When Maggie fled her family home on the Mozhay Point Indian Reservation headed for the railroad tracks that led to Duluth, it was without her husband, who was because of her lying unconscious on the floor next to the woodstove, or her three oldest children, who in the fall had been blown from home by the winds of seasonal change and federal Indian policy to boarding school. She did take her two small boys and—tied into a flowered quilt—some children’s clothing, several potatoes, and a pan of lugallette. And his rifle, which she wrapped in a gunnysack and slung on her back, like an infant. Then she left him, that bastard she hit over the head with the frying pan after he had passed out, unconscious but breathing, on the floor of the two-room tarpapered house that had been her grandma’s, on the forty-acre land allotment in Sweetgrass Township that had been taken from that renegade devil-Indian Joe Muskrat and assigned to the LaForce family when Maggie was a little girl.
Andre, that bastard. She had just come in the door with an armful of wood, which stuck to her shawl. When she set the wood down on the floor, it left bits of snow and bark against the plaid wool crossed over her chest. Giizis and Biikwaastigwaan were asleep at the bottom of the bed, their hair stuck to their heads in that damp sleep sweat, from that hard work that children do in their dreams, Giizis snoring and Biik so still in his labor that she placed a hand on his chest to ease for a second her endless worrying that those two, the littlest, her last, would leave, too, in the relentless gusty wake of the three before them. “Biik? Ginibaa?” He breathed. Ah. And she smoothed the quilt over their bodies, faded maroon and pink flowers against a summer sky fogging and running after years of wear and washing to snow and sleet, her wedding quilt. Sixteen irregular large pieces of ladies’ dresses crazy-stitched together.
Her wedding quilt. Remember that day. Andre, good-looking little man he was, with those short bowed legs that she couldn’t help but follow the first time she saw him walk past her. But he was mean to her when he drank. She knew everybody could see that but nobody said anything, and she was as big as he was anyway and should be able to take care of herself. And Sonny was there too, not showing yet, him, a tiny boy carried right inside Maggie and nobody knew except Andre, not even the priest, so she committed mortal sin going to confession and leaving that out, and right before the sacrament of marriage, too. She supposed her mother knew, the way she was looking at her. Mother had made that quilt in a real hurry, stitched the top together in two days and batted, tied, and finished in two more, pieced so large that sleeves and bodices could be clearly seen clutching and elbowing expanses of skirt. When it was spread on the bed, the quilt told a hundred stories about Mother and Nokom and the aunts and the ladies who had donated whatever they could spare that was suitable for a wedding quilt that needed to be finished quickly.
He pushed open the door and leaned on the frame, Andre, right after she set the wood down, and told her to move her big old hind end and get him something to eat. She put the frying pan on the woodstove, put some lard in to melt, started cutting up the potatoes, and said, “Go wash up, you. Where you been? You stink like Old Man Dommage’s place.” Next thing she knew, he had her by the hair and he was gasping and wheezing with the work it was to swing her around, and she could smell his breath—bad enough to make her sick—snoose and meat and rotgut wet on her face asking, “Where the hell’s Louis?” In their embrace, her mouth so close to his ear she whispered hoarsely, “Hold on, hold on. The supper’s gonna burn.” He let go and stood there swaying, head down but eyes up staring without focus, putting a lot of work into trying to watch her cook till his legs gave out and he slept on the floor. “Bastard,” she thought. Andre, you bastard.
And Maggie realized that she was ready. She scraped the potatoes into the empty lard bucket and set the frying pan on the table, in the center, exactly on the blackened circle that it had charred into the wood that time he grabbed her around the waist and spun her away from the stove so quickly that she hadn’t had time to let go of the frying pan and so held it with both hands while she twirled, arcing it high in the air to miss Biik’s and Giizis’s heads, before she dropped it on the table, where it gonged like a church bell before she went down like a sack of apples.
Ready. She had practiced this so many times in her head that her body moved and her hands did the work without thought. She watched herself do this. First the frying pan, to keep him out for a while. Then the twine. It was under the bed with Andre’s broken traps and the lard can that Giizis and Biik peed in when it was too cold and dark for them to go outside. She tied Andre’s hands to the biggest trap and then wound the twine around his ankles, his knees, around his shoulders and arms, tying the knot right over where he had torn that hole in the back of his red-and-black buffalo plaid jacket, catching it on the saw next to the woodpile that time he swung at her and missed when she was chopping wood. Then she took the quilt off the bed and wrapped the potatoes, the pan of lugallette, and Giizis’s and Biik’s other shirts. She woke the boys and helped them put on their shoes and coats and hoods and the mittens she’d made them from the tops of Andre’s old socks. Finally, she grabbed the rifle and slung it with the quilt bundle over her shoulder. The boys followed her out the door and down the road all the way to the tracks where the railroad men kept their handcar. She hefted and loaded onto the platform her little boys and the quilt that held what she needed now instead of the hopes and dreams she’d been silly enough to fill it with when she’d married that bastard. Then Maggie stepped up, lifted one end of the pump, and began to move her little boys and her wedding quilt down the tracks to Mesabi, where she hocked the rifle and bought a train ticket to Duluth.
Henen was a good sister, Maggie’d always thought, a truly good person who would do anything for you, and one of those people everybody liked. When they were girls at mission school, those long years away from home, Henen always got along well with the nuns, was always there at the front of the line all neat and clean when it was time for morning Mass, always spoke up nice and clear just the way they liked, yes sister no sister please sister thank you sister, and always pronounced her name just the way the nuns liked it, Hell-en. She was the only one of the girls who got to help the sisters make the little communion hosts, and once in a while she put some that got overbaked into her apron pocket and gave them to Maggie and the other girls to eat when they were getting ready for bed. And the nuns never said anything, even though it wasn’t allowed, when on those nights when Maggie was so lonesome for Mother that she couldn’t get warm she crept down the dark hallway after lights out, between the little girls’ and big girls’ dormitory rooms, on bare cold feet over icy floorboards that creaked under her weight, to crawl under the covers with Henen.
Henen had taken good care of Maggie all right, and after Henen was sent home after disgracing herself, she began writing to Maggie, her letters so interesting that they would have made good school essays, her handwriting so precise and clean that if she hadn’t been sent away they would have been put up on the wall in continuity of that rebuke of the other girls’ laziness, sloppiness, and general inability to measure up to the standard set by the nuns’ favorite pupil. Maggie read the letters to the other girls in the dormitory; Henen’s letters were better than the books from the library shelf. The letters eased and aggravated the girls’ homesickness with stories about maple sugaring and picking berries and washing clothes and hauling wood, all in the company of Mother and Baba, Nokom, and all the neighbors at Mozhay Point. Henen didn’t mention anything about the baby, or if she did, the letter never got to Maggie. When Maggie got home the next summer, Mother told her not to talk about it to Henen. And Henen didn’t say a word about it; the first thing she did when she saw Maggie was give her a new blouse that she had made for her, yellow flowers on white, that sack style that all the grown-up ladies wore, and to say, tell me about all the girls at school, what did you read, are you learning how to embroider, do you want to practice penmanship with me. That was all, no word about a baby, just Henen all cheerful and happy during daylight, fading to silence when the sun went down.
She never did get back to school, Henen. When Sister Rock noticed her belly, that hard round lump below the waistband of her skirt, grown to the size of a small saucepan and pushing her waistband up closer every day to her bust, she confined Henen to the infirmary, where she couldn’t be seen by the other girls, to wait for the doctor to arrive and confirm the result of Henen’s sin. That evening, Maggie complained of an earache, and in the middle of the night woke Sister Rock by crying in her sleep. The drainage of blood and fluid had soaked through the pillowcase and smeared the sheets and the sleeves of her nightgown. Sister clicked her tongue and muttered, stripped the bed and Maggie, bundled the dirty linens under her arm, and led Maggie out of the little girls’ dormitory, down the stairs to the basement, where she threw the wad onto the pile of whites to be washed, then back upstairs. Naked, Maggie shivered in the cold night air of the damp hallways. She crouched as she walked on tiptoe, mortified, in the wake of Sister Rock’s large backside, which bounced back and forth under a wool dressing gown the shape and style of her daytime habit, into the infirmary, where Henen sat up in bed and asked, “Wegonen? Nishimay, Maggie, gidaakoz ina?”
Sister Rock shushed Henen and told her to help Maggie into a clean nightgown and then go directly to the kitchen to wait, and to not say a word, not one word.
In the wash basin was clean water for morning. Henen warmed the wash cloth with her hands before wiping the blood off of Maggie’s hair and ear and face and her thin and childlike body and whispered that it was all right. She put a clean towel down over the pillowcase and told Maggie that it would feel soft and warm against her sore ear. Then she went to the kitchen, where she slept on the floor of the pantry, rolled in a blanket left for her by Sister Rock.
The next day, because Maggie was too sick to move out of the infirmary, the doctor examined Henen in the pantry, with Sister Rock present but averting her eyes. The girl obediently removed her bloomers and placed one foot on a stepstool. Astonishingly, the doctor knelt before her and leaned his forehead against her knee. He reached under her skirt and ran a thick and warm hand up the inside of her thigh, then probed inside with two fingers, where, she now understood, the baby had been placed. She stared at the gaslight fixture suspended by a metal chain from the pantry ceiling. Out of the corner of her eye she watched, although she tried not to, the doctor’s head gleam with a shiny sweat, and his red face twist unhappily while he grunted, reaching in vain for her virginity.
He withdrew and stood, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. “Spoiled. She has been spoiled,” he said to Sister Rock. She shook her head.
“On the table, my dear,” he said to Henen. He held her hand as she stepped onto the stool. “Lie down, my dear, on your back.” He lifted her skirt and folded it back above her waist; sunlight poured onto her skin. In the humiliation of her exposure on an oilcloth-covered pantry work table, she watched patterns of light dance through tree branches that waved in the wind outside the window, casting thin waves of warmth on her round belly, on her baby. The chain that attached the gas fixture to the ceiling was really three metal cords, she could see, braided and painted brown.
Again, the doctor’s face twisted, reddened. He pulled a dishtowel from a shelf to cover Henen from ribs to knees, then used both hands to cup, through threadbare cotton faintly yellowed with food stains bleached by the girls in the laundry room, her belly and then prod in a circle around the small saucepan shape that was a baby. A baby. “Oh, yes … oh, yes.” He prodded her breasts. “Are they sore?” And again her belly. “Ye-e-es. About halfway there, I would guess. Have you felt quickening? Moving?”
“No,” she answered softly, thinking, “but I will.”
“Well, you will. Would you like to see this, Sister?”
Sister Rock, eyes on a row of canned goods, shook her head.
The doctor fumbled, searching in his pocket, as he had fumbled under Henen’s skirt, and placed a piece of horehound candy wrapped in white paper and a lemon drop fuzzy with pocket lint on the dishtowel. He and Sister Rock left Henen in the pantry to step back into her bloomers.
When she got home, she helped her mother and wrote letters. She read every day, silently in the morning and aloud before bed, from the only book in the house, the Bible. When the Indian agent’s wife paid Mother for ironing with a length of yellow calico, Henen cut and sewed a new blouse for Maggie on the new kitchen table—heavy and solid as a sow—that Baba had built right in the house. Sitting there one night, sewing with her delicate and even stitches, listening to Baba and Mother talk while they drank raspberry tea, listening to Nokom sucking on her pipe as she lit it with a coal from the stove, Henen felt a tapping from within her belly, a lurch to the side. She hummed a song of gratitude.
The baby never moved again; instead, it shrank within Henen’s belly, imperceptibly from day to day but nevertheless steadily from week to week. She began to reach for her belly when alone in the house, or in the outhouse, or when she forgot to keep her hands from idleness, searching in sickening composure for a small body, cupping her belly and using her fingers to prod a circle around the lump that every time she searched was harder, more dense, as the little body of her baby calcified and shrank to the shape and consistency of a robin’s egg, until any appearance of a small saucepan shape that was a baby simply disappeared. And then, after that, every day, the spirit of her baby receded from her own and the others that continued to live, growing more and more distant, until when the children came back from school in June it had joined those other baby spirits who, because they were too small to walk, traveled to the other world on the east wind, which carried them gently in the sky, borne by visions of the Great Ojibwe Migration of long ago. Out of sight, they were mourned by bereft earth-bound mothers like Henen.
Henen had taken good care of her all right, so once Maggie got to Duluth, she walked, carrying Biik and holding Giizis’s hand, over to the rooming house where Henen was staying to settle in for a while, and of course Henen didn’t ask any questions or say a word about that damn bastard Andre or ask where Louis was; that wasn’t her way—she had always been very considerate of other people’s feelings. The sisters shared the bed and the little boys slept on the floor, and it was like the old days at the mission school except there were no nuns telling them what to do, and except of course for the changes in Henen. It took a couple of days for Maggie to see that all of Henen’s ways were just a little more so than they had been the last time she saw her, and then to realize that for years Henen’s ways had been each time she saw her just a little more so, till it became clear that life had boiled down and distilled Henen to an exaggeration and mockery of the mission school girl she had been. She was as always kind and polite, and she still wore the brown scapular that the nuns had given her underneath her clothes right next to her skin, but Maggie could see that her sister’s drinking was getting closer to winning the upper hand in its battle with her spirit. She indulged the boys, allowing them to do as they liked, never sharing in their discipline, though that was the way the LaForces and everyone else at Mozhay Point helped in the proper raising of children, yet hissed at Biik to never, never touch her things when he opened the bottle of cologne she kept on the dresser. She insisted that Maggie try on her rouge, stroked Maggie’s hair, told her that they would never be apart again, that she would take care of her baby sister forever, then spent some of the rent money on a bottle of wine from the blind pig in the basement of the house next door, which she drank, secretly she thought, in the outhouse in the backyard that they shared with the rest of the boarders. She had begun to step stiffly and speak slowly, her lips slightly pursed and drooping at the corners as she attempted the precision of speech and posture that the nuns used to hold her up as both example and reproach in front of the other girls. Her belly slackened to a paunch as her waist thickened, yet her arms and legs grew thinner. Her face had begun to swell with the miseries of times she disappeared for days, reappearing with a bruised nose, a new clip for her hair, puffy eyes, or without her coat or memory of liquor- and smoke-hazed bar flirtations that changed unexpectedly into arguments, fistfights, torn clothes, and abandonment. Henen, too proud to acknowledge those betrayals and mortifications, returned alone, making her way up the walk and through the door with a grace and dignity oddly enhanced by the landscape of her face. And she didn’t say anything; that was her way.
When Maggie found a job at the mattress factory, she used her first paycheck to rent a house and brought her sister, now so fragile and needing Maggie as Maggie had needed her when they were girls, to live with her.
Sonny wrote home once a month, always the same letter.
Dear Mother,
I hope that this letter finds you well. I am in good health, and doing well in school.
Sincerely,
John Robineau
That time we were carrying the wash out for the girls to hang on the lines, me and my cousin Mickey, who we called Waboos at home, we started talking Indian and laughing; we weren’t supposed to do that, to the teachers there I guess it was like we were saying dirty words.
“Giziibiiga-ige makak, it’s heavy, hey.”
“Nimashkawaa.”
“Gimashkawaa like a little girl, ha!”
We stumbled with that big old washtub, each on one side of it, holding on to one of the handles. It was heavy, and we leaned our shoulders away from the tub to balance the weight. Mickey, he was so skinny his over-hall strap come off the one shoulder and dragged down his arm, making it harder to carry his side. Well, we were breathing so hard from the work and laughing we didn’t even know McGoun was sneaking up behind us till he says real loud, “Hey! Are you boys talking Sioux?” McGoun, he didn’t know one Indian from another and sure wouldn’t know we were talking Chippewa. I says to the prefect, “No, sir, we weren’t talking Sioux.” And then Mickey says right after me, “No, sir, we wouldn’t do that.” McGoun squints his eyes at us and says, “Well, see that you don’t,” and left. We started laughing so hard he heard and came back and shoved Mickey, who fell right on the ground, and the washtub tipped over so all that white wash load was right in the mud, and McGoun said, “Look what you boys done now,” and unhooked that doubled leather strap off his waist and started hitting Mickey with it. Then he had us carry the washtub back to the laundry building, and we had to wash it ourselves, all that big pile of girls’ underwear and nightgowns. We were humiliated to be touching all that stuff and the laundry girls so embarrassed that for once they stopped their giggling and looked away at anything but us.
That night when we were getting ready for bed, I could see Mickey had bruises on his upper arm, four fingertip shaped on the back and one larger, thumb shaped on the front, from where McGoun pulled him, just about lifting him right off the ground, and a couple of welts on his skinny hind end. I whispered to him, “Maajaa daa, Waboos, let’s get out of here tonight,” and he looked back at me and smiled so big, his snaggly and rotting teeth all crooked and his eyes all happy. “Eya, ‘ndaa,” he whispered back.
We lay there on our beds across from each other and listened to the other boys fall asleep as the light from the moon came in through the windows in wide stripes that moved across the floor and beds so we could see first Thomas on his back, arms out wide, with one leg sticking out of the covers, then Shigog, who pulled his covers over his head so he looked like a ghost. We heard Wesley snort and mumble, “C’mere, you,” and I was glad he was sleeping because he was so wild. All the time me and Mickey were facing each other in our beds, Mickey laying on his right side, me on my left. After a while, when it was pretty quiet except for breathing sounds, we looked right at each other and I said, “Let’s go, Cousin,” and Mickey’s eyes widened there in the dark, then turned into crooked black triangles as he smiled and stood up. We picked up our uniform pants and jackets folded and laid out for morning at the ends of the beds, and our shoes and socks, and walked just quiet across the dormitory floor to the kitchen, where we tied some bread and apples into a dish towel to carry. Then we walked out the front door, leaving it open so nobody’d hear us pull it shut, and walked behind the barn in our nightshirts. We got dressed and slicked our hair down a little with some water from the trough and walked down the road toward home.
It was a long ways from Harrod to Duluth, and we were on the road for three, four days. We walked, and hitched, and slept in fields the first two nights, and even though we were wearing these soldier-style uniforms so anybody who looked could have guessed where we had come from, only one person, this one farmer who picked us up on the third day, asked us if we were from that Indian school. Since Mickey was so bashful and because I was afraid he’d tell the truth, doing so with that big smile of his, I did the talking for us. “Yes, sir, we were sent for,” I said, looking solemn. “We had a death in the family and have to get to Duluth.” The farmer said he was sorry to hear that; he was going to Allouez in the morning and could give us a ride almost to Duluth; if we wanted we could stay in his barn that night.
We helped the farmer unload the wagon and cleaned up a little in the chicken coop, then his wife set us a nice place to eat at their kitchen table. Fried chicken—relatives of the ones we had just fed—these ones’ parts were all separated into sizzling little legs and wings and breasts and looking mighty tasty there in the frying pan. The wife kept getting up from her chair to put more food on our plates, and because she was a big woman, built a lot like those chickens of hers, her front and behind hit the backs of our chairs and the sideboard as she moved, and she clucked these nice little chicken noises and fussed over us, how sorry she was about our loss and what brave boys we were to travel all by ourselves. In the morning she fed us again, and the farmer dropped us off in Allouez in front of the feed store. We walked the rest of the way to Duluth, more than ten miles to home.
Ma was surprised to see us walk in the door; the last time I’d run, McGoun had called the Duluth police, who had come to the house to tell her, so she knew about it by the time I got there. She said, “Sonny, Waboos, namadabin. Gibakade, na? I’ll make some tea.” She called out the back door for Giizis and Biik, “Ambe, ambe, look who’s here.” She fixed us tea and ladled out some soup, and we told her all about our trip and felt like heroes. Mickey wanted to get going to Mozhay to see the LaVirage cousins, so after he’d eaten, she gave him two quarters and packed him some food for the road.
It was when we were going out the front door to send Mickey on his way that we saw the black Ford parked in front of the house and McGoun sitting on the running board having a cigarette. He got up as soon as he saw us come out and grabbed me and Mickey each by an arm. “Mrs. Robineau, I am here to escort these young men back to the Harrod School,” he said, in this formal and official way but breathing hard because it must have been hard to talk with Mickey squirming and me pulling the way we were. Giizis and Biik hadn’t gotten all the way out the front door, so Ma pushed them back before McGoun saw them. They knew what to do, went into the bedroom and under the bed, behind the quilt. Ma went right up to the prefect and took me by the other arm and said, “Mr. McGoun, Sonny is sixteen now and we need him at home, here, to go to work. You can’t keep him anymore.” It was McGoun’s job to bring two boys back, but I have to hand it to Ma, she didn’t back down this time and he was losing. Finally he said that I was more trouble than I was worth anyway and shoved Mickey into the backseat of the car. Mickey was too big to cry; he smiled just brave with those snaggly teeth and waved at Ma just before they drove away, but then I could see through the back window that his head was down and I could feel it that he wasn’t smiling anymore. We went back inside and Ma told Giizis and Biik that they could come out now.
Ma was able to send money to school for train tickets home so that when summer started Girlie and me could come home and not be put to work on the truck farm for our room and board. We had a good time at home. Once it got warm out a lot of people would come to visit at Ma’s, stopping by to visit and stay a while, people from Mozhay Point and Lost Lake, relatives and friends, the Brules and Gallettes, the Sweets, the Bariboos. They brought their kids and their quilts and food, flour or salt pork or maybe a sack of rice, if they had some left over from last fall. We had some good times. All day we would be visiting, kids playing and the grownups having tea while they talked, people coming and going. Some of the men got jobs shoveling grain at the elevators or working in the scrap yard and were able to find places for their families to live here in town, too. So now we knew some people here. Good times. And Ma’s house was right in the middle of it when Girlie and me got home that summer.
Some nights after it was dark outside we would have a fire in the backyard, in the pit Sonny had dug, and sit to visit, watching till it burned out. Ma would set potatoes in the fire, close to the outside edge and under the wood, to cook. She picked up the potatoes when they were blackened and done, with her bare hands, and handed them out. Split open, the insides looked so white out there in the dark.
Ma was always very generous with people; she had that reputation. She’d give you the shirt off her back, people said. They always talked that way, like they admired her, but I saw people take advantage of her, too, and she died poor, like a lot of other generous people. Not everybody is like Ma, but she didn’t care about that. I remember not long after we got home me and Sonny were sleeping on the front room floor after everybody was asleep, and we could hear these people, some friends of some of our cousins, in the kitchen. They were real quiet in there, with the door to the front room shut, making these rustling noises as they unwrapped food that they’d brought for just themselves. Here they were staying at Ma’s, and she made them welcome, and with her good manners offering them whatever she had—and that wasn’t much. Before everybody went to bed, they’d finished up the coffee she had on hand and ate more than their share of potatoes, so that there weren’t going to be enough for everybody for the next day, but Ma didn’t say anything because that wouldn’t have been polite. And there they were, eating, in the middle of the night there, all by themselves in the kitchen, and there were me and Sonny in the front room, still hungry, listening to them eat. Paper bags rattling. Chewing. Whispering.
They got up early and left with their garbage so we wouldn’t know what they’d been up to. When I told Ma about it she said that was their own business and not ours.
“Why should they get away with that, those bums?” I asked.
“Maybe they think they need it.”
“Maybe we think we do, too.”
“Not like that, we don’t.”
And Girlie and Aunt Helen just nodded their heads in that way, saying in those voices that sounded like they were singing together, “Mmmm, hmmm,” to let me know that Ma was acting the way a person should.
“It was cookies, and doughnuts, and it smelled like they were eating dried meat, too. Next time they come here we should throw them out, those bums.”
“People do what they do for reasons we don’t know about. They must need it more than we do.”
“E-e-en za,” Aunt Helen added, “so I’ve heard,” which made Ma laugh.
Ma lived long enough for me to buy a Buick and take her out driving and visiting when I came home, and she made sure that I took everybody else out who needed a ride, too. And let them borrow money. I bought her things I knew she would like, pretty things, a bowl with red and blue stripes painted on the outside, a statue of a little girl holding a flower, a blue powder box with a music box inside—when she opened the lid she could listen to it play while she powdered her face.
I always worked hard, almost as hard as Ma, but I was somehow able to hang on to more of my money. It wasn’t easy; it took some compromises that sometimes I think she didn’t understand. But she always stood up for me when anybody called me a stingy-gut.
Like I said, she died poor. Gave it all away. Give you the shirt off her back and died poor, like a lot of other generous people.
With the weather getting warm and people able to travel around easier, the house got pretty full, with somebody there to watch the little boys and keep them company while Maggie and Sonny worked: Girlie and George and sometimes Henen if it was a good day, or some of the cousins from Mozhay, who visited for an afternoon, or a week, or a month. Some nights there were people sleeping all over the place. They brought blankets and sometimes food with them and shared what they had.
Maggie’s children slept on quilts that she had sewn during the spring on Sundays, her days off, while she watched Giizis and Biik play and roughhouse with Sonny, of pieces cut from clothing donated to St. Matthew’s and discarded by Father Hagen because it was too worn for wear. Sonny and George had quilts patched from pieces of men’s pants and jackets, dark wools, Girlie a flower garden of brights and pastels, ladies’ skirts and dresses. Sonny and George slept on the front room floor, but Girlie brought her quilt into the bedroom and slept with the little boys on the floor next to Maggie’s bed. For the first week after she got home from school she had followed Maggie from room to room, kitchen to front room to bedroom, as she did her work at home, cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing, and when Maggie sat in the rocking chair, Girlie sat on the floor next to her, touching the hem of her mother’s skirt with the back of her hand or pinching it between her thumb and first finger, being Maggie’s little girl again for just a little while.
Andre showed up one day while Maggie was at work and made himself at home. When she got home he was lying asleep on the front room floor on the wedding quilt that her mother had made them, the one she took when she left the allotment, that he must have taken off her bed, with his head on his damn jacket, and Girlie was in the kitchen slicing up some pork and lard for when he woke up. “Ai,” she thought, “sshhtaa,” and was going to say something when Girlie turned from the stove and said with a happy smile, “Look who’s here!” Maggie thought, well the children were glad to see him; he was good to the children. Why ruin it for them?
He stayed two days and then took Sonny and George to find a ride with him back up to Mozhay Point; Maggie didn’t see them again until the end of summer when the boys walked in the front door swaggering a little because they had cash money from working at the tourist stand and ricing. They had Waboos with them but not their father, whom they’d left up at Old Man Dommage’s.
George came back to town from Mozhay with Mickey right before we had to go back to boarding school, which was a good thing because I didn’t want to have to go on the train by myself and then have to try to explain to Mr. McGoun where they were. It was going to be hard enough to leave Mama and the little boys, who were really old enough to go to school and really shouldn’t be left alone like that when she went to work. Mama was doing everything she could to keep those boys with her and not send them to Indian school, but I knew she was going to have to send them sometime. One night we could hear her and one of the uncles talking out in the front room, late when they thought we were asleep, me and the little boys. The big boys were outside in the backyard by the fire, so it was just Mama and Uncle Noel sitting out there, the rhythm of Ma in the rocking chair making tiny rumbles against the floorboards, once in a while Uncle Noel spitting into a tin can, very soothing it was so I was lulled almost asleep till they started talking about the little boys. Noel was saying how they needed somebody to watch them with Mama having to be at work and he didn’t see how anybody else could take them; once Indian school started the older children would be gone; Giizis really had to go to school and who could watch Biik? She couldn’t count on Henen to do it; Henen had her own troubles and needed watching herself; maybe Maggie should go home. Grandma was too sick even to leave the allotment for Duluth; she wouldn’t be able to take care of them even if Maggie sent them up to Mozhay and stayed in Duluth to work.
“Who else would watch them, my girl?” he asked.
Mama’s voice was so quiet I had to hold my breath to hear her. “I don’t know, I just don’t know,” she said.
Biik and Giizis were scared; they pushed closer to me so that their little bodies got my sides all hot and sweaty, Biik’s eyes big so he looked like a little owl there in the dark, and Giizis trying so hard not to cry that he shook. Little brothers. I sat up on the floor cross-legged and sat one on each knee to lean back against me while I rocked them side to side. Side to side. Little brothers. I played with Giizis’s ears a little because that always made him all lovey and sleepy, and after a while his shoulders stopped that shaking and he turned his round face around up to look at me and smile before he fell asleep.
So it was true what I’d been telling the matron at school, Mama needed me at home. Matron didn’t know about Giizis and Biik and I couldn’t tell her, so she couldn’t really understand, and I suppose she must have thought Mama must have something else going on—maybe she thought Mama was a drinker like Aunt Helen. Matron said she thought that school was a good place for me.
They all drank, of course, all of them, Mama and Aunt Helen and Daddy and Louis and everyone who was old enough to, and when I was home whenever they had a bottle it was the same thing. But I have to tell you that no matter how anybody else acted, Mama and Aunt Helen always acted like ladies, no matter what. They would sit there at the table perched on the edge of their chairs, with their backs straight and their skirts neat and straight over their legs just like they had learned from the sisters when they were at that mission school, and they would just sip, very delicately; they were never guzzlers. Every once in a while they would lean their heads together and laugh or, when they got pretty serious, sit very close together and talk in their low silvery voices, a pair of doves. And ladies, always ladies. Their indirect and kind eyes, behind Mama’s lovely and still mask and Aunt Helen’s, occasionally slipping when her graciousness was frayed by that betrayal of her spirit, met reality with courage and mission school manners. To this day, and I am an old woman now, two generations past the age they were in the times I am talking about, I sip my liquor, too, and remember how a lady is supposed to act. Pretty old-fashioned for these days, I guess, and because I am the only one left of all Maggie’s children, the first daughter and the last to die, Mama’s ways and Aunt Helen’s, too, that lived their longest in me will probably die with me. And their faces, too; I am the last living person who remembers those composed masks, marked by life to a state beyond beauty, and those kind and indirect eyes.
We didn’t want to leave, George and Mickey and me, but like everybody else we didn’t have any choice. We would have to get on that train and get off at Harrod and somebody would be there to pick us up in the wagon to make sure we got to school. We would report to the matron and the prefect, who would march us to the girls’ and boys’ dormitories to get deloused and fumigated and try on our uniforms to see if they still fit. Mickey had gotten so tall that he was going to need a whole new uniform, jacket and pants and shoes, and I guessed that when they saw how big he was they’d take him out of the laundry and put him to work at the truck farm or the carpenter shop. That was the summer that he really grew, though he stayed skinny; his clothes had been big on him last spring but now his wrists stuck out of his shirtsleeves and his over-halls flapped around a couple of inches above his ankles when he walked. I asked him one night when we were watching the fire outside about what happened when McGoun got him back to school last spring. He told me that McGoun gave him a beating with that doubled leather strap, took away his quarters, then put him in the lockup room in the basement for three days. “It was nothin’,” he said, McGoun would get his one day. He smiled then, crooked and snaggletoothed, like Mickey, but with glints and flashes of something hungry and wolfish; in changing from boy to man he was also changing from Waboos to Maingen.
Giizis’s last day as one of the little boys hidden at home was the day that the superintendent of the Indian school himself showed up on Maggie’s porch with tribal census records verifying that Vernon Gallette, son of Marguerite LaForce and Louis Gallette, was seven years old, that he lived with his mother, and that he was not attending school. He left a half-fare ticket for Giizis and full-fare tickets for Girlie, George, and Mickey.
The next morning, they walked to the train station, Mickey and George carrying the lunch that Maggie had packed and their box of extra clothes, Girlie holding Vernon’s hand. Maggie stayed on the porch, holding Biik and waving his hand, bye-bye. “Take care of your little brother,” she called, “see you in the spring,” as she watched them walk away, growing smaller and smaller in her sight. Just before they disappeared around the corner, they turned to wave again, George and Girlie smiling to set an example for little Vernon, whose round moonface was shiny and stretched with crying. Waboos waved, then became Maingen, who thought of that day that would come, and smiled with bared pointed teeth, that thin young wolf hungry for the day McGoun would get his.
Maggie kept her smooth and pleasant mask in place until they turned the corner. Her composure slipped for just a moment, exposing ravages of grief that made her look like Aunt Helen’s twin, but then she pressed the crook of one arm to her eyes to absorb her tears, which darkened the print of her cotton work dress sleeve, dried, and disappeared. Then, remasked, she smiled at Biik, took his hand and led him back inside, set him down, and knelt to fold her children’s quilts, smoothing and soothing the prints of their bodies into squares that she then pushed under the bed. She had practiced this so many times in her head that her body moved and her hands did the work without thought. Without direction from heart or head, her hands washed dishes, swept the floor, washed and dressed Biik, stroked his hair while they waited on the porch for Andre, helped him into Andre’s brother’s car for the ride up to her brother Earl’s house at Mozhay Point, waved bye-bye, see you soon little man, pulled her coat up over her arms and shoulders, pulled the front door shut behind her. Her feet, at their even greater distance than her hands from head and heart walked. Walked to the mattress factory, up the stairs, to the time clock, to her sewing station, where she worked without thought, eyes down, face composed, heart heavy and still as her face and as unreadable, as with the rhythm of the earth she prepared for winter, the season of hibernation and dreams of her children’s return.