I’ve always been afraid to sleep alone. See, I had a lot of “invisible friends” when I was a toddler. My mom took no notice of it; to her, it was natural for little NDN kids who lived way out in the middle of nowhere to have invisible friends. But one day, I told her, “Mom, Grandpa says hello.”
I never met my kokum’s first husband, my mother’s father. My grandpa’s name was Roderick Simpson and he was a beloved hunter on the rez. He used to trap rabbits and sometimes lynx in the summer and skin them for their pelts, then my kokum would cook rabbit stew and make a roast of the occasional lynx that would get caught. My grandpa and kokum became well known for their pelts and dried meats and were popular with the Ukrainian colony that was situated next to the rez; my grandpa would trade them for their chicken eggs and potpies. My grandparents became good friends with the Ukrainians that way—my kokum would always have a chicken potpie from the Ukrainians on hand, ready for company.
My mother freaked out when I told her I saw Grandpa. Not only that, I described him in perfect detail, from his short, thin hair that made his head look like a stippling brush to the crooked twist of his nose. When my mom called Kokum, she came over right away and brought her smudge bowl, tortoise rattle, drum, sweetgrass, and sage to cleanse the house of spirits. I wasn’t allowed to watch, so I sat in my room in the basement while they conducted the ceremony.
The basement was always dank and cold. My mother and Kokum’s loud footsteps made me shudder, and I could smell the smoke of their medicines. I finally fell asleep listening to the rhythmic shake of my kokum’s tortoise rattle. When it was over, both women came downstairs to wake me and told me that I wouldn’t be bothered by spirits anymore.
But around this same time, I began to see a lot of shadows in the basement—which could have been caused by the swaying ceiling light, or from what I would later learn to call the “little people.”
I had a lot of night terrors.
Because of this, I slept with my mom almost every night for a year, much to Roger’s dismay. I never ventured downstairs to my bedroom save for a fresh pair of clothes and the odd chore for my mother. On occasions when I did, I would turn on all the lights and run back upstairs as quickly as I could. To help me with my anxieties, Roger concocted a plan. He told me a story of the mannegishi.
“When I was a boy,” he said softly, “I used to see little people too. I always saw them jumping down from the ceiling light in my room in the basement. Used to spook my mom out so much that one time when I saw a shadow run across the wall and screamed, my mom pushed me out of her way and ran upstairs. We were all afraid of them. But my gran told me that it was a blessing to see the mannegishi. They say that only children and medicine people can see them. And if you treat them right and offer them tobacco, they’re supposed to help you. They’re super hairy and ugly—so don’t look them in the face. But they’re little, very little, and like to play tricks on people. That’s probably why they’re bugging you.” Then he pulled out a handful of jelly beans from his pocket. “We’ll use these,” he said, “to get them to ease up on their tricks.”
He led me by the hand to my basement bedroom. We searched the room from top to bottom. We pulled out my drawers, checked in the pockets of my sweaters, hell, Roger even unscrewed the vents to peer into them with his flashlight. We didn’t find any mannegishi.
“See, little people, they love shiny things,” Roger said. “My gran told me that. She said that you can never get rid of them, that they follow families around when they move. So we’re stuck with these damned little annoying fucks!” He was half-shouting, half laughing. “She told me that if you can offer them treats, they’ll usually leave you alone. This is what I always did.” Then he pulled out a crumpled bit of tinfoil and placed it on the floor. He unfolded it, shaped it into a little bowl, and placed the jelly beans inside. “This here tinfoil will attract them. They’ll take the jelly beans as an offering. To them, in the spirit world, a jelly bean is like the equivalent of receiving an entire elk—a little goes a long way. They’ll be full and sugar-high for a while yet. Give them more in a few months and you’ll be okay, Jonny.”
Together we placed the tinfoil bowl of jelly beans beneath my bed and we went upstairs, where my mom made us hot chocolate, and then we all sat down and watched Family Feud. That night, I slept in their bed straight through till morning, when Roger and I went to check on our tinfoil trap. To our astonishment, the jelly beans were gone. It never occurred to me that maybe my mom or Roger himself woke up in the middle of the night to eat those jelly beans—as far as I knew, they were gone to the spirit world. I had fewer nightmares after that, fewer visions of shadows running across the walls. And fewer hangouts with Roger.
My kokum told me once that the mannegishi are helpers to medicine people—that she too had seen them and asked them for help. She joked that this was how she found all of her keys that she had once lost. When I told my kokum of my dreams, she let me talk and would listen carefully, nodding gently while sipping her tea. “Some people think their name means hairy—that they’re ugly and mean spirits,” she finally said. “But from my experience, m’boy, they’re quite nice. Other people say that their name means butterfly, from the Ojibwe word memengwaa. Maybe that’s what they are to you, m’boy? Butterflies.”
It reminded me of this poem we read in school once, by John Keats, who said that he wished he were a butterfly and lived only three short days—and he would fill those three short days with more delight than fifty common years could contain. Since my conversation with my kokum that day, I’ve always thought of my relationship with the spirit world along those lines, that the mannegishi and the dreams they gave me showed me that I was a pupa and the rez my chrysalis; that I was living on borrowed time and that my three short days had a deadline—but hey, it’s like I always say: what’s three days in regular time is five in NDN time.