“To the tree.”
I knew where the tree was. Everybody knew where the tree was. The tree still grew on Marn’s land, where Billy Peace’s kindred used to stay. People had stopped going there for a while, but come back now that the kindred had disappeared. The tree took up the very northwest corner of the land, and it was always full of birds. Mooshum and I drove silently over the miles, then parked the car on a tractor turnout. When we slammed the car doors, a thousand birds startled up at the same instant. The sound reverberated like a shot bow. They flew like arrows and disappeared, sucked into the air.
We walked over dusty winter-flattened grass into the shadow of the tree. Alone in the field, catching light from each direction, the tree had grown its branches out like the graceful arms of a candelabra. New prayer flags hung down — red, green, blue, white. The sun was flaring low, gold on the branches, and the finest of new leaves was showing.
Mooshum knotted the laces, handed the boots to me. I threw them up. It took three times to catch them on a branch.
“This is sentiment instead of justice,” I said to Mooshum.
The truth is, all the way there I’d thought about saying just this thing.
Mooshum nodded, peering into the film of green on the black twigs, blinking, “Awee, my girl. The doves are still up there.”
I stared up and didn’t have anything to say about the doves, but I hated the gentle swaying of those boots.
All Souls’ Day
SO AFTER ALL, Mooshum saw in the skies of North Dakota an endless number of doves cluttering the air and filling heaven with an eternity of low cries. He imagined that the blanket of doves had merely lifted into the stratosphere and not been snuffed out here on earth. By this flurry of feathers, he was connected to the great French writer whose paperback I picked up again after abandoning Anas Nin. I read it so often that I sometimes thought of Judge Coutts as the judge-penitent, who bore my mother’s name, and waited at a bar in Amsterdam for someone like me. I didn’t know what I was going to do now. Albert Camus had once worked in a weather bureau, which made me trust his observations of the sky.
It was a warm Halloween night, and I had come home from school to help celebrate Mooshum’s favorite holiday. To get ready for the trick-or-treaters, I drizzled warm corn syrup onto popcorn, larded my hands, and packed popcorn into balls until we had about a hundred or more stacked in a big steel bowl. We had backup — two vast bags of sticky peanut butter kisses. Our house was first on the road and everyone from out in the bush came into town on Halloween nights. Mooshum glared sadly at the treats. He didn’t like peanut butter and the popcorn balls would be a problem, as he had never adjusted to his dentures.
“I could not bite the liver out of anyone with these dull choppers,” Mooshum said.
I pulled out a bag of pink peppermint pillows. He plucked one out, set it on his tongue, and closed his eyes. The little wisps of his hair fluttered in the breeze from the door.
“I miss my brother,” said Mooshum, fingering his mangled ear. “I even miss how he shot me.”
“What?”
“Oh yai,” he said, “this ear, didn’t you know? It was him.”
Mooshum told me that the fall after he and Junesse returned to the reservation he followed his younger brother out hunting. Somewhere in the woods Mooshum had hidden the bear’s skin that ordinarily draped the family couch. Pulling the skin over himself, Mooshum managed a convincing ambush, rising suddenly from a patch of wild raspberry pickers and flinging himself forward in a mighty charge. Shamengwa fled as Mooshum pursued, fled with a loaded gun, but turned and shot with an awful cry as he tripped and fell.
“That bullet took my ear,” Mooshum said, chopping the side of his hand at his head. “Clipped me good.”
My mother sat down with us, and stirred sugar into a cup of tea.
“My brother pissed himself all the way down his legs that time. Did you ever know that?” Mooshum said.
“No!”
They started snuffling behind their hands. “Shame on you, Daddy,” said Mama. “You’re the one who peed himself.” They suddenly fell silent. Mooshum rocked back on his chair’s rear legs. He’d shrunk so that his soft, old green clothes were like bags, and his body inside was just lashed-together sticks.
Mama finished her tea, got up, and threw a couple of big hunks of dough on the cutting board. She started kneading, thumping them hard and shoving the heels of her hands in, a practiced movement I’d seen a thousand times. She was setting the dough to rise before going out with my father. They were attending some church-sponsored event that was supposed to be an alternative to the devil’s inspiration, trick-or-treating. Father Cassidy still worked on the family, though more by habit than with any real hope.
Mooshum chewed and spat; his new coffee can was a red Folger’s.
“They still won’t give me a stamp!” He hissed behind Mama’s back.
“Give me the letter,” I said. “I’ll mail it.”
Mama was leaving, a spiderwebby lace scarf at the collar of her neat navy blue coat. My father wore a starched green shirt and a plaid jacket. His face was tired and resigned.
“He’d rather of stuck here with us,” Mooshum said as they went out the door.
“He needs some relief,” I said.
My father’s class that year was dominated by two big unstable Vallient boys, who were uncontrollable. Most of my father’s days were filled with conflict. He said that he couldn’t take teaching anymore and had decided to sell his stamp collections and retire. Of course, we thought it was just talk, but he was conducting an auction by mail. Letters with the crests of stamp dealers appeared in the post office box.
After they left, Mooshum and I sat beside the door. Mama had wrapped each popcorn ball in waxed paper and twisted the ends shut. I opened one and began to eat it. There was an excited knock and the first wave of trick-or-treaters hit. We got the usual assortment of bums and pirates, some sorry-looking astronauts, a few vampires out of Dark Shadows, ghosts in old sheets, nondescript monsters, and bedraggled princesses with cardboard crowns. A lot of the older kids were motley werewolves or rugaroo with real fur stuck on their faces and wrists.
“This ain’t no fun yet,” said Mooshum.
For the next ones who came, I hid around the back of the door while Mooshum sat in darkness with the bowl of popcorn balls in his lap and a flashlight held under his chin. The kids had to approach and pluck the treat from the bowl, but only the toddlers were anywhere scared enough for Mooshum. A couple of older kids even laughed. He tried moaning some, rolling his eyes to the whites.
“They are hardened!” he said when they left.
“It’s not easy to scare kids these days with all they see.” I attempted to comfort him, but he was downcast. We tried the same thing with the next bunch, but not until he bit into a popcorn ball as one little boy approached, and his dentures stuck, and he took the ball out and held it toward the kid with the teeth in it, did we get a real satisfying shriek.
After that, when a child approached, I turned the flashlight on Mooshum and he bit into the popcorn ball, leaving his teeth in the gluey syrup. The kids had to reach underneath the hand and the popcorn ball with the teeth in it. We kept it up until one mom, who was carrying her two-year-old in a piece of white sheet, said, “You’re unsanitary, old man!” That hurt Mooshum’s feelings. He put his dentures back in sulkily and gave out peanut butter kisses with a stingy fist to the next three groups. There was a short hiatus, and I ate a kiss, which tasted faintly of peanut butter, more of glue. Mooshum’s dentures were so loose now that he clacked and spat.