The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich

She gathered the dough from the bucket and laid it out in her frying pan, using one smooth motion. Sometimes the things her mother did from lifelong repetition looked like magic tricks.

Thomas hitched his pants to keep the ironing crisp, and sat.

I talked to the superintendent, but he says the money is extremely tight.” “You mean he’s extremely tight. In the butt.” Moses said this in Chippewa—most everything was funnier in Chippewa. A laugh cleared out the cobwebs for Thomas and he felt like the coffee was also doing him some good.

Thomas began to speak with his father in Chippewa—which signaled that their conversation was heading in a more complex direction, a matter of the mind and heart.

“We’re not nothing. People use our work. You got your teachers, nurses, doctors, horse-trading bureaucrats in the superintendent’s office. You got your various superintendents. You got your land-office employees and records keepers.” All of these jobs and titles could be expressed in Chippewa. It was much better than English for invention, and irony could be added to any word with a simple twist.

One day ago, overnight ago, she had laughed with her mother. They had enjoyed the impudence of her disguise. What would her mother think now? Mayagi. Strange. Maama kaajiig. Strange people. Gawiin ingikendizo siin. I am a stranger to myself. Another person, harder and bolder than the usual Patrice, had taken her over. This Patrice was the one who forced Jack to bring her places, the one who bargained for a key. This was again the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding this entire situation was of the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt, and there were secrets involved, and desperation, for indeed she had nowhere, after her unthinkable short immediate future rolling in the water tank, nowhere to go but the dressing room down at the other end of the second-floor hall of Log Jam 26.

“Gwiiwizens,” she said, lifting him to her heart. It was what her people called a boy baby if they didn’t want bad spirits to find him. If there was disease or danger around. Nothing fancy that could attract attention, just Little Boy.

Zhaanat said that sometimes in the old days, when the baby’s mother couldn’t nurse, the older women were sometimes able to take over. “And I’m not that old,” said Zhaanat. “My breasts aren’t yet hard dried-up old leather pipe bags.” In Chippewa, that was all just one word. They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.

The tea was made from aromatic cedar fronds and melted snow. It was her favorite kind of tea. There was something about the water that was swirled through the heavens, frozen, scooped up, and boiled with cedar. You couldn’t name it. But the hot tea, made of ingredients that joined earth and heaven, radiated its penetrating force through her body.

To them all, especially the humorless book Elnath and Vernon had left, Thomas preferred their supernatural figure Nanabozho, who fooled ducks, got angry at his own butt and burnt it off, created a shit mountain to climb down when stuck high in a tree, had a wolf for his nephew, and no conscience at any time, who painted the kingfisher lovely colors and by trickery fed his children when they starved, who threw his penis over his shoulder and his balls to the west, who changed himself to a stump and made his penis look like a branch where the kingfisher perched, who killed a god by shooting its shadow, and created everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter.

Sign me up!

The Lord’s Plan It was getting so Norbert stopped pretending that they were going to do anything else. He didn’t warm her up. No candy for Betty. No love talk, no pretense. They didn’t go to the soda fountain or for a scenic drive or to a movie on the days it changed and they didn’t even listen to the radio once he stopped the car. He just got down to business. And this was not all right with Betty, although she was fine about jumping into the backseat with him. One night, she managed to slow him down, it was going well, and in fact she was becoming very hot and happy, when the car door opened and Norbert shot right out. He had been squeezed up against the door, his head pressed to the window as he labored away above. The door had unfortunately opened as he withdrew from her and thrust himself up between her breasts. He skidded off her body and flailed his way belly down onto the slick road. Betty thought the latch had popped by itself until someone outside said, “Could I have a minute of your time to tell you about the Lord’s plan for your soul?”

Laughing alone, out loud and, somehow, not alone