind unclasped. Again, something moved. She looked. Saw the slipping of the seen and the emergence of the unseen. A being stooped low and carefully peered out of the brush. It was her father, eyes gleaming from black hollows, wearing the same colorless raggedy clothes they’d found him in. He saw her. It seemed he wanted something from her. He opened his red weepy mouth as if to plead. Maybe he was thirsty. Or hungry. Yet there was something so pitiful and longing in the way he looked at her, dead now, called by the other dead people, violating the laws of being dead the way he always violated the laws of being a living man. Yes, he wanted to take her with him, just as he’d always wanted her before.

Patrice stood up, thinking he might move away if she moved, and sure enough, he began to lunge along through the woods again, through crowded black trees, toward the place where his grave was waiting. She could see the black slit in the earth. He stopped there, stood at the lip of darkness, looking down. That was when his voice began, low at first, then sharpening to a high whistle. His voice flew at her, whining and bending the air. She stood as it whipped the fire into tall flames. It thrashed the bare branches and drove clouds to scud like gray smoke across black space. His voice was trying to pull the life out of her. She shook, heart pounding in her throat. As the wind whirled around her, gripping her body, tearing at her face, she could feel herself beginning to hover. She threw her weight into her feet and began to laugh.

“You can’t get us! You can’t get us now!” she shrieked.

Someone had come up behind her and her throat shut. But she slowly dared to look. It was her mother, staring at the place where her father was climbing down into his grave. For a moment, Zhaanat’s face was exalted by ferocity, but then she slowly shifted her gaze to her daughter, and Patrice thought she was seeing her own face, lighted from below by a reflecting mirror of clouds and water. Yet it was only a bowl of soup that her mother was holding out to her, strong with bear meat and steaming hot.





Daylight


Wood Mountain brought the grave house. Thomas would sleep and then they would conduct the burial. Zhaanat and Pokey had tied Paranteau into a blanket and covered him with bark thawed and rolled back around his shape. Gerald had arrived in the night and his people were arranged on the floor of the house in a puzzle of blanketed forms. Three women slept on Patrice’s bed with their children, so she folded herself into a corner, underneath her heavy coat. Millie was already sleeping there, head covered with a scarf, feet sticking out in fur-trimmed galoshes, odd and touching, like a child’s.



Other people began to arrive. Whole families. Some brought food, some came because they needed to eat. The LaBattes showed up, everyone with their own bowls to carry home leftover food. LaBatte wept. He’d been drinking with Paranteau and Eddy a few nights before, but he said nothing, though he’d reported, for Patrice, to Mr. Vold so that she could take off work for the funeral. It was still deeply cold. Bucky came, wearing a coat and a blanket over the coat. Patrice saw him from where she stood. His hair was matted around his head, caked like the pelt of a dead animal. When he entered Zhaanat’s house, dragging his leg, everyone fell silent. Bucky walked effortfully up to Zhaanat and pointed at his face, the cheek and flesh drooping down on one side. His mouth was disarranged, unable to fully close, drool frozen down his neck, one eye crossed.

Bucky bent over, took from his pockets the pair of shoes he’d stolen from Patrice. He went on his knees and pushed them along the floor. He gave a moaning mumble that sounded like “Take this off me.”

Zhaanat looked at the shoes, observed him closely, not unkindly.

“Your actions put that on you. I had nothing to do with it,” she said.

Bucky collapsed on the floor.

“Then doctor me, please doctor me.”

In the incoherent jumble of his words there was none of the old Bucky left.

He is helpless, thought Patrice. As helpless as I was. But if he gets his strength back, he will hurt us.



Later, as Gerald talked to Paranteau’s body and told him what to look for and what to do when he arrived on the other side, Millie came up to stand with Patrice. When Gerald paused, Millie asked what he had said, nodding when Patrice told her in a low voice. There was a dazed, rapt look on Millie’s face. At last the men used ropes to lower Paranteau into the ground.





Two Months





Thomas


The date was set. The hearings were scheduled for the first week in March. That gave the Turtle Mountain Advisory Committee about two months to save the tribe from ceasing to exist.





Millie


Millie Cloud sat on the floor wearing her winter coat. She was hunched over a notebook held tight against her thighs, and she was writing rapid notes on her visit to the Paranteau funeral. She had never been to an event like the funeral, had never heard the strangely agreeable off-key and repetitive songs, nor had she heard more than a few words of the Chippewa language uttered in the Pipestone house. When she had conducted her survey, she was nearly always addressed in English. Now she understood that the English was for her benefit and that most of the people around her, including Louis and Grace, spoke the traditional language. All of this was fascinating to Millie, and while she could hardly take notes during the ceremony, she had closely observed the proceedings. She had taken up her notebook as soon as possible and was sitting in the corner of the bedroom she shared with Grace Pipestone. She was freezing cold, while Grace slept on the bed beneath two heavy blankets. As soon as every detail that she could remember was written out, Millie took off her coat. Wearing her warmest socks and the long johns that, incredibly, she had almost decided not to bring, she tiptoed across the room and slid under the blankets, next to Grace.