Red Earth White Earth Page 5

  Guy turned off the light. He swallowed to keep from puking.

  Then he heard a whimpering. He turned on the light again. From behind Bub’s big body they saw yellow curls and round eyes. They scrambled forward.

  Mary Ann was sandwiched between Bub and heavy timber, two of whose spikes had nailed her right hand to her brother’s back. Guy and Tom braced against the wood and with their feet pushed Bub away. They jerked her hand free of the nails, then together carried her toward daylight.

  6

  Winter Saturdays, Guy and Tom and Mary Ann sledded on the hills above No Medicine Lake. Mary Ann, who wore a double mitten on her right hand, was always with them. Jewell Hartmeir would wait until spring to rebuild the barn so there were only cooking chores for Mary Ann. Guy’s parents often woke him late at night with their voices but they hardly spoke during the day. Tom came one Saturday with two black eyes and a puffed-up lip, none of which he would talk about. So the three of them played outside even in the coldest weather.

  “Stumps there and there and there,” Tom called, his nose dripping clear and shiny in the cold. He pointed to swells in the snow that ran down to the lake. Not far offshore was a fish house. The icehouse belonged to the old Indian, Zhingwaak. It was a small, white-painted shack no more than six feet square. Depending on the sunlight, Zhingwaak’s fish house seemed some days close to shore and other days far away. With bright sunlight on snow, the little house was invisible but for a thin, gray string of smoke wavering from the ice.

  They sledded and did not think about the fish house. Sometimes a dark rectangle suddenly appeared on the lake and only then did they remember it. For once in a morning and once in an afternoon Zhingwaak would swing open the door and step behind the house. Then he went back inside. The black door on the ice closed to white and the fish house again disappeared.

  “He ever get fish there?” Guy said. All the other icehouses were clustered on the sandbars two miles down the lake. There the water was clearer. The farther north you went on the lake, the cloudier the water became. That was because of the big underground spring which fed into the lake from somewhere under the hills that Guy and Tom and Mary slid on.

  Tom shrugged.

  “So why does he stay there?” Guy said.

  “He thinks the big northern pike live closest to the spring.”

  “He ever see one? I mean a really big one?”

  Tom nodded.

  “How big?” Guy said. He turned from the fish house to Tom.

  “Big as a shark,” Tom said.

  “Shit,” Mary Ann said. “Ain’t no sharks up here.”

  “Aren’t any sharks here,” Guy said automatically. “You want to stay in third grade the rest of your life?” He and Tom’s reading lessons had pulled Mary Ann up to third grade, but they still held school for her when they could find a warm place without parents.

  “Ain’t is a word,” Mary Ann said, pushing out her bottom lip.

  “No it ain’t,” Tom said. He grinned.

  “Then how come everybody uses it?” Mary Ann said.

  “Everybody around Flatwater, you mean,” Guy said, still thinking about Zhingwaak and the big pike. “You don’t hear people on TV using ‘ain’t.’ Your heartthrob Dr. Granger, and Julia, you don’t hear them using ain’t. And that’s how they got on television.”

  Mary Ann stared. “Really?”

  “For sure,” Tom said. “It’s like the world is full of little microphones that listen for people to say ‘ain’t’ and ‘ourn’ and ‘hisself’ and stuff like you say. The microphones are hooked up to a machine that keeps track of people. People who talk funny can never get on TV or become movie stars.”

  “Really?” Mary Ann said.

  Guy nodded. “Dr. Granger and Julia, too, they probably never said ‘ain’t’ in their whole lives,” Guy said, still staring across the ice, trying to spot the faint feather of smoke from Zhingwaak’s house.

  “Shit,” Mary Ann said. She kicked at the toboggan. When Guy looked back her eyes had begun to shine with tears. “That means I already could never be like Julia.”

  Guy and Tom glanced at each other.

  “Naw,” said Tom. “It’s like this. The people with the microphones and the machines take into account where you was born. Who your daddy and mom were. If your mom died, like yours did, they write that down too. If you got a slow start being a kid, like you did, they’re not going to be so tough on you.”

  “Take Julia’s or Dr. Granger’s kids,” Guy added, “they got a head start on the rest of us. But one ‘ain’t’ and they fall down a notch and we move up.”

  “Really?” Mary Ann said, beginning to smile.

  “For sure,” Tom said.

  “Get on,” Guy said, sliding the toboggan toward Mary Ann. He was still thinking about Zhingwaak and the big pike and the underground spring.

  In January a warm front lumbered slowly from the south onto the reservation. The knee-deep, fluffy snow settled like white bread whose yeast had failed. Cold weather came again and left a frozen crust on which their toboggan never slid better. Holding on to each other, Guy and Tom and Mary Ann swept down the hill toward No Medicine Lake. They soared shrieking over the ridge where the frozen water met the shore, slammed back onto the snow, then hissed forward across the ice. Sometimes their toboggan came within a snowball’s throw of Zhingwaak’s fish house.

  Once Zhingwaak opened his door and left it open. He was watching them.

  “Maybe we’re bothering him,” Guy said.

  “Naw,” Tom said, “nothing bothers him.”

  Another time when they were sliding, Zhingwaak came out of his fish house and walked down the lake. He carried a small saw. He walked to where he was finger-tall and a toothpick-sized tree lay blown over onto the ice. He bent over the tree. Guy watched his dark arm move back and forth like a wing. At first there was no sound, then came the faint rasp of the saw. When Zhingwaak stopped cutting and stood up the saw continued to rasp without him. Guy imagined the cut still deepening. Sawdust still falling.

  As Tom and Mary Ann pulled the toboggan back uphill, Guy watched Zhingwaak. His dark figure against the white shoreline was connected to the black door of the fish house on the lake. Zhingwaak was a door.

  He watched as Zhingwaak gathered a few sticks in his arms and began the walk back to his fish house. Guy looked at the long toboggan sliding toward him on the ice, then back to Zhingwaak.

  The three of them approached Zhingwaak on the ice. The old Indian wore layers of plaid wool shirts and green wool pants that looked like army blankets. His pants were held up by suspenders made from braided strips of buckskin. On his head he wore a floppy cap of shiny black and white skunk fur. In the bright sunlight Zhingwaak’s face looked like oak bark with knotholes for eyes. He smelled like wood smoke and tobacco. He nodded to them and spoke some word Guy did not know.

  “We have the toboggan, we’ll haul your wood,” Tom said.

  Zhingwaak nodded, then placed his sticks on the sled.

  They hauled and stacked a large pile of dead branches beside the fish house. Zhingwaak’s little door remained closed. When they finished he swung open the door. He stared at the pile of wood. Then he said, “Come in, children.”

  Tom, Guy, and Mary Ann squeezed into the hot darkness of the little house. At first Guy could see nothing but the moon glow square of the spearing hole. While his eyes adjusted to the darkness, his nose took over. He smelled sweat dried in old wool. Tobacco. Pine pitch and creosote from the wood stove. And a sharper scent that was a cross between cedar shavings and something cooked for Thanksgiving but left too long in the oven, something burned.

  Soon he could see better. Zhingwaak sat on a stool at the far end of the fish house. He leaned over the spear hole and his face drew light from the water. A zigzag scar cut like a crow’s track across the fu
rrows of his forehead. Guy thought of the policemen’s sticks that summer night in Flatwater, the flash of lights, the swirl of falling bodies.

  The big pike spear leaned against Zhingwaak’s shoulder. The spear was a narrow rod of iron, taller than Guy. Its tines were a wide hand of ten barbed fingers that pricked in the wood floor. The spear’s cord was draped across Zhingwaak’s knee, then tied in a noose knot around his ankle. That way if Zhingwaak speared a big pike he could easily walk it outside and let it flop and stiffen on the ice.

  Beside Zhingwaak was a wood stove, a five-gallon pail with a hole cut for a stove pipe on top and a door for wood cut in its side. On the wall beside Zhingwaak’s head was a long gray feather, a feather bigger than Guy had ever seen. Beside the feather was a small leather pouch. Tied to the pouch was a tiny tin man. Below the tin man, hung on nails, were three bright-painted decoy fish carved of wood and with tin, curved tails.

  A fourth decoy, a red and white one, hung in the water in the center of the hole a few feet beneath the ice. Guy stared down the bright door of the spear hole. The walls of the ice glowed white and smooth. The water welled slightly up and down, as if somewhere there were waves underneath the ice. Tiny, sand-sized bits of green moss hung in slanted drifts in the water like grain dust in sunlight. Faint white polka dots that could have been clam shells showed against the mossy-green lake bottom. Guy could not tell the depth of the water.

  Zhingwaak began to work the decoy line. The decoy fish darted forward from a spray of green dust, then began to loop in slow circles about the hole. Zhingwaak’s wrist clicked as he worked the line. In the dusty green water the decoy followed itself; its white sides left a ghost of phosphorescence that chased its real body in perfect circles below the ice. Guy watched Zhingwaak’s wrist rise and fall. Click. Rise and fall. Click.

  Then he realized Zhingwaak was watching him. The old Indian’s dark eyes drew light from the water.

  “You want to try?” Zhingwaak said, handing the line to Guy.

  The decoy jerked and bobbed as Guy pulled on the line.

  “Slower,” Zhingwaak said.

  Soon Guy had the red and white fish looping evenly about the hole.

  “I’m next,” Tom said quickly.

  “Then me,” Mary Ann said.

  The three of them took turns with the decoy line. Zhingwaak watched the decoy swim.

  “Not that way,” Tom said to Mary Ann, “that’s too jerky. Here. Like this.”

  Mary Ann stamped her feet on the floor and grabbed back the line from Tom.

  “Children,” Zhingwaak said, “we must be very quiet. The big pike Nimishoomis will hear us and he will not come to our hole.”

  They fell silent. They looked into the water, then back up to Zhingwaak.

  “You saw him once?” Guy asked.

  Zhingwaak nodded.

  “How big is he?” Mary Ann asked quickly.

  “As big as a man.”

  All of them stared back into the hole.

  “Nimishoomis. He is the grandfather of all pike,” Zhingwaak said.

  They were quiet for a while. Zhingwaak handed the decoy line to Tom, then reached into his pocket. He pulled out a large potato. He held the potato over the hole and with his knife began to cut the potato into thin slices. The white slices splashed onto the water, then fell, wavering like leaves falling, to the bottom. Guy realized the water was only six or eight feet deep. Resting on the green moss, the potato slices drew light from the water and brightened the hole.

  “Why are you doing that?” Mary Ann asked.

  “Light for Nimishoomis,” Zhingwaak said. “So he can find his way to our house.”

  Nimishoomis did not come that afternoon. He did not come the next day, nor the one after. But Guy and Tom and Mary Ann came often to Zhingwaak’s fish house. When they tired of sliding or were cold, they crowded into Zhingwaak’s house. Often he told them stories, stories like “The Little Boy and the Windigoo.”

  Long ago there was an Indian village. The men in the village were all hunters. One day some of the hunters went into the woods but never returned. Other hunters went to look for them. But those hunters never returned.

  This kept on.

  In the same village there was a little boy who lived with Ookomisan, his grandmother. He listened to people talk. He watched the hunters leave the village.

  One day he said to his grandmother, “Ookomisan, may I go hunting in the woods?”

  “Don’t you know there’s a Windigoo in the woods?” she answered him.

  “A Windigoo is like a giant, only bigger,” Zhingwaak explained, then continued.

  “The Windigoo does not scare me,” said the little boy. “So give me a little sack of buckskin to carry my lunch in and let me go into the woods.”

  “The Windigoo will catch you and eat you,” Ookomisan said.

  “Not me,” the little boy said. “I will catch the Windigoo if only you will let me go into the woods.”

  The boy coaxed and coaxed Ookomisan. And finally she gave in. She knew the little boy was brave. She gave him a buckskin pouch and some dried venison for the trip.

  The little boy walked from the village into the forest. He walked among the rivers and trees for four days. On the fourth day he stopped to lean against an oak tree. The tree moved. The tree was not a tree at all, but was the leg of the Windigoo.

  The Windigoo thought, Here is a boy. But he is too small to eat. So I will invite him to my house. When he eats he will grow big. Then I will eat him.

  At the great hut of the Windigoo, the Windigoo brought out venison and duck and partridge and bread and blueberries and cranberries and more. “Eat,” the Windigoo said to the little boy. “If you eat, I won’t hurt you and you can stay here with me and grow big and I will be your friend.”

  But the little boy was as clever as he was brave. He knew the giant’s plan. And the little boy had a plan of his own.

  The Windigoo and the boy began to eat. They ate and ate. Once when the Windigoo’s big eyes looked down to his bowl, the little boy felt for his own buckskin pouch. He moved the pouch so that it hung in front of him but under his shirt.

  They kept eating. But the boy began to drop food into the buckskin pouch instead of into his mouth. The giant ordered more food. He began to stare at the little boy who could eat so much. But the little boy’s fingers were faster than the Windigoo’s eyes. He kept dropping his food into his pouch.

  From the juice of the berries and the juice of the meat, the buckskin pouch began to stretch as all leather stretches when it is wet. In this way the little boy kept eating.

  Soon the Windigoo thought, My! This little boy eats more than anyone I’ve ever seen, even more than other Windigoos.

  Finally the Windigoo could eat not another leg of a partridge or even a berry.

  “Have you had enough?” the Windigoo asked the little boy.

  “Not yet,” answered the little boy. He kept eating until his shirt puffed out in front as round as a goose before winter.

  The Windigoo decided to kill the little boy. He could hang him from the rafters of his hut and then eat the boy tomorrow when he was hungry again.

  But then the little boy said, “I can do something no Windigoo can. Watch this.” With that he took out his skinning knife, pulled up his shirt, and slit open the buckskin pouch.

  Now the Windigoo was angry and jealous. He took out his own knife and did the same thing to his own great belly. From the Windigoo’s belly tumbled all the hunters of the village, who set upon the Windigoo and killed him.

  When the Windigoo was dead, the hunters carried the little boy back to the village on their shoulders. They sang:

  Windigoo gii-nibo, Windigoo gii-nibo.

  The cannibal is dead, the cannibal is dead.

  Mangademo, mangademo. />
  The trail is wide, the trail is wide.

  Sometimes after a story Zhingwaak left them alone in the fish house while he walked up the lake to get more firewood or to look for animal tracks along the shore. Then Guy or Tom or Mary Ann got to sit in Zhingwaak’s chair.

  One February afternoon it was Tom’s turn. As Zhingwaak’s footsteps crunched away from the fish house, Tom tied the spear’s cord around his ankle but leaned the spear against the wall. Since they had never yet seen a fish in Zhingwaak’s hole, they played games with the decoy fish. Guy found another line and let a second decoy circle down into the water. He and Mary Ann played chase with the two decoys. The little wooden fish, one white and red, the other yellow, darted back and forth across the hole.

  “Never catch me,” Mary Ann called.

  “Just wait,” Guy said.

  Soon their lines tangled. Still laughing, Guy and Mary Ann kept pulling on the lines. The little fish, like fighting kites, wound themselves closer and closer together.

  As Guy opened his mouth to say “Tag . . .” there was a green swirl in the hole and both decoys disappeared. Guy pulled on his line but it was stuck on something.

  “Holy shit,” Tom breathed.

  Then Guy saw the fish. It was Nimishoomis. His broad, dark back lay below them in the center of the hole like a great old log with yellow-black eyes. He filled the length of the hole and his tail was out of sight beneath the ice. His eyes looked all directions at the same time. His gills, as wide as Guy’s grandfather’s hands, swelled and sank, swelled and sank as he breathed the water. The two decoy lines disappeared inside his closed jaws.