“They don’t need to hear it,” she said.
“Hear what?” asked Mooshum.
“You know.”
“Ah, that, tawpway, my girl!”
Mama would usually have made sure that Mooshum left off, or given us each some task to ensure that her directions were followed, but she seemed distracted that day and simply walked up the back steps. The moment she passed into the house, we leaned close to Mooshum.
The Basket Makers
BIG STANDS OF willow grew around their cabin, so Asiginak taught Holy Track the art of making baskets. That spring, they cut willow and bundled it away in a cool place, then split the ash to make the framework of the baskets — some with carved handles, tikinaganan for babies, wide and flat baskets, even heart-shaped baskets for the farm women. Every day, they wove pliable willow into ash frameworks until their fingers were tough as sticks. When they had thirty or forty, as many as they could carry, they went out selling.
People readily bought baskets from Holy Track. The boy’s big childish teeth were white and crooked; his smile was shy and his eyelashes were so long they shadowed his cheeks. Asiginak had tried to give him a whiteman’s haircut and it got clipped so short in places that the hair stood out like brushy quills.
One day in early summer, when the little strawberries ripen along the edges of the field and the ducklings whisk across the sloughs, the two set off walking to the towns and farms off the reservation. They sold a basket or two everyplace they went. Only ten baskets were left when they met Mooshum and Cuthbert Peace coming down the road.
“Us two rowdies,” said Mooshum, winking at us, “were unhappily sober. We fell in with Asiginak and Holy Track hoping that we could persuade the old man to spare enough of his basket money to get his old friends drunk.”
“Gewehn!” Mooshum swiped his hand in the air, remembering. “Go home!” the old man told us.
“Ah, no, brother, I replied, let us carry these things for you!”
Mooshum put his hands out as if to help carry the baskets, but told us how Holy Track held tight to his baskets and tramped steadily beside his uncle.
Mooshum’s friend Cuthbert was dark as a bear, round, and his nose was like his nickname, Opin, a potato. Something had gone wrong with it after a fight and it had kept growing out of control on one side. It took up most of his face now and was an odd, lumpy shape. He spat tobacco and tugged at Holy Track’s arm.
“Leave him alone,” said Asiginak. “Your nose will sprout.”
Cuthbert took offense, dropped his hands away, and kicked his feet like a dog scratching dirt on its shit. Holy Track was still studying catechism with Father Severine, but he couldn’t help laugh at Cuthbert. The rascal pranced down the road, then stopped, jiggled his dodooshag and preened like a pretty girl. Mooshum showed us, doing a little dance in his chair. Then he sat back, laughing, and mimicked Cuthbert: “You’d be surprised what this nose gets me, and this belly, but it’s down here the women love the best!”
Asiginak tried to shut up the two other men, saying, “This boy is going to be a priest. He can’t hear things like that.”
Mooshum said that he and Opin walked in silence behind the two basket makers, still hoping, until Asiginak turned and warned them, “Don’t step in his tracks.”
Mooshum shook his head slowly back and forth, shifting his wad of chew, frowning as he did. “The old man meant that we were not worthy to step in the boy’s tracks. Evil had us in those days.”
The Lochren Farm
THEY WALKED DOWN the wagon path into a farmyard bounded by a scraggle of cottonwood. The farm was set near the town of Pluto, but the entrance was obscured by a low rise and the brushy tangle of a slough. When they got to the farm, Mooshum said he wished they had not followed the boy’s tracks. He said he knew there was something wrong from the beginning, with the smeared door to the house wide open and no smoke from the chimney. When they got close, the cows in the barn set up a sudden groaning to be milked. The desperation in their resonant bawls stopped the men in the trampled yard.
Asiginak set down his baskets. One of the cows screamed like a woman in pain, and everything went abruptly quiet. After a moment the frogs started up again, trilling and sawing in the slough.
“Let’s not go any closer,” said Asiginak. “The devil has this place.”
And then they heard the baby crying. It was a scratchy cry, a thin, exhausted wail from inside the house.
Asiginak picked up his baskets and turned to leave.
“That’s a baby,” said Cuthbert, and he grabbed Mooshum’s shirt and stood rooted, staring, his stained jaw working.
The baby continued to cry as if it knew they were out there, but they did not move and soon the little sound died away. The wind struck up in the leggy young cottonwoods. Bits of fluff whirled high above them. There was the clatter of stiff, new leaves. As Asiginak started to walk away, the cows started up even louder. Maybe the baby did, too, but now they couldn’t hear it over the vast moans from the barn.
“I feel the devil,” Asiginak cried. “Look there!”
But Cuthbert had gone through the door marked with blood. He vanished into the house. When he came out, he was carrying the baby and his eyes were bugging out — that’s how Mooshum put it, his eyes were bugging out. Cuthbert staggered to the barn with the baby. It wore a tiny white dress and a reeking diaper. The others followed. On the way there, they saw two boys curled on their sides, in the weeds, like they were sleeping, and then a man, his fingers clutched in the green black grass, his head up and still staring at the boys when he died crawling. His back was blasted out.
“Don’t look in that direction,” Asiginak told Holy Track.
The men cracked the barn doors wide and entered the mad wall of sound.
There were ten cows, one dead. Mooshum helped Holy Track put down the baskets somewhere in the dark, and blinked until he could see the nearest cow. He began on that one, then found another. Soon there was just the hiss of milk and a few last cows. The milked ones sounded like they were weeping, softly, in relief. Cuthbert cradled the baby in one arm and squeezed a teat to its lips — the bud of its mouth was hardly big enough, but he squirted the milk in deftly. At last the baby relaxed and its head lolled back. A smile played around its chapped scarlet lips. Mooshum turned the cows out to pasture and the men fled outside, rubbing their eyes, dazzled.
“I’ll carry this baby back,” said Cuthbert, peering anxiously into its face.
“Back where?” said Asiginak.
“To the sheriff.”
“The white sheriff?”
Asiginak saw that his nephew was gaping at the yard. He gently pushed the boy’s face so that Holy Track was facing not the sleeping forms but the watery blue line of the horizon.
Asiginak turned back to Cuthbert. “You’re not drunk, so why do you say this? We are no-goods, we are Indians, even me. If you tell the white sheriff, we will die.”
“They will hang us for sure,” said Mooshum. He picked up Holy Track’s baskets.
“It’s all right,” said Holy Track. “I know what to do. I will tell the priest.”
The other men looked at him.
“Do not tell the priest,” said Mooshum.
Cuthbert held the baby tight. “We cannot put this little one back. If we go, we take it with us.”