“Sounds easy enough.” I agreed.
The pay was fifty dollars. I went to her house. They fed me, and later on they sent me over to her barn. I went in. When I saw her dressed in a white coat with a hat like a little black pancake on her head, I felt pity. She was an old wreck of a thing. Snaggletoothed.
She put me on a block of wood and then said to me,
“Disrobe. ” No one had ever told me to take off my clothes just like that.
So I pretended not to understand her. “What robe?” I asked.
“Disrobe,” she repeated. I stood there and looked confused.
Pitiful! I thought. Then she started to demonstrate by clawing at her buttons. I was just about to go and help her when she said in a near holler,
“Take off your clothes!”
She wanted to paint me without a stitch on, of course.
There were lots of naked pictures in her barn. I wouldn’t do it.
She offered money, more money, until she offered me so much that I had to forget my dignity. So I was paid by this woman a round two hundred dollars for standing stock still in L a diaper.
I could not believe it, later, when she showed me the picture.
Plunge of the Brave, was the title of it. Later on, that picture would become famous. It would hang in the Bismarck state capitol.
There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death. Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well from my dealings with I whites I would add to that quote: “The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse.”
When I saw that the greater world was only interested in my doom, I went home on the back of a train. Riding the rails one night the moon was in the boxcar. A nip was in the air. I remembered that picture, and I knew that Nector Kashpaw would fool the pitiful rich woman that painted him and survive the raging water. I’d hold my breath when I hit and let the current pull me toward the surface, around jagged rocks. I wouldn’t fight it, and in that way I’d get to shore.
Back home, it seemed like that was happening for a while.
Things were quiet. I lived with my mother and Eli in the old A place, hunting or roaming or chopping a little wood. I kept thinking about the one book I read in high school. For some reason this priest in Flandreau would teach no other book all four years but Moby Dick, the story of the great white whale. I knew that book inside and out.
I’d even stolen a copy from school and taken it home in my suitcase.
This led to another famous misunderstanding.
“You’re always reading that book,” my mother said once.
“What’s in it?”
“The story of the great white whale.”
She could not believe it. After a while, she said,
“What do they got to wail about, those whites?”
I told her the whale was a fish as big as the church. She did not believe this either. Who would?
“Call me Ishmael,” I said sometimes, only to myself. For he survived the great white monster like I got out of the rich lady’s saw” picture. He let the water bounce his coffin to the top. In my life so far I’d gone easy and come out on top, like him. But the river ‘t done with me yo. I floated through the calm sweet spots, wasn but somewhere the river branched.
So far I haven’t mentioned the other offers I had been getting.
These offers were for candy, sweet candy between the bed covers.
There was girls like new taffy, hardened sour balls of married ladies, rich marshmallow widows, and even a man, rock salt and barley sugar in a jungle of weeds. I never did anything to bring these offers on.
They just happened. I never thought twice. Then I fell in love for real.
Lulu Nanapush was the one who made me greedy.
At boarding school, as children, I treated her as my sister and A shared out peanut-butter-syrup sandwiches on the bus to stop her N crying. I let her tag with me to town. At the movies I bought her AA licorice.
Then we grew up apart from each other, I came home, and saw her dancing in the Friday-night crowd. She was doing the butterfly with two other men. For the first time, on seeing her, I knew exactly what I wanted.
We sparked each other. We met behind the dance house and kissed. I knew I wanted more of that sweet taste on her mouth. I got selfish. We were flowing easily toward each other’s arms.
Then Marie appeared, and here is what I do not understand: how instantly the course of your life can be changed.
I only know that I went up the convent hill intending to sell geese and came down the hill with the geese still on my arm.
Beside me walked a young girl with a mouth on her like a flophouse, although she was innocent. She grudged me to hold her hand. And yet I would not drop the hand and let her walk alone.
Her taste was bitter. I craved the difference after all those years of easy sweetness. But I still had a taste for candy. I could never have enough of both, and that was my problem and the reason that long past the branch in my life I continued to think of Lulu.
Not that I had much time to think once married years set in. I liked each of our babies, but sometimes I was juggling them from both arms and losing hold. Both Marie and I lost hold. In one year, two died, a boy and a girl baby. There was a long spell of quiet, awful quiet, before the babies showed up everywhere again. They were all over in the house once they started. In the bottoms of cupboards, in the dresser, in trundles. Lift a blanket and a bundle would howl beneath it. I lost track of which were ours and which Marie had taken in. It had helped her to take them in after our two others were gone.
This went on. The youngest slept between us, in the bed of our bliss, so I was crawling over them to make more of them. It seemed like there was no end.
Sometimes I escaped. I had to have relief. I went drinking and caught holy hell from Marie. After a few years the babies started walking around, but that only meant they needed shoes for their feet.
I gave in. I put my nose against the wheel. I kept it there for many years and barely looked up to realize the world was going by, full of wonders and creatures, while I was getting old bating hay for white farmers.
So much time went by in that flash it surprises me yet. What they call a lot of water under the bridge. Maybe it was rapids, a swirl that carried me so swift that I could not look to either side but had to keep my eyes trained on what was coming. Seventeen years of married life and come-and-go children.
And then it was like the river pooled.
Maybe I took my eyes off the current too quick. Maybe the fast movement of time had made me dizzy. I was shocked. I remember the day it happened. I was sitting on the steps, wiring a pot of Marie’s that had broken, when everything went still. The children stopped shouting.
Marie stopped scolding. The babies slept.
The cows chewed. The dogs stretched full out in the heat. Nothing moved. Not a leaf or a bell or a human. No sound. It was like the air itself had caved in.
In that stillness, I lifted my head and looked around.
now What I saw was time passing, each minute collecting behind me before I had squeezed from it any life. It went so fast, is what I’m saying, that I myself sat still in the center of it. Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.
It was happening already.
I put my hand to my face. There was less of me. Less muscle, less hair, less of a hard jaw, less of what used to go on below.
Fewer offers. It was 1952, and I had done what was expected fathered babies, served as chairman of the tribe. That was the extent of it.
Don’t let the last fool you, either. Getting into the big-time local politics was all low pay and no thanks. I never even ran for the office. Someone put my name down on the ballots, and the night I accepted the job I became somebody less, almost instantly. I grew gray hairs in my sleep. The next morning they were hanging in the comb teeth.