The Night Watchman(94)
The page was indeed still damp and the scent of fresh aniline dye flooded Millie with euphoria. It was perhaps her favorite smell. She also liked newly pumped gasoline, fried celery drenched in buttermilk, and rubber cement. She had come along to the office to help Juggie. There were thirty-five copies in increasingly fuzzy purple type. But also, there were four special copies made by a ghostly hand with access to the more sophisticated photocopier located in the office of Superintendent Tosk.
Those copies were for the file that Thomas was building. Juggie’s access to the superintendent’s office, however, was limited. The mimeograph machine that Thomas had requested had not arrived, might never arrive, and so they had to make do with dittos. After thirty copies, the master degraded and Millie was there to type a new one. The copies would be sent to all of the local and state officials, the newspapers and radio announcers, anyone who might be interested in the economic state of affairs that prevailed here.
Millie removed the slip sheet and inserted the master sheet with the carbon into the typewriter. She was finicky about getting it straight from the get-go.
“They’re always getting it wrong out there,” said Juggie. She’d brought her cinnamon rolls. A treat for Millie. Cinnamon rolls and coffee would take them far into the night.
“Long time ago,” Juggie went on, “they sent a fool from Wahpeton named McCumber to count Indians. Of course he wasn’t a fool. He knew very well what he was doing. Most of us were off hunting and he counts only full-bloods so in consequence our reservation, which was already down to twenty townships, gets mashed down to only two townships. That’s what I mean by getting it wrong.”
“Indeed,” said Millie, now cleaning the typewriter keys with a special brush, “indeed.”
It was a word she had resolved to use instead of yeah.
“Getting it wrong meant people starved dead. We don’t have enough land or all our people in one place ever since.”
“The government was operating on a set of assumptions tantamount to wishful thinking,” said Millie. “I suspect as always they simply want our land.”
“Wait,” said Juggie. “Let me write that down.”
Millie was so pleased that she struck a wrong key and made an error. Bit her lip in vexation. She turned up the platen and used a razor blade to gently scrape the carbon off the back of the paper. Then she covered the mistake with correction pencil. She blotted with correction putty and inserted a small piece of carbon paper. She retyped the letter and removed the extra carbon paper and kept typing. What Juggie said was true. A mistaken census survey had been used to convince Congress that the Turtle Mountain people were prosperous. But it was much bigger than that. Millie couldn’t set out in sequence or exactly form the why of it into a paragraph. It was something about being an Indian. And the government. The government acted like Indians owed them something, but wasn’t it the other way around? She hadn’t been educated in a boarding school or educated in any way about Indians. From her Catholic schooling, she would never have known about Indians at all except as a bunch of heathens who were vanquished or conveniently died off. She’d hardly known her family and was as assimilated as an Indian could be. And people hardly ever recognized her as an Indian. So why did she firmly see herself as an Indian? Why did she value this? Why did she not long for the anonymity of whiteness, the ease of it, the pleasures of fitting in? When people found out why she looked a little different, they would often say, “I never thought of you as an Indian.” And it would be said as a compliment. But it felt more like an insult. And why was that? She thought about Pixie. Or Patrice. She wasn’t sure which name. The two of them were in the same league, not in prettiness, more in coloring, and maybe Pixie had thought these things out. Millie thought about Pixie’s mother, so forceful, so elegant, so knowledgeable. And Pixie knew everything that Zhaanat knew. Did she know how extraordinary she was, Pixie, in being so much like her mother?
“Oof.” Millie had made it through a couple of pages. Perfect. She was, of course, an excellent typist. But, thinking of Zhaanat and Pixie, she’d grown inattentive and misplaced her fingers on the keys, wrecking an entire line. And she’d almost reached the end of the page. So this time she had to entirely remove the paper, use a razor to excise the mistyped line, retype the line on other paper, razor that out and fix it into the master with transparent tape. Then the business with the scrap of carbon paper. And the exacting problem of precisely placing that repaired line below the previous line. Of course, she was very good at this. She had typed her entire master’s thesis, of which this was only part. All the men with her in the program had hired women to type theirs. She looked down on them for it.
By the time she finished, the night was half over. And Juggie had fallen asleep on a blanket in the corner. Millie drank a cup of coffee, still hot, from the thermos, and ate an entire magnificently coiled roll, licking the icing and freckles of cinnamon off the fork that she meticulously used. Other people ate with their fingers. Indeed. Not Millie. Knowing that, Juggie had even brought cutlery and plates. So let her sleep, Millie thought, and fixed the first master sheet onto the drum of the spirit duplicator. She turned over the fluid tank, made the necessary adjustments in the pressure, the wick, the guide rail. Then she started turning the hand crank, lovingly, growing happier and happier as the intoxicating smell of duplicating fluid filled the office air.