In the Night of Memory, page 2
And then she overslept.
Well, they were dressed, anyway. Loretta bent Rainy’s pot-bellied little body into a faded red corduroy jumpsuit, the tiny girl’s wrists and ankles flexing compliantly in her hands. She smoothed the knots of fine auburn and brown hair that had tangled into an egg-sized wad at the back of Rainy’s head as she slept.
“Want help with the kiddies, too, Missus?” the cab driver asked, as though he thought she was Queen Elizabeth. Rainy went right to the man, held her arms out to be lifted up onto his hip, wrapped her legs around his waist. Loretta directed him to carry the cardboard box that she had folded, flap over flap, across the top.
“Give me a minute.” She ducked into the kitchen and quickly ate a slice of bread, this to settle and weight her stomach and absorb the smell of wine on her breath. The bread rose, rose, backing up; Loretta swallowed again, hard, and it stayed down. She breathed into a cupped hand, inhaled. Yeasty, fruity, not too winey, she decided, and returned to the front room, where Norman was holding Rainy with one arm and the cardboard box under the other.
“All right, let’s go.” Loretta picked up her leather suitcase, the kind that used to be called a grip.
“I’m hungry, Mama.” Azure said this in the same whiney voice she used to ask if Loretta was awake, those mornings just before she had slapped her, Loretta recalled, which caused tears to drip down the back of her throat onto the slice of bread, which they salted. She swallowed both and pulled the last of the bread, the heel, from her pocket and handed it to her younger, bigger girl.
“I’m hungry too, Mama.” Rainy reached for the bread, starting to cry when Loretta slapped her hand. Azure tore a piece from the heel and held it out to Rainy, who dropped it onto the floor. Loretta dug between the couch cushions for Rainy’s pacifier, which her smaller, older girl slid between her lips and began to chew.
The man is kind to me, calls me little lady. I want to sit in front but he tells me I need to sit by my mother. I tell him what I had heard Loretta tell the landlord: we’re going for a ride, that we’re not gonna live with our mama no more. Sitting next to Mama I kick the seat back of the driver’s seat. He doesn’t say anything. Loretta, holding Rainy, moves my foot and takes my hand. Her own hand is damp and hot, and the nails are chewed. The cab smells nice; there is a little cardboard pine tree hanging from the radio knob. He asks if we are warm enough back there, says he can turn up the heat. Rainy falls asleep in minutes; the pacifier falls out of her mouth. Loretta opens up a tube of Life Savers and tells me I have to have the pineapple because it won’t leave my face stained.
Loretta remembered that she hadn’t brushed her teeth and rubbed her sleeve across them. She wondered how she looked. Too late now. She put the thought of her teeth out of her mind and read the taxi license. Norman McNeil was the owner-operator, it said.
“He owns his own cab,” she thought to herself. “No wonder the outside is so shined up and the inside so clean.” The mingled scents of cigarette, Norman’s leather jacket, and the little green cardboard tree hanging from the radio knob were as smooth as the ride’s feel of good tires on blacktop. Norman’s radio was turned to an oldies channel that he hummed along to in a deep rumble so low it might have been the engine, except that Loretta could recognize the tunes. The heater hummed with Norman, blowing air that warmed her feet, and she relaxed, thinking that she could ride there forever listening to Perry Como and Norman and watching the West End and then downtown sliding smoothly past the side window. “Can you girls see the lake?” she was going to ask, but before she had a chance the cab turned left and up the avenue to the civic center, where it stopped in front of the County building.
“I’ll get the doors for you, Missus,” the man says, but although my mother swings her legs down to the pavement she seems unable to get up. He offers her his hand, which she grabs, rising with Rainy in her arms. He reaches back into the car for the handle of the grip; with a grunt he hoists the cardboard box up under the other arm. “Come on out, little lady,” he says to me; I take his hand, which he gently removes to place in my mother’s. We walk, almost like a family, up the sidewalk and stairs and through the double glass doors of the County building where we are met by the social worker, who can smell the wine on Loretta and the diaper, old cooking, and sleep on me and Rainy and looks disgusted. She takes Rainy from our mother’s arms and stands her on the floor, then takes my hand from my mother’s. Rainy’s arm, thin-boned inside her red corduroy jumpsuit, brushes mine and stays there.
Loretta told the social worker that she would be back as soon as she had taken care of things at the hospital. “After I finish treatment, I’m getting my tubes tied, then I get my babies back,” she said and wrote down her address and her cousin Artense’s on the back of a drugstore receipt. She held the receipt out until the social worker took it. “You can bring the babies to Artense’s if I’m not home, but you’ll have to call first,” she said. “Don’t forget; the addresses are right here. The hospital will let you know when I’m out.”
Norman figured the mileage and fare on a small billing tablet, tore it out, and gave it to the worker, who accepted it more willingly than she had the drugstore receipt with the instructions about Artense. “Thanks, Missus,” he said to Loretta, nodding to her children. “It’s a pleasure,” he said, without a smile. As he walked, smoothly spiderlike, back to the cab he paused to pull the cigarette from back of his ear and a book of matches from his jacket pocket, turning and bending to shield the match from the wind as he lit up. Then he got into his cab and drove away.
Loretta kissed her children. As the social worker brought Azure Sky and Rainfall Dawn to the elevators and pressed the Up button, Loretta waved at them. Then the elevator doors opened, the social worker took the little girls inside, and pushed a button.
“Hurry up, Mama, the door’s gonna close,” the smaller girl said.
The taller girl took a step towards the mother.
“Be careful,” the social worker said as she tightened her grip on both sisters’ hands.
Loretta kept waving until the elevator door slid closed. And then she was alone.
Outside the glass doors she looked for a rock to throw at the civic center fountain; seeing none she grabbed the handle of the trash can next to the County building doors, ready to pull it across the drive and up over the edge of the sidewalk and into the water. As she set foot into the street an oncoming car braked, the driver tapping the horn twice; looking up, Loretta saw Norman’s taxi circle back to the civic center and the County building.
Norman offered her a ride. “It’s free,” he said. “Got to go back that way anyway; no trouble at all.”
Loretta was silent during the ride back to the apartment; noticing a small handprint on the side window she touched it gently, then rubbed it away with her jacket sleeve. Norman spoke twice, asking, when the cab was stopped at a red light, if she would like a stick of gum and then offering, after humming along with Doris Day, that “Que Sera, Sera” was his favorite song.
Pulled up at the curb in front of Loretta’s apartment, Norm handed Loretta a ten-dollar bill. “Get yourself some groceries,” he said. “There’s a brighter day out there.”
Inside the apartment building the day was, as Norman had predicted, brighter. The window shade on the usually dark landing had been raised, and bright sunlight shone on the man who knelt at Loretta’s doorway. The landlord turned at the sound of her step, then silently continued to change the lock set.
Loretta pivoted and ran, down the stairs and out the front door of the apartment building, down the sidewalk and into the street, where she chased the maroon cab, waving her arms until it turned the corner and disappeared. She stopped running; a car honked and she moved to the curb.
On the sidewalk, a young man waiting for his dog to finish urinating against a dead elm tree hawked and spit on the sidewalk.
“Mornin’,” he said to the woman who was holding her side and muttering, Shit, shit.
“Pig,” said Loretta. “You ever think somebody’s little kids might walk on this sidewalk?”
Then she walked back towards downtown, the ten-dollar bill a sweating mass wadded into the center of her fist.
Miskwaa
1
AUNTIE GIRLIE
I was thinking all yesterday. All afternoon and through supper and my programs on TV, right up to my bedtime, though not once my head hit the pillow because I sleep like a sack of rocks. Always have. It was yesterday that Nolie Dulebohn, that would be my cousin Beryl’s grandson, well, he does the Mozhay Masine’igan, the reservation newsletter that comes out once a month, and he came to Elder Housing for lunch. He wanted to interview me because I am the oldest Mozhay elder. By far (I am adding this part myself). He wanted to know about the old days, which all the younger people like to read about because they are so different from things today that to them Mozhay in those times might have been like living on the planet Jupiter.
Elder Housing is a nice place, and I am glad to live here, on the ridge that runs along the southern shore of Lost Lake. There is a nice view here out of every one of our rooms, and out of the dining room, too, where Nolie ate every scrap of his macaroni and cheese and half of mine while I talked. The portions are not enough for younger people, and because Nolie can’t ever hang on to his money, I think he probably didn’t have enough to buy a second lunch for himself. He ended the interview by asking me the secret to a long life. When people ask me that, they are really asking me why in the world I am not dead yet, and I mean this in a good way.
“Whiskey and cigars,” I answered, which made him laugh, but then I told him what these oshki-Pointers would expect to read in the Masine’igan, that every morning the first thing I do is thank God for making me an Indian and then try my best to walk the path of Bimaadiziwin, the traditional Anishinaabe way of living a good life. Then Nolie packed up his laptop computer that he was taking notes on, shook my hand in a thoughtfully gentle way that didn’t hurt my fingers, which are sore and strangely crooked with the arthritis, and said it was an honor to interview me (Before you die, which could be any minute, I could tell he was thinking).
The truth is, of course, that I don’t smoke cigars, and I don’t drink, at least not in the way my mother Maggie and her sister Helen did, though I do like a glass of wine while I watch my programs. The reason I have lived longer than anyone, even Beryl’s husband, Noel, who was older than sin, is because I never married. Nobody ever asked me or even showed interest; I was never chosen and so my heart never took the beating that other women’s do. Maggie’s held out as long as it could, but between my father and then Louis, and then her children and all the Mozhay and Duluth relatives, it wore out when she was just sixty. Mine is still beating, steady and slow, never subject to the highs and lows of emotions, the long-term sorrowful slowing and abrupt jarring of the joys and frights that people like Maggie experienced. My secret to a long life is also my secret to a clear head and memory: I am untouched and bear no scars on my heart that beats as slow and cold-blooded as a turtle’s. The Creator blessed me in this; it’s a gift.
Although it is not by blood, although she is a Gallette and I am a Robineau, Loretta and I are related in the Indian way. Her father, Albert Gallette, and Louis Gallette were cousins, and my mother Maggie and Louis’s sons, Vernon and Buster Gallette, were my half-brothers. As Loretta’s auntie in the Indian way, I will tell you that there is more to Loretta’s story than her disappearance and more to her disappearance than the story. Stories like Loretta’s were and are sadly so common that it didn’t even merit mention in the news, that an Indian woman who lived a rough life had lost her children to the County and dropped off the face of the earth without anyone even noticing for the longest time. Loretta was one of those women, one of how many we will never know, and just as it was with Loretta it was for them, that the story is more than any individual lost woman’s failings, more than speculation about the mystery, surely more than rumor and gossip and any satisfaction that it was her own fault, or that what goes around comes around, that you reap what you sow, that people get what they deserve. It’s our history, the loss of land, of course, but there’s more to it: the Old Indians, they knew how to live in the good ways but then so much became lost, with everything that was happening—people getting moved all over the place, the Indian schools and the families that lost their children, and then the drinking, the wrecking of lives—it leads directly to all that is Indian Country today, including the disappearance of Indian women, who the Creator intended to be the heart and spirit, the continuity of the people. That includes Loretta.
The Gallettes at Miskwaa River hadn’t been in touch with Loretta since the last time she had left for Duluth, for Louis Gallette’s funeral. She lived in Duluth for a while after that, where, if the rumor is true, she had a baby boy that she never saw because it was adopted out; it is where she lived when a couple of years later her first little girl Rainfall Dawn was born, then up north in Mesabi, she had her second, Azure Sky. Sometime after that she moved to Minneapolis, then back and forth between Minneapolis and Duluth so many times nobody ever kept track of where she was. It was in Duluth that she lost her children to the County; by the time people began asking if anybody had heard anything from Loretta lately, she was nowhere to be found, and her little girls had been lost, or hidden, somewhere within the foster system.
Miskwaa is a hard place to live. Miskwaa Ziibens is what it used to be called, the little red river that runs along the western edge of the Mozhay Point Reservation, a hundred miles or so north of Duluth. The name sounds pretty—doesn’t it?— the little red river, and it is a beautiful place out there in the bush of rocky riverbanks and wild forest. Two hundred years ago fur traders and Indian trappers negotiated their business deals on the banks of a natural harbor below the rapids; a settlement grew around the trading post. When the fur trade failed and the post was abandoned, Waabishkaa Waboos and his son Half-Dime LaForce moved into the building, which they used as a trading place and store for the settlement and the Indians, lumberjacks, and homesteaders in the area. An able trader and skilled woodsman, eligible bachelor Half-Dime was married at a young age to Artense DuCharme the half-breed daughter of a lumber company clerk, a business arrangement that was lucrative for everyone, even the initially reluctant but heavily dowered Artense.
In the early 1890s, this would have been right around when my mother, Maggie LaForce, was born, the Mozhay Point Reservation Lands were divided into allotments, acreage that was assigned to band members, except for the half-mile-wide Miskwaa settlement along the eastern bank. That land was set aside for unallotted, displaced Indians who had no place to go because the allotted Mozhay Pointers were moving in. Half-Dime, as a signer of the treaty, was allotted forty acres near Lost Lake, which meant that the LaForces had to close up their store at Miskwaa Ziigens and move; the Lost Lake families, the unallotted Indians, relocated to the riverbanks. The unallotted Muskrat family, whose name was changed by the Indian agent to Washington, had to move from where they had been living, which was now assigned to the LaForces; displaced, they were the first to move to the eastern banks of the Miskwaa. They were shortly joined by the Ricebirds, Etiennes, Dommages, Beavers, and Gallettes (who were double-cousins to the Dionnes but had not signed the treaty). They were all promised that they could stay on the Miskwaa River banks until the government should decide they would have to leave. This never happened, and as unrecognized Indians, the little Miskwaa River community and its people were forgotten by the federal government, by the Mozhay Point Reservation Indian agent and, sad to say, by the Mozhay Point band members much of the time, too. Those displaced Miskwaa River people lived on the trapping and harvesting that a half-mile riverbank strip provided, on welfare checks from the county, and the liquor trade, since liquor sales were illegal at Mozhay Point.
When Loretta Gallette was born, the ragged little Miskaa River settlement, if you could call it that, consisted of scattered tar-papered houses of one to three rooms, most without plumbing or electricity, and a one-room post office and general store added onto the original Etienne house by Kiiwizens Etienne, the old man of the family, who had been born in the bedroom. Mail was delivered via a contracted star route once a week; Mary Etienne, the postmistress, paid the star route driver extra to deliver supplies from Mesabi with the mail. The Etiennes had become the most prosperous family at Miskwaa, and the Dommages and Gallettes the heaviest drinkers. Loretta’s father, Albert Gallette, cousin to Louis Gallette and my mother Maggie LaForce’s second husband in the Indian way, which meant not through the Church; my father was Andre Robineau, Maggie’s first husband. So again, although it is not by blood, I am related to Loretta. In the Indian way.
I am telling you all of this not to make excuses for anyone but so that you can understand how the past has an influence on the present and, in fact, never goes away.
At first, after their removal, the Miskwaa River Indians were very old-time in how they lived; today we would call them “traditional,” but that word is somewhat misleading. It is true that the people there practiced the old-style religion and customs, that they hunted, fished, riced, and maple-sugared, and they continued the custom of dividing up the meat after a kill so that each of the families was fed. And although they still spoke the old-style Ojibwe language in their everyday lives, that language that should have reinforced all that was desirable in living in the ways of the old Anishinaabeg, the trials of life were simply too much for the Miskwaa River outcasts. The treaty Indians, who became known as the Mozhay Pointers, had gotten the better deal because of their land allotments: they became property owners, free to lose their land through swindle or theft, but property owners nonetheless. As for the people banished to the Miskwaa River banks, well, the pride their grandparents had taken in not admitting defeat by signing their homeland away resulted in their relocation and in their not owning anything at all, as a tribe or individually, except for the little houses they put up by themselves and might or might not be able to stay on the next day, or the next year. The treaty-signing Mozhay Pointers had prospered, the unallotted Miskwaa River Anishinaabeg had not: cold, hungry, and sick as they were, we could hardly blame them for neglecting the sacred teaching of generosity, tested as it was by hardship as well as the distances in land and legal standing between them and the treaty Indians, the Mozhay Pointers.
