“My mother will come back,” Delphine stated, as though dead were a place just like heaven or road and she had convinced herself that her mother would return.
Well, dead is a place right around the corner, but she didn’t have to convince herself of anything, thought Step-and-a-Half. Delphine’s mother had never left. She persisted right down the road from Delphine even now. She would live forever, messy as a haystack, her shack outlined against the huge and lowering clouds. But Delphine would live forever, too. Step-and-a-Half took pleasure from the picture of Delphine and her sister in the plant shop they had renovated. Two curly-headed old women surrounded by hothouse trees, refrigerated flowers, and bedding plants grown in the rich stockyard dirt. Sleep tugged Step-and-a-Half underneath the quilted scraps of Argus days and Argus years. She gave up and entered the wide pull of dreams. She could see one square of sky from her window. Step-and-a-Half slowly released her weight into the mattress and let herself be carried into that blueness. The blanket was comforting and familiar against her face. One of the pieces sewed into the quilt was a piece of ragged shirt the good Sioux lady had given her to wear beneath her coat, so long ago.
Step-and-a-Half had kept a scrap of the ghost shirt ever since, a bit of yellowed muslin and tattered fringe. She touched its faded painting of a crow, eyes bright, beak open, and pressed her cheek to the horned white moon. Some said the ghost dancers believed that those shirts would protect them against bullets, but Step-and-a-Half knew the dancers were neither stupid nor deluded. They just knew something that is, from time to time, forgotten except by the wind. How close the dead are. One song away from the living. She had heard the soldiers bawl their drinking songs the night before the great guns sounded. Sometimes rough, sometimes smooth as whiskey, the harmonies of male voices had seemed mellow and oval in the freezing December air. “Aura Lee.” “Auld Lang Syne.” “Calpurnia, the Faithful.” From across the tent, she had heard the mournful sweetness of the lullaby that the mother crooned into her baby’s soft swirl of black hair. No, the dancers understood just what was happening. They were told. The cloth of the shirt allowed the wearer to visit the dead and to draw comfort from their singing.
From underneath the crazy quilt now, Step-and-a-Half heard them, outside. Wild keening of women. Men exercising their voices. Up and down the scales. La-la-la. Foghorns of chords. Adeline est morte. Elle est morte et enterrée. Ina’he’kuwo’ Ina’he’kuwo’. Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten. The air scoured the fields, then hit the telephone wires and trees. It entered and was funneled through the streets and around the sides of buildings in Argus. The singing flowed over rooftops and rammed down chimneys, trapped itself in alleys or bent the tree branches in a muted off-key roar. Sometimes it was all joy and bluster! Foolish ballads, strict anthems, German sailor’s songs and the paddling songs of voyageurs, patriotic American songs. Other times, Cree lullabies, sweat lodge summons, lost ghost dance songs, counting rhymes, and hymns to the snow. Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled. Step-and-a-Half hummed in her sleep and sank deeper into her own tune, a junker’s pile of tattered courting verse and hunter’s wisdom and the utterances of itinerants or words that sprang from a bit of grass or a scrap of cloud or a prophetic pig’s knuckle, in a world where butchers sing like angels.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU Diane Reverand, Andrew Wylie, Trent Duffy, Terry Karten, Lisa Record, Jen Mundt — and most of all, Ralph Erdrich, my dad.
In the oral history of the massacre at Wounded Knee it is said two people from the north, Cree or Ojibwe, died with Bigfoot’s people. I have always wondered about them.
The picture of the young butcher on the cover of this book is of my grandfather Ludwig Erdrich. He fought in the trenches on the German side in World War I. His sons served on the American side in World War II. This book is fiction except for snout salad, the bull’s pizzle, and my grandmother’s short stint as a human table in a vaudeville act.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LOUISE ERDRICH grew up in North Dakota and is a mixed blood enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of eight novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Love Medicine and the National Book Award finalist The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, as well as poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and is included in the O. Henry and Best American short-story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore, The Birchbark.
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