The Water Dancers, page 21
The kitchen smelled of bacon and gas and last night’s curry. Ben sat across from Mandy at the table, forking scrambled eggs into his mouth.
“When was the last time you ate?” asked Mandy. Her eyes narrowed as she traced down his shoulders to his belly. “That dinner the other night, from the look of you.”
Ben smiled and patted his stomach. Mandy had stood on the dock the day before with her hands on her hips till he lowered himself from the mast. “Mrs. March says we got to feed you.” Now they were fussing over Ben like he was Jesus after the fast.
“I remember when you was a boy,” said Ella Mae. “I’d feed you sweet rolls when you came with your daddy.”
“He’s not my father,” said Ben. “But I remember the sweet rolls.”
“Do you now?” Ella Mae looked pleased. She reached out and took one of Ben’s hands. “Let me take a look.”
For a long moment, she studied his palm till Ben pulled it away and said, “You never seen a hand before?”
Ella Mae looked at him, blew out her cheeks. “I’ve seen hands,” she said. “Some you wouldn’t even want to look at, the lines are so knotted. Some are smoothish.” She stood up, untied her apron, sat back down with it clumped in her lap. “But I’ve never seen a hand like yours.”
Mandy, spooning some more eggs onto his plate, said, “What’s that thing on your face?”
Ben’s eyes drifted up, rested on a board of numbers on the wall. “I got burned,” he said, wondering what they were for.
“Mmmm, mmmm,” said Mandy.
“Hands like that,” said Ella Mae, shaking her head.
Someone knocked at the screen door. “Woodman,” said Ella Mae, getting up slowly. She peered at Ben. “You say he’s not your daddy?”
Honda was standing at the door when Ella Mae opened it. He glanced at Ben. They hadn’t seen each other in more than a month, but the first thing Honda said when he walked into the kitchen was, “Someone’d better fix that gas leak before the whole place blows.”
“Someone’d better fix a whole lotta things around here,” said Mandy.
“So,” said Honda, looking at Ben, “they said at the boat shop this was where I’d find you. I see that they’re feeding you.”
Mandy rolled her eyes.
“Can’t complain,” Ben said.
“People spoil the boy,” Honda said to no one in particular. “Always have.”
“This boy’s special,” said Ella Mae.
“That so?” said Honda. He looked at Ben. “How about giving me a hand.”
Outside, Honda’s truck, brimming with firewood, was idling in the still morning air. A squirrel, digging around for acorns, skipped away as the men came closer.
“Over here,” said Honda, handing Ben a pair of canvas gloves and nodding at the stone wall of the kitchen. They set to work unloading the truck and stacking the logs. Neither man spoke but fell into the familiar routine from years before when a boy had helped a man deliver wood to the summer people.
When at last the stack was done, Honda peeled off his gloves, flicked them into the truck. “Your mother’s been waiting to hear from you.” His hair was graying in the sideburns.
Ben leaned against the stack of logs, watched a dewy-winged butterfly land, take off. “Been busy,” he said.
“That busy?”
“I got a lot to do.”
“Like eating these people’s food?”
Here it comes, thought Ben, about how the summer people had stolen their land in the first place.
“We need you,” said Honda. “The powwow’s in a few days. If this thing with the government goes through, it could mean a lot to us.”
Ben rubbed his sunburned eyes. Yeah, he thought. Like money. But he’d already made plans to take Rory sailing next week. They were going to take out the Blue Heron for the first time since she’d been fixed. He’d worked all month for it.
“Did you know,” said Honda, jerking his head at the house, “your mother used to work for these people?”
Ben crossed his arms. Honda knew his mother didn’t tell him much.
Honda climbed into the truck, leaned out the window. “So what do you think?”
Ben shrugged. “Life goes on.”
“True,” said Honda as he started up the engine. “But either way, you’ve got to make a choice.”
That night, there was music across the water. Not the drumming Ben was used to or the insistent beat of rock ’n’ roll. This was light and airy, insubstantial as small talk, but it moved him anyway, as ancient and foreign as church music.
Ben decided to take a walk on the bay-side beach and think about what Honda had said. He hadn’t seen Rory all day. Maybe Rory had slept in till the evening, then risen, brushed off that blue blazer, and headed back into the night. Listening to the music, Ben wondered if youth could be recaptured in the movement of bodies swirling as one. He had once seen a jingle dancer pull the disease out of a man, grow sick herself, only to recover as the other dancers moved in around her. Indians thought salvation lay in the clasping of hands, the shared rhythm of heart and drum.
A ring had formed around the moon. As he made his way down the path to the beach, heat lightning flickered against a stack of clouds. His bare feet sunk into the sand, soothing as his mother’s touch. Who could say this was trespassing?
At the water’s edge, he began to move, at first to the thin strands of music drifting from the club, then to the cadence in his mind. A steady beat of waves, then drums, the distant hint of chants. He stomped the sand, crouched low to the stone-covered beach. The rat-a-tat in his brain reminded him of gunfire, the screams above the shots. He turned, twisted. Again, the image of something burning. Hiya-ha-ha, hiya-ha-ha. He began to spin. The club music had turned to something else, the sound of Spenger’s off-key Hendrix. Ben thrust his chest out as Spenger did when he was hit in the back by a spray of bullets, the blood and spit oozing from the corners of his mouth.
What did the cries of a war dance mean? Were they no more than prayers for victory, a plaintive cry that someone else’s blood be spilled? Even the Odawa had taken this land through slaughter. Down by the lake, an entire village gone in a frenzy of hatchets.
The lightning pulsed above the horizon. A wave slapped the shore, spilled across his ankles, and still he danced, his calves and arms spattered with sand. A low moan of thunder.
“Ben?”
Elizabeth March was standing on the beach not far from him, her shape faint in the moonlight, her hair pale. With bare arms, she hugged herself, and he assumed it frightened her to see him spin to imaginary drumming. He stopped, ran his fingers through his hair, slicked it behind his shoulders. Catching his breath, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t stop.” She must have been at the club because she was in a long silver dress that dragged in the sand. He wanted to tell her to watch out for the waves, that they could catch you by surprise, but she was already at the water’s edge, her dress wet, and she didn’t seem to care.
He half laughed, his hands on his knees, his breathing still hard. “I haven’t danced in years.”
She was standing up to her calves in water, prom-queen beautiful, even at forty or whatever she was. Probably as old as his mother, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the gold of her hair.
She was swaying slightly in the waves as if she, too, was dancing to unheard music. “I used to love to dance,” she said, “when I was a girl. Woody would wear his uniform, and we would waltz under those tiny lights till I got so dizzy, I thought I’d fall down.”
Another wave struck her, and she seemed to falter. He wondered if she had been drinking. When he took her elbow, she leaned into him, staring at the sky. “All these stars,” she said. Her skin was smooth and cold.
“You’re freezing.”
She wrapped her arms around herself again and shivered. “Dance with me.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I saw you…”
He laughed. “What you saw wasn’t dancing.”
“What, then?”
Anger. Despair. Still holding her, he said, “Praying, maybe.”
Elizabeth gave a quick laugh. “My mother-in-law prays all the time.”
Ben thought of the useless cells that were multiplying in Mrs. March’s body—the embarrassment of riches she had neither wanted nor prayed for. They were killing her, devouring her tissue, pushing up against her organs, haunting her lungs. She had shown Ben the cremated remains of her son, saying, See? We are nothing but fish bones in the end.
Elizabeth leaned in closer to him. “She thinks she’s immortal. She thinks this whole damn family is.” Her eyes grew bright in the starlight. “You’ve spent time with my son. What kind of odds would you give on his getting married and having children?” It occurred to Ben that she was very drunk. “The things mothers want for their kids.”
She leaned into him until he was holding her up. Slowly, Ben began to rock her. Tears were running down her face, and he touched one, licking his fingertip. Perfume, tears, and mascara intermingled as they moved together, the waves pushing in and out. She tasted of sorrow and disappointment, of rigid, stark hope, and Ben felt he knew her the way he had known soil or grass or rain.
He thought about what his mother wanted for him—to go back to the lake and dance with the band. It meant so much to her and so little to him. He’d all but forgotten the steps.
Still rocking, he watched the top of Elizabeth March’s head, waiting for a signal, but she moved away and smiled, breaking the spell. “This is some way to end a lousy evening.”
Ben shook his head to clear it. Above them, the house glowed in the trees. He liked this house, liked the grand, proud way it claimed the lake, perched like a boulder that had stood there for eons. He should have hated it, everything it stood for—the smug sense of entitlement based on land grants and a too-brief history. His people had pieced together their living from the leftovers of their culture. Moccasins sold in tourist shops. Quill boxes. The lumbering days were over, fur trading barely a memory. The men had gone to the cities, forgotten the forests and the lakes. The women worked in white people’s houses, carried their wash, scrubbed their floors.
Elizabeth followed his gaze. A light flicked off in Mrs. March’s windows. “Someone should torch this place.” Lifting the soggy hem of her dress, she crossed the darkened sand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was early evening. The lake was slate, and the mosquitoes were getting thick. Along the beach, a temporary village had gone up. Dozens of people—maybe more—had camped around the lake in trailers and cars, in tepees, tents, or blankets laid across the ground. Someone had a radio on in one of the cabins—Old Jedda, probably—listening to a ball game out of Detroit. Rachel could hear the distant static of the announcer calling plays, the crescendo of cheers, someone swearing in response.
“Taw,” said Minnie. “That man’s got a mouth.”
“There’s mouths and there’s mouths,” said Ada, who had come with Bliss to watch the powwow.
The day had ended badly when one of the girls had stabbed her hand with an awl. Teaching these girls to quill was an art, and not for the first time, Rachel wondered how her grandmother had put up with her.
“I have better things to do,” the girl had said as Ada stitched up her hand.
“So did I,” muttered Rachel.
The quill lesson had been a disaster. Patiently, she had shown the girl how to use the awl to puncture the bark. Think of the pattern, she had said to the girl. Think of how the quills will lie. But the girl had been fidgety, and now she was down at the water, throwing stones with her friends, flirting with some boys who had come down from Escanaba. Rachel was sitting on her porch alongside Ada, Bliss, and Minnie in hand-me-down rockers—broken pieces of furniture Honda had mended after scavenging them from dumps or from summer people who’d offered him their refuse when he’d come to deliver wood.
“These girls,” said Rachel.
“And were you so different?” said Minnie.
Ada laughed and said she remembered the way Rachel had taken it upon herself to walk to the lake in winter. “About ten months pregnant, and we could barely see her head above the snowbanks.”
“Even so,” said Rachel, “you followed me.”
Ada pressed her lips together and glanced at Bliss. In the past few years, Bliss’s vision had grown dim, and her right eye was beginning to wander. Still, she smiled at the memory. “What would we have said to the nuns?”
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Ada would have lied.” She flicked away a mosquito. “Like always.”
“Ha!” said Ada.
“Tsss,” said Minnie. “Who are you to talk about lying?”
Rachel avoided her eyes. If she lied, it was because it was for the best. To what end should Ben know that his father’s family had abandoned him, paid her off, or worse, that she had asked them to? Blackmail money, she had explained to Honda, stolen from the Marches. Honda had laughed and said, Good for you, but Rachel made him promise to say it was his. Better that it came from Honda than from her. Better that no one should add up the pieces. And what do you want me to tell them? Honda had asked. That I found it on the street? Tell them you won it in a crapshoot, Rachel told him. Tell them anything you want.
And so he did. But no one believed it. The stories went from dull to wild, died down eventually, flared up when someone got mad at Honda, then fizzled out altogether. From time to time, someone dragged out the ancient admonition that “you can’t trust a Jackson,” but no one listened. It didn’t matter where the money came from. All that mattered was the land.
In the beginning, only a few families had moved back—the remnants of those who had lived here and gone. More came later. Everyone said they belonged to the tribe, but Rachel wondered if all of them really were Indian, much less Odawa. Blond Indians? But anything was possible, Honda had reminded her. A lot of these people had the blood, even though it was only a half, a quarter, an eighth. Look at you, Honda had said, adding, Look at Ben.
But Ben wasn’t here. And Ada, Bliss, and Minnie kept asking when he was coming until Rachel finally snapped, “Who knows? He hasn’t been here in months.”
The powwow would be starting the next day. Ben had been one of the best dancers, and though Honda wouldn’t admit it, Rachel knew he was proud. Why did he pretend not to care? Now Honda, winner of crapshoots, was ogema—a leader of the band. He had negotiated for years with the Northern Michigan Odawa Association, had worked with them to fight for what the treaties hadn’t provided. There was money at stake. The band was up for review, pleading their case to gain recognition. The Horseshoe Band. If they drew attention, anything was possible. Rumor had it, the federal government was coming around. Anyone who was a member of the NMOA was qualified, but they had to be accepted first, and there were standards.
“Honda,” said Minnie as if she had read Rachel’s mind, “is working too hard lately.”
Bliss nodded slowly. “Someone should take care of that man.”
All three women looked at her, but Rachel pretended not to notice. Honda was practically her brother. Besides, he had other women. Hadn’t they seen the tattoos on his arms?
“Speaking of working too hard,” Rachel said, “you two aren’t getting any younger. You should take those people up on their offer.”
Bliss’s eye drifted slowly south, making her look even older. For forty years, Ada had lived with her on the farm. Their two sets of hands were knotted from labor, their faces sagged and lined from hard weather and helping girls give birth. Now all the land around the farm was being bought up by developers, subdivided for housing—three-bedroom ranch houses, A-frames, and split-levels. Like weeds, Ada said.
“Tsss,” said Bliss, her eye focusing on Rachel. “And where would we live?”
Rachel shrugged. “Why not here?”
“Sure,” said Minnie, slapping Ada on the arm, perhaps a bit too hard. “We’ll make you honoraries.”
“Some honor,” said Ada, rubbing her arm.
“We’re family,” Rachel said. “At least, that’s what you two used to tell me. Besides”—she patted Bliss’s callused hand—“you like it here.”
Bliss’s good eye traveled upward. Rachel knew what she was thinking. The farm had been in her family for generations. It was their home. But Rachel knew they couldn’t keep it up. The place was growing over, falling down.
Down by the lake, the teenagers clustered, silently sharing a cigarette. Someone threw a stone at the water, making rings that disturbed the rushes. They said a matchi-manitou lived at the bottom of Horseshoe Lake, that he used to lure young girls when they stood at the water’s edge. On nights like these, when the air was still and filmy, the drowned maidens were sometimes spotted dancing on the water.
“What the hell was that?” said Ada.
A loud, plaintive screech wailed across the water.
“Loon,” said Rachel. “Mong.”
“You’re getting better,” said Minnie, surprised that Rachel knew the word. “When you first came back, you were a know-nothing.”
“You couldn’t even find it,” said Ada.
“I hardly remembered the place.” Rachel nodded.
More than a hundred years before, the federal government had bilked them out of their treaty and tried to move them to Kansas. The Odawa refused to move. Instead, they had packed their canoes, moved to Manitoulin Island until, someday, they could buy back their land.
“But now…,” said Minnie.
“Now it’s ours,” Rachel said, picking up her awl and a piece of bark, suddenly feeling as rooted here as the two midwives did to their farm. “It will always be ours.”
It was dark when Rachel crept down to the lake—the noiseless predawn hour when everything slept. Peeling off her nightshirt, she waded into the water, her toes sinking into the oatmeal softness of clay and decayed leaves. The water was urine warm and boggy. No breeze moved the pines. Sometimes, while she swam, she imagined the fishy incarnations of the manitou, au-sa-way and naw-me-gon, ghoul-eyed and watching. She imagined Woody, his spirit choked in sea grass.
