I showed her the Berlitz book I’d found on a stellar day in the mission rummage, brand-new, not a mark in it.
“Say something, say something!” Marn cried.
“La nord, le sud, l’ouest, et l’est sont les quatre points cardinaux!”
Mooshum looked disgusted. “That’s not how it goes! She tries to speak Michif and she sounds like a damn chimookamaan.”
“I sound French, Mooshum. Je parle franais!”
“Ehhh, the French, Lee Kenayaen!” He swiped his hand at me and bit daintily, gingerly, into his pie. His new teeth had been hard to fit and loosened easily. I still missed his old teeth, how he used to shovel the food right past them. He seemed happier then, even when they hurt. And the toothaches had always been a good excuse for whiskey.
“You!” he said. “My girl, you’re going to be famous in school. Like your brother.” He nodded at Marn and winked. “No surprise coming from such forebears. She’s outta the royal line, anyway, on both sides. The great chiefs and the blue blood Scots, she’s related to Antoinette herself and through that the German—”
“The Mormons have come around the house again with their genealogy charts and they’re trying to suck Mooshum into their religion by telling him that he’s got kingly ancestors,” I told Marn.
“I know it to be so,” said Mooshum firmly, licking his fork. “And the Chippewa side, we’re also hereditary chiefs. And we’re quick. I escaped from Liver-Eating Johnson — he just got half my ear.”
He tugged his damaged ear.
“What?”
“Listen,” I said to Marn. Her children had gotten up and were coloring quietly in the next booth. “We’ll split up the hours, you’ve got kids, so you take first pick.”
“We’ll adjust,” she smiled, a little wan now. “And I think I’ll cut my hair.”
“What’s this I hear,” said Mooshum, “about a snake ranch?”
Marn opened her eyes wide at me and blinked.
“I need to see the judge, Evey.”
“Come and live with us for a while,” said Mooshum. “La michiinn li doctoer ka-ashtow ita la koulayr kawkeetuhkwawkayt.”
“He says the doctor will treat your snakebites. He’s the doctor, I’m sure. Just come over tomorrow and we’ll visit Geraldine’s. Judge Coutts will be there.”
Marn laughed, but she looked spooked, too, and gathered up her children. After she left, I said to Mooshum, “You scared her away with that snake stuff.”
He looked at me. “The old women talk about her. The old women know.”
“So you’ve been with the old women again?”
“Not my precious lovey. Your mama won’t bring me over there to visit. They have even hid the stamps on me! I cannot write to her!”
“I’ll get you stamps,” I said. “The worst Aunt Neve can do is not open the letter.”
“You are a very good granddaughter,” Mooshum beamed. “And for sure! You look more French than any girl around here.”
Judge Antone Bazil Coutts
Shamengwa
FEW MEN KNOW how to become old. Shamengwa did. Even if Geraldine hadn’t been his niece, I would have visited Shamengwa. I admired him and studied him. I thought I’d like to grow old the way he was doing it — with a certain style. Other than his arm, he was an extremely well-made old person. Anyone could see that he had been handsome, and he still cut a graceful figure, slim and medium tall. His fine head was covered with a startling white mane of thick hair, which he was proud of and every few weeks had carefully trimmed and styled — by Geraldine, who still traveled in from the family land just to do it.
He was fine-looking, yes, but there were other things about him. Shamengwa was a man of refinement who practiced clean habits. He prepared himself carefully to meet life every day. Ojibwe language in several dialects is spoken on our reservation, along with Cree, and Michif — a mixture of all three. Owehzhee is one of the words used for the way men get themselves up — neaten, scrub, pluck stray hairs, brush each tooth, make precise parts in our hair, and, these days, press a sharp crease down the front of our blue jeans — in order to show that although the government has tried in every way possible to destroy our manhood, we are undefeatable. Owehzhee. We still look good and know it. The old man was never seen in disarray, but yet there was more to it.
He played the fiddle. How he played the fiddle! Although his arm was so twisted and disfigured that his shirts had to be carefully altered and pinned on that side to accommodate the gnarled shape, yet he had agility in that arm, even strength. With the aid of a white silk scarf, which he chose to use rather than just any old rag, Shamengwa tied his elbow, ever since he was very young, into a position that allowed the elegant hand and fingers at the end of the damaged arm full play across the fiddle’s strings. With his other hand and arm, he drew the bow.
Here I come to some trouble with words. The inside became the outside when Shamengwa played music. Yet inside to outside does not half sum it up. The music was more than music — at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and didn’t want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprising pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
Thus, Shamengwa wasn’t wanted at every party. The wild joy his jigs and reels brought forth might just as soon send people crashing on the rocks of their roughest memories and they’d end up stunned and addled or crying in their beer. So it is. People’s emotions often turn on them. Geraldine sometimes drove him to fiddling contests or places where he could perform in more of a concert setting. He was well-known. He even won awards, prizes of the cheap sort given at local or statewide musical contests — engraved plaques and small tin loving cups set on plastic pedestals. These he kept apart from the other objects in his house. He placed them on a triangular scrap of shelf high in one corner. The awards were never dusted. When his grandniece, Clemence’s girl, was young, she asked him to take them down for her to play with. They came apart and had to be reglued or revealed patches of corrosion in the shiny gilt paint. He didn’t care. He was, however, somewhat fanatical about his violin.
He treated this instrument with the reverence we accord our drums, which are considered living beings and require from us food, water, shelter, and love. They have their songs, which are given to their owners in sleep, and they must be dressed up according to their personalities, in beaded aprons and ribbons and careful paints. So with the violin that belonged to Shamengwa. He fussed over his instrument, stroked it clean with a soft cotton hankie, kept it in a cupboard from which he had removed two shelves, laid it carefully away every night in a case constructed to its shape, a leather case that he kept well polished as his shoes. The case was lined with velvet that was faded by time from heavy blood-red to a watery streaked violet. I don’t know violins, but his was thought to be exceptionally beautiful; its sound was certainly human, and exquisite. It was generally understood that the violin was old and quite valuable. So when Geraldine came to trim her uncle’s hair one morning and found Shamengwa still in bed with his feet tied to the posts, she glanced at the cupboard even as she unbound him and was not surprised to see the lock smashed and the violin gone.