“You know why she’s a nun, after all, my girl,” said Mooshum, while Joseph was outside. “Not too many people have the privilege of seeing right before their eyes there is no justice here on eart.” He said “eart,” he hardly ever used a th.
Mooshum put his hands down before him and pushed the air twice. He pushed the air like he was stuffing it into a box. “She saw it. No justice.”
“Yeah?”
Joseph came back in and we waited, but Mooshum suddenly turned his back on us and rummaged in his shirt pocket. We could not see what he was doing. He turned back to us and spat into the empty coffee can with such a loud ping that my father glanced up, but his eyes didn’t even focus on us before the stamps reclaimed his attention. Mooshum shifted the wad a little and kept squinting at us. Measuring us. We sat still and stared at him, trying to contain ourselves. The television had succumbed to some disturbance in the atmosphere and no delicate adjustment of its long wire antennae had cleared the snow from the picture. We were very bored, but there was more — perhaps I could add to my facts about Sister Mary Anita. It seemed that Mooshum had knowledge of something new about her, or her family at least, and I suspected that it might be something that no one else would tell me.
Mooshum straightened with a creaky groan and rocked himself forward. He found his balance, launched himself. We followed as he walked out the screen door, down the wooden steps, onto the tortured lawn. He lowered himself into the peeling yellow kitchen chair that he brought out in spring and took back inside after frost. It was late September, but the day was very warm. He liked to sit outside on the dead grass of the yard and inspect people as they walked the road to the agency offices. We grabbed a pair of camp stools and sat watching him think. His mouth fell slack and then his face seized up; he scratched his jaw and glared at us. Mooshum’s strange reluctance to tell this story was compelling. The less he wanted to tell, the more we wanted to hear. He turned away from us again, bent his head and with a furtive squint reached into his shirt. He took a snort of something that we couldn’t see. Whirling quickly, he focused on our mother. She put a wooden clothespin between her teeth and picked up two others. Then she bent down, grabbed a pillowcase, and snapped it once, briskly, before she pinned it with the two pins she had in one hand. The pin in her teeth always was an extra, or she used it for securing her underwear beneath thin top sheets, she was that modest.
Mooshum spat, ringing the can again, and waited to see if our mother would turn around. She didn’t, so he began to talk to us in a low voice, returning to that time when he had been young, though not as young as when the doves filled the sky. They were gone when this next thing happened, he said, and Joseph asked if the prayers had worked to drive them off. Mooshum said that everything had dwindled away by then, even the buffalo, which he’d been told were once limitless. Killed off, he said, shrugging and spitting at the same time, a gesture we tried to imitate later, with stolen snuff. Mooshum told us that we should not tell our mother or father the things he was about to tell us. This of course squeezed our breathing tight, and we huddled closer.
The Boots
MOOSHUM SPAT THOUGHTFULLY and repacked his lip. He repeated the name Holy Track several times, his voice trailing. Then he suddenly roused, as the old do, and told us in a rain of words how, when he and Junesse rode Mustache Maude’s good horses back onto the reservation, they were accused of stealing those horses. For a time, they had had trouble fending off the newly appointed tribal police, who coveted good blood stock. They kept the horses only through the intervention of Father Severine. Scolded by the priest, the authorities quit. The young mare Junesse rode had long legs, a great keg of a barrel, and a fighting heart, and so raced very well. Mooshum made enough on bets to buy a cow and to outfit the farm with a windmill. He traded the stud services of his horse for help building a cabin of hewn oak. But having fallen in with the sort who raced horses — not a good sort, said Mooshum — he began, for the first time, to drink whiskey.
“I could always take or leave it,” he paused, crumpling his face with an odd wince, and added, low, that sometimes the whiskey would not just take or leave him. The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.
A boy and his mother, who was a cousin to Junesse, lived on the edge of Mooshum’s land, and it was pitiful. The mother’s lungs had rotted. Mooshum spread his hands across his own chest. She was so weak that she could hardly stir out of her bed to care for the boy. He was thirteen years old and getting rangy, but he was an innocent boy. Until his mother weakened, he walked her to church every day. She remained after, sunk in prayer, while her son memorized the Latin Mass and learned exactly how to help Father Severine change bread and wine into the body and blood of the Son of God. Sometimes Junesse came with her and the three walked back together, Junesse and the boy holding the sick woman between them. From time to time she stopped and coughed blood carefully into the dust of the road, bending way over so that it would not stain her dress.
This went on all autumn until the weather got too cold. Through the winter, the mother wasted. By the time the snow was entirely gone and the bitter new leaves had darkened, she was nearly dead. Junesse sent Mooshum by the house every day to see if her cousin had survived the night. One spring morning, he brought along the hammer and fine nails she had requested. The boy was there as well as an aunt who worked in Canada at a sanatorium for tubercular patients. That place did not as a rule take Indians, but because of the aunt’s piety the nuns had agreed to make an exception and had prepared a bed.
The boy’s mother had a small cross in each hand, prizes given to her son for memorizing the long prayers. She nodded at her boy’s crude, thick-soled boots and gestured that he should remove them and give them to Mooshum. She then told Mooshum to fix a cross to each sole. He nailed carefully through the inside of the boot, and covered the tops of the nails with pieces of her blanket that she’d cut away for this purpose. When Mooshum was finished, she staggered toward her sister, who helped her into the bed of a small cart, hitched to a tough old pony.
“Wear them,” she whispered to her son. “The sickness will not follow you. Evil will not cross your tracks. You will live.”
The boy put his feet in the boots and stood miserably beside Mooshum as his aunt led the horse and cart off down the grass trail, then turned onto the broader road leading north. Mooshum brought the boy to an old man called Asiginak, who was named for a great chief, Blackbird, and lived alone farther back in the bush. The old man was the boy’s great-uncle.
At first the boots must have cut, said Mooshum. But by the time he saw the boy again, he had bound his feet in strips of leather and had gradually gotten used to their weight. People came to believe that his mother was right about the boots, for her son did not begin to cough. After some time, because he left tracks printed with a cross, the people began to call him Holy Track.
The Clothesline
MOOSHUM LOOKED UP, brightened his eyes, and nodded. Mama had finished pinning up everything in the basket. Dad’s blue teacher’s shirts, all of our denim pants, white bedsheets, and the brown dress I hated flapped there, lightly soaking in the sun. Through the box elder leaves, we could see clouds massing to the west, building radiant pink towers against a blue-gray backdrop of distant rain. Mama watched us. She had a talent for looking at a person with no expression — you filled in whatever you felt guiltiest about. Mooshum stopped talking. She set down the empty basket under the wire lines and stepped across the dry grass. Dust puffed up behind her firm steps.