LaRose (28 page)

The head bobbed in circles, the nose snuffling and twitching until it stopped, sensing her. If she fell asleep, the head moved closer. So she tried to stay awake. Inevitably, sleep took her. Every time she woke, the head was closer still. Soon she could see that over the years it had deteriorated; one eye was white and blinded, fire had scarred and puckered the skin, blacked the pocked nose. Hair bristled in the paddle ears and vacuum nostrils. As night came on the hairs burned like straw. Gentian light flashed in the waves. She caught its scent—not of decay but strong brine. Mackinnon had pickled his head long ago in salts and alcohol, and could not be killed.

The nurse came and bound LaRose in sheets, covered her with heavy blankets warmed with bricks, strapped her safely in to sleep. Weak as water, strong as dirt. It was taking so long to die that she
had become strengthened by the effort. She was ready. The head climbed, grunting its way up the rock cliff. She couldn’t flee the bed, but she used her mother’s teaching. She thrashed out of her body, unsticking her spirit. Mackinnon’s head worried at the stones with its teeth, lashing back and forth. Gurgling with eagerness, it gnashed itself over the brim of the ledge, and was upon her. Too late. She broke out of her body and spun up through the rushing air, just as Mackinnon sank his pig tusks into her heart.

Wolfred arrived later that day. All the way there, he had felt her arms, and the weight of her behind him in the saddle. He had talked to her, told her to stay in her body. But the scent of bergamot and her warm breath between his shoulders persisted—these things made him despair. There was a tiny waiting room. He was brought there to learn the news, which was told to him by a plump, florid nurse. Indeed, his wife was sadly departed. The nurse did not have time for details. She patted his hand, and left him to bear the news in private.

Wolfred had prepared his mind for this by picturing the actions he would take. He would wrap her body tightly, carry her to his big horse. He would ride home with the reins in one hand, her on the saddle before him. Her head would rest on his chest and her hair would absorb the tears that melted down his throat. He couldn’t get Mackinnon’s head out of his thoughts. But she would at last be safe now, beyond reach. Her children would never have to endure what she had suffered. He would care for them with his life. In his thoughts, he told this to her, his words warm in the air, searching out her spirit.

He saw himself turning down the road home. He would slow to a hopeless walk. He dreaded telling their children, although they might know for she would have visited them, he thought, in their dreams. He would dismount, he decided, turn his wife across the saddle, lay her to rest upon the earth.

Then he would bring the children to address her. When he’d left,
it had rained the night before and the ground was still wet in places. He closed his eyes, saw himself mixing a little mud up with his fingers. He would touch her face, smear the mud across her cheeks, down her nose, across her forehead, the blunt tip of her chin. If he’d owned a bronze shield, he’d have thrust that into the earth at the head of her grave. After she was buried, he would wander the woods, drinking from the hives of wild bees the bitter honey that had driven Xenophon’s soldiers insane.

LaRose, he said out loud in the stuffy waiting room.

Where was that nurse?

He didn’t want his beloved to be hurt in the next life, by men, the way she had been in this life. Later, he would burn all her things to send them with her.

Walk to the edge and wait for me, he said into the air. Wear your hat with the feather.

Where was that nurse?

Wolfred came clomping down the road, numb. His children ran to him. They had been keeping watch. Seeing their ever rational father disoriented confused them. They immediately became needy, loud, insistent. Wolfred rolled off the horse and put his hand across his face. They did not ask if their mother lived, they asked where she was. It took until he was inside the cabin, seated in a chair by the stove, until the fire was built up, the horse brushed down. It took a long time for him to say any word. His silence fueled their anxiety to such a pitch that they went still. Into that stillness, at last, his words struck.

Your mother has died. She is buried. Buried far away.

He held them, petted them, allowed them to weep against his vest, his arms, until they were exhausted and crept in misery into their bed. Only the youngest, LaRose, her mother’s namesake, stayed curled near him. At one point, staring into the coals, her father shook himself. LaRose heard his whisper-rasp.

Stolen. Your mother was stolen.

UNTIL THE SECOND
LaRose was grown, she sometimes imagined that her mother, although stolen, perhaps by God, might actually be living somewhere. She knew it wasn’t true, of course, but the thought nagged at her. When at last she questioned her father about it, he became upset and got the whiskey bottle down off the top shelf. Wolfred only drank a spot from time to time. He never became a drunk, so his drinking of the whiskey only meant he was preparing to speak of something difficult.

You’re the only one who ever asked, he said.

You told me she was stolen, said LaRose.

Did I?

Wolfred had never remarried, though women threw themselves his way. For many years, he had talked of their mother incessantly, which had kept her alive to the children. He hadn’t spoken of her now for perhaps a year. This daughter, this LaRose, had been recruited by a man named Richard H. Pratt, who had passed through the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara reservation and traveled through North Dakota as well as through South Dakota. He’d started a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She wanted to go because she knew that her mother had gone to a boarding school. It was a way of being like her mother, who had vividly and with desperate insistence taught her daughter everything she knew.

What She Learned

BEFORE THE FIRST
LaRose died, she had taught her daughter how to find guardian spirits in each place they walked, how to heal people with songs, with plants, what lichens to eat in an extremity of hunger, how to set snares, jig fish, tie nets, net fish, create fire out of sticks and curls of birchbark. How to sew, how to boil food with hot stones, how to weave reed mats and make birchbark pots. She taught her how to
poison fish with plants, how to make arrows, a bow, shoot a rifle, how to use the wind when hunting, make a digging stick, dig certain roots, carve a flute, play it, bead a bandolier bag. She taught her how to tell from the calls of birds what animal had entered the woods, how to tell from the calls of birds which direction and what type of weather was approaching, how to tell from the calls of birds if you were going to die or if an enemy was on your trail. She learned how to keep a newborn from crying, how to amuse an older child, what to feed a child of each age, how to catch an eagle to take a feather, knock a partridge from a tree. How to carve a pipe bowl, burn the center of a sumac branch for the stem, how to make tobacco, make pemmican, how to harvest wild rice, dance, winnow, parch, and store it, and make tobacco for your pipe. How to carve tree taps, tap maples, collect sap, how to make syrup, sugar, how to soak a hide, scrape down a hide, how to grease it and cure it with the animal’s brains, how to make it soft and silky, how to smoke it, what to use it for. She taught her to make mittens, leggings, makazinan, a dress, a drum, a coat, a carry sack from the stomach of an elk, a caribou, a woods buffalo. She taught her how to leave behind her body when half awake or in sleep and fly around to investigate what was happening on the earth. She taught her how to dream, how to return from a dream, change the dream, or stay in the dream in order to save her life.

CARLISLE INDIAN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL
in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was overseen by a tall hatchet-beaked former captain of the Tenth Cavalry. Having succeeded in educating prisoners at Marion, Illinois, and having worked with young Sioux men and women at Hampton Institute, having in effect foiled those whose ideas were identical to Frank Baum’s, Richard Pratt promoted his students to sympathetic reformers, writing that the hope and salvation of the race was
immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.

The second LaRose was saturated. She was smart. After the
agony of getting used to her corsets she pulled them tight and wore gloves—because her mother had on special occasions worn gloves. She learned to clean white people’s houses during Carlisle’s outing program, gouging congealed dust from corners with a knife. Polishing the gray veins of marble floors. She made the woodwork glow. Sparkled up the copper boilers. Also, she wrote in lovely script and factored into the thousands. She knew the rivers of the world and the wars the Greeks fought, the Romans fought, the Americans fought, beating the British and then the savages. A list of races she had to memorize placed white the highest, then yellow, black, and finally savage. According to the curriculum, her people were on the bottom.

So what. She wore hats and buttoned up her shoes. She knew the Declaration of Independence by heart and Captain Pratt himself had spoken to her of the Civil War and why it was fought. She gave recitations including a poem about the angel in the kitchen. She learned mathematics and memorized the shape of the countries on the globe. She learned American history and the levels of civilization ancient to modern, which culminated in men like Captain Richard Pratt. She learned how to survive on bread and water, then coffee, gravy, and bread. Mostly she learned how to do menial labor—how to use a mangle, starch, an iron. She worked ten-hour days in 120 degree heat. She learned how to sew with a machine. How to imagine her own mouth sewed shut. For speaking Anishinaabe. She learned how to endure being beaten with a board. How to eat with a fork, a spoon, how to lard bread correctly with a knife, how to grow vegetables, how to steal them, how to make soap, scrub floors, scrub walls, scrub pots, scrub the body, scrub the head, scrape a floor clean, a commode, a pantry shelf by shelf, what rats were and how to kill them, how to supplement her diet by stealing from the surrounding farms or gathering nuts and acorns, hiding them in her bosom. During those early years, Carlisle sold its farm produce and fed the students oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal.

She learned how to stand correctly, shake hands firmly, pull on
gloves and take them off finger by finger. How to walk like a white woman on hard shoes. How to use and wash out stinking menstrual rags when Ojibwe women never stunk of old blood as they used and discarded moss and cattail down, bathed twice a day. She learned to stink, learned to itch, learned to boil her underwear for lice and wash only once a week, once every two weeks, three. She learned to sleep on cold floors, endure the smell of white people, and set a proper table. She learned how to watch her friends die quickly from measles or chokingly from pneumonia or shrieking from the agony of encephalitic meningitis. She learned how to sing funeral hymns, and she sang them for a Sioux boy named Amos LaFromboise, for a Cheyenne boy named Abe Lincoln, for Herbert Littlehawk, Ernest White Thunder, Kate Smiley, and for a suicide whose name she carefully brushed from her mind. She learned how to go hungry and how to stay full even if she had to eat bark—the innermost layers of birch. She learned, like her mother, how to hide that she had tuberculosis.

Pratt also said:
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with this sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

They hadn’t started the killing early enough with this LaRose, though. She knew “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and yet her mother had taught her how to use fierce and subtle Ojibwe poisons. She knew how to catch and skin any animal she saw. Her mother had snared the head of a demon white man and burnt its eyes out. Her mother had called for her mother’s drum and cured a man who wandered in black vertigo. Her mother had made a new drum for her daughter. Nobody took it because she left it with her father. Now this LaRose had seen the ocean. Now her work out east was done. Her mother had taught her to put her spirit away for safekeeping
when that was necessary. Out of the treetops, she brought back and absorbed her many selves. She was complete. She could go. Beneath the bobbing plume on the cast-off hat she was given for a month’s wages cleaning pots, she moved demurely along the railway platform, in her purse a ticket home.