any powwow or sweat-lodge or even sun-dance song he has ever heard. There are flushing sounds, water, a shower. She loves the shower and will stand beneath it smiling for half an hour and would stay longer if Rozin, wife of Richard Whiteheart Beads and monitor of hot water use in this joint living space, didn’t stop her.
“I need some hot water for cleaning,” she calls from the kitchen.
Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad is the Ojibwe word for Saturday and means Floor-Washing Day. Which tells you that nobody cared what day of the week it was until the Ojibwe had floors and also that the Ojibwe wash their floors.
We are a clean people, Klaus thinks. He knocks on the bathroom door. He opens the door and when he sees the bathroom window is wide open, in spite of the child safety locks he installed, he knows already without looking behind the shower curtain that she is gone.
S HE LOPES CRAZILY through the park. In the lighted shelter where the street people drag her, she curls up on a flea-funky pallet in the corner and sleeps, not forgetting all of her daughters but taking them back into her body and holding them.
At night, she remembers running beside her mother.
Her daughters dance out of black mist in the shimmering caves of their hair.
When she touches their faces, they pour all their love through their eyes at her. Klaus? She never dreams about or remembers him. He is just the one she was tied to, who brought her here. But no matter how fast or how far she walks, she can’t get out of the city. The lights and cars tangle her. Streets open onto streets and the highways roar hungry as swollen rivers, bearing in their rush dangerous bright junk.
Anama’e-giizhigad
Although the Ojibwe never had a special day to pray until mission and boarding schools taught how you could slack off the rest of the week, Sunday now has its name. Praying Day. Klaus spent all day yesterday walking the streets and bushwhacking down by the river and questioning. Questioning people.
“Have you seen a naked beautiful Indian woman hanging around here by any chance? Or she could be wearing just a towel?”
“Bug off, asshole.”
“She’s mine,” he says. “Don’t touch her.”
Yesterday he walked a hundred miles. At least he felt like it. Today on Praying Day he takes out the pipe that his father was given when he returned home safe from the war. Which war? The war so shadowed out by other wars that nobody can recall that it was the war to end all wars.
“I’ll be asking the Creator for some assistance,” he says to his father’s pipe as he fits it together and loads it while singing the song that goes along with loading a pipe. He takes from a slip of cardboard a feather that he uses to fan the ember at the heart of a small wad of sage. The smoke rises and rolls. He has disabled the smoke alarm.
“I pledge this feather to my woman if she returns of her own free will,” he says between smokes.
The feather is very special, a thunderbird feather, a long pure white one that dropped one day out of an empty sky.
Dropped into my life just like you, my darling sweetgrass love, Klaus thinks. The smoke curls comfortingly around his head. But he smokes his pipe too much. He smokes it again and again until his head aches and his chest is clogged. He will cough for the rest of the day and every time he does, a puff of smoke will pop from his lungs.
Dizzy, he breaks down his pipe, cleans it, puts it carefully away. He rolls the pipestone bowl in his father’s sock—all besides the pipe and his deaf ear that he’s got left from his father. Oh, wait, you could count his libido, too, and of course his lips.
“You got a lip line a girl would kill for,” one of his not-girlfriends had said to him. Those plush yet sculpted lips were his father’s lips. Many times they fit around this pipe stem, this okij. His father was so old that he died of old age when Klaus was six. Klaus is the same age as his nephews. He rolls the okij in a
“I need some hot water for cleaning,” she calls from the kitchen.
Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad is the Ojibwe word for Saturday and means Floor-Washing Day. Which tells you that nobody cared what day of the week it was until the Ojibwe had floors and also that the Ojibwe wash their floors.
We are a clean people, Klaus thinks. He knocks on the bathroom door. He opens the door and when he sees the bathroom window is wide open, in spite of the child safety locks he installed, he knows already without looking behind the shower curtain that she is gone.
S HE LOPES CRAZILY through the park. In the lighted shelter where the street people drag her, she curls up on a flea-funky pallet in the corner and sleeps, not forgetting all of her daughters but taking them back into her body and holding them.
At night, she remembers running beside her mother.
Her daughters dance out of black mist in the shimmering caves of their hair.
When she touches their faces, they pour all their love through their eyes at her. Klaus? She never dreams about or remembers him. He is just the one she was tied to, who brought her here. But no matter how fast or how far she walks, she can’t get out of the city. The lights and cars tangle her. Streets open onto streets and the highways roar hungry as swollen rivers, bearing in their rush dangerous bright junk.
Anama’e-giizhigad
Although the Ojibwe never had a special day to pray until mission and boarding schools taught how you could slack off the rest of the week, Sunday now has its name. Praying Day. Klaus spent all day yesterday walking the streets and bushwhacking down by the river and questioning. Questioning people.
“Have you seen a naked beautiful Indian woman hanging around here by any chance? Or she could be wearing just a towel?”
“Bug off, asshole.”
“She’s mine,” he says. “Don’t touch her.”
Yesterday he walked a hundred miles. At least he felt like it. Today on Praying Day he takes out the pipe that his father was given when he returned home safe from the war. Which war? The war so shadowed out by other wars that nobody can recall that it was the war to end all wars.
“I’ll be asking the Creator for some assistance,” he says to his father’s pipe as he fits it together and loads it while singing the song that goes along with loading a pipe. He takes from a slip of cardboard a feather that he uses to fan the ember at the heart of a small wad of sage. The smoke rises and rolls. He has disabled the smoke alarm.
“I pledge this feather to my woman if she returns of her own free will,” he says between smokes.
The feather is very special, a thunderbird feather, a long pure white one that dropped one day out of an empty sky.
Dropped into my life just like you, my darling sweetgrass love, Klaus thinks. The smoke curls comfortingly around his head. But he smokes his pipe too much. He smokes it again and again until his head aches and his chest is clogged. He will cough for the rest of the day and every time he does, a puff of smoke will pop from his lungs.
Dizzy, he breaks down his pipe, cleans it, puts it carefully away. He rolls the pipestone bowl in his father’s sock—all besides the pipe and his deaf ear that he’s got left from his father. Oh, wait, you could count his libido, too, and of course his lips.
“You got a lip line a girl would kill for,” one of his not-girlfriends had said to him. Those plush yet sculpted lips were his father’s lips. Many times they fit around this pipe stem, this okij. His father was so old that he died of old age when Klaus was six. Klaus is the same age as his nephews. He rolls the okij in a
Similar Books
