LaRose (27 page)

WOLFRED WAS WAITING
to greet her when she stepped off the wagon that brought her down to St. Anthony. She had left the missionary house for the mission school six years ago, wearing a shift and blanket.

Now behold!

A tight brown woolen traveling jacket, kid leather gloves, a swishing skirt, and underneath it stockings, pantaloons trimmed in lace she herself had knitted, bone corset, vest. She had been paid for years of hard labor with old clothes. She wore a shaped felt hat, also brown, decorated with a lilac bow and the iridescent wing of an indigo bunting. Her shoes had a fashionable curve to the heel that had nearly lamed the mistress of the house.

Exactly as she hoped, Wolfred did not recognize her. He gave her an appreciative glance, then looked down, disappointed. His gaze gradually returned to her. After a while, his look cleared to a stunned question and he stepped forward.

It is I, she said.

They smiled at each other, unnerved. His face reflected her glory with a satisfying humility. She stripped off a glove and extended her hand; he held it like a live bird. He hoisted her trunk on his shoulder. They walked the dusty margin of the road. Wolfred showed her the cart, his Red River cart, two-wheeled and hitched to a mottled ox. The cart was made entirely of wood, ingeniously pegged together. Wolfred put her trunk in back and helped her up onto the plank seat beside him. He snapped his whip over the bullock’s right ear and the beast drew the cart onto the road, which became a rutted trail. The wheels screeched like hell’s millions.

The trail led back to the trading center of the Great Plains, Pembina, then farther, out to where Wolfred had decided to try his hand at farming. As she rode in the disorienting noise, which made speaking useless, a melting pleasure stole up in her. First she unpinned
her hat, puffed out the lilac bow and balanced it carefully upon her thighs. Her skin had yellowed from lack of sunshine. Now light struck her shoulders and burned along her throat. She closed her eyes. Behind her lids a blood-warmth beat, a shadowy red gold. She balanced herself with a hand on Wolfred’s arm. The mission teachers believed that educating women in the art of strictly keeping house and disciplining children was essential to eliminating savagery. A wedge should be placed between an Indian mother and daughter. New ways would eliminate all primitive teaching. But they hadn’t understood the power of sunlight on a woman’s throat.

The warmth revived in LaRose the golden time before her mother was destroyed. She looked critically at Wolfred. He seemed to have become an Indian, true. The teachers would have cut his hair off and relieved him of all he wore—a shirt of flowered red calico, fringed buckskin pants, a broad-brimmed hat, moccasins beaded with flowers and finished off with colored threads. Wolfred’s skin was tanned to a deep nutshell color and he’d lighted a pipe. The smoke was fragrant, the tobacco mixed with sage and red willow bark. He winked when he felt her sidelong gaze. She tried to laugh but her stays were too tight. Why not laugh? She reached beneath her shirtwaist and loosened her corset, right there. She kicked her shoes off, plucked the pins from her hair. The corset and shoes had been the worst—never to take a deep breath, and each step a stabbing pain. Who was looking? Who to care now if she wore moccasins, burned her corset, gambled with the fifty buttons that closed the back of her dress? She would eat fresh meat and no more turnips. Wolfred’s teeth flashed. How long he’d waited—in a manner of speaking. Anyway, he hadn’t married any of those women. Was he now too rough for her? Excited, he wondered. He slowed the ox. He stopped the cart. The wind boomed yet there was silence on the earth.

Wolfred turned to her, held her face gently.

Giimiikawaadiz, he said.

Suddenly, clearly, she saw them naked on a river rock in
sunshine, eating berries until the juice stained their tongues, their lips, until it ran down her chin and pooled along her collarbone. She saw their life. She saw it happen. She yanked Wolfred close. He carried her through tall grass and they lay down where it hid their nakedness. They rolled in berries, smashing them like blood, like childbirth. Everything would happen to them. They’d be one. They’d be everyone.

I want a wedding dress like this, she said to Wolfred, and showed him a picture that was used to raise money for the school. Her friend was in it. All the clothes were borrowed, but her hair was real. LaRose had combed her friend’s hair out and arranged it to cascade down her shoulders. Later, she had pulled it up into a bridal knot.

I think she died of tuberculosis, she said. Like everybody else I knew. I never heard from her after she went back home.

A cough boiled up in her own chest, but she breathed calmly and tapped her sternum until the tightness released. She was getting well. She could feel her strength casting the weakness out.

Wolfred built the cabin that would eventually be boarded into the center of the house containing the lives of his descendants. The cabin was made of hewn oak, mudded between with tan clay. There was a woodstove, a cast-iron skillet, oiled paper windows, and a good plank floor. Wolfred made a rope bed and LaRose stuffed a mattress with oak leaves and pillows with cattail down. The stove in winter glowed red-hot. They made love beneath a buffalo robe.

After, LaRose washed in icy water by the light of the moon. She stretched out her arms in the silver light. Her body was ready to absorb wanton, ripe, ever avid life. She crept back into bed. As she drowsed in the pleasant heat of Wolfred’s body, she felt herself lifting away. When she opened her eyes to look down, she’d already drifted up through the roof. She fanned herself through the air, checking the area all around their little cabin for spirit lights. Far away, the stars hissed. One dropped a speck of fire. It wavered,
wobbled, then shot straight into LaRose. She bobbed back down and lay next to Wolfred.

And so they brought a being into the world.

She cut up her fancy clothes for baby quilts. She took apart her corset and examined the strange, flexible bones. Wolfred fashioned them into head guards for the cradleboard. The shoes were bartered to a settler’s wife for seed. The stockings and hat were given to a medicine man who dreamed the child a name.

The next three children arrived during thunderstorms. LaRose howled when the thunder cracked. Energy boiled up in her and the births were easier. Each child was born strong and exceptionally well-formed. They were named Patrice, Cuthbert, Cleophile, and LaRose. It was clear they would all possess the energy and sleek purpose of their mother, the steady capability and curiosity of their father, variations of the two combined.

She scoured the floorboards of her house, sewed muslin curtains. Her children learned how to read and write in English and spoke English and Ojibwe. She corrected their grammar in both languages. In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships. She made a map of the world on a whitewashed board, from memory. Everybody factored, copying their father’s numbers. They all sewed and beaded, especially once the snow came down and isolated them. The children chopped wood and kept the stove stoked. Wolfred taught them the mystery of dough making, the wonder of capturing invisible wild yeasts to raise the bread, the pleasant joy of baking loaves in wood ash and over fire. The oiled paper windows were replaced by glass. The land would become reservation land, but Wolfred had homesteaded it and the agents and priest left them alone.

When her youngest child was a year old, LaRose’s urgent cough exploded past her strength and pain shot through her bones.
Wolfred made her drink the butter off the top of the milk. He made her rest. He wrapped her up carefully and set hot stones in the bed. She improved and grew strong. She was herself for years. Then one spring day she collapsed again, spilling a bucket of cold water, and lay wet in the cold grass, wracked, furious, foaming bright arterial blood. Yet again, though, she recovered, grew strong. She fooled the ancient being and wrested from it ten more years.

Finally, in its ecstasy to live, the being seized her. It sank hot iron knives into her bones. Snipped her lungs into paper valentines. Wolfred spooned into her mouth the warmed fat of any game he brought down. He still made her rest, wrapped her carefully every night, and set hot lake rocks around her feet. Every night she said good-bye, tried to die before morning, was disappointed to awaken. He arranged a plaster of boiled mashed nettles between strips of canvas, and lowered it onto her chest. She improved, gained strength, but was herself for only a month. On a cool late summer day with insects loud in the hay field, tangled song in the birch trees, she folded herself again into the grass. Staring up into a swirl of brilliant sky, she saw an ominous bird. Wolfred wrapped LaRose in quilts and laid her on a bed of cut reeds in the wagon bed. The children had piled the bed thick and high. They had covered the boards with two heavy horse blankets, then with their quilts. LaRose saw this bed they had made for her and stroked their faces.

Take back your blankets, she said, in a horror that she would spread what ate her.

Air them out, she cried. Air out the house. For a time, sleep in the barn.

They touched her, tried to calm her.

I am warm, she smiled, though she wasn’t.

Wolfred heard there was a doctor in newly built St. Paul who had a treatment for the disease. He took LaRose overland in the wagon. There, after a two-week journey that nearly killed her, she met Dr. Haniford Ames.

In an immaculate examining room, the mild, pale doctor took her pulse with calm fingers, listened to her breathe, and explained what he’d learned from a southerner, Dr. John Croghan. In a great cavern in Kentucky, he had originated cave therapy for consumption, or phthisis. The purity and mineral health of the air in caves was curative. Dr. Haniford Ames had hollowed out and built four stone huts in the Wabasha caves of St. Paul, and there he kept his patients, feeding them well and making certain that their surroundings were clean and beneficial. When he met LaRose, the doctor was at first opposed to bringing her into the treatment regimen. Because she was an Indian, he was certain she could not be cured, but Wolfred was adamant. They waited eight days. A patient died and Wolfred handed over all the money they possessed. She was admitted. Her whitewashed stone room was tiny, with space just for a pallet and washstand. The front opened onto an expansive rock ledge where she would lie all day watching the untamed, torrential Mississippi River. LaRose smiled when Wolfred set her on the soft, fresh mattress. From the bed she could see across the river to the horizon, to the east, where bold pink clouds urgently massed.

Her brain seethed with fever; she was excited, alert. She asked for paper, quills, and ink. For two nights Wolfred slept at the foot of her bed, rolled in a blanket. All patients slept on this long stone outcrop of a porch because Ames believed that night air, also, strengthened the lungs. LaRose wrote and wrote. When he went home, Wolfred took the papers, which were stories, admonitions, letters to her children.

They had messages from her whenever there was a post rider. She was eating. She was resting. Dr. Haniford Ames was using the latest science to govern her treatment. He was judicious with the laudanum, was considering surgery. The doctor had lost a sister and a brother to the white plague. Though he’d been ill right along with them, he was now recovered. If he could have dissected himself to find out what had caused him to live, he would have. When
he found the eastern doctors too conservative in their thinking, he packed his entire laboratory and headed west. There, he would have the freedom to pursue a cure. He would find out what had saved him while his loved ones wrackingly died. As far as he could tell, there was nothing unusual about him. He was not robust. His only exercise was walking, in all weathers, to set his thoughts at peace. His diet was slothful—he ate whatever he could, gorged on sweets. He even smoked. No, there was nothing outwardly special. Everything about him was uncolorful, unprepossessing. There must be something inside of himself that he could not quantify. His brother had been a mountain climber, ropey and long limbed. His sister had been a great beauty, who swam in the Atlantic waters off Cape Cod and rode intractable horses. She had had a mystical belief in herself and it had surprised her very much to die. It had surprised Haniford as well, and because of it he had been resigned to his own death. To be alive still startled him.

When he met LaRose, he met another conundrum that would shape his life. Disease was rampant among her people, and nearly every disease was lethal. He believed in science, not this idea of manifest destiny, which kept appearing in the newspapers. He was upset when pious land-grabbers declared that the Will of God was somehow involved in so effectively destroying Indians who squatted in the path of progress.

Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.

Some found him offensive. He did not care. He had ability, he had life, he would put both to use.

Because no Indians were ever cured of the disease, he doubted that LaRose would survive. Because as he came to know her, LaRose reminded him of his sister, he decided that he would cure her anyway, and threw himself into her case.

From her bed on the stone promontory, LaRose watched the weather change. Dr. Ames had eaten fish in cream sauce when he was ill.
LaRose ate fish in cream sauce. He had walked, so she walked, though up and down the cave’s short stone corridor was all she could manage. When Wolfred left, she was already improved. Dr. Ames wrote to say that she was responding well to the experimental collapse of one lung—he had some hope. Her letters told Wolfred that she was stronger, that she was allowed to walk twice a day now, that she was still eating fish in cream sauce. Then a letter arrived in which she told Wolfred she had seen Mackinnon.

Wolfred fixed food for the children in a manic rush and saddled his horse.

Mackinnon’s head appeared at dawn, across the great river, a speck, tumping gently in place all day, preparing. Every sunrise, day after day, she woke to see that the head was waiting, greedy, steam boiling around it in a cloud. One afternoon, the head lurched into the water. Sometimes it disappeared for days. But always, it surfaced again. The tattered ears, like oars, pulled Mackinnon laboriously against treacherous currents that surged in eddies and rapids. When the river upended or sucked the head down a pool, she took heart. But it always spun back. Her eyes sharpened and she saw clearly over the distances.