The Antelope Wife: A Novel Part 1

The Antelope Wife.

A NOVEL.

Louise Erdrich.

Part One.

Bezhig.

The niizhoodenhyag are very old when they decide to sew this world into being. One twin uses light and the other dark. The first twin's beads are cut-gla.s.s whites and pales, and the other twin's beads are glittering deep red and blue-black indigo. One twin uses an awl made of an otter's sharpened p.e.n.i.s bone, the other uses that of a bear. They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each woman trying to set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world.

Chapter 1..

Father's Milk.

Scranton Roy.

Deep in the past during a spectacular cruel raid upon an isolated Ojibwe village mistaken for hostile during the scare over the starving Dakota, a dog bearing upon its back a frame-board dikinaagan enclosing a child in moss, velvet, embroideries of beads, was frightened into the vast carca.s.s of the world west of the Otter Tail River. A cavalry soldier, spurred to human response by the sight of the dog, the strapped-on child, vanis.h.i.+ng into the distance, followed and did not return.

What happened to him lives on, though fading in the larger memory, and I relate it here in order that it not be lost.

Private Scranton Teodorus Roy was the youngest son of a Quaker father and a reclusive poet mother who established a small Pennsylvania community based on intelligent conversation. One day into his view a member of a traveling drama troupe appeared. Unmasked, the woman's stage glance broke across Roy like fire. She was tall, fatefully slender, pale, and paler haired, resolute in her character, and simple in her amused scorn of Roy-so young, bright faced, obedient. To prove himself, he made a rendezvous promise and then took his way west following her glare. An icicle, it drove into his heart and melted there, leaving a trail of cold water and blood. The way was long. She glided like a snake beneath his footsteps in fevered dreams. When he finally got to the place they had agreed upon, she was not there, of course. Angry and at odds, he went against the radiant ways of his father. He enlisted in the army and was sent to join the cavalry at Fort Snelling on the banks of the Mississippi in St. Paul, Minnesota.

There, he was trained to the rifle, learned to darn his socks using a wooden egg, ate many an ill-cooked bean, and polished his officers' harness leather until one day, in a state of uneasy resignation, he put on the dark blue uniform, fixed his bayonet, set off marching due west.

The village his company encountered was peaceful, then not.

In chaos of groaning horses, dogs screaming, rifle and pistol reports, and the smoke of errant cooking fires, Scranton Roy was most disturbed not by the death yells of old men and the few warriors shocked naked from their robes, but by the feral quiet of the children. And the sudden contempt he felt for them all. Unexpected, the frigid hate. The pleasure in raising, aiming. They ran fleet as their mothers, heading for a brush-thick gully and a slough of gra.s.s beyond. Two fell. Roy whirled, not knowing whom to shoot next. Eager, he bayoneted an old woman who set upon him with no other weapon but a stone picked from the ground.

She was built like the broken sacks of hay he'd used for practice, but her body closed fast around the instrument. He braced himself against her to pull free, set his boot between her legs to tug the blade from her stomach, and as he did so tried to avoid her eyes but did not manage. His glare was drawn into hers and he sank with it into the dark unaccompanied moment before his birth. She broke his gaze. In a groan of heat and blood she cried a word that would reverberate in his mind until the last moment of his life. He yanked the bayonet out with a huge cry, and began to run.

That was when he saw the dog, a loping dirt-brown cur, circle the camp twice with the child on its back and set off into open s.p.a.ce. As much to escape the evil confusion of this village and his own dark act as out of any sympathy for the baby, though he glimpsed its face-mystified and calm-Scranton Roy started running after the two. Within moments, the ruckus of death was behind him. The farther away the village got, the farther behind he wanted it. He kept on, running, walking, managing to keep the dog in view only because it was spring and the new gra.s.s, after a burn of lightning, was just beginning its thrust, which would take it to well over a full-grown man's height.

From time to time, as the day went on, the dog paused to rest, stretched patient beneath its burden. Grinning and panting, it allowed Roy to approach, just so far. A necklace of blue beads hung from the brow guard of the cradle board. It swayed, clattered lightly. The child's hands were bound in the wrappings. She could not reach for the beads but stared at them, mesmerized. The sun grew razor-hot. Tiny blackflies settled at the corners of her eyes. Sipped moisture from along her lids until, toward late afternoon, the heat died. A cold wind boomed against Scranton Roy in a steady rush. Still, into the emptiness, the three infinitesimally pushed.

The world darkened. Afraid of losing the trail, Roy gave his utmost. As night fixed upon them, man and dog were close enough to hear each other breathing and so, in that rhythm, both slept. Next morning, the dog stayed near, grinning for sc.r.a.ps. Afraid to frighten it with a rifle shot, Roy hadn't brought down game although he'd seen plenty. He managed to snare a rabbit. Then, with his tinderbox and steel, he started a fire and began to roast it, at which smell the dog dragged itself belly-down through the dirt, edging close. The baby made its first sound, a murmuring whimper. Accepting tidbits and bones, the dog was alert, suspicious. Roy could not touch it until he thought to wash himself all over and approach naked to diminish his whiteman's scent.

So he was able at last to remove the child from its wrappings and bathe it, a girl, and to hold her. He'd never done such a thing before. First he tried to feed her a tiny piece of the rabbit. She was too young to manage. He dripped water into her mouth, made sure it trickled down, but was perplexed at what to feed her, then alarmed when, after a night of deprivation, her tiny face crumpled in need. She peered at him in expectation and, at last, violently squalled. Her cries filled a vastness that nothing else could. They resounded, took over everything, and brought his heart clean to the surface. Scranton Roy cradled the baby, sang lewd camp tunes, then stalwart hymns, and at last remembered his own mother's lullabies. Nothing helped. It seemed, when he held her close upon his heart as women did, that the child grew angry with longing and desperately clung, rooted with her mouth, roared in frustration, until at last, moved to near insanity, Roy opened his s.h.i.+rt and put her to his nipple.

She seized him. Inhaled him. Her suck was fierce. His whole body was astonished, most of all the inoffensive nipple he'd never appreciated until, in spite of the pain, it served to gain him peace. As he sat there, the child holding part of him in her mouth, he looked around just in case there should be any witness to this act which seemed to him strange as anything that had happened in this sky-filled land. Of course, there was only the dog. Contented, freed, it lolled appreciatively near. So the evening pa.s.sed and then the night. Scranton Roy was obliged to change nipples, the first one hurt so, and he fell asleep with the baby tucked beside him on his useless teat.

She was still there in the morning, stuck, though he pulled her off to slingshot a partridge, roasted that too, and smeared its grease on his two sore spots. That made her wild for him. He couldn't remove her then and commenced to walk, holding her, attached, toward a stand of cottonwood that wavered in the distance. A river. A place to camp. He'd settle there for a day or two, he thought, and try to teach the baby to eat something, for he feared she'd starve to death-although she seemed, except for the times he removed her from his chest, surprisingly contented.

He slung the blue beads around the baby's neck. Tied the cradle board onto his own back. Then the man, the child, and the dog struck farther into the wilderness. They reached hills of sand, oak covered, shelter. Nearby, sod he cut painstakingly with the length of his bayonet and piled into a square, lightless but secure, and warm. h.o.a.rding his shots, he managed to bring down a buffalo bull fat-loaded with the new gra.s.s. He fleshed the hide, dried the meat, seared the brains, stored the pounded fat and berries in the gut, made use of every bone and sc.r.a.p of flesh even to the horns, carved into spoons, and the eyeb.a.l.l.s, tossed to the dog. The tongue, cooked tender and mashed in his own mouth, he coaxed the baby to accept. She still much preferred him. As he was now past civilized judgment, her loyalty filled him with a foolish, tender joy.

He bathed each morning at the river. Once, he killed a beaver and greased himself all over against mosquitoes with its fat. The baby continued to nurse and he made a sling for her from his s.h.i.+rt. He lounged in the doorway of his sod hut, dreaming and exhausted, fearing that a fever was coming upon him. The situation was confusing. He did not know what course to take, how to start back, wondered if there'd be a party sent to search for him and then realized if they did find him he'd be court-martialed, if not hanged for desertion. The baby kept nursing and refused to stop. His nipples toughened. Pity scorched him, she sucked so blindly, so forcefully, and with such immense faith. It occurred to him one slow dusk as he looked down at her, upon his breast, that she was teaching him something.

This notion seemed absurd when he first considered it, and then, as insights do when we have the solitude to absorb them, he eventually grew used to the idea and paid attention to the lesson. The word faith hooked him. She had it in such pure supply. She nursed with utter simplicity and trust, as though the act itself would produce her wish. Half asleep one early morning, her beside him, he felt a slight warmth, then a rush in one side of his chest, a pleasurable burning. He thought it was an odd dream and fell asleep again only to wake to a huge burp from the baby, whose lips curled back from her dark gums in bliss, whose tiny fists were unclenched in sleep for the first time, who looked, impossibly, well fed.

Ask and ye shall receive. Ask and ye shall receive. The words ran through him like a clear stream. He put his hand to his chest and then tasted a thin blue drop of his own watery, appalling, G.o.d-given milk.

Miss Peace McKnight Family duty was deeply planted in Miss Peace McKnight, also the knowledge that if she did not n.o.body else would-do the duty, that is, of seeing to the future of the McKnights. Her father's Aberdeen b.u.t.ton-cart business failed after he ran out of dead sheep-his own, whose bones he cleverly thought to use after a spring disaster. He sawed b.u.t.tons with an instrument devised of soldered steel, ground them to a l.u.s.ter with a polisher of fine sand glued to cloth, made holes with a bore and punch that he had self-invented. It was the absence, then, of sheep carca.s.ses in Scotland that forced his daughter to do battle with the spirit of ignorance.

Peace McKnight. She was st.u.r.dily made as a captain's chair, yet drew water with graceful wrists and ran dancing across the rutted road on curved white ankles. Hale, Scots, full-breasted as a pouter pigeon, and dusted all over like an egg with freckles, wavy light brown hair secured with her father's gift-three pins of carved bone-she came to the Great Plains with enough education to apply for and win a teaching certificate.

Her cla.s.s was piddling at first, all near grown, too. Three consumptive Swedish sisters not long for life, one boy abrupt and full of anger. A German. Even though she spoke plainly and as slow as humanly possible, her students fixed her with stares of tongueless suspicion and were incapable of following a single direction. She had to start from the beginning, teach the alphabet, the numbers, and had just reached the letter v, the word cat, subtraction, which they were naturally better at than addition, when she noticed someone standing at the back of her cla.s.sroom. Quietly alert, observant, she had been there for some time. The girl stepped forward from the darkness.

She had roan coppery skin and wore a necklace of bright indigo beads. She was slender, with a pliable long waist, a graceful neck, and she was about six years old.

Miss McKnight blushed pink-gold with interest. She was charmed, first by the confidence of the child's smile and next by her immediate a.s.sumption of a place to sit, study, organize herself, and at last by her listening intelligence. The girl, though silent, had a hungry, curious quality. Miss McKnight had a teaching gift to match it. Although they were fourteen years apart, they became, inevitably, friends.

Then sisters. Until fall, Miss McKnight slept in the school cloakroom and bathed in the river nearby. Once the river iced over at the edges, an argument developed among the few and far-between homesteads as to which had enough room and who could afford her. No one. Matilda Roy stepped in and pestered her father, known as a strange and reclusive fellow, until he gave in and agreed that the new teacher could share the small trunk bed he had made for his daughter, so long as she helped with the poultry.

Mainly, they raised guinea fowl from keets that Scranton Roy had bought from a Polish widow. The speckled purple-black vulturine birds were half wild, clever. Matilda's task was to spy on, hunt down, and follow the hens to their hidden nests. The girls, for Peace McKnight was half girl around Matilda, laughed at the birds' tricks and hid to catch them. Fat, speckled, furious with shrill guinea pride, they acted as house watchdogs and scolded in the oak trees. Then from the pole shed where they wintered. In lard from a neighbor's pig, Scranton Roy fried strips of late squash, dried sand-dune morels, inky caps, field and oyster mushrooms, crushed twice-boiled acorns, the guinea eggs. He baked sweet bannock, dribbled on it wild aster honey aged in the bole of an oak, dark and pungent as mead.

The small sod and plank house was whitewashed inside and the deep sills of small bold windows held geraniums and started seeds. At night, the kerosene lamplight in trembling rings and halos, Miss Peace McKnight felt the eyes of Scranton Roy carve her in s.p.a.ce. His gaze was a heat running up and down her throat, pausing elsewhere with the effect of a soft blow.

Scranton Roy He is peculiar the way his mother was peculiar-writing poetry on the margins of bits of newspaper, tatters of cloth. His mother burned her life work and died a few years after the black-bordered message from the President arrived. She was comforted by the ashes of her words yet still in mourning for her son, who never did make his survival known but named his daughter for her. Matilda. One poem survived. A fragment. It goes like this: Come to me, thou dark inviolate. Scranton Roy prays to an unparticular G.o.d, communes with the spirit headlong each morning in a rush of ardor that carries him through each difficult day. He is lithe, nearly brown as his daughter, bearded, driven. He owns more than one dozen books and subscribes to periodicals that he lends to Miss McKnight.

He wants to be delivered of the burden of his solitude. A wife would help.

Peace tosses her sandy hair, feels the eyes of Scranton Roy upon her, appreciates their fire, and smiles into the eyes of his daughter. Technically, Miss McKnight soon becomes a stepmother. Whatever the term, the two women behave as though they've always known this closeness. Holding hands, they walk to school, kick dust, and tickle each other's necks with long stems of grama gra.s.s. They cook for Scranton Roy but also roll their eyes from time to time at him and break into fits of suppressed and impolite laughter.

Matilda Roy Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

When he rocks her, Matilda remembers the taste of his milk-hot and bitter as dandelion juice. Once, he holds her foot in the cradle of his palm and with the adept point of his hunting knife painlessly delivers a splinter, long and pale and b.l.o.o.d.y. Teaches her to round her c's and put tiny teakettle handles on her a's. Crooks stray hairs behind her ears. Washes her face with the rough palm of his hand, but gently, scrubbing at her smooth chin.

He is a man, though he nourished her. Sometimes across the room, at night, in his sleep, her father gasps as though stabbed, dies into himself. She is jolted awake, frightened, and thinks to check his breath with her hand, but then his ragged snore lulls her. In the fresh daylight, staring up at the patches of mildew on the ceiling, Matilda watches him proudly from the corners of her eyes as he cracks the ice in the was.h.i.+ng pail, feeds a spurt of hidden stove flame, talks to himself. She loves him like nothing else. He is her father, her human. Still, sometimes, afflicted by an anxious sorrow, she holds her breath to see what will happen, if he will save her. Heat flows up the sides of her face and she opens her lips but before her mouth can form a word she sees yellow, pa.s.ses out, and is flooded by blueness, sheer blueness, intimate and cool, the color of her necklace of beads.

Kiss Have you ever fallen from a severe height and had your wind knocked forth so that, in the strict jolt's sway, you did experience stopped time? Matilda Roy did when she saw her father kiss the teacher. The world halted. There sounded a great gong made of sky. A gasp. Silence. Then the leaves ticked again, the guineas scornfully gossiped, the burly black hound that had whelped of the Indian dog pawed a cool ditch in the sand for itself. Sliding back from the window to the bench behind the house where she sat afternoons to sh.e.l.l peas, shuck corn, peel dinner's potatoes, pluck guinea hens, and dream, Matilda Roy looked at the gold-brown skin on her arms, turned her arms over, turned them back, flexed her pretty, agile hands.

The kiss had been long, slow, and of growing interest and intensity, more educational than any lesson yet given her by Miss Peace McKnight. Matilda shut her eyes. Within herself at all times a silent darkness sifted up and down. A pure emptiness fizzing and gliding. Now, along with the puzzling development between her friend and her father, something else. It took a long concentration on her stillness to grasp the elusive new sensation of freedom, of relief.

Ozhaawashkmashkodikwe / Blue Prairie Woman The child lost in the raid was still nameless, still a half spirit, yet her mother mourned her for a solid year's time and nearly died of the sorrow. A haunting uncertainty dragged the time out. Ozhaawashkmashkodiwe might be picking blueberries and she feared she would come across her daughter's bones. In the wind at night, she heard her baby wailing, a black twig skeleton. As she stirred the fire, a cleft of flame recalled the evil day itself, the ma.s.sed piles of meat put to the torch, their robes and blankets smoldering, the stinking singe of hair, and the hot iron of the rifle barrels. At night, for the first month after that day, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s grew pale and hard and her milk impacted, spoiling in her, leaking out under her burnt clothes so that she smelled of sour milk and fire. An old midwife gave her a new puppy and she put it to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Holding to her nipple the tiny wet muzzle, cradling the needy bit of fur, she cried. All that night the tiny dog mercifully drew off the shooting pains in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and at dawn, drowsy and comfortable, she finally cuddled the sweet-fleshed puppy to her, breathed its salty odor, and slept.

Wet ash when the puppy weaned itself. Blood. Her moons began and nothing she pressed between her legs could stop the rush of life. Her body wanting to get rid of itself. She ate white clay, scratched herself with bull thorns for relief, cut her hair, grew it long, cut it short again, scored her arms to the bone, tied the bundle of a pretend baby to her chest, and for six moons ate nothing but dirt and leaves. It must have been a rich dirt, said her grandmother, for although she slept little and looked tired, Blue Prairie Woman was healthy as a buffalo cow. When Shawano the younger returned from his family's wild rice beds, she gave her husband such a night of s.e.xual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she pa.s.sed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale wiindigoog with aching eyes, tongues of flame.

Twins are born of such immoderation.

By the time her husband left again with his sled of traps, she was pregnant and calm. During that winter, life turned more brutal. The tribe's stores had been burned by order, and many times in starving sleep Blue Prairie Woman dreamed the memory of buffalo fat running in rivulets across the ground, soaking into the earth, fat gold from piles of burning meat. She still dreamed, too, with wide-eyed clarity of the young, fleet brown dog, the cradle board bound to its body. Even carrying two, she dreamed of her first baby bewildered, then howling, then at last riding black as leather, mouth stretched wide underneath a waterless sky. She dreamed its bones rattled in the careful st.i.tching of black velvet, clacked in the moss padding, grown thin. She heard their rhythm and saw the dog, the small skeleton flying. She howled and scratched herself half blind and at last so viciously took leave of her mind that the old ones got together and decided to change her name.

On a cool day in spring in the maple-sap-running moon the elders held a pitiful feast-only nothing seems pitiful to survivors. In weak sunlight they chewed spring-risen mud-turtle meat, roasted waabooz, the remaining sweet grains of manoomin, acorns, puckoons from a squirrel's cache, and the fresh spears of dandelion. Blue Prairie Woman's name was covered with blood, singed with fire. Her name was old and exquisite and had belonged to many powerful mothers. Yet the woman who had fit inside of it had walked off. She couldn't stop following the child and the dog. Someone else had taken her place. Who, as yet, was unclear. But the old ones agreed that the wrong name would kill what was in there and it had to go-like a husk dried off and scattered. Like a sh.e.l.l to a nut. Hair grown long and sacrificed to sorrow. They had to give her another name if they wanted her to return to the living.

The name they gave her had to be unused. New. Oshki. They asked the strongest of the namers, the one who dreamed original names. This namer was nameless and was neither a man nor a woman, and so took power from the in-between. This namer had long, thick braids and a sweet shy smile, charming ways but arms tough with roped muscle. The namer walked like a woman, spoke in a man's deep voice. Hid coy behind a fan and yet agreed to dream a name to fit the new thing inside Blue Prairie Woman. But what name would help a woman who could be calmed only by gazing into the arrowing distance? The namer went away, starved and sang and dreamed, until it was clear that the only name that made any sense at all was the name of the place where the old Blue Prairie Woman had gone to fetch back her child.

Other Side of the Earth Once she was named for the place toward which she traveled, the young mother was able to be in both places at once-she was following her child into the sun and also pounding the wiiyaas between rocks to dried scruffs of pemmican. She was searching the thick underbrush of her own mind. She was punching holes to sew tough new soles on old makizinan and also sew new ones, tiny, the soles pierced before she beaded the tops. She starved and wandered, tracking the faint marks the dog left as she pa.s.sed into the blue distance. At the same time, she knocked rice. She parched and stored the grains. Killed birds. Tamed horses. Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.

The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

In the deep quiet of her blood the two babies were forming, creating themselves just as the first twin G.o.ds did at the beginning. As yet, no one had asked what might happen next. What would happen to the woman called Other Side of the Earth when Blue Prairie Woman found Matilda Roy?

A Dog Named Sorrow The dog nursed on human milk grew up coyote gray and clever, a light-boned, loping b.i.t.c.h who followed Blue Prairie Woman everywhere. Became her second thought, lay outside the door when she slept, just within the outer flap when it rained, though not in. Not ever actually inside a human dwelling. Huge with pups or thin from feeding them, teats dragging, the dog still followed. Close and quiet as her shadow, it lived within touch of her, although they never did touch after the dog drew from Blue Prairie Woman's soaked and swollen nipples the heat, the night milk, the overpowering sorrow.

Always there, jumping up at the approach of a stranger, guarding her in the dusk, alert for a handout, living patiently on bits of hide, guts, offal, the dog waited. And was ready when Blue Prairie Woman set down her babies with their grandmother and started walking west, following at long last the endless invisible trail of her daughter's flight.

She walked for hours, she walked for years. She walked until she heard about them. The man. The young girl and the blue beads she wore. Where they were living. She heard the story. The twins, two girls, she left behind to the chances of baptism. They were named Mary, of course, for the good blue-robed woman, and Josephette, for the good husband. Only the Ojibwe tongue made Zosie of the latter name. Zosie. Mary. Their relatives, who had survived the blue-coat ma.s.sacre, would raise them as their own.

When she reached the place, Blue Prairie Woman settled on a nearby rise, the dog near. From that distance, the two watched the house-small, immaculate, scent of a hearth fire made of crackling oak twigs. Illness. There was sickness in the house, she could sense it-the silence, then the flurries of motion. Rags hung out. Water to haul. One shrill cry. Silence again. All day in thin gra.s.s, the dog, the woman, sunlight moving across them, breathed each other's air, slept by turns, waited.

Matilda Roy She heard the gentle approach that night, the scrawl of leaves, the sighing resonance of discovery. She sat up in her crazy quilt, knowing. Next to her, held in the hot vise of fever, Peace muttered endlessly of b.u.t.tons and sheep bones. Sounds-a slight tap. The clatter of her beads. In the morning, there was no Matilda Roy in the trunk bed. There was only a note, folded twice, penned in the same exquisite, though feminized, handwriting of her father.

She came for me. I went with her.

Scranton Roy Peace McKnight was never devout, so there was no intimacy of prayer between the newlyweds. Their physical pa.s.sion suffered, as well, because of the shortness of his bed. There was, after all, very little s.p.a.ce inside the sod house. Scranton Roy had slept in a tiny berth on one side of the room, his daughter on the other. Both slept curled like snails, like babies in the wombs of their mothers. More difficult with an extra person in the bedding. It wasn't long before, in order to get any rest at all, Peace slipped outside to sleep with the guineas, took up nightly residence apart from her husband.

Still, there were evenings when Scranton was inflicted with ardor and arranged them both, before she could leave, in the cramped and absurd postures of love. If only he had imagined how to use the armless rocking chair before the fire! Peace's mind flashed on the possibility, but she was too stubborn to mention it. Even the floor, packed dirt covered with skins, would have been preferable. Again, she didn't care to introduce that possibility into his mind. Anyway, as it happened she had every right to turn her back when the tiny knock of new life began in the cradle of her hip bones. As he retreated, missed the rasp of her breath, wondered about Matilda, and imagined the new life to come all at once, Scranton Roy prayed. Wrote poems in his head. Come to me, thou dark inviolate.

After her deliverance from the mottled-skin sickness, the gasping and fever that made her bones ache, Peace was in her weakness even warier of her new husband. For the rest of her pregnancy, she made him sleep alone. Her labor began on a snowy morning. Scranton Roy set out for the Swedish housewife's in a swallowing blizzard that would have cost him his life but for his good sense in turning back. He reached the door. Smote, rattled, fell into the heat of a b.l.o.o.d.y scene in which Peace McKnight implored her neglected G.o.d in begging futility. For two days, then three, her labor shook her in its jaws. Her howls were louder than the wind. Hoa.r.s.er. Then her voice was lost, a sc.r.a.pe of bone. A whisper. Her face bloated, dark red, then white, then gray. Her eyes rolled back to the whites, so she stared mystified with agony into her own thoughts when at last the child tore its way from her. A boy, plump and dead blue. Marked with cloudy spots like her earlier disease. There was no pulse in the birth cord but Scranton Roy thought to puff his own air into the baby's lungs. It answered with a startled bawl.

Augustus. She had already named her baby. Known that it would be a boy.

Scranton wrapped the baby in a rabbit fur blanket and kissed the smoothed, ravaged temples of Peace with tender horror at her pains, at the pains of his own mother, and of all mothers, and of the unfair limitations of our bodies, of the hopeless settlement of our life tasks, and finally, of the boundless iniquity of the G.o.d to whom she had so uselessly shrieked. Look at her, he called the unseen witness. And perhaps G.o.d did or Peace McKnight's mind, pitilessly wracked, finally came out of hiding and told her heart to beat twice more. A stab of fainting gold heeled through a sc.r.a.p of window. Peace saw the wanton gleam, breathed out, gazed out. And then, as she stepped from her ripped body into the utter calm of her new soul, Peace McKnight saw her husband put his son to his breast.

Blue Prairie Woman All that's in a name is a puff of sound, a lungful of wind, and yet it is an airy enclosure. How is it that the gist, the spirit, the complicated web of bone, hair, brain, gets stuffed into a syllable or two? How do you shrink the genie of human complexity? How the personality? Unless, that is, your mother gives you her name, Other Side of the Earth.

Who came from nowhere and from lucky chance. Whose mother bore her in s.h.i.+t and fire. She is huge as half the sky. In the milk from her rescuer's b.r.e.a.s.t.s she has tasted his disconcerting hatred of her kind and also protection, so that when she falls into the fever, she doesn't suffer of it the way Peace did. Although they stop, make camp, and Blue Prairie Woman speaks to her in worried susurrations, the child is in no real danger.

The two camp on the trail of a river cart. The sky opens brilliantly and the gra.s.s is hemmed, rife with berries. Blue Prairie Woman picks with swift grace and fills a new-made makak. She dries the berries on sheaves of bark, in the sun, so they'll be easy to carry. Lying with her head on her mother's lap, before the fire, Matilda asks what her name was as a little baby. The two talk on and on, mainly by signs.

Does the older woman understand the question? Her face burns. As she sinks dizzily onto the earth beside her daughter, she feels compelled to give her the name that brought her back. Other Side of the Earth, she says, teeth tapping. Hotter, hotter, first confused and then dreadfully clear when she sees, opening before her, the western door.

She must act at once if her daughter is to survive her.

The clouds are pure stratus. The sky is a raft of milk. The coyote gray dog sits patiently near.

Blue Prairie Woman, sick to death and knowing it, reaches swiftly to her left and sets her grip without looking on the nape of the dog's neck. First time she has touched the dog since it drank from her the milk of sorrow. She drags the dog to her. Soft bones, soft muzzle then. Tough old thing now. Blue Prairie Woman holds the dog close underneath one arm and then, knife in hand, draws her clever blade across the beating throat. Slices its stiff moan in half and collects in the berry-filled makak its gurgle of dark blood. Blue Prairie Woman then stretches the dog out, skins and guts it, cuts off her head, and lowers the chopped carca.s.s into a deep birch-bark container. She heats stones red-hot, lowers them into the water with a pair of antlers. Tending the fire carefully, weakening, she boils the dog.

When it is done, the meat softened, shredding off the bones, she tips the gray meat, brown meat, onto a birch tray. Steam rises, the fragrance of the meat is faintly sweet. Quietly, she gestures to her daughter. Prods the cracked oval pads off the cooked paws. Offers them to her.

IT TAKES SIXTEEN hours for Blue Prairie Woman to contract the fever and only eight more to die of it. All that time, as she is dying, she sings. Her song is wistful, peculiar, soft, questing. It doesn't sound like a death song; rather, there is in it the tenderness and intimacy of seduction addressed to the blue distance.

Never exposed, healthy, defenseless, her body is an eager receptacle for the virus. She seizes, her skin goes purple, she vomits a brilliant flash of blood. Pa.s.sionate, surprised, she dies when her chest fills, kicking and drumming her heels on the hollow earth. At last she is still, gazing west. That is the direction her daughter sits facing all the next day and the next. She sings her mother's song, holding her mother's hand in one hand and seriously, absently, eating the dog with the other hand-until in that spinning cloud light and across rich level earth, pale reddish curious creatures, slashed with white on the chest and face, deep-eyed, curious, pause in pa.s.sing.

The antelope emerge from the band of the light at the world's edge.

A small herd of sixteen or twenty flickers into view. Fascinated, they poise to watch the girl's hand in its white sleeve dip. Feed herself. Dip. They step closer. Hooves of polished metal. Ears like tuning forks. Black p.r.o.ngs and velvet. They watch Matilda. Blue Prairie Woman's daughter. Other Side of the Earth. Nameless.

She is ten years old, tough from chasing poultry and lean from the fever. She doesn't know what they are, the beings, dreamlike, summoned by her mother's song, her dipping hand. They come closer, closer, grazing near, folding their legs under them to warily rest. The young nurse from their mothers on the run or stare at the girl in fascinated hilarity, springing off if she catches their wheeling flirtation. In the morning when she wakens, still holding her mother's hand, they are standing all around. They bend to her, huff in excitement when she rises and stands among them quiet and wondering. Easy with their dainty precision, she wanders along in their company. Always on the move. At night she makes herself a nest of willow. Sleeps there. Moves on. Eats bird's eggs. A snared rabbit. Roots. She remembers fire and cooks a handful of grouse chicks. The herd flows in steps and spurting gallops deeper into the west. When they walk, she walks, following, dried berries in a sack made of her dress. When they run, she runs with them. Naked, graceful, the blue beads around her neck.

Chapter 2.

Wiindigoo Story The Cracker Tin Scranton Roy touched the dirty brown hair of his beautiful son, Augustus, and said, "I am tired of my numb heart."

Augustus looked down at his feet, knowing he would hear more.

"I thought when I loved your mother my heart had come to life, but then her death killed my heart again. Even watching you grow hasn't brought it back. I have been reading the ancients."

Augustus looked at the pile of books. He was twenty-three years old and had read most of them with his father, who admired the Greek philosophers. Anaximander viewed time as a judge, and Scranton Roy had meditated on this concept until its truth came clear. Time had judged and sentenced him in the form of an unforgettable word.

"As a young man I committed a crime in the fever of war. Although I have tried to absolve myself repeatedly-I even took up self-scourging for a year-I still see the old woman's face and hear her say that word. The word wakes me up at night. It is written in my brain. As you know, it is carved into my arm."

Augustus looked at his father's arm, the white scars, the letters carefully blocked and scored. The word was a long word. The word reached up past his elbow.

"I still see the children who fell," his father continued. "Especially them. I still taste on my tongue the smoke, powder, blood, and burning fat."

Augustus had grown up in the shadow of his father's ever more complex grief, and although he had few other adults to compare him with, he did think his father was lost. His father wandered in the dark. But Augustus himself grew up in wind and sun. He loved perpetual change and was glad it was the law of the universe. Heracleitus had also declared there to be a balance of opposites, and so Augustus was the balance of his wracked father, a happy child who ran boundless, hunting prairie chickens, stealing the blue eggs of robins, caring for descendants of the agile guinea hens his mother had laughed at. He walked overland to attend the same school, set in the center of the towns.h.i.+p, where his mother had taught.

At home, he read with his father, and both agreed with Pythagoras that the essence of things was to be found in numbers. At school, Augustus's best subject was math. He collected numbers until they made him dizzy. He counted everything around him and totaled it up with other countings and subtracted or divided those countings just to have the numbers in his head. Each number had a color and some had a sound or taste.

"We are going to search out the people I wronged and give them the cracker tin," said Scranton Roy.

Augustus knew the tin well. Once very light, it had contained Christmas crackers sealed against moisture. Now the cracker tin was very heavy and contained gold and silver money. Exactly $438.13. A bright purple number. A n.o.ble number, sc.r.a.ped of sacrifice. When Scranton Roy felt the sad heat come on him, he put a bit of money in the tin and it helped to ease his burden. When Augustus Roy felt slightly morose, he took some money from the tin and it helped to ease his burden. It was hard caring for a father who raved of smoke and blood and carved into his arm the letters of a word he did not understand.

I hope I don't have to carry the cracker tin, thought Augustus. But of course he did, and it made his back sore, or his arms when he hefted it before him. Sometimes he made a pillow of his s.h.i.+rt and carried the tin on his head. As they walked on and on, Augustus was increasingly grateful that he had lightened the tin and he smiled to think how he'd spent the money-on home-brew fire. As he walked toward the place where his father had killed the woman and perhaps the children, too, Augustus counted the clouds until they blended together and there was just one gloomy sky. He counted trees until they turned into a crowded woodland. Where were they going? They were going backward, out of the good simple world he'd lived in so far and into complex rolling prairie. Every so often the land dipped and the trees stood thick. Sometimes they towered in lightless stands.

The sloughs turned to shallow lakes and then the lakes deepened. Abruptly there began vast lumbered areas of rotting pine stumps surrounded by springy popple. He feared his father didn't know where he was going and had forgotten where he'd murdered the harmless old woman.

"Here is the place," said his father at last. He put down the cracker tin. "Here is where I betrayed the silent light in which I was raised. Here is what desire made of me, and foolishness, and an irresistible and b.l.o.o.d.y impulse."

Scranton lay down in some poison ivy.