A wonderfully evocative, sharply detailed, and tender, vibrant story about life on the Rez, in the Anishinaabeg village of Polecat Lake, written in sentences prismatic with allusion and mystery, and a story that moves agilely from one tantalizing, half-glimpsed revelation to another. “Kids with a tentative grip on home,” the narrator writes, “we didn’t never expect answers and explanations.” —Guest Judge Colin Barrett
i. a kind of home
At my grandma’s, I often sit outside on the hay bales with the dogs, all of us keeping watch for visitors and the scraps they bring—meat bones or stories. They arrive in chevy pickups, in sedans with two different color doors, or more often than you think, in wagons. While great aunties reach in the back for pictures, uncles for fresh fish or a newspaper, Larky and Chief bark a little, they arch their backs, prowl around the car, and then crawl back under the jacked-up bottom of my grandma’s house.
I’m shy around adults and, as much as I have anticipated visitors, sometimes I can hardly keep from following them dogs as they take refuge in the underworld. Rez dogs give birth in that crawl space beneath the house, bury their cache there, get out of the weather. I sometimes shimmy under to collect the scent of puppies. Or in summer, just because it’s dark and cool. Tufts of grass grow there, sparse but real tall where no one mows. The damp clay earth soothes my sunburn and I can think. Away from my big-laugh cousins.
I’m lucky in the cousins though. They’ll come, hair slicked back by rain, all watery-eyed telling me they forgot their umbrella when we all know none of us ever had one. The umbrella is code dressed up in a joke. On the eye chart, umbrella stumped me. I could see the darn picture, but the word wasn’t there.
“Fuck the eyechart,” Bean said when she saw me sniffling and heard my story. Bean’s my Uncle Walleye’s daughter. She’s eleven, or eleven hundred as she sometimes says. She always looks after me, braids my hair, gives me her socks when mine have too many holes. Her hair is a tangle, thick and muddy brown, pushed back with a headband. She won’t let me brush it. Won’t let anyone touch it. “I’m in mourning,” she says if I offer. I know that makes no sense. Ojibwes cut their hair for mourning, they don’t grow it nasty. Besides, nobody in her family has died recently. But some things you know better than to ask.
Bean’s school name is Maribel Jean. But everyone knows she’s too short for that name, so someone kind of pushed the words together and now she’s just Bean. Bean, Bean, musical fruit. Village boys started singing that after they locked her in an old outhouse one night. They set off fireworks beside the door. Bean’s pooper goes rooty-toot-toot! Bean pretends it doesn’t bother her. Haughty. That’s another name I’ve heard the teacher’s calling her. Bean says it means prisoner. Uncle Russell laughed when she told me that. According to him it means armor—like a porcupine’s quills.
I’ve been watching her lately. Sometimes I see the sharp edges and the little circle of safety they create. Bean has been trying to teach me—the way pretending can become a kind of truth. That’s why she told my secret about the eye chart. So it wouldn’t fester. Now we joke like we are all rez Mary Poppins, elbow bent and nose up—being lifted away by umbrellas.
None of us plans to leave. And all of us do. It comes and goes. When I feel it the meanest, that’s when I sneak off for the underworld—nest with the dogs.
Running jokes like those about the porcupine or umbrella are just the way we buck one another up. In grandma’s house, everyone lives off the wisecracks except Nookomis. Her conduit to survival is us kids. We have parents who appear in Buicks with store-bought cookies, make promises about new jobs and school clothes, then leave while we’re sleeping. Our abandonment has kept Grandma’s tongue young enough to dodge social service people and her arms strong enough to lift the littlest ones into a wewebizonensing. She rigs up the little cradle swing with blankets, sticks, and rope when someone needs her to take their baby “jest for a few days, til I kin get on my feet.”
In summer, like now, we sit at the kitchen table finishing the baking powder biscuits and playing 500. She mumbles complaints constantly as we horse around, then finally gives us baskets and paper bags, and shoos us outside with her broom to go pick whatever is in season. Her house sits smack in the middle of the little Ojibwe village of Polecat Lake, but village really means tamarack and maple, white pine, medicine plants and bushes with abundant crops—chokecherry, hazelnut, highbush cranberry, cedar, wild mint, blueberries. Not the bible’s paradise, the Anishinaabeg’s.
PL has only one paved road, County 4. It cuts through the new growth forest that surrounds the village. The other roads are two-ruts or gravel with washboard patterns and potholes. They give the Cliff family’s junkyard steady tire business. The lake itself is only one of a couple dozen in the northern slice of Rice County, MN, rich with walleyes and bull heads. It was an early tribal settlement, and our village remains a gathering place. We have a post office slash village store slash Texaco gas station, a resort with two dozen lake cabins, a couple of feuding churches, and a square, two-story, red brick school.
I never understood why the social studies map key labels Polecat Lake an isolated community. The store, our roads, yards, and even the graveyards are meeting spaces. In PL, people still visit—as a pastime. We crisscross the scattered collection of houses, trailers, woodpiles, and abandoned cars just to say Boozhoo, return something we borrowed, or catch up on the village news. All day long, even in the deep August heat, teenagers scuff along the paved road that encloses Pole. With cigarettes tips sheltered in the cups of their hands, they veer off onto the gravel road dissecting the village, and then wander down the grassy paths that lead to one or another of the lake shores. All the while jabbering like blackbirds, Grandma says.
Once when I asked Uncle Russell for help with a school worksheet, on the blank where I was supposed to put the main industry of PL, he told me to write gossip. I know he was joking, but he’s only a little wrong. Most of us are related here, and even if we’re not, we act like a messy family—sometimes feuding, but locked together. By blood, I guess, or history.
So, people drop by regular to visit or trade. No one makes plans for everyday visiting, they just raise some dust on the gravel road and skid into the driveway. Sometimes they announce themselves with a honk, but more likely, household dogs send up an alert. In PL, most everyone keeps a mutt or hunting dog—bear deterrent, theft deterrent, remnant of old wolf myths. Everyone keeps stories here, too—sometimes for the same reasons. For us cousins, those stories—especially the ones that go back years—are the closest we can get to what the schoolbooks call home. We collect them like bees collect pollen or like wolves bury a half-eaten carcass. For lean times.
Bean says our wild relatives survive season to season so why should we expect more? Mostly, we have learned not to waste time wondering where we will wake up next week. But sometimes when my insides hollow, ain’t nothing funny enough. Emptiness has an echo. It ricochets. Fills my ears like when I try to sleep after a pow-wow and I can’t stop hearing the drums.
Times like that, I slip under the house. The dogs sniff me, lick the salt from my skin. When they go back to panting. I become just another pair of eyes, pupils wide, staring out the holes in the cement blocks.
ii. a caught fox
June when I was almost six, I saw the ragged work boots and green pants leg of the game warden walk up to the screen door. I heard his rap and holler and my grandma’s, “Biindigen!”
Then my Uncle Russell stepped into the doorway, blocking the warden’s way in. That’s when the yelling and spitting started. Uncle Russell is what my cousin’s call bull built—broad and a breath away from charging. Year round, he wears jeans, plain colored t-shirt with a pocket for cigarette papers, leather gloves tucked in his Levi’s, and work boots. In winter he adds a flannel shirt and a vest. His face stays smooth without shaving, and his pepper black hair is prone to falling over his eyes, except when he turns his baseball cap backwards on his head. He has sunglasses with silver reflective lenses he uses like a shield or a weapon.
I had been about to crawl out from under the house when the jeep pulled up. I had snatched left over saltpork, wrapped it in bread, dove into the dark so I could eat in peace. But with Larky drooling onto my pant leg, I thought I’d take my chances with the cousins. Then Matt Brune flew into the driveway. I slinked back under and watched as he slammed his door. Both door and the sleeve of his khaki shirt held an acorn-shaped insignia with a map of the state in the middle and “Game and Fish” at the bottom. He kicked the front tire of that government vehicle.
Warden Brune is tall and big boned with a jaw like a cartoon villain and a toothpick sticking out of his mouth. He has a crew cut and the stubble of his hair sticks up cactus prickly on his head. Not many crew-cut Shinabes. Maybe that whisker hair itches him because he is always taking off his cap and running his sap-stained fingers across the crown of his head over and over.
That day, though, his hands gestured wildly as he followed Uncle Russell across the drive and around the small yard. Uncle was bending and picking up sticks, straightening stakes in the garden, even watering my grandma’s flowers. I knew he was avoiding. I do it often enough myself when I need time to figure out if I want to punch or cry. I think Uncle Russell decided punch, but just then Warden Brune stopped following and cursed.
“Don’t snowball me, Russell. We’ve played poker—I know all your tells.
“And don’t walk away. Look we all have relatives doing it the right way and relatives doing it the wrong way. Most of us muddle through, scrounge for money, and send up prayer smoke in between.
“You find them boys, you bring ‘em in. You hear? I can’t guarantee anything, but I’ll try.”
He didn’t wait for words back, didn’t make Uncle promise, just walked back to his jeep and opened the door. Then, just before he got inside and backed out of the drive, he said, “Twenty-four hours or I do it myself, Russell. Your choice. Either way its gonna go down.” Then he said some words I didn’t know, real low like under this breath. He looked my uncle’s way and I did too.
Uncle Russell had slid his sunglasses from the top of his head. His grasshopper eyes gave nothing away beneath the silver reflective surface. I imagined him looking back at the warden the way a caught fox looks when he can’t get his foot loose—both sorrowful and fierce. But my uncle knows how to play a losing hand. He turned away and started to take a leak knowing Matt Brune watched him. In poker, that’s what Uncle Russell calls goading. The warden’s face got a little more red. He shook his head, took the toothpick out of his mouth, and his spit made a little mound on the driveway. “No grudge, Russell. This is my damn job.”
It felt real quiet after Warden Brune drove away. Uncle kept walking around doing the same things he had just done. I stayed put. Waiting, like you do when someone has lit a firecracker and it’s taking too long to go off. You can’t be sure, so you wait.
Maybe Uncle Russell would have exploded all over the tomatoes, but two more things happened in real quick succession. When I think about it now, I figure it’s like when you line up blocks across the kitchen floor just so. It takes a long time to measure with your eyes, but then you just bump the one in the front and they go down one after another after another. It feels slow and fast at the same time.
That’s how it was this day when two teenage girls came along—one riding a bike and one pulling a red wagon with a child, a shotgun, and a paper bag inside. They stayed at the edge of the driveway and just called over to my uncle. “Are they back yet?”
“No. Don’t come in here. And don’t send nobody. This is none of your business.”
The girls whispered back and forth, one kept pointing with her chin toward the house. It was like watching the movies they show in school where all the motion is jerky and exaggerated. No matter what anyone does in those stories, it feels like a faraway time. I watched this scene through the narrow opening between the bottom of the clapboard house and the flat lap of earth.
Maybe that’s why what happened next seemed unreal.
The girl on the bike just said, “Gaawin.” She shook off the other girl’s hand, dismounted, took the gun out of the wagon and set it like a carton of eggs on the driveway, then picked up her bike and aimed it back the way they had come. But like those people in slow motion movies, she didn’t go anywhere at first. She peddled and her tires spun in the loose surface of the road. Her legs moved faster and faster, became a blur, but still she seemed to spin in place forever. Finally, the bike tires caught, snaked, and slid, until she built up speed. Then poof! just like that she was out of my line of sight.
I looked back at the girl pulling the wagon. She was dumping something on the pitiful plot of grass on our side of the ditch. “You tell them, old man. It’s their problem now.” She emptied the bag which was stained red, crumpled it up and threw that towards the woods on the other side of the road. She was shaking and the bag fell only a few feet away. Then she started crying, and seemed to shrink like a popped balloon.
I remember watching her and trying to think of something else. I noticed the blue flowers someone had painted on the handle of the wagon. She had a hand full of those flowers when Uncle Russell walked over and picked her up. He carried her at arm’s length as if she weighed nothing, as if she were a wet dog who was going to shake all over him. Carefully, he set her down in the wagon beside the little kid. Her legs hung out the sides and I saw she had lost one flip-flop. Neither of them noticed. Uncle Russell turned the wagon around and started to pull. He bent, struggled for a moment to get momentum in the loose sand and dirt, as if he too, had entered a slow-motion film.
I kept my eye on the lost shoe, like that was my job.
iii. nookomis makes a new story
Kids with a tentative grip on a home, we didn’t never expect answers and explanations.
Uncle came back. I gave him the flip-flop. Though it had been broken, I had fed the strap back through the hole it had been torn from. Sometimes that works, sometimes it just breaks loose again.
He took the shoe, laid it on his palm like he was guessing its weight, then he hung it on a coat hook by the door. Grandma asked him something in Ojibwe. He shook his head, poured water from the kettle into the wash basin, took homemade soap from the carved wooden bowl, looked at it, put it back, picked up the yellow Dial soap and lathered his hands. He bent down and doused his face.
I don’t know what he washed down the drain, but when he turned around, he winked at me. “Come ‘ere, my girl. Bring me the cards and I’ll show you a new game of solitaire.” Just like that the drama of the day ended.
People I didn’t know came and went all that week. In wrecked cars, in pickups or farm trucks. They followed my uncle to the tool shed and loaded things in their vehicles. My grandma baked and set out plates. Every time someone passed zhooniyaa to Uncle Russell, they shook hands and then came in to eat.
Finally, I pestered Grandma with questions one night when we were in bed. I was the only grandchild sleeping at her house because my older cousins were tenting it at a neighbor’s. I knew that meant smoking and raiding gardens. But I didn’t care. When they were away, I always got to sleep with Nookomis.
Her hair came down. White-gray and crimped from her braid, it hung past her waist. I watched it ripple like a river in the firelight as she bent to feed logs into the round black belly of the woodstove. Between the flannel sheets, I felt the little pills with my toes and waited until she was almost asleep and then I asked in a voice that threatened to cry. That’s the voice she soothed.
Tonight, it took awhile to get to the thing I really wanted to know. I had to start with the when is my mom coming back warm up, then when she was smoothing my hair and tickling me a little, I asked, “Are Nettle and James being sent away and what did Uncle Russell say he couldn’t pay for unless he sold his canoe?”
There is an ash crock next to the wood stove and it sits on a piece of tin that protects the floor from sparks. I waited so sweetly I could hear a waawaabiganoojiinh patter across the tin and then fall plop into the ash. Grandma says I imagine these things, but she always sifts through for mice when she thinks I’m not looking. I didn’t tell her what I heard tonight though. I waited like the sky waits for the return of the moon. I knew it would come.
Anishinaabeg grandmothers build bridges with their bent brown bodies and their stories. Whatever those boarding schools burned of our culture, mindimooyenyag stayed alive to repair. She would want me to understand so I wouldn’t be taken away from this bed, this land, our people, our way of life. Anishinaabe-aking.
The story came like a long sigh. What my beloved boy cousins did, how my Grandma engineered their rescue, and how my Uncle Russell’s sacrifice could save them if he let it. And just like she knew would happen, just like she tole me that night, Warden Brune came back, loaded up my Uncle Russell’s ricing canoe and left.
The next day, the Simonson brothers showed up and returned the canoe while I was on the tire swing. “Tell Russell nobody wants this ratty old jiimaan,” they laughed. This part was a surprise to Grandma. I know because she kept brushing her sleeve over her eyes while she shucked corn. Finally, just before supper, the warden pulled in. He didn’t come to the door this time. Instead, he paced around outside. Then Nettle and James were delivered in the back of the Sheriff’s squad. They were getting tall, but were still thin like herons. I watched them unbend their long legs and stand looking around at grandma’s yard like they’d never seen it before. They ran their faded ball caps through their fingers, waiting.
Uncle Russell came out and Nookomis. I knew this part and what had to happen. But I was tired of things exploding and tired of people disappearing in dust down the driveway mad, ashamed, or just searching. I felt ready to cry for real. “Let them stand up like men,” uncle had said to grandma. But they were still boys without proper fathers. I was not even in first grade and I had already seen handcuffs close. Nookomis had seen too many.
As quiet as that mouse, she gave the signal and I ran to them when I should have stood still. I flung myself and someone had to catch me.
The dogs joined in the fracas, jumping, barking, and spinning in circles. The boys’ smiles came out. Grandma came forward wiping her hands on her apron and then pulling each boy to her for a hug and a little smack.
“Aye ye, mitigo-head!” she said. “Youse must be tired. Bakade-ina?”
I hung back now. It was like the broken flip-flop all over again. Everything happened in slow motion—a film I couldn’t stop watching. Uncle dug in his jeans pocket, brought out the stack of bills he’d collected for the fine, passed it without a word to Brune. Then he took my hand, gave it a little squeeze, and I found myself pulled back—inside the story.
I understood it even then. All that could have happened, but didn’t. Some paths on the reservation once followed can never be retraced. Indian boys don’t get to be boys. They get marked young.
But in the Anishinabek world, the earth is feminine. It nurtures us in every season. My grandma turned toward the house laughing, a little clay figure of a woman between two boulders.
Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her poetry collections include Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser’s honors include the Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts. For more information visit: http://kblaeser.org