The Night Watchman(95)
Prayer for 1954
On this night who is awake in the hills?
An increasingly delighted young woman operates the rotating drum of a spirit duplicator. A lanky missionary stumbles in his sleep along a frozen road. A traditional Chippewa-Cree woman rubs bear grease into the skin of a wakeful baby. A very old man is talking to the small lights that came to visit him and a very old woman is dreaming fiercely of having crossed the roiling Red River to escape her enemies. A big thatch-haired blond man tries to get to second base with a slender woman who sits up suddenly and says, “You’re sure clumsy.” An extremely drunk fellow is bawling in the snow, pleading that his curse be lifted. Another man, only half drunk, plays an endless card game with his brothers, who tell him that his conversion to Mormonism is ridiculous and will tarnish the good Catholic name of LaBatte. Yet another man, damaged, powerful, and bearing the name of the place where he was born, has fallen asleep in the horse stall by his small woodstove. In the next stall a horse named Gringo is the only horse covered with a blanket and still not satisfied. He presses his head to the thick boards and thoughtfully gnaws the rich wood. Gringo would certainly prefer oats or barley and throws his head back and forth, stomps, hoping that his servant will appear. But nothing happens and the night goes on and on.
A solid and much fatigued woman sleeping on the floor of the tribal office begins to talk in her sleep. Too much salt, she says.
A young woman with soft, bright eyes, often referred to by her teachers as “elfin,” is filling out an order from the Montgomery Ward catalog and purchasing a wristwatch.
The cursed man is crawling toward his parents’ house, where every single person is sleeping hard. He feels like he has been punished enough for something he did just because he wanted to. If his brain worked he could name grown men right and left who had done the same and were walking around in good shape, smiling with their whole mouth, opening and shutting both their eyes. Yes, he’d cuffed her around. Yes, he’d almost nailed her. But nothing happened! It’s not that he shouldn’t have tried. Just that he picked the wrong girl.
Several miles away, a worried man with a flowing pen is doing Palmer exercises at the jewel bearing plant. He revolves his wrists, flexes his fingers, turns from side to side in his chair. Once he is finished, he faces forward and writes yet another letter to Senator Milton R. Young, a letter laying out strategy and signing off with polite desperation. Next, with no hope, he writes a courteous missive, full of jokes, to the other North Dakota senator, William “Wild Bill” Langer, who is in favor of termination. There is nothing to lose and Thomas can’t help liking Wild Bill, who once barricaded himself in the governor’s mansion and refused to be removed from office. If the isolationist Langer had had his way, maybe Falon would not have died in a distant war. The world would almost certainly be much worse off, but Thomas would have his brother, Falon, in reality, not just walking through the wall now and then. And speaking of lonesome spirits . . .
Roderick didn’t seem to be around tonight but there was such a strange feeling. As if the pen held everything balanced on the reservation as Thomas wrote. And wrote.
You Can’t Assimilate Indian Ghosts
Even as a ghost, Roderick was never going to be assimilated. You can’t assimilate Indian ghosts. It’s too late! He didn’t go to their white hell and didn’t go to their white heaven. But he died in Sac and Fox country, too far away to meet the deadline for Chippewa heaven. So he followed his coffin home and just hung around. He listened in on things. It was after his death that he found out the term. What they were up to. Assimilation. Their ways become your ways. He took stock. When they shaved his head and it grew out all fuzzy and spiky, Roderick sort of liked it. Like fur, he ran his hand over it. There were certain things he really went for. Canned peaches. But not the hard shoes. The trumpet. But not before sunrise. A warm woolen jacket.
Wool socks. But then again, if they hadn’t killed them off he could have had a curly buffalo jacket. And curly buffalo socks.
Tuberculosis. For sure, he didn’t like that. Did they have illness in the old days? He hadn’t heard of any and he had to wonder.
What did Indians use to die of? Animals, accidents, cold, other Indians. He had heard back then there were so many animals, animals everywhere, so nobody starved. You could be kicked by a horse or gored by a raging buffalo. He was obsessed by how he might have died. Anything would be better. Battle, for instance, staked to a spear and fending off his enemies. No, the horror and agony he had been through, he’d not forgotten all these many years. Of course, the years were like an instant to him as a ghost. He had gone to old Paranteau’s funeral thinking maybe he could sneak along or follow him on the journey to the afterlife. He was ready for somewhere new. But old Paranteau had died drunk and veered off the holy road. And Roderick had turned back because he smelled the boiling-hot bear meat that Zhaanat had cooked in three changes of water, like his mother.
He could smell anyway. And he also liked to hear Zhaanat talking. No to assimilation! There were no swear words in Chippewa but lots of words for sex and Roderick liked to hear about sex. He regretted that he hadn’t had it, but of course he knew all about it now. He knew too much. Long ago, he’d stopped haunting people when they started acting sexy. But when Zhaanat and the old people talked about sex it was funny. He laughed a ghost laugh. Which sounded like water off an icicle, or like twigs in the woods rubbing together, way up high. But sex in general? It was a farce. Which was what it was to act assimilated.