Love and the Dawes Act
Augustus built a cabin of thin logs and clay. He bought real shingles for the roof. The twins lived next door with the old people who had sheltered them. The twins also lived with him. He had tossed a coin and asked Mary to be his wife, but sometimes he was sure that Zosie took her place. Augustus put in a bedstead with a saggy mattress, and the twins curtained off another room. He built a kitchen table where the women sat at night. They made moccasins from the deerskin they’d tanned with the deer’s own brains. They sat in the lamplight, talking softly in their own language. In the cracker tin, empty now of money, they kept their quills and beads. At all times, as they talked or laughed, their needles moved in and out of the soft deerhide, complicating the design.
Because of the Dawes Act, reservation land was parceled out to individuals instead of remaining in tribal trust possession. Land was the only thing that hungry people owned, and it started to disappear with astounding haste. At the bank, Augustus assisted every day with transferring money from white hands into Ojibwe hands. He then witnessed the signing of a land deed by Ojibwe hands and saw it transferred into white hands, which then placed the land deed in a safe-deposit box. Invariably, he begged the person with the money to open a savings account. That rarely happened. The money usually flung itself around the town.
Augustus knew an Ojibwe man and woman named Whiteheart Beads who were persuaded to buy a grand piano with their land payment, and now their whole family slept beneath it just beside the road. Fancy clothing, rifles, liquor, pink and yellow and aqua shawls, and shiny buttoned boots appeared. Barrels of salted doves and sacks of white flour, dairy butter and tinned peaches, went out into the bush. People still lived on the margins of the land they had owned. But the land was gone, gone, gone and subject to the plow and No Trespassing. People milled about their old houses like ghosts and were driven off, bewildered. Augustus railed and threatened. He beat a speculator, nearly lost his job. Shrieked when his calm advice was ignored. He sprinted home every night and told his family not to sell their land.
The twins answered that Old Shawano and Victoria and the two of them were not stupid like the others. They drank very little whiskey, not like the others. They were in addition apt to think in the old ways, not like the others. They had Augustus, too, not like the others. Augustus, who brought home provisions when the hunting failed and the garden was resting. They had no reason to sell their land, even though, and here one twin paused and looked down at her belly, there was going to be a baby.
The other twin sucked in her breath ferociously and said, “Yes, it is I who will have the baby.”
Augustus looked from one to the other, terrified.
AFTER THAT ANNOUNCEMENT he got no sleep. One twin and then the other crawled into his bed. Or was it twice and the same woman? Their ways devoured him. Mornings, they glared at each other and then at him, and did not speak. He thought of running away before they wore him out, but could not because he was helpless before the nights, cold nights, northern and slow. And although he knew he’d be called to superhuman effort later on, he loved to watch them, just rest his eyes on them at their work every evening.
The lamp shone a peach golden circle at the table where Mary and Zosie arranged their saucers of beads — white for the background, Hungarian cut glass, delicate size 13, tiny loops of old greasy yellows and blues, a hank of mauves, a collection of glossy whiteheart reds. Mary worked on moccasins already bought and half paid for by a missionary chimookomaan lady who would get them in the mail. Zosie worked on tiny slippers for the baby who was growing in one, the other, or perhaps both of them. As they worked, the two grew calmer. Augustus did not move. They were spooky as cats, but he could tell that his presence soothed them.
They breathed in the tobacco scent of Augustus’s once-a-week cigar, and the very slight undertone of whiskey. Augustus had begun to take a shot with Shawano, who liked him and decided to adopt him. He was glad to have a son with a quick smile and a friendly outlook — these things seemed surprising in a whiteman. Augustus was glad to have as a father a man who quietly went about the business of life, and taught him how to dream the whereabouts of animals and to follow their tracks and use the wind to catch them. Old Shawano taught Augustus how to pick wild rice, weave nets, tap maples, and ignore the doings of women. Augustus became adept at all but the last thing. As the twins worked, they breathed the smoked hide and touched the rabbit fur and tasted the duck grease of the birds the two men shot together. They breathed Augustus’s clean sweat, for he bathed in the lake each morning, even breaking the ice sheaves once November came around. He had learned from Shawano an old-time Indian’s habits. But also like Shawano, he wore suspenders and read aloud from the newspapers. Augustus acted like an akiwenzii although he was very young. This confused the twins’ rivalry and dulled their glares. Protected by his books and pens and envelopes and bills, Augustus tried to remain oblivious. But their feelings for him were a long thread. The two sisters had licked, threaded, and waxed either end. They began to sew with it, adding to their own peculiar pattern bead by bead until, one night, the thread pulled taut, the space shortened, Zosie’s and Mary’s needles halted, and they looked each other in the eye.
Fried Robins
Although the twins enjoyed flummoxing people, especially Augustus, with their sameness, they were in truth very different. Zosie liked sweet things and Mary preferred sour and salty. Mary hated to eat birds, eggs, and any roots that came out of the ground. Zosie liked those foods but rejected green cabbage and complained that if any maple sugar was added to her meat she was likely to get the runs. Mary was good at small things and Zosie was good at large. For instance, Mary could mend a sock to perfection while Zosie could help Augustus split new shingles for the roof. Zosie could also cook for many people at once while Mary was better at more intricate food tasks, although she cried while plucking birds. Zosie liked to snare birds although Mary called her heartless. Zosie was frying up six robins one day when she decided that she was tired of sharing her sister with Augustus. A husband was all right to have, as long as he could be controlled. But you couldn’t get along without your twin. If he ever learned their differences, he might tell one from the other and choose. So that night, as they looked at each other over their beadwork, Zosie put her hand on her head and twirled the crown of her hair. Mary put down her needle and did the same. “The robins are sacred,” said Mary. “If you ever eat one again, you will choke on its tiny breastbone.” “I will give them up,” said Zosie. Then they both laughed so hard, blowing and snorting with relief, that they didn’t stop until they felt drunk.
The Hidden Knot
A woman used to deception knows how to hide her stitches. The twins’ beadwork was tight and true. No visible beginning or end to the design. Impossible to find the starting knot, the final tie. Unseeable the place where the needle went in or out. Their maple leaf or prairie rose or vines twisting skeletal on black velvet were done with invisible thread. They used those threads on Augustus. He never saw the stitch work that kept him sewed to their side. He never saw the fabric upon which their passion was marked out in chalk. Or the inlay, one bead to the next, the remarkable interpenetration of colors.