The horses lived on the other side of the wooden fence at the edge of Mr. McCuskey’s farm, in their own horse paradise of woods and meadow and barn. Violet and I secretly rode them from time to time both summers we lived there, in the meadow that like the McCuskey farm was lost in forfeit to the county for back taxes not long after Mrs. McCuskey took Violet and after little Sam and I went to the orphanage. For decades now the horse paradise has been the jail and work farm, and McCuskey’s farm the nursing home, where Lisette lives.
Lisette was my mother’s dearest friend; she used to call me Rosie-ens or Sister-ens or “my little niece,” but now she thinks I am a ghost. When I call her Auntie, her mind searches through all the relatives and friends who still live in her head; not finding me frightens her.
Going into Duluth when we drive down from the reservation to visit Lisette at the old folks’ home, we pass the prisoners who work outside on the farm or on the grounds of the home. Some of the men who get caught breaking the law and have to do their time get to work with the horses there, maybe even ride them, when nobody’s looking, like me and Violet. But we were never caught.
Once in a while, on afternoons that we thought that our mother would be all right without us for a while, that she was going to stay home, that she was not going to leave us, we would sneak away from the house to meet the horses there at the fence, Violet and I. We waited on Mr. McCuskey’s side of the fence. The first summer, Violet was tall enough to stand with her forearms and folded hands on the top rail, her chin on her hands; the second summer, I could do the same, stretching so that my dress, one of those skimpy cotton wash dresses that little girls wore during those days of the Great Depression, pulled up, and my bloomers showed. From the fence we could see all the way to the edge of paradise, where the horses stood under the tamaracks. We never called them; they seemed to sense us: their bodies would become very still, their necks would stiffen; ripples ran across their sides like those tiny waves on their drinking pond during steady wind. I wonder now if they watched for us, too, but obliquely, like Ojibwe people do. The obliqueness of a horse’s gaze is a necessity, because of the way its eyes have been placed by God, for reasons we will only understand after we die, if we still care to know. The obliqueness of an Ojibwe’s gaze is also a necessity, because of what transpired after we were moved from where God had placed us. The gaze of an aandakii Ojibwe, who lives elsewhere, beyond even that, is the most oblique of them all.
We never called them. They approached us, the beautiful horses, when the time—given to us and meant to be by the Great Spirit who is God—was right, slowly and indirectly, gliding toward us in figure eights around the trees, appearing, disappearing, reappearing, until they came up to the fence and stuck their noses through to be petted. We would stand up on our toes to reach their foreheads, stroking them from between their eyes down to their nostrils, while they stood perfectly still, those beautiful horses, each more breathtaking than the last. We were in love with them all and never could have chosen one over the other—the brown with white spots, the almost black with the white blaze forehead, the round, short-legged pony, the light brown with the maroon eyes like our mother’s, the old faded gray, blind in one eye. They chose favorites, however: the almost black liked me the best; the light brown liked Violet.
From behind the fence we could, by moving from side to side, look between the trees all the way to the owners’ house and barn and the pickup truck parked in the yard. Sometimes if the truck was gone we would walk along the fence almost to the house and coax a couple of those horses all along the fence to where their woods ended and the meadow began and then creep under the fence. We walked toward them slowly, speaking softly in baby talk, one hand out. They stood still, their eyes focused somewhere above our heads while they listened, knowing what we wanted and what we would do next. Close enough to touch, we patted their noses, so lightly; they tolerated our little girl hands as we stepped slowly and gently to their sides, talking and stroking noses, necks, then sides. Our little girl voices rang high and husky in the stillness of the owners’ absence, the horses’ breaths a lower pitch in the stillness of their waiting.
I always went first; that’s how it was with me and Violet. When the patting and soothing, the soft urging of our young voices, and the warm low-pitched breathing of the horses blended into an almost audible hum of anticipation, I grasped the almost black’s mane in both hands and swung my right leg up across his back, belly-flopping the front of my body, elbows bent, face buried in the base of his neck where his mane ended; then, with my arms, I pushed myself upright, sitting astride, the skirt of my dress tucked tightly under my legs from the front, floating in a washed cotton puff out the back. Because Violet’s legs were longer, she always went up a little more easily, a little more gracefully; her slender, straight back and her long neck looked like a natural extension of the horse. As I have thought of her over the years, I have imagined Violet like that all through her life, wherever she has lived it, even today if she is still alive, sitting gracefully and lightly atop whatever life gives her to ride on, chin high, eyes quizzical, mouth smiling shyly. To me, she was beautiful in the way our mother was. I don’t know if anyone else saw her that way.
Our mother. We never knew and never thought to wonder what it was that would cause her to leave those afternoons, because whatever it was, it was beyond our understanding and hers. There in the middle of listening to the radio, or rocking the baby, or stirring something on the stove, the tremor of her being would slow for just a few seconds and she would be still, as if hearing something of a softness or pitch beyond her children’s ears, put down the baby, or the spoon, or the mop, and walk out the door and down the road. If it was cold she stepped into the bedroom first, reaching into the closet for her coat, the brown cloth one that she buttoned the little fur collar to in the winter. Summers, she just took off her apron and hung it on the nail by the stove and left, walked out the door and down the road all along the McCuskeys’ farm and the horse paradise and didn’t look back.
Up until that one time, she always came back, though. She had no place else she could stay.
Our mother. The white people, except for our dad, called her by her boarding school name, Charlotte. Everybody else called her Shonnud. Thin—she was always thin—and big boned. And nervous, people said, with that tremor beating and quivering under her skin, her fingers always moving so slightly I still wonder to this day if I saw it, or heard, or felt. I suppose she was homely, with that bony, long-jawed face and those eyes of hers, long, triangular, maroon, and looking off to the side, the side her head tilted down toward, the side that her trembling wide and thin-lipped mouth turned down toward, the side she turned away from the world. Her left side. Her left shoulder dipped slightly; her right shoulder rose. Perennially oblique, her stance stepped its quarter turn away though she faced forward, her elbows out, the backs of her hands facing front. As she walked down the road away from us she looked forlorn, blown off course, on days windy or still, her walk seemingly aimless, her destination somewhere down that road.
We never asked her to stay. We never asked her where she was going, knowing as we did that it was beyond our understanding and hers. When we were little and still living downtown, Cousin Cynthia sometimes took care of us while our mother was gone; when Cynthia went away to school, Violet and I became girls big enough to take care of ourselves and Daddy when she left. And Sam, after he was born.
As I can recall, it always happened in the afternoon. There were the afternoons before she left. The afternoons she walked out the door. The afternoons she was gone. The afternoons she came back weren’t afternoons at all; they were the dark-clouded dawns, really, of long days of waiting for her next departure.
We never asked her where she had been, when she came walking back up the road a few days later, tired and pale. If it was cold, she stepped into the bedroom first, reaching into the closet to hang up her coat and smooth it out with shaky hands before lying down to rest. She lay on her back, in the middle of the bed she shared with our father, hands folded on her stomach, fingers trembling, eyes sometimes open, sometimes closed, narrow nose and feet pointed at the ceiling. Her body sank into the dip in the middle of the bed and appeared to flatten just about down to the height of the mattress. She breathed so quietly that we held our own breaths in order to hear her.
Our dad found out she’d left when he came in from working the farm, to a scrubbed kitchen in a quiet house. He never asked, “Where’s your mother?” Maybe that first time he did, asked Cynthia, but he never asked Violet and me, just went to the sink to wash and sat at the table for his supper. We dished it up for him, just as Mother did when she was home, and he ate it silently. If he wanted more, we could tell, and we dished it on his plate. He ate without talking, everything on his plate, then wiped up whatever was left with a piece of bread, chewed and swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
When Mother was gone, Violet and I became the mothers to the baby, Sam. He slept with us in our parents’ bed, and our dad slept on the kitchen floor, rolled in a blanket, next to the stove, where Violet and I slept when Mother was home. Our dad got up early to help Mr. McCuskey and didn’t want anybody to fix his breakfast or talk to him; he didn’t even want to see anybody when Mother was gone. We stayed in bed and kept Sam quiet until after our dad had left to work.
We lived in the two-room house built by the Bjornborgs, who homesteaded the property long before the McCuskeys bought it. Mr. Bjornborg, his young wife, and her nephew had put up a shed first, where they lived with the animals for the first couple of years, and when they built the house it was on the little trail that led to the shed, which they added on to and made into a barn. When we lived there our father worked for Mr. McCuskey, who lived in the new house he had built for Mrs. McCuskey and all the children they had hoped for, and the trail was a county road. The Bjornborgs’ first barn had burned down years before the McCuskeys ever moved there. The Bjornborgs’ second son died trying to rescue the cow. We never walked on that spot.
Today, of course, nobody even remembers the McCuskeys but me. The prisoners work in a big concrete-floored barn where the Bjornborgs’ house was.
When our dad got hired to work for Mr. McCuskey it was a good chance for us to live in the country. He was handy and good with animals and thought he was lucky to leave the scrap yard for the chance to work the farm, with free rent included. The house had a bedroom and a kitchen and a lean-to shed off the back of the kitchen. The outhouse, next to the Bjornborgs’ old one that had been filled up and shoveled over and made into a toolshed, was almost new, dug by Mr. McCuskey. When we moved into the old and empty house, I could just about see a ghost path from the house to the old outhouse that had become the toolshed, an ever so slight bareness in the quack grass where the ghosts of the ill-fated Bjornborgs must brush, cutting their vapor feet as they moved back and forth, back and forth in the night, looking for the outhouse. I shivered and carried the bag of my and Violet’s clothes into the house that, inside, didn’t look haunted at all. Mrs. McCuskey had washed the windows and swept and dusted and put new paper on the long shelf above the stove, which she folded into fancy squares and points along the edge. She had scrubbed the floors and walls and cleaned and blacked the woodstove. On the kitchen table, which she had painted apple green, was a plateful of doughnuts, so many that they were not quite covered by a white dishtowel that she had tucked over them. We moved into the old Bjornborg house after Sam was born. We fit fine in the house, Violet and I sleeping on the kitchen floor, Sam in the bedroom with our mother and dad.
Dad slept holding our mother’s trembling hands in both of his. On the good days, she woke early, before everyone; on those days the smell of the coffee woke us up, and we opened our eyes to watch from where we’d slept on the floor her skinny ankles and feet do little dancing turns around the floor while she stirred oatmeal, took the lugallette out of the oven, set out bowls and spoons. “Kwesensag, ambe wiisinin,” she all but sang in her quiet and thin voice, smiling and as scrubbed and neatly combed as Mrs. McCuskey. “Ondii Baby-ens? Wiisinii-daa!”
Every day but Sunday, Daddy worked for Mr. McCuskey until suppertime. He plowed, planted, harvested, took care of the horses and cows, repaired the barn and the house, kept the yards clean, and sometimes hired out with Mr. McCuskey on other farms or to do roadwork. Violet and I helped our mother with Sam and the house and helped Mrs. McCuskey with the chickens. We had what seemed like the entire outdoors to play in. And on the other side of the fence was the horse paradise. It was a big improvement over our apartment in Duluth.
When we lived in Duluth, Cynthia didn’t live with us. She was away at school with her friend Ernestine at the Tomah Indian college in Wisconsin, where they were becoming educated ladies. Ernestine had already graduated and had a paying job in the kitchen and her own room, and Cynthia was working at her outing placement, taking care of the laundry and small children for a family in Prairie du Chien. That summer right after school ended they took the train to visit us in Duluth, when we lived in that apartment in the West End, on the same block as the Robineau brothers, and stayed with us for two weeks.
Ernestine didn’t have a family.
Ernestine had a peach-colored dress, still new looking, that she had made for graduation, with money that she had earned herself from her own outing placement.
I am requesting $12.00 from my work placement savings account to buy fabric, thread, and trim for summer dresses and underclothing for Cynthia Sweet and me. My dress will be worn for the graduation ceremony and will wear nicely for summer also. Cynthia is in need of a new summer dress as she has outgrown the one she has been wearing. I have nearly $40.00 in my account from my earnings, which after the $12.00 will be more than enough for train tickets for our visit to Cynthia’s home this summer.
Sincerely,
Ernestine Gunnarson
Dear Miss Gunnarson
You may spend $7.00 on materials for your summer dress and underclothing. See the attendant in the discipline office for the money, which I have placed in an envelope for that use. Miss Sweet will receive a new summer-weight work uniform, which will suffice for her needs; however, because the $7.00 should be more than enough for your clothing expenses, you may buy additional trim for the summer dress you wore last year. You and Cynthia may turn and trim the dress, which will become hers for church and town.
Alma Ripp, Superintendent of Girls
Ernestine and Cynthia cleaned the apartment for Mother and washed and ironed and patched our clothes. They were kind to us and worked to bring a little of the order from Tomah to our lives, but they didn’t have a lot to say to us; mostly, they spoke to each other. They didn’t say more than two words to our dad. They stepped back or to the side when they passed him in the hallway, looking away to the side. Cynthia’s dad had left her with us just like that, gone to Minneapolis, when she was younger than Violet and I were. So our dad was the only one she had.
When she was old enough for school, a social worker came to the apartment one day and left with Cynthia; the next day Violet and I walked to the depot with Mother to wave to Cynthia as she left on the train. We didn’t know why, Violet and I, and couldn’t ask Mother, who was walking in her sleep that day, her cheeks puffy and her eyes and nose swollen and pink from the wine she had been drinking the night before.
We didn’t find out about our dad’s prison record until Sam enlisted in the army. I suppose the county couldn’t let a little girl live with a person like that unless she was his own child. But he was always good to Cynthia, and to Violet, Sam, and me. And almost always to our mother.
Cynthia visited us in the summers and wrote a letter to Mother once a month. She and Ernestine lived in a dormitory, where every girl had her own bed and her own trunk to keep her letters and things in, and they had these sharp-looking Sunday uniforms with braid on the collar and chevrons on the sleeves and striped ticking work dresses they made themselves in sewing class to wear while they earned their keep. They went to football games and lyceums. They saw a ballet once. There was a matron in charge of the girls; she was supposed to take care of them. She made sure they had clean clothes and neat hair and made their beds and kept the place nice and acted like ladies. It was her job. She lived in a room in the dormitory and slept there every night so they were never left alone. That was her job.
At the end of their last summer at home, Mother left late in the afternoon, on the day before Ernestine and Cynthia went back to Tomah. We were hanging out the open front room window to look at the jail, watching a policeman walk a swaying and resigned drunk toward the sandstone steps to sleep it off in a cell. At the bottom of the steps, the drunk stopped and looked down at his feet, then turned from the waist and looked up at the sky and freedom and the little girls hanging out the window and waved. The policeman put one arm around the drunk’s waist and held his other hand; the two of them turned and walked up the steps as if they were dancing or ice skating. As they walked through the door into the jail, our mother walked through the door out of our apartment.
Violet and I stood by the door staring at Ernestine and Cynthia, who would know what to do next. They stared back, and thought, and looked at each other. Then Ernestine said, “Well, let’s finish cleaning this place up.”
“It’s a dump,” answered Cynthia. “Look at it. We can’t even wash the walls, the plaster’s all crumbling.” She ran her hand along one bare patch, and white grains sprinkled like powdery sand to the floor. “All you could do with this is cover it up.” Again she and Ernestine looked at each other, young women becoming educated ladies. Then they walked into the bedroom, this their last afternoon of their last visit home. Cynthia pulled Mother’s money bag from the hole in the mattress, where she kept it hidden, and counted out nearly three dollars. “Ernestine, my girl,” she said, “go see if the Robineau boys are home. We’re gonna wallpaper this place.”
The Robineau boys brought over a bottle of their homemade brew and a lard bucket filled with flour to make paste. Cynthia and Ernestine used part of the flour to mix a pan of lugallette. When it was baked, Violet and I sat on the bed in the front room and watched them work and party; I remember it like it was yesterday. They drank the brew right from the bottle, and we ate the lugallette slice by slice, spreading each one with a little lard and sprinkling it with the sugar that Cynthia bought with the money left over from the wallpaper. They mixed the rest of the flour with water in the bucket and spread it on the back of each wallpaper section that Johnny measured and cut. They shared that one bottle of brew the whole time they did this, and as the night went on they got silly and started laughing hard at anything anybody said, and George said, “Look at the wallpaper, it’s all crooked,” which made them all laugh harder. Ernestine and Johnny began to dance, their hands and the front of Ernestine’s apron all crusted with drying flour paste, and Cynthia and George sat on the bed next to Violet and me, singing and clapping to keep time.
“Come on, Sissy, let’s dance,” Ernestine said to me, and took my hands. We swung and twirled, then Johnny grabbed Violet around the waist and carried her around the room, dancing with only his feet on the floor, her feet dangling near his knees. We were delighted with the attention; I watched the room tilt and spin as Ernestine held me by one hand and twirled me one direction, then the other. Violet smiled as Johnny hefted her weight a little higher, dancing with her behind sitting on his right forearm, his left hand holding her hand out like they were in a ballroom, and when Ernestine and Johnny got too tired to dance us around anymore we all fell right onto the bed, and George and Cynthia got up to dance.
George held Cynthia tightly, pulling her left hand behind his back, laying his cheek against hers, and she put her hands against his chest and pushed. “Cut that out, you!” she scolded, which offended him, so he went back to wallpapering, leaning against the wall while he did it so he could hold the bottle in one hand and wallpaper with the other.
Violet and I fell asleep while they were still partying, and when we woke up it was morning, the overhead light was still on, and the Robineau boys were asleep on the floor. Cynthia was packing the suitcases and Ernestine was wetting down the wallpaper so it would come off the wall. She cleaned the flour mess up and shook Johnny by the shoulder. “Johnny, you and George gotta fix this wallpaper.”
Daddy came back that afternoon; during the times Cynthia was visiting he never slept at the apartment when Mother was gone. By the time he arrived, the place was clean, Ernestine and Cynthia had left for the train station, and Johnny and George were getting the wallpaper on good and straight.
I wouldn’t see Cynthia again for a long time.
When Daddy got the job with Mr. McCuskey, he left the scrap yards for good and we moved out of the West End, all of us, Daddy, Mother, Violet, baby Sam, and me, out to the country. Violet and I loved living at the farm, loved Mrs. McCuskey, who waved at us when she was out hanging her wash. Her windburned, reddened face shone as bright and happy as the sun below her frilled mop cap; her spotless white sheets hung in bleached brilliance below the bright and happy McCuskey farm’s sun. She had us over for coffee and caramel rolls, treated our mother like special company, me and Violet like ladies, snuggled Sam in her lap and smelled his head, and told us how they were hoping to have a little one of their own one of these days, she and the Mister. And she and the Mister treated us kindly, always kindly. A couple of times when Mother actually woke them up in the middle of the night screaming unspeakable things as she and Dad shoved and hit each other, Mrs. McCuskey wrapped our blankets around the three of us children and brought us to her own house, putting me and Violet to bed in her guest bedroom, between sheets (they were so smooth, so clean, so fragrant), our heads on pillowcases she had embroidered with pansies, and slept with Sam in her own bed while Mr. McCuskey, a massive man, made pots of coffee while he calmed our parents in the same pretty McCuskey kitchen where we had been special company.
“I didn’t touch her, sir,” Dad told him in a shaky voice. “Shonnud, you crazy Indian, tell him I didn’t touch you.”
Mother stood gripping the back of a kitchen chair, too overwrought to sit or speak, in her coat that Mrs. McCuskey had wrapped around her shoulders for modesty (“Here, Charlotte, here, put this on, I’ll take your kiddies to my house tonight. Here, Charlotte, put on your coat”), in her nightgown so thin and worn it was nearly transparent, her eyes downcast, her face shiny with sweat, her hair black snakes writhing round her long damp neck.
“Mrs. Sweet, come on now, you can either sit down and have some coffee, or you can go home and go to bed,” Mr. McCuskey growled in his deep voice.
She stood silently, frightfully, knuckles sharp white bones showing through the skin of her hands. He repeated himself. She raised her eyes and nearly unnerved him with her unfocused purple glare.
“My God, poor Sweet,” he thought. “I mean it, Mrs. Sweet, one or the other, take your pick.”
She went to bed.
“I swear, sir, I didn’t touch her,” Dad lied again.
“Maynard, man, let’s have some of that coffee.”
Violet and I lay awake in the guest bed for a long time. To this day I wish I could enjoy fresh, ironed sheets and pillowcases the way other people do. But I don’t. It causes me to feel dread and suffer insomnia. Long nights I have, sometimes, remembering that beautiful bed. We lay awake, Violet and I, until she fell asleep, and for once she went first, slept with the side of her face against that white pillowcase, her mouth in sleep turned down on that side. She lay on her left side, facing me, right shoulder down, left up and forward. She looked beautiful in the way our mother was. I watched her sleep.
But those were the bad nights. Things weren’t always bad. There were the days Mother was up before Dad and cooked and cleaned and swept and hung the blankets out on the clothesline to air out. There were the days she put on her good dress, the white one with the low waist and embroidery down by the hem on the left side, and brought us over to Mrs. McCuskey’s for coffee (our Mother had lovely manners that she had learned at boarding school, the one run by the mission, and the sight of Mother’s slender, long-boned hands stirring sugar into one of Mrs. McCuskey’s delicate wedding china cups contrasted so with Mrs. McCuskey’s red, work-roughened hands that were heavy as a man’s). And there was that one day she had me take her to the dump.
Her eyes were bright that late summer morning; the floor was mopped and the windows were open to air the rooms. Violet and I were out in the yard with Sam, and she called to me, “Sister, go get the wagon! We’re going to the dump!”
In those days it wasn’t an unusual thing for people to go out to the dump to see what they could find, and it wasn’t unusual for a girl like me, and I was only ten, to drive a wagon. So I hitched up Sugar Pie, the mule, to Mr. McCuskey’s wagon that he kept in our yard, harnessed up like I’d seen Dad do, and Mother and I went up the road way out in the country to the dump. Like I said, it wasn’t an unusual thing, and in those days people went to the dump to get all kinds of things.
It was a nice day; the breeze that was airing out our house was airing out the whole outside, and Mother and I could smell the barn, and then the creek, and then we thought there must some sweetgrass close by. Sugar Pie’s rear shone in the sun; the mule tossed her head as she trotted up the county road. I held the reins and didn’t really need to do anything; Sugar Pie acted like she knew the road and was going someplace she really liked (we always called Sugar Pie “she” because Mrs. McCuskey said she was a girl no matter what anybody else said). She actually pranced as we got to the dump turnoff and stopped willingly when Mother found a good place for us to stop. And it was a good day at the dump. There were a lot of people there, people who knew us.
“Shonnud, my girl, are you looking for a dresser?” called Old Man Shigog. “There’s a pretty nice one here.”
“Boozhoo, Uncle. No, thank you,” my mother called back politely, “but if I hear of anybody who is, I’ll tell them about it.”
My mother hopped around the dump in her black strap pumps like she was sixteen years old, her skinny legs in her black stockings almost skipping from one spot to the next. The day was so warm that she rolled her stockings down to just below her knees, which I could see flash white in the sun as she climbed hills of refuse. Her hair began to loose from its bun and hang in strings on each side of her face, which began to take on some color from her exertions. She smiled her crooked smile and laughed, a songbird it sounded like, with the other people at the dump. She introduced me proudly, “Mrs. Bigboy, this is my girl, Rose. Rose, Mrs. Bigboy knew you when you were a baby…. Yes, she is getting to be a young woman now, isn’t she…. Yes, very pretty…. Yes, we are very proud of her.”
“Young woman, you take good care of your mother,” Mrs. Bigboy directed me as we went on to another refuse pile.
We found a straight chair that was in very nice shape, and Mother told me that was all we should take since we didn’t really need anything else. At a clean grassy spot we ate the bread we’d brought in a basket, along with some crabapples we picked on the way to the dump. Mother lay on her back, hands folded at her waist, looking from me to the clouds. “When your dad gets his money from Mr. McCuskey this Friday I think I might be able to buy some material for new dresses for you and Violet,” she said, although she and I both knew this wasn’t possible. “What color do you like?” We talked about what colors would look the best on each, dark red on me, a blue plaid on Violet, and how a green print would look on the dress my mother might make for herself sometime, too, until the sun became so bright overhead that she closed her eyes. I watched her as she slept. She looked like Violet.
We decided to take a shortcut on the way home and followed this road that was paved almost to the outskirts of town. Here I was, ten years old and coming back from the dump with a sleepy mother with grass in her hair and a straight chair in very nice shape, driving a mule with Mr. McCuskey’s farm wagon on a street right in the middle of town, almost in the middle of all those cars. “Hey! Hey, youse! Go back to the reservation!” a young man in a flivver shouted. I drew my elbows tightly to my sides and put my head down, looking only at Sugar Pie’s shiny backside and what I could see between her big ears of the street. Mother sat with oblique dignity, left shoulder dipping slightly, right shoulder up, her long neck gracefully holding her head with chin high, eyes quizzical, mouth smiling shyly, crookedly, looking around at the houses and buildings without a sign that she could see anyone looking at the sight of her and her little girl and Sugar Pie, her demeanor and manners as lovely as if she were sitting sipping sweet coffee out of Mrs. McCuskey’s wedding china. Beautiful she was, on that wooden farm wagon seat, sitting gracefully and lightly in the way I imagine Violet must be sitting today, our mother.
And mother was beautiful—the sum of all she was, was beauty. In her white low-waisted dress with the embroidery down the left side of the skirt. In the dress she wore to powwows, black cotton with red tape trim, cones rolled from snuff can covers sewn on the hem, the pleasant jingle they made as she walked and as she danced next to her dear friend Lisette, off to the side of the powwow circle, the way all the ladies did in those days, swaying ever so slightly, swiveling slowly, nine steps left, nine steps right. Lisette, she was called, and Mother was called Shonnud. Lisette was a maple tree, strong and stately, Shonnud an aspen that trembled to the music that moved the still air.
Like Ojibwe ladies should, Mother and Lisette dressed modestly. All that showed were their faces, hands, arms below the elbow, and their necks, Mother’s long and thin, Lisette’s rounded and strong. Mother wore a black velvet jacket over her dress, beaded with flowers and vines on the front and back and white scallops on edges of its short sleeves. They both wore lisle stockings and moccasins with flowers beaded on the toes. Their dancing was hard work, controlled, disciplined, and prayerful; their calves were trim and very firm from this dancing, their feet muscular. And I watched them and waited for the day that I would be a young lady in a black dress and beaded jacket, waited and watched them dance as they had since they were young ladies, Shonnud and Lisette dancing side by side, dipping gracefully in a rhythm deeper in the hearts and souls of women than the drumbeat.
It was the following summer that Mother disappeared for good, leaving one day and not coming back the next, or two days later, or a week. Some of the relatives from Mozhay Point came and stayed at the house for a while, and two of her cousins went down to Minneapolis, where somebody said they thought they knew somebody who thought they saw her downtown. But it never came to anything. Dad called the police, but we never heard anything.
We kept her things on the dresser, her hairbrush and comb and the little cardboard soap box with her hairpins. We left her under-things and nightgown in the dresser drawer and her other housedress hanging from the nail in the bedroom with her green-checked apron. We left her good white dress and her powwow dress in the box under the bed, where she had kept them wrapped in an old sheet.
We stayed at the McCuskeys’ farm until the year after that, when Daddy died of stomach cancer and the county took me and Sam away for placement. Mrs. McCuskey said she would take Violet, and the last time I saw her was just before Sam and I got into the county worker’s car. She was holding Mrs. McCuskey’s hand and the two of them were walking away from us and toward the farmhouse, skinny Violet and big-bottomed, kind Mrs. McCuskey, who over coffee and donuts had told Charlotte that she wanted one of her own. Violet’s face was turned to the clouds, looking for our mother; she stepped so lightly her feet seemed above the ground, as if she would rise right into those clouds and vanish, perhaps into the invisibility of our mother’s arms, except for the anchor of Mrs. McCuskey’s hand.
Sometime after that the McCuskeys sold their farm to the county and left the state. I don’t know what happened to Mother’s things, if Mrs. McCuskey put them away somewhere intending for us to have someday, if she sorted what to keep and what not, gave Mother’s housedress and underthings away, or threw them out, or used them for rags. I don’t know if she used Mother’s comb and brush and hairpins, or gave them to Violet. I don’t know what she did with the box under the bed, what she did with Mother’s good white dress and powwow dress wrapped in sheets. And I don’t know where Violet is.
And I don’t think Violet knows where we are, Sam and I. We lived at the county orphanage for a while, but when I turned fourteen I had to leave, because the county said I had to go to work. They found me a job at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic diocese’s home for unwed mothers, to work in the kitchen for my keep and walking-around money. I finished school right there at the home, with girls my age who were hidden away until they gave birth and gave away their babies for adoption. I shared a bedroom with girls, one at a time, who grew rounder and rosier and shorter of breath, girls who bloomed like hothouse flowers and then vanished. I have seen some of them over the years, on the street, at the grocery store, even sat next to one in the emergency room once, but we never say a word, of course. That time and place is their secret, and mine to keep for them.
I do see Mother everywhere, and Violet, too. Once or twice a month I drive down into Duluth past the work farm and take that road to the horse paradise, which is where Lisette lives now, in this big concrete block nursing home built right in the meadow. Mother and Violet stand by the fence and wave as I pass by before the turn into the parking lot; I spot them right away partly because I recognize Mother’s green-checkered apron and the wash dress Violet is wearing, one I have nearly outgrown, but even more recognizable is Mother’s stance, that slight turn to her left, her arms wrapped over her middle, and the set of Violet’s chin, high on her graceful neck. They wave, and I wave back, and sometimes when I get out of the car I walk over to where the fence was to look for them, though of course they are not really, solidly, there. Vapor they are, the checkered apron and wash dress, just vapor hanging in the air, disappearing as my hands reach to touch. And vapor I become when I go into the home to see Lisette.
She shares a room with a Finnish lady who crochets rag rugs and thinks that Lisette steals her upper plate. Lisette rises above it; that’s her way. Last time I was there she had been just minding her own business, propped up in her bed with her hair down, waiting for somebody to come braid it, and Mrs. Kinnunen had looked over at her and said, “You think you’re so damn good-looking. Where are my teeth, you whore?” and Lisette had tried to reach over toward the lunch tray to see if the old Finn’s teeth were somewhere with the dirty dishes, and Mrs. Kinnunen started to scream. “Leave me alone, don’t you raise your hand to me you filthy Indian whore! Help! Help me, somebody help me!” which is when I walked in, right behind the orderly who stepped between them like a firewall that would keep flames off Lisette. He smoothed Mrs. Kinnunen’s wild spiky hair, stroked her mean old hand, all shriveled and dried up, that old Finlander skin darker than Lisette’s. Mrs. Kinnunen’s hand looks like an old peach pit, probably feels like one too. “Moomoo, that is a lovely rug…. Here’s a nice little bit of sponge cake for you…. Is your daughter coming to visit soon?” He waved me past. “She forgets right away,” he whispered at me. “She doesn’t mean it,” he whispered at Lisette. She nodded graciously. “Thank you, young man.”
I began to braid one side of Lisette’s hair. “You always act like such a lady,” I told her.
“That’s right. I was raised that way, to be a lady,” she answered the air in the room. “When she gets like that I just tell her to kiss my ass.” I have to keep my laugh to myself, can’t snort out loud. Lisette can’t do anything for herself, and how she would even get over to that lady’s teeth, wherever she leaves them, is beyond me, but whenever they’re lost, Lisette gets blamed, and when they’re found, it’s because Lisette must have done it, Mrs. Kinnunen insists, hid them on the lunch tray, or on the dresser, or under the bed, and, this one time, in a volunteer’s smock pocket.
I braided both sides of her hair and smoothed the braids down past her collarbone, almost to where her breasts might have been if she were younger, wishing that her room was on the other side of the building so that we could both look out the window to see Mother and Violet.
I wish I could reach through the pain that fits tighter than my skin, that I could bring myself to ask her about things. “Tell me about Mother and you,” I would say. “Tell me about Shonnud and Lisette.” She hears my wish as a ghost voice borne in on the breeze blowing in the open window at the foot of her bed and looks past my shoulder, remembering, telling the story silently to herself, forgetting to tell it to me.
Sometimes I think how it might have been if Violet and I had gone away to the Tomah Indian school, like Ernestine and Cynthia, what our lives might have been like, and what they would be like now. Sometimes I used to think about that even when we lived in Duluth, or at the McCuskeys’ farm, used to wonder how it would be to live in a dormitory, have your own bed and a little trunk to keep your letters and things in. To sleep between sheets, to wear clean clothes all washed and ironed, to line up in the lunchroom to get your meals on a tray, at exact times of the day. To know just where to go every minute, and just what to do. I thought of Violet and me in wool Sunday uniform dresses with braid around the collars and chevrons on the sleeves marching with other girls in precisely measured and numbered steps, drilling in formations, marching in time up and down on the Tomah football field while the townspeople watched and applauded. I thought how Mother would just have to take care of herself, and Sam and Daddy, too, all by herself; Violet and I would be busy becoming educated ladies, like Ernestine and Cynthia.
She never came back, Cynthia, never lived with any of us again. She left Tomah with Ernestine, eventually, for Minneapolis, and during the war I went to Minneapolis, too, and lived with them for a while when I worked at the munitions plant. After the war was over I moved back home and up to our reservation, to Mozhay Point. Cynthia and Ernestine never did. But that doesn’t mean they’re not here with us, along with everybody else, Lisette, Mother, Violet, Daddy, everybody.
See, for me, what I have learned is that we have a place where we belong, no matter where we are, that is as invisible as the air and more real than the ground we walk on. It’s where we live, here or aandakii: those of us who returned to the old LaForce land allotment, those of us in Duluth, those of us far away. We were there before we were born and we will be there after we die, all of us, including Cynthia, too. It doesn’t matter if we leave, or if we think we will never even come back. It’s where our grandparents, and their grandparents, lived and died; it’s where we and our grandchildren and their grandchildren will, too.
I learned it in a dream.
Any of us by ourselves, we’re just one little piece of the big picture, and that picture is home. We love it, we think we hate it sometimes, but that doesn’t change anything. We are part of it; we are in the picture. It’s home.