There was one secret way to tell the twins apart. Victoria had pity on Augustus one day and told him to check the whirlwinds at the crown of their heads. One swirled to the left, the other swirled to the right.
Augustus had fallen in love with the enigma of duplication, and the hold had deepened. The confusion of sameness between the twins made him tremble like an animal caught in a field of tension. Sitting at the table, he’d feel the current of their likeness. Things even they did not notice. Mary pricked herself. Zosie muttered owey! Zosie started a legging and Mary, without even trying to copy, constructed another of an identical design. They got hungry at exactly the same time. Started humming one tune suddenly, no sign having passed between them.
When making love, there was barely anything one did differently from the other. He could tell them apart only with the greatest difficulty, even in their nakedness beneath his hands, but this exploration, rather than daunting, excited him. He could always make certain which was which by touching the whirlwinds at the crowns of their heads — that is, until suddenly it seemed they started combing their hair in new ways. This way, that. Messing with his one sure proof.
After they messed up the hair on their whirlwinds, he searched and searched for another way to identify them. Soon one of them would show her pregnancy. He had to know which one or he would be lost. For a time, as they beaded, he surreptitiously examined their fingers. Curled around the needles, each nail was just that slightest bit different from the next. He marked out the degree of growth, fixed in his mind a nick or a tatter.
He was driven to noticing the tiniest things. Became a devotee of pricks and scratches. Sometimes, in his desperation, he tried placing a mark on one of them himself.
You could say he started what happened next.
The accident occurred as a stroke of luck. Augustus knocked a hot fry pan over and grease splattered Zosie’s wrist. Mary was so upset that she gasped out Zosie’s name. For several weeks Augustus had a certain sign of Zosie’s identity and this quieted him. He even gained a few pounds, for anxiety had thinned him terribly. But Zosie’s scar was fading. Just before it disappeared, he tipped the hot fry pan over once again, this time onto Mary, whose painfully burned foot had to be bandaged and unbandaged twice a day. Yet she, too, recovered and her skin stayed unmarred.
How to leave a more permanent mark? He took a knife one day. Cutting a rope, he sliced through the air and nearly took off the tip of Mary’s right ear. She ducked in time, but it gave him an idea and that night when Zosie came to him he worked himself into a heat and climaxed with the lobe of her ear between his teeth.
FOR THE REST of the pregnancy, he slept alone. The twins both feared he had gone wiindigoo. The child was born, but even Victoria was confused. The baby had two whorls of hair, clockwise, counterclockwise, on the crown of its head.
“An unusual situation,” said Augustus, holding his little daughter, who clutched his finger and stared up at him in focused intensity. “I am your father, but we may never know the exact identity of your mother. Even if one tells us, she may be lying. I give up.”
Augustus accepted that he was lost. That his predicament was insoluble now. Time was marked both ways on the crown of his daughter’s head. Time was moving forward with the clock, time was moving backward, against the clock. Time had judged his father. But perhaps time does not recognize the particulars of human identity, thought Augustus, and keeps track only of the magnitude of crime. If there were those yet living affected by his father’s murder of the old woman, then it stood to reason that punishment would also be carried out upon his father’s descendant.
I am the one, Augustus concluded. The one who will answer.
Chapter 3. Answers
WHEN SCRANTON ROY had explained his cracker tin dilemma so long ago, one of the twins had answered, You’ve come to the right place. Augustus thought the answer was a typically quick-witted response to the jingle of money. But he was wrong. That answer was the truth. Over time, he discovered that the women he loved were great-nieces of the old woman eagerly slaughtered by his father. The old woman who died had been high-spirited, a tease, always ready to laugh. She had suffered three days before she died of the wound. Raving, she had cried out exactly what was carved into Scranton’s arm. Augustus covered his face and breathed deeply when he learned what it meant. He also learned the name Blue Prairie Woman and understood that she was the mother of the women he loved.
Zosie and Mary were the twins created of immoderation in the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. Perhaps, as they owed their origins to that haunting and ironic laughter, they tended to take their jokes too far. Augustus thought so. But just as he finally accepted that he would never tell one from the other, his child, their child, a daughter he named Peace, began to speak. She spoke Ojibwe, but eventually Augustus came to the exciting conclusion that she consistently called Zosie Nimaamaa, and Mary Inninoshenh. My mother and my auntie.
The spell was broken. Augustus was astonished he’d ever thought them so exactly alike. One had a slightly crooked nose! The other’s eyes were wider apart. Mary even had a tiny permanent dimple in her chin. This entire realization presented a new problem.
Knowing that Zosie was the mother of his child, he felt he should marry her correctly in the eyes of the law and the state of Minnesota. And if he married Zosie, then he could not, of course, sleep with Mary. He watched them with grief in his heart. They had sewn themselves new wash dresses out of the lengths of green flowered fabric he’d given them. They were combing out their long, wet, dark masses of hair. Sometimes they wore simple braids; other times pinned up their hair in charmingly untidy arrangements. He loved their smooth skin, handsome faces, their fine thin noses, and even their lips, cruel but perfectly formed. Their teeth were very white and sharp. Both were vain about their smiles and showed them off broadly when he bought them fancy boar-bristle toothbrushes and whitening tooth powder. He had softened them with his attention, he thought. For they treated Peace with utmost tenderness. He didn’t want to give either one of them up. Not only that, but it would cause such unthinkable discord.
So Augustus spent the rest of his life pretending that he could not distinguish between them, even though as they grew older they also grew even more unlike. When Mary bore him a son, Augustus rejoiced and named him Charles. When Zosie bore him another son he rejoiced and tried to name the baby Arthur, but nobody would call the willful, cheerful ball of boy Arthur. They called him Booch. The last son came along the same year Old Shawano passed over to the spirit world, so that baby was named Shawano and the family was complete.
The Train Station
Peace, Charlie, Booch, and Shawano were all as fine-looking as their mothers, tall with clear features and thoughtful eyes. They were each a year or two apart in age and played together in isolation. The allotment land fiercely protected by Shawano, Victoria, the twins, and Augustus was prime lakeshore property. By the time Peace was five years old, all the land around them was lumbered to stumps. By the time Charlie was five, the lakeshore was filled with white people’s cabins. By the time Booch and young Shawano were five, the Indian agent came while Augustus was at work and their mothers out picking medicines. Only old Victoria was there.