The Round House (22 page)

Come on, she said. I'm onna need help. Please?

But I got out of the car and walked up the road.

T
he back kitchen door was open. I walked in and called out.

Auntie C?

She came up from the cellar with a jar of Juneberry jam and said she thought I had a job.

I quit.

That's lazy. You get back there.

I shook my head and wouldn't look at her.

Oh. They at it again? Whitey's back at it?

Yeah.

You stay here then. You can sleep in Joseph's old room—the sewing room now, but anyway. Mooshum's in Evey's room. I set up a cot for him there. He won't sleep on Evey's soft bed.

That day I helped Clemence out. She kept a nice garden like my mother used to and her snap peas were in already. Uncle Edward was working on his backyard pond, trying to get the drainage and flowage just right, measuring mosquito larvae, and I helped him too. Whitey dropped my bike off, but I never went out and saw him. We ate fried venison with mustard and browned onions. Their television was as usual in the repair shop sixty miles away and I was sleepy. Mooshum tottered off to Evey's room and I went to Joseph's. But when I opened the door to the room and saw the sewing machine wedged in next to the bed and the folded stacks of fabric and the wall board covered with hundreds of spools of bright thread, when I saw the quilt pieces and the shoe box labeled Zippers and the same heart-shaped pincushion only Mom's was dusty green, I thought of my father entering our sewing room every night and how the loneliness had seeped from under the door of the sewing room then spread across the hall and tried to get to my bedroom. I said to Clemence, You think it would bother Mooshum if I bunked with him?

He talks in his sleep.

I don't care.

Clemence opened Evey's door and asked if Mooshum minded, but already he was lightly snoring. Clemence said it was fine, so I shut myself in the room. I shed my clothes and crawled into my grown-up cousin's bed, which was plush and saggy and smelled of dust. Mooshum's snore was a very old man's hypnotizing purr. I fell immediately asleep. Sometime right after moonrise, for there was light in the room, I woke. Mooshum was talking all right, so I rolled over and stuck a pillow over my head. I dozed off, but something he said hooked me in, and little by little, like a fish reeled up out of the dark, I began to surface. Mooshum was not just talking in the random disconnected way people do, blurting out scraps of dream language. He was telling a story.

Akii

At first she was just an ordinary woman, said Mooshum, good at a number of things—weaving nets, snaring rabbits, skinning out and tanning hides. She liked the liver of the deer. Her name was Akiikwe, Earth Woman, and like her namesake she was solid. She had heavy bones and a short, thick neck. Her husband, Mirage, appeared and disappeared. He looked at other woman. She had caught him many times but stayed with him. He was a resolute hunter in spite of his ways and the two of them were good at surviving. They could always get food for their children, and even extra meat would come their way, for she especially, Akii, could make out in dreams where to find the animals. She had a shrewd heart and an endless stare, with which she kept her children in line. Akii and her husband were never stingy, and as I say they were always very good at finding food even in the dead of winter—that is, until the year they forced us into our boundary. The reservation year.

A few had broken soil like the white man, and put some seeds in the ground, but a real farm takes many years to build until it keeps you alive in winter. We hunted all the animals before the Moon of Little Spirit and there wasn't even a rabbit left. The government agent had promised supplies to tide us over for the loss of our territory, but these never came through. We left our boundaries and ranged back up into Canada, but the caribou were long gone, there were no beaver left, no muskrats even. The children cried and an old man boiled strips of his moosehide pants for them to chew on.

During this time, every day, Akii went out and she always came back with some small tidbit. She chopped an ice hole and with great effort she and her husband kept it open day and night, so they fished there until she hooked a fish that said to her,
My people are going to sleep now and you shall starve
. Sure enough, she could not get another fish after that. She saw Mirage looking at her strangely, and she looked strangely back at him. He kept the children behind him as they slept and the axe with him in his blanket. He was tired of Akii so he pretended he could see it happen. Some people in these hungry times became possessed. A wiindigoo could cast its spirit inside of a person. That person would become an animal, and see fellow humans as prey meat. That's what was happening, her husband decided. He imagined that her eyes were starting to glow in the dark. The thing to do was you had to kill that person right away. But not before you had agreement in the matter. You couldn't do it alone. There was a certain way the killing of a wiindigoo must be done.

Mirage got some men together, and persuaded them that Akii was becoming very powerful and would soon go out of control. She had cut her arm for her baby to drink the blood, so that baby might go wiindigoo too. She stared as if she might pounce on her children and followed their every movement. And then, when they tried to tie her up, she struggled. It took six men to do it, and they came out the worse for their work—bitten and gouged. Another woman took the children away so they would not see what was to happen. But one, the oldest boy, was left. The only person who could kill a wiindigoo was someone in the blood family. If her husband killed her, Akiikwe's people might take revenge. It could have been a sister or a brother, but they refused. So the boy was given a knife and told to kill his mother. He was twelve years old. The men would hold her. He should cut her neck. The boy began to weep, but he was told that he must do it anyway. His name was Nanapush. The men urged him to kill his mother, tried to buck up his courage. But he got angry. He stuck the knife into one of the men who was holding his mother. But the man had on a skin coat and the wound wasn't very deep.

Ah, said his mother, you are a good son. You will not kill me. You're the only one I will not eat! Then she struggled so powerfully that she broke away from all of the men. But they wrestled her down.

He knew, Nanapush, that she had just threatened to eat those men because she was being tormented. She was a good mother to her children and had taught them how to live. Now the men brought her back tied in cords. Her husband bound her to a tree and left her there to freeze or starve. She screamed and fought the straps, but then grew quiet. They thought she must be getting weak so they left her alone that night. But the chinook wind came through and the air turned mild. She ate the snow. There must have been some good in the snow, because with her strong fingers she undid the knots and untied the cords. She began to walk away. Her son crawled from the tent and decided to go with her, but they were followed and overtaken when they reached the lake. Again, the men tied her up.

Now Mirage enlarged the very hole Akii had fished, where the ice was thinner. The men decided to put her down into the water, all of them, so no one had to take the blame. They strengthened those bindings and this time they attached a rock to her feet. Then they stuffed her down the hole into the freezing water. When she did not come up, they walked away, except her son, who wouldn't go with them. He sat on the ice there and sang her death song. As his father passed him, the boy asked for his gun and said that he would shoot his mother if she came out.

Maybe at that moment his father wasn't thinking straight, because he gave his gun to Nanapush.

Once the men were out of sight, Akii crashed her head from the hole. She had managed to kick free of the rock, and breathed the air that sits just beneath the surface of the ice. Nanapush helped her out of the water and put his blanket on her. Then they went into the woods and walked until they were too weak to walk anymore. The mother had her flint and striker in a pocket next to her skin. They made a fire and a shelter. Akii told her son that while she was underwater the fish spoke to her and said he felt sorry for her, and that she should have a hunting song. She sang this song to her son. It was a buffalo song. Why a buffalo song? Because the fish missed the buffalo. When the buffalo came to the lakes and rivers on hot summer days, they shed their tasty fat ticks for the fish to eat, and their dung drew other insects that the fish liked too. They wished the buffalo would come back. They asked me where the buffalo had gone, said Akii. I couldn't tell them. The boy learned the song, but said he wondered if it was useless. Nobody had seen a buffalo for years.

The two slept that night. They slept and slept. When they woke, they were so weak that they thought it would be easier to die. But Nanapush had some wire for a snare. He crawled out and set that snare a few feet away from their little shelter.

If a rabbit is snared, it will tell me where the animals are, said Akii.

They went to sleep again. When they woke, there was a rabbit struggling in the snare. The mother crept to the rabbit and listened to what it said. Then she crept back to her son with the rabbit.

The rabbit gave itself to you, she said. You must eat it and throw every single one of its bones out into the snow, so it can live again.

Nanapush roasted the rabbit, ate it. Three times he asked his mother to take some, but she refused. She hid her face in the blanket so he would not see her face.

Go now, she said. I heard the same song from the rabbit. The buffalo used to churn up the earth so the grass would grow better for the rabbits to eat. All the animals miss the buffalo, but they miss the real Anishinaabeg too. Take the gun and travel straight into the west. A buffalo has come back from over that horizon. The old woman waits for you. If you return and I am dead, do not cry. You have been a very good son to me.

So Nanapush went out.

M
ooshum stopped talking. I heard his bed creak, and then the light, even rattle of his snoring. I was disappointed and thought of shaking him awake to find out the end of the story. But at last I fell asleep too. When I woke, I wondered again what had happened. Mooshum was in the kitchen, sipping at the soupy maple-syrup-flavored oatmeal he loved in the morning. I asked Mooshum who this Nanapush was, the boy he spoke of in the story. But he gave me another answer entirely.

Nanapush? Mooshum gave a dry, little creaky laugh.

An old man prone to madness! Like me, only worse. He should have been weeded out. In the face of danger, he was sure to act like an idiot. When self-discipline was called for, greed won out with Nanapush. He was aged early on by absurdities and lies. Old Nanapush, as they called him, or akiwenziish. Sometimes the old reprobate worked miracles through gross and disgusting behavior. People went to him, though secretly, for healings. As it happened, when I was a young man I myself brought him blankets, tobacco, and acquired from him secrets on how to please my first wife, whose eyes had begun to stray. Junesse was slightly older than me, and in bed she craved patience from a man that only comes with age. What should I do? I begged the old man. Tell me!

Baashkizigan! Baashkizigan! said Nanapush. Don't be shy. Take your time with the next, and if another stand comes on think about paddling across the lake against a stiff wind and don't stop until you've beached your canoe.

And so I kept my woman and came to respect the old man. He acted crazy to sort his friends from his enemies. But he spoke the truth.

What about his mother? I asked. What about the woman no man could kill? When she sent him for the buffalo. What happened?

What caca are you talking about, my boy?

Your story.

What story?

The one you told me last night.

Last night? I told no story. I slept the whole night through. I slept good.

Okay then, I thought. I'm going to have to wait for him to fall asleep good and hard again. Maybe this time I'll hear the end.

So I waited the next night, trying to keep awake. But I was tired and kept dropping off. I slept for a good while. Then in my dreams I heard the sound of a light sticklike gnashing, and woke to find Mooshum sitting up again. He'd forgotten to take out his dentures and they were loose. He was clacking his teeth together, not speaking, as he sometimes did when he was very angry. But at last the teeth fell out of his mouth and he found words.