I want a wedding dress like this, she said to Wolfred, and showed him a picture that was used to raise money for the school. Her friend was in it. All the clothes were borrowed, but her hair was real. LaRose had combed her friend’s hair out and arranged it to cascade down her shoulders. Later, she had pulled it up into a bridal knot.
I think she died of tuberculosis, she said. Like everybody else I knew. I never heard from her after she went back home.
A cough boiled up in her own chest, but she breathed calmly and tapped her sternum until the tightness released. She was getting well. She could feel her strength casting the weakness out.
Wolfred built the cabin that would eventually be boarded into the center of the house containing the lives of his descendants. The cabin was made of hewn oak, mudded between with tan clay. There was a woodstove, a cast-iron skillet, oiled paper windows, and a good plank floor. Wolfred made a rope bed and LaRose stuffed a mattress with oak leaves and pillows with cattail down. The stove in winter glowed red-hot. They made love beneath a buffalo robe.
After, LaRose washed in icy water by the light of the moon. She stretched out her arms in the silver light. Her body was ready to absorb wanton, ripe, ever avid life. She crept back into bed. As she drowsed in the pleasant heat of Wolfred’s body, she felt herself lifting away. When she opened her eyes to look down, she’d already drifted up through the roof. She fanned herself through the air, checking the area all around their little cabin for spirit lights. Far away, the stars hissed. One dropped a speck of fire. It wavered, wobbled, then shot straight into LaRose. She bobbed back down and lay next to Wolfred.
And so they brought a being into the world.
She cut up her fancy clothes for baby quilts. She took apart her corset and examined the strange, flexible bones. Wolfred fashioned them into head guards for the cradleboard. The shoes were bartered to a settler’s wife for seed. The stockings and hat were given to a medicine man who dreamed the child a name.
The next three children arrived during thunderstorms. LaRose howled when the thunder cracked. Energy boiled up in her and the births were easier. Each child was born strong and exceptionally well-formed. They were named Patrice, Cuthbert, Cleophile, and LaRose. It was clear they would all possess the energy and sleek purpose of their mother, the steady capability and curiosity of their father, variations of the two combined.
She scoured the floorboards of her house, sewed muslin curtains. Her children learned how to read and write in English and spoke English and Ojibwe. She corrected their grammar in both languages. In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships. She made a map of the world on a whitewashed board, from memory. Everybody factored, copying their father’s numbers. They all sewed and beaded, especially once the snow came down and isolated them. The children chopped wood and kept the stove stoked. Wolfred taught them the mystery of dough making, the wonder of capturing invisible wild yeasts to raise the bread, the pleasant joy of baking loaves in wood ash and over fire. The oiled paper windows were replaced by glass. The land would become reservation land, but Wolfred had homesteaded it and the agents and priest left them alone.
When her youngest child was a year old, LaRose’s urgent cough exploded past her strength and pain shot through her bones. Wolfred made her drink the butter off the top of the milk. He made her rest. He wrapped her up carefully and set hot stones in the bed. She improved and grew strong. She was herself for years. Then one spring day she collapsed again, spilling a bucket of cold water, and lay wet in the cold grass, wracked, furious, foaming bright arterial blood. Yet again, though, she recovered, grew strong. She fooled the ancient being and wrested from it ten more years.
Finally, in its ecstasy to live, the being seized her. It sank hot iron knives into her bones. Snipped her lungs into paper valentines. Wolfred spooned into her mouth the warmed fat of any game he brought down. He still made her rest, wrapped her carefully every night, and set hot lake rocks around her feet. Every night she said good-bye, tried to die before morning, was disappointed to awaken. He arranged a plaster of boiled mashed nettles between strips of canvas, and lowered it onto her chest. She improved, gained strength, but was herself for only a month. On a cool late summer day with insects loud in the hay field, tangled song in the birch trees, she folded herself again into the grass. Staring up into a swirl of brilliant sky, she saw an ominous bird. Wolfred wrapped LaRose in quilts and laid her on a bed of cut reeds in the wagon bed. The children had piled the bed thick and high. They had covered the boards with two heavy horse blankets, then with their quilts. LaRose saw this bed they had made for her and stroked their faces.
Take back your blankets, she said, in a horror that she would spread what ate her.
Air them out, she cried. Air out the house. For a time, sleep in the barn.
They touched her, tried to calm her.
I am warm, she smiled, though she wasn’t.
Wolfred heard there was a doctor in newly built St. Paul who had a treatment for the disease. He took LaRose overland in the wagon. There, after a two-week journey that nearly killed her, she met Dr. Haniford Ames.
In an immaculate examining room, the mild, pale doctor took her pulse with calm fingers, listened to her breathe, and explained what he’d learned from a southerner, Dr. John Croghan. In a great cavern in Kentucky, he had originated cave therapy for consumption, or phthisis. The purity and mineral health of the air in caves was curative. Dr. Haniford Ames had hollowed out and built four stone huts in the Wabasha caves of St. Paul, and there he kept his patients, feeding them well and making certain that their surroundings were clean and beneficial. When he met LaRose, the doctor was at first opposed to bringing her into the treatment regimen. Because she was an Indian, he was certain she could not be cured, but Wolfred was adamant. They waited eight days. A patient died and Wolfred handed over all the money they possessed. She was admitted. Her whitewashed stone room was tiny, with space just for a pallet and washstand. The front opened onto an expansive rock ledge where she would lie all day watching the untamed, torrential Mississippi River. LaRose smiled when Wolfred set her on the soft, fresh mattress. From the bed she could see across the river to the horizon, to the east, where bold pink clouds urgently massed.
Her brain seethed with fever; she was excited, alert. She asked for paper, quills, and ink. For two nights Wolfred slept at the foot of her bed, rolled in a blanket. All patients slept on this long stone outcrop of a porch because Ames believed that night air, also, strengthened the lungs. LaRose wrote and wrote. When he went home, Wolfred took the papers, which were stories, admonitions, letters to her children.
They had messages from her whenever there was a post rider. She was eating. She was resting. Dr. Haniford Ames was using the latest science to govern her treatment. He was judicious with the laudanum, was considering surgery. The doctor had lost a sister and a brother to the white plague. Though he’d been ill right along with them, he was now recovered. If he could have dissected himself to find out what had caused him to live, he would have. When he found the eastern doctors too conservative in their thinking, he packed his entire laboratory and headed west. There, he would have the freedom to pursue a cure. He would find out what had saved him while his loved ones wrackingly died. As far as he could tell, there was nothing unusual about him. He was not robust. His only exercise was walking, in all weathers, to set his thoughts at peace. His diet was slothful — he ate whatever he could, gorged on sweets. He even smoked. No, there was nothing outwardly special. Everything about him was uncolorful, unprepossessing. There must be something inside of himself that he could not quantify. His brother had been a mountain climber, ropey and long limbed. His sister had been a great beauty, who swam in the Atlantic waters off Cape Cod and rode intractable horses. She had had a mystical belief in herself and it had surprised her very much to die. It had surprised Haniford as well, and because of it he had been resigned to his own death. To be alive still startled him.