She sets two places carefully. A paper napkin folded once. Knife, fork, and spoon all on one side. She fills the plates with the wild rice in a heap beside the turkey, the milky, buttery corn, a bit of fruit salad containing strawberries, and, beside them, a large bowl of vanilla pudding.
Come on now. Come home. Eat it, eat it all up, now, she thinks vehemently, heartsick. You’ve been out all night. The sooner you eat the sooner you can go to sleep.
The minute hand flicks down the face of the clock. 7:30. The phone rings. The caller ID says it is Frank so she does not answer it. At 7:36 she hears the dog scrabbling up the steps and then the tired dragging footsteps of her daughters. She’s out the door and holding them. They smell like salt, pepperoni, leaves, garbage. They smell like the only meaning in life. They slept in the park, they tell her in amazement, underneath the heaviest bushes. They had their jackets! There was a thick layer of newspaper down on the ground, so they curled up because they couldn’t walk farther and the dog curled with them to keep them warm you should have heard he growled a horrible growl if anybody came near the bush. They don’t know where they were. Where Sweetheart Calico was. And no, she didn’t kidnap them. No. They just went with her. For the fun of it. And then it wasn’t fun and they were lost and a man gave them pizza and the night covered them. Then to get back here they followed the dog. And what’s that smell? It smells good. Is there some food? They sit at the table shoveling in the food with concentration. As Rozin watches them, her being fills. She gets up and walks to the refrigerator. She takes out a pound of hamburger, which is all the meat she has, unwraps the meat, and puts in on a plate on the floor. The dog comes over, inhales the meat. Laps fresh water from the bowl she sets beside it. Rozin slowly lifts the phone.
“Did you find them?” asks Noodin.
“Yes,” she says.
Rozin knows that they have been smoking their little pipes and praying all night long. They learned the words to their prayers from their grandmother Peace and their grandfather Waabizi, the Swan, during the years those two raised them. The words call the spirits by name from each direction, from the sky, from the earth, from the night, from the day, from the sun, from the moon, from the winds, the flocks of birds and the solitary birds, from the clans, from the animals that give themselves as food or are sent to delight us or to help us, like the dog, from the rivers, from the lakes, from the rain, from the water in the mother’s body and the water in the snow, from the stars and the mysterious place the stars came from, and the fire, the original fire.
N
OW, MY BROTHERS
and sisters, having retraced my urine with stunning accuracy, snarled at bums all night, snarfed a bowl of hamburger, and having guarded and saved my young humans, I will resume the story of my life. I begin shortly after I received my name. As you know, I started my life in the vicinity of Roys and Shawanos. There I lived among my relatives, who all descended in some manner from the dog named Sorrow, who was nursed by Blue Prairie Woman and bequeathed to us our eternal protective connection, the devotion of Sorrow’s descendants to hers. I was brought down to this place by the theft of Sweetheart Calico. We dogs sensed that danger and chaos in her form could threaten the twins.
I like Gakaabikaang. I’ve made it my home. Here on the ground where I now sprawl and scratch, I intend to live out my years of strength, fertility, and purpose. As you see, I have survived into my tranquil middle age. But not by chance. Not by luck. I have the dog skills of the ages in my blood.
Survival Rules for Animoshag
It is jokingly said by Anishinaabeg that those Indians who live on the plains eat dogs while they, the woods Indians, eat rabbits. However, it is my dog experience that this is not entirely true. I tell you now, relatives and friends, it is best to beware. Even in Ojibwe country, we are not out of danger.
There are the slick and deadly wheels of reservation cars. Poisons, occasionally, set out for our weaker cousins the mice and rats. Not to speak of the coyotes, the paw-snapping jaws of clever Ojibwe trapper steel. And we may happen into the snares set as well for our enemies. Lynx. Marten. Feral cats. Bears, whom we worship. I learned early. Eat anything you can at any time. Fast. Bolt it down. Stay cute, but stay elusive. Don’t let them think twice when they’ve got the hatchet out. I see cold steel, I’m gone. Believe it. And there are all sorts of illnesses we dread. Avoid the bite of the fox. It is madness. Avoid all bats. Avoid all black-and-white-striped moving objects. And slow things with spiny quills. Avoid all humans when they get into a feasting mood. Get near the tables fast, though, once the food is cooked. Stay close to their feet. Stay ready.
But don’t steal from their plates.
Avoid medicine men. Snakes. Boys with BB guns. Anything ropelike or easily used to hang or tie. Avoid outhouse holes. Cats that live indoors. Do not sleep under cars. Or with horses. Do not eat anything attached to a skinny, burning string. Do not eat lard from the table. Do not go into the house at all unless no one is watching. Do not, unless you are absolutely certain you can blame it on a cat, eat any of their chickens. Do not eat pies. Do not eat decks of cards, plastic jugs, dry beans, dish sponges. If you must eat a shoe, eat both of the pair, every scrap, untraceable. Always, when in doubt, the rule is you are better off underneath the house. Don’t chase cars driven by young teenage boys. Don’t chase cars driven by old ladies. Don’t bark or growl at men cradling rifles. Don’t get wet in winter, and don’t let yourself dry out when the hot winds of August blow. We’re not equipped to sweat. Keep your mouth open. Visit the lake. Pee often. Take messages from tree stumps and the corners of buildings. Don’t forget to leave in return a polite and respectful hello. You never know when it will come in handy, your contact, your friend. You never know whom you will need to rely upon.
Which is how I come to my next story of survival.
Avoiding Sacrifice
Within the deep lakes of the Ojibwe there is supposed to live a kind of man-monster-cat thing that tips boats over in the cold of spring and plucks down into his arms the sexiest women. Keeping this cranky old thing happy is the job of local Indian humans and they’re always throwing their tobacco in the water, talking to the waves. But when the monster takes a person in whatever way—usually by drowning—there is some deeper, older, hungrier urge that must be satisfied by a stronger item than tobacco. You guessed it. Lay low, animoshag. I tell you, when a man goes out drunk in his motorboat, hide. Say he’s just good-timing, lapping beer, driving his boat in circles, and he hits his own wake coming at him. Pops out of the boat. Goes down.
Humans call that fate. We dogs call that stupidity. Whatever you name it, there’s always a good chance they’ll come looking for a dog. A white dog. One to tie with red ribbons. Brush nice. Truss in a rope. Feed a steak or two. Pray over. Pet soft. Not worth it. Stone around the neck. Then, splash. Dog offering!
My friends and relatives, we have walked down the prayer road clearing the way for humans since before time started. We have gone ahead of them to present their good points to the gatekeeper at that soft pasture where they eat all day and gamble the night away. Don’t forget, though, in heaven we still just get the bones they toss. We have kept our humans company in darkest hours. Saved them from starvation—you know how. We have talked to their gods on their behalf and thrown ourselves in front of their wheels to save them from idiotic journeys, to the bootlegger’s, say. We’re glad to do these things. As an old race, we know our purpose. Original Dog walked alongside Nanabozhoo, their tricky creator. The dog is bound to the human. Raised alongside the human. With the human. Still, half the time we know better than the human.
We have lain next to our personal human shrouded in red calico. We have let our picked-clean ceremonial dog bones be reverently buried in bark houses. We have warned off bad spirits from their babies, and talked to the irritating ghosts of their suicide uncles and aunts. We have always given of ourselves. We have always thought of humans first. And yet, for me, when Fatty Simon went down I did not hesitate. I took to the woods. I had puppies, after all, to provide for. I had a life. Next time, there was a guardrail accident way up on the bridge and Agnes Anderson met her end that way. Again, not me. Not me tied like a five-cent bundle and tossed overboard. Nor when the lake took Alberta Meyer or the Speigelrein girls, not when old Kagewah fell through that spring sitting in his icehouse or even when our track star Morris Shawano disappeared and his dad’s boat washed up to the north. Not me. Not Almost Soup. That is my name and I refuse to give it up for human mistakes or human triumphs.
I refused, that is, until my girls weakened and got sick.
As I told you, a girl saved my life, but also saved me from worse—you know. (And now I specifically address my brothers, the snip-snip. The Big Fix. The words we all know and watch for in their plans and conversations.) Cally and Deanna hid me whenever their mother tried to drag me to the vet. Thus, they saved my male doghood and allowed me full dogness. I have had, as a result of their courage, the honor of carrying our dogline down the generations many times. For this, alone, how could I ever thank them enough? And then they got sick, as I say.
Visiting their grandmas for Christmas, it happened. One foul night in a blizzard they got sick with a fever and a cough. It worsened, worsened, until I sensed the presence of the black dog. We all know the black dog. That is, death. He smells like iron cold. Sparks fly from his fur. He is the one who drags the creaking cart made of sticks. We have all heard the wheels groan as they turned, and hoped they would keep on past our house. But on that cold late winter night, up north, he stopped. I heard his hound breath, felt the heat of his lungs of steam and fire.
A
LMOST
S
OUP
Curled underneath the beading table with the shoeless feet of women, you hear things you’d never want to know. Or things you do. Maybe it’s the needles, Pony Number Twelve, so straight and fine they slip right through the toughest hide. Maybe it is my own big ears that catch everything, and more. Maybe it’s the colors of the seed beads that work up in stitches so intimate and small—collect, collect—until you have a pattern to the anguish.
We dogs know what the women are really doing when they are beading. They are sewing us all into a pattern, into life beneath their hands. We are the beads on the waxed string, pricked up by their sharp needles. We are the tiny pieces of the huge design that they are making—the soul of the world.
See here, Rozin says, holding out her work with a trembling hand. We dogs know already what happened down in Gakaabikaang and why she left for her mothers’ house. After her children ran off with Sweetheart Calico, after her lover, Frank, left boxes of cookies that the dog willingly wolfed, after Rozin was late the entire next week and the week after the trauma and the celebration of Cally and Deanna’s return into her arms, she was laid off. She applied for unemployment and was given enough to live on if she used her savings bit by bit as she looked for the next job. But not enough to pay the mortgage on that house.
Frank suggested that, as the girls were out of school for Christmas break, why not go up north and stay with their grandmas for a while? “I’ll fix up your house,” he said, “and we can live there when we get married. I’ll even help with the mortgage.”
That last line seals it (although Rozin ignores the when-we-get-married part). She takes the girls up to her original turf for a visit. And then she stays. And Frank travels up and travels back. Up and back. And whatever is happening down in Gakaabikaang just happens without Rozin. Her cousins up north, Jackie and Ruby, who figure they have a say in Rozin’s love life, counsel her to go back down and snap up Frank. He has a job, they say, fully employed! And pleasant enough looks and is maybe insecure but that’s a plus in an Indian guy. He doesn’t appear to drink to excess. Wow! He is also known to be one of those rare men who was faithful to his wife until he left her. So what is Rozin waiting for? Why the hesitancy? Why the chilled feet? Why enroll her daughters in the tribal school and disrupt their learning process? She even has a house down there! Is it that you miss the grandmas? They will visit you. Is it that you fear commitment after Richard? Just get over it. Do you guys lack chemistry?
“No,” says Rozin, “there’s too much of it.”
“There can’t be too much,” says Ruby, looking puzzled at Jackie. They are both large, happy women who laugh often and make anything, everything, into wild rice hot-dish.
R
OZIN CAN’T SAY
exactly what “it” is and so cannot be helped. She just wants to stay where she is, living out by the lake with her mother and her aunt. Even though they drive her crazy, she just wants to stay with them and learn things, oh, cultural and spiritual things, maybe, and she wants her daughters near and she does not want to rely on a man to make her happy. Frank. Though she misses him. Well, but she can live with it.
Here’s the real reason: Getting her children back feels like all the luck in her life is now used up. She doesn’t want to take any more risks.
But I could have told her that from a dog’s point of view life is nothing but risks.
Wild Rose Pattern
“Let me tell you about this flower,” Rozin rambles to her mother now, “this leaf, this heart-in-a-heart, this wild rose, these girls of mine.”
“Cally knows everything about me. Deanna knows everything about everything.”
“What things, for instance?”
“Ridiculous things!”
Rozin lowers her velvet and the old twins’ eyes glide over at the swimming vines, the maple leaf in three blends of green beads, the powerful twist of the grape tendril, and her four roses of hearts that she’s finishing in a burst of dangerous pinks. Rozin is becoming tiny and bird-boned. She has developed a drooping eye. You could think this eye was giving you the curse. Or you could think it was giving you the come-on.
“So how, ridiculous?”
“Just listen!”
“My girls and I get confused about one another. It happens with mothers and daughters, you know it does. Deanna. Cally. We think the same things sometimes. They don’t mind if I am nine years old again. Will they even like me three years from now? Will I embarrass them? Will they hate me like the other girls all hate their mothers? Was I like that to you?”
Noodin and Giizis exchange a look that says,
whatever they deal to her she’s got it coming.
“Eya’, indaanis,” says Noodin. “Don’t worry.”
C
ALLY AND
D
EANNA
are always outside. It’s good for them, Rozin thinks. Cally stomps massive clearings out on her snowshoes and throws her jacket off, her hat, for me to run with and toss. We see a mink flash by. Deanna loses her mittens for me to find. The girls play hard then tear into the house, faces dark with joy, cheeks blazing, the raw cold and sweat of icy breezes swirling in their hair.
Rozin paints their fingernails a golden satin pink. Cally burns her mouth on hot bread behind her back.
“Ow, Grandma!”
But Cally is laughing, fanning off the tip of her tongue, taking the next piece of dough her grandma fries with more care. Instead of eating once it cools, however, my girl suddenly sets down the golden crust, unfinished. Cally coughs hard and then she is tired. She curls up by Deanna. They wrap together in one blanket beside the stack of old newspapers that the grandmas keep by their easy chairs. They don’t want to play with the dog anymore. I sneak under the edge of the couch-cover fringe. They usually don’t let me in the house—the girls have to hide me.
Just like her great-grandfather Augustus, Giizis reads all of the summer news through long winter nights. She calls out to Noodin or Rozin occasionally, exclaiming over a visit from the Pope, another shooting, the practices of cults and movie stars. Now she shades Cally and Deanna from lamplight as they curl into a knitted afghan. It is only later when the girls wake, flushed in their first misery, that anyone except me even knows they are sick.
Their fevers shoot up abruptly to an identical 103. Rozin takes the steel bowl and washcloth. She wrings the cloth reluctantly, sloppily, and bathes down the fever, wiping slow across her daughters’ arms and throats. Faster, faster! I think desperately, whining. She touches the girls’ stomachs and they both cry out. Their faces wrench suddenly.
“Mama!”
Rozin bundles off the knitted blankets, brings fresh sheets and remakes the couch. All that night they are up, then down. I am constant. Under the couch, I keep faith and keep watch. Rozin falls asleep on the roll-away in the next room and Noodin sleeps beside the couch in the recliner, covered up with an old hunting jacket and a giveaway quilt. Giizis sleeps down on the cold floor. Every hour, Cally or Deanna cries out and is sick with nothing in her stomach, her whole body straining, her face fiery with heat again.
There are eight inches of new snow on the ground next morning. Rozin wakes to a still brightness in the tiny bitterly cold closet where she slept as a child. She curls for a moment into the blanket, deeper, then rolls wearily over when she hears the girls. She closes her eyes, aching for the warmth again, waiting for Noodin or Giizis to respond. Cally and Deanna continue to cry softly. Rozin rips the covers down with an almost angry gesture and hops out, stretching. Shit, she mumbles, walking into the next room. Her hand, though, touches down gently on Cally’s forehead and cheeks as she strokes. She refills the basin, then sponges each daughter’s blazing gold forehead, throat. She lifts Deanna’s head and puts the cloth against the back of her neck and again rubs Cally’s chest, again waits out the dry heaving.
Noodin goes out to shovel. An hour passes, and then Rozin pours a little ginger ale into a cup and sits down, careful not to jostle her daughters. She feeds them teaspoon by teaspoon, waiting for each spoonful to settle. Their lips are dry. Rozin puts a bit of Vaseline on her finger, rubs their deep and punished color. Cally lies back in the pillows, impossibly still. Deanna turns over and stares dully at the wall.
When Noodin comes in the door, Rozin turns.
It’s no good, Noodin’s look says. The phones were unreliable anyway, now cut off.
Then the girls can’t keep down even those precious teaspoons of ginger ale and the whole miserable process begins again. They’ll get dehydrated, Rozin says. Now Giizis comes in from outdoors, from the old lean-to where she’s been searching through rolls and bags of bark for the best slippery elm, the strongest sage to boil to make a healing steam. Noodin goes back out and all morning they hear her shovel or the regular fall of her ax as she builds up the woodpile. I go out to encourage and guard her. Slip back in, dart under the couch. Hardly eat. By the end of the afternoon, Giizis’s eyes narrow, her lips crease with worry. The smell of cooking upsets the girls. More snow falls and all day they take turns sleeping and eat cold food.
Cally is shrinking, thinning, hardening on her bones, Deanna is coughing in explosive spasms that shake the springs just over my head. Weeping tiredly. Cranky. Then they lose the energy to fight and grow too meek. I lick the hand that hangs over the edge of the couch. I call upon my ancestors and their old ones for help. That night, the girls seem even worse. They stare blankly at Rozin, who takes a sleeping bag and sleeps in the chair and sends Noodin to sleep on the roll-away. Rozin coaxes her daughters back to sense after that odd stare. Falling instantly into my own sleep, I dream of hissing cats.
Bad omen! Bad things! I wake at Cally’s cry and Rozin jumps to her. Cally thrashes her arms and legs, but then silently and rhythmically. The regular movement of the seizure stiffens Rozin to a calm horror. She holds Cally as best she can until the climbing movements of her arms and legs cease. At last Cally sags, unknowing, her face at her mother’s breast, eyes staring out of the whited mask of her features.
“Cally.”
Rozin’s voice is deep, from a place in her body I have never heard. Cally. She calls her daughter back from a far-off tunnel path. Cally’s mouth opens and she vomits blood into Rozin’s hands, into a towel she holds beneath her daughter’s mouth. She calls until her daughter stops looking through her mother and brings her troubled gaze to bear. She regards her mother from a distance, then, with eyes that soften in a grown woman’s pity.
Rozin wipes her daughter’s mouth, her forehead, her twig wrists, the calves, so fine, burning, dry. The soles of her feet. She wipes and wrings and wipes again until Cally stops looking at the ceiling. Rozin keeps on stroking with the cloth, finds herself humming. Slowly singing, she wipes up and down the pole arms. The forehead, her daughter’s beating throat. She wipes until Cally says, I’m thirsty, I’m so thirsty, in a normal voice.
You have to wait. Just wait a little bit. Rozin’s voice shakes.
Cally falls back. Her eyes shut. Her lips have darkened, cracked in fine, bloody lines, and her skin dries the wet cloth. Rozin keeps on wiping the fever away. I know she feels it underneath her hands, swirling, disappearing, but always coming back. After a while, I can see the fever itself, a viral red-yellow translucence creeping behind the blue of the wiping cloth. The exact same thing happens to Deanna next. Rozin puts the fire out, all night she puts the fire out, wiping until the sweet blue trembles in her daughters and she herself is light, lighter, rising to her feet to get the teaspoon again, fetching the ginger ale, the cup. She adds more water to the boiling kettle on the stove, more bark. The air is steaming, the windows a solid black with frost, a heart-rent blue, a dim gray, then white when Noodin rises to take her place.
Rozin sleeps, but her nerves are shot through with adrenaline. She lasts one hour and then rises strong with fear. She washes her face—the water icy from the tap—brushes her teeth. Her eyes in the mirror are staring, young and round. She slicks her hair back into a tail and chews a nail impatiently.
“Go to bed.”
Giizis sends her back, fierce, almost slapping at her. And so a day passes. Another evening. Another night in which Rozin and Cally and Deanna do as before, the same routine, no change, except that the girls are weaker, Rozin stronger in her exhaustion.
You get too tired, you’ll get sick too.
The grandmas send Rozin to bed with hard words, but their eyes are warm and still with a mixture of worry, sympathy, and something Rozin has not seen in their faces before. Drifting away she wonders at it, but then the dark well opens and she drops into an unconsciousness so profound she does not hear the four-wheel-drive winter ambulance finally groan and whine down the road that Noodin is killing her heart to shovel.
The ride down to IHS is complicated by new drifts and whiteouts. I jump in the back and hide just as they swerve off. No way that I’ll get left behind. The dark comes on quickly as the EMT drives along, silent. In the back Rozin holds our girls. Snowlight flicks through the branches as the wheels grind and tear and the ambulance swings patiently along. Rozin stares into her daughters’ faces and whispers. Cally’s skin goes white as wax. Deanna’s dark eyes bore into her mother’s face, intent and strange. Their skin is rough as velvet when cool, then slides up to the skid of wax again when hot. They finally get there, carry the girls into the emergency room, into the hands of the nurses and doctor.
One look at their blood pressure and the doctor orders IVs. Cally has surprising strength. I watch through the hospital window. Hear her yells and shouts. See Deanna tug away, or try to, but Rozin holds her close in a fixed and tender grip saying calm words, calm though wrenched inside out at her daughter’s feeble terror. They put a cot up right beside them in the hospital room. At last with Noodin downstairs on the phone, signing papers and arranging things, with Cally and Deanna on the IVs suddenly unhollowed, full of color, strengthening and falling into sleep, Rozin lies still, breathing calmly.