“They had to rescue me out of her grip.
I tried again.
“I want to talk about your mother ….. Lipsha nodded, cutting me off. “I consider Grandma Kashpaw my mother, even though she just took me In I ike any old stray.”
“She didn’t do that,” I said. “She wanted you.”
“No,” said Lipsha. “Albertine, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Now I was the one who felt ignorant, confused.
“As for my mother,” be went on, “even if she came back right now, this minute, and got down on her knees and said
“Son, I am sorry for what I done to you,” I would not relent on her.
I didn’t know how to rescue my intentions and go on. I thought for a while, or tried to, but sitting up and talking had been too much.
“What if your mother never meant to?” I lay down again, lowering myself carefully into the wheat. The dew was condensing. I was cold, damp, and sick. “What if it was just a kind of mistake?” I asked.
“It wasn’t no mistake,” said Lipsha firmly. “She would have drowned me.”
Laying still, confused by my sickness and his certainty, I almost believed him. I thought he would hate June if he knew, and anyway it was too late. I justified my silence. I didn’t tell him.
“What about your father?” I asked instead. “Do you wish you knew him?”
Lipsha was quiet, considering, before he answered.
“I wouldn’t mind.”
Then I was falling, and he was talking again. I hung on and listened.
“Did you ever dream you flew through the air?” he asked. “Did you ever dream you landed on a planet or star?
“I dreamed I flew up there once,” he said, going on. “It was all lighted up. Man, it was beautiful! I landed on the moon, but once I stood there at last, I didn’t dare take a breath.”
I moved closer. He had a light nylon jacket. He took it off and laid it over me. I was suddenly comfortable” very comfortable, and warm.
“No,” he said. “No, I was scared to breathe.”
I woke up. I had fallen asleep in the arms of Lipsha’s jacket, in the cold wet wheat under the flashing sky. I heard the clanging sound of struck metal, pots tumbling in the house. Gordie was gone. Eli was gone. “Come on,” I said, jumping straight up at the noise. “They’re fighting.” I ran up the hill, Lipsha pounding behind me. I stumbled straight into the lighted kitchen and saw at once that King was trying to drown Lynette. He was pushing her face in the sink of cold dishwater. Holding her by the nape and the ears.
Her arms were whirling, knocking spoons and knives and bowls out of the drainer. She struggled powerJ fully, but he had her. I grabbed a block of birch out of the woodbox and hit King on the back of the neck. The wood bounced out of my fists. He pushed her lower, and her throat caught and gurgled.
I grabbed his shoulders. I expected that Lipsha was behind me.
King hardly noticed my weight. He pushed her lower. So I had no choice then. I jumped on his back and bit his ear. My teeth met and blood filled my mouth. He reeled backward, bucking me off, and I flew across the room, hit the refrigerator solidly, and got back on my feet.
His hands were cocked in boxer’s fists. He was deciding who to hit first, I thought, me or Lipsha. I glanced around. I was alone. I stared back at King, scared for the first time. Then the fear left and I was mad, just mad, at Lipsha, at King, at Lynette, at June…. I looked past King and I saw what they had done.
All the pies were smashed. Torn open. Black juice bleeding through the crusts. Bits of jagged shells were stuck to the wall and some were turned completely upside down. Chunks of rhubarb were scraped across the floor. Meringue dripped from the towels.
“The pies!” I shrieked. “You goddamn sonofabitch, you broke the pies!”
His eyes widened. When he glanced around at the destruction, Lynette scuttled under the table. He took in what he could, and then his fists lowered and a look at least resembling shame, confusion, swept over his face, and he rushed past me. He stepped down flat on his fisherman hat as he ran, and after he was gone I picked it up.
I went into the next room and stuffed the hat under King Junior’s mattress. Then I sat for a long time, listening to his light breathing.
He was always a good baby, or more likely a wise soul.
He slept through everything he could possibly sleep through.
Lynette had turned the lights out in the kitchen as she left the house, and now I heard her outside the window begging King to take her away in the car.
“Let’s go off before they all get back,” she said. “It’s them. You always get so crazy when you’re home. We’ll get the baby. We’ll go off. We’ll go back to the Cities, go home.”
And then she cried out once, but clearly it was a cry like pleasure.
I thought I heard their bodies creak together, or perhaps it was just the wood steps beneath them, the old worn boards bearing their weight.
They got into the car soon after that. Doors slammed. But they traveled just a few yards and then stopped. The horn blared softly.
Isuppose they knocked against it in passion. The heater roared on from time to time. It was a cold, spare dawn.
Sometime that hour I got up, leaving the baby, and went into the kitchen. I spooned the fillings back into the crusts, married slabs of dough, smoothed over edges of crusts with a wetted finger, fit crimps to crimps and even fluff to fluff on top of berries or pudding. I worked carefully for over an hour. But once they smash there is no way to put them right.
SAINT MARIE r G a Sr (1934)
MARIE LAZAR RE
So when I went there, I knew the dark fish must rise. Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard. There was no use in trying to ignore me any longer. I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I was going up there to pray as good as they could.
Because I don’t have that much Indian blood. And they never thought they’d have a girl from this reservation as a saint they’d have to kneel to. But they’d have me. And I’d be carved in pure gold. With ruby lips. And my toenails would be little pink ocean shells, which they would have to stoop down off their high horse to kiss.
I was ignorant. I was near age fourteen. The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. And it was just that-the pure and wideness of my ignorance-that got me A up the hill to Sacred Heart Convent and brought me back down alive.
For maybe Jesus did not take my bait, but them Sisters tried to cram me right down whole.
You ever see a walleye strike so bad the lure is practically out its back end before you reel it in? That is what they done with me. I don’t like to make that low comparison, but I have seen a walleye do that once. And it’s the same attempt as Sister Leopolda made to get me in her clutch.
I had the mail-order Catholic soul you get in a girl raised out in the bush, whose only thought is getting into town. For Sunday Mass is the only time my father brought his children in except for school, when we were harnessed. Our soul went cheap. We were so anxious to get there we would have walked in on our hands and knees. We just craved going to the store, slinging bottle caps in the dust, making fool eyes at each other. And of course we went to church.
Where they have the convent is on top of the highest hill, so that from its windows the Sisters can be looking into the marrow of the town.
Recently a windbreak was planted before the bar “for the purposes of tornado insurance.” Don’t tell me that. That poplar stand was put up to hide the drinkers as they get the transformation. As they are served into the beast of their burden.