Neither Wolf nor Dog (28 page)

Once over the first rise, the land stretched out for miles in a dizzying profusion of ebbs and draws. The silver moonlight washed away all detail, leaving only great splashes of dark and light upon the earth.

Grover drove without fear. Once or twice I thought he was going to get stuck in a hollow. But he revved and roared and spun his way across every obstacle. Here and there a side path would break off, yet he never slowed, never wavered. The sedate caution of his highway driving had disappeared; in its place was a relentless certainty. He was the captain, plowing through grassland seas.

The nose of the car rose and fell, rose and fell. We were buffeted around in our seats like men on a carnival ride. Bottles clinked in the grocery bag. Somewhere in the trunk a jack or tire iron had become dislodged and was thudding and chunking off the wheel wells and trunk lid.

We ground our way to the top of a long hill and Grover brought the car to a stop. There, at the bottom of the next hollow, nestled among a few scrubby trees, stood a solitary structure. From our vantage point, still a half a mile away, it seemed uninhabited. But a close look revealed a dim glow from a tiny window.

The building was not much bigger than a chicken coop. Objects were scattered on the ground around it. There was no car anywhere.

“Well, we made it,” Grover announced.

Dan nodded.

A small figure appeared in the yard. The sound of barking filled the evening quiet. Three dogs raced up the rise toward us. Fatback bolted in her seat and started whimpering. Grover reached behind and flipped open the rear door so she could slip out.

She rushed to the front of the car. The charging dogs lapped
and panted up the rise and almost overran her. They began a wild frenzy of wagging and growling and sniffing.

Grover blinked his headlights several times. The figure by the house waved, and we proceeded down the hill.

When we reached the trees I could see that the figure was a woman. She was heavy-breasted and old, almost as old as Dan. She wore a baggy print dress cinched around the waist with a man's belt. A thin dark sweater was draped over her shoulders like a shawl.

Her hair was white or silver — I could not tell in the moonlight — and was pulled together in back. It hung down almost to the bottom of the sweater.

She was standing with her hands on her hips, like a stern mother awaiting the late arrival of her daughter from a date. As the car lights swept across her, I could see that she was smiling. It was a mother's grin, full of knowing mirth.

Grover shouted something out the window in Lakota. She clasped her hands in front of her and rocked back onto her heels several times. Her smile got even broader. Some more words were exchanged, and Grover told us all to get out.

The old woman turned back toward the house. The dogs moiled behind her, including Fatback. She walked bent over, on heavy ankles.

“Come on,” Grover coaxed. “This is Annie,” as if that were sufficient to make all things clear.

Now that the headlights were off, the stars burst forth like crystals. As my eyes adjusted I surveyed the surroundings. The house was indeed not much bigger than a chicken coop. It was made of rough, uneven squared logs, chinked between by a heavy layer of concrete or mud. The roof was tarpaper held down by thin wood batting strips and old car tires. Off behind I could barely make out the form of a tall thin outhouse set against a clump of trees. To its left was a
tiny humpbacked house trailer with its tongue resting on a section of log.

The yard itself, if indeed it could be called a yard, contained a small garden plot that was fenced in by chicken wire. Some low vegetables seemed to be growing in its rows. A metal bed frame and mattress stood near the house for no apparent reason.

On the opposite side, away from the car, wood was stacked almost as high as the roof. A bucket hung from the neck of an old crook-handled pump near the front door.

All of this stood huddled, like a tiny outpost of human habitation, in the center of this great bowl of land that stretched for miles in all directions.

Grover nudged me. “Does she live here alone?” I asked. The sea of stars seemed to flow on forever.

“Bring the bag of groceries,” was all he answered. Dan had walked ahead and had already entered the house.

Inside, the house seemed even smaller. It was divided into two rooms, each no bigger than a large closet. The floor was made from wood planks and there were small windows cut into each of the heavy timber walls. A red and green striped blanket served as a door between the two rooms. The only illumination was a tiny yellow light flickering from a kerosene hurricane lamp that stood on a table next to the door.

Because of the rug divider, I could only see the first of the rooms. It contained only four pieces of furniture: the square pine table on which the lamp was placed; a massive grey-and-white enamel wood cook stove that took up almost an entire wall; an old overstuffed easy chair shoved in the corner just to my left; and a single ladderback wooden kitchen chair pushed in against the table. The sheer size of the objects made the room claustrophobic; there were places to sit and stand, but no place to move.

Pots and dishes lined a shelf above the table, along with jars
of beans and flour. Pieces of dried meat hung from a rack above the shelf.

Though the windows were open, I felt like I might suffocate. The smell of something burbling on the stove mixed with the acrid reek of kerosene. The heat from the stove was immense, and not at all mitigated by the dry breeze blowing through. Everything was too close.

I heard Dan's voice from the back room. He was laughing with another man. Their conversation was all in Lakota, and I could recognize no word other than
wasichu.

I had no sense of protocol. The woman had not acknowledged me beyond smiling warmly in my direction. I did not know whether I should introduce myself, or even if she spoke any English. I stood silently by the front door and watched her take the groceries out of the bag and place them in various shelves and corners around the room.

She was obviously a kind woman. Her face was creased with deep furrows that flowed gracefully from the edges of her eyes and the corners of her mouth. She wore the perpetual expression of one withholding a humorous secret.

Since there was no graceful place to stand, and nothing had been said about where I should sit, I stayed in the open doorway, smiling warmly whenever the old woman looked at me. Grover had pushed aside the blanket between the rooms and was involved in the conversation that Dan was having with the unseen man.

Outside the dogs continued to tussle and tumble in mock battle under the star-filled sky. I considered going back out to sit with them, but the woman gestured me in. It was a warm, come-hither gesture — the universal welcome of a grandmother with food. “You want to eat?” she said.

The English surprised me. She gestured me toward the single ladderback chair. “Come on. Sit down.”

I had enough sense not to refuse hospitality. I had made enough errors in etiquette to last for a while.

I wedged my way in to the table. The old woman took a bowl from the shelf and ladled something from the cast-iron skillet. I had no idea what it was, but I knew I had to eat it. Memories drifted up of the Ojibwe kids at Red Lake joking about the Lakota, or “Sioux” as they called them, being “dog eaters.” Most of them were merely mouthing stories they had heard. But the stories had to have come from somewhere.

I looked hard into the gruel. I saw nothing demonstrably canine, though hunks of some kind of meat floated half submerged in an ominously dark gravy. They were surrounded by reassuringly round objects of vegetable or grain origin. I took the dented metal spoon and lifted a bit of the liquid to my lips.

The old woman was grinning.

It was surprisingly good. There were tastes of pepper and corn, and a lingering aftertaste of berries. I bit into one of the balls. It was some kind of dumpling, and quite tasty in its own right. I worked my way through the liquid, skirting the meat as best I could.

Grover turned and saw me. He looked at my bowl full of meat chunks, then looked at Annie. “Didn't you used to have four dogs?” he said in English.

I
t wasn't long before my exhaustion overcame me. “You sleep on the bed in the yard,” Annie said. I remembered the strange iron frame with the faded striped mattress. If we didn't have a late-night thunderstorm, it seemed like a fine choice.

I grabbed my sleeping bag from the trunk and curled up on the creaking springs of the old bed. Despite the comings and goings of the dogs, and the occasional bursts of laughter from
inside the house, I was soon fast asleep.

I must have slept soundly. I had no recollection of Dan and Grover or anyone else walking by me on the way to the trailer or the outhouse. When I opened my eyes the sun was creeping over the horizon to the east. The sky was a symphony of violets and purples, and a sparkle of dew covered the grass. I lay in silence, listening to the movements of the insects and the animals.

Sounds of life came from the other side of the house. I climbed out of my sleeping bag and went to the car to get my toothbrush and some clean clothes.

Annie was in the yard by the pump. She was pushing the rusty metal handle up and down in short, powerful bursts. Her outfit was the same as yesterday, but she now wore a dark headscarf against the wind. She waved at me and smiled.

In the daylight I could get a better sense of where we were. The house sat alone in the middle of a bowl that must have been twenty miles across. There were no other structures in any direction; only a few stands of trees broke the unending dip and roll of the brown grassland hills.

The trail we had driven in on stretched up and over a rise to our rear. Other than that, no roads or pathways were anywhere to be found. A man walking, or riding on a horse, would have been seen for miles.

The sky dominated all. Like the land, it was too large, too singular, to be absorbed. The sunrise was swathing the east with colors of golds and oranges and purples. They dripped and streamed across the entire horizon, backlighting the clouds and shooting rays of yellow sunlight across the land. The sun was slowly pushing into view. As it rose, it drove the shadows deep into the valleys and the draws. I felt like I was in an amphitheater of the gods.

Annie had returned to the house with her basin of water. I walked over to the pump and worked the handle until a small
stream came from the spout. Holding my breath against the anticipated cold, I shoved my head under the flow and slapped a handful of shampoo onto my hair.

The water was anything but cold. The smell was putrid and sulfuric; the temperature, tepid; the color, brackish. I quickly finished washing and tried to towel myself free of any residue from the vile substance.

Annie was standing in the door. Memories of the soup rose up inside me. “Don't drink,” she said. “Here.” She held out a cup. “Use this.” I took it from her hand and looked down at the clear liquid. It was water, but it had come from someplace other than the pump. “Thank you,” I said, and finished brushing my teeth.

While I was washing, Annie had pulled the wooden chair outside and placed it next to the front door. She was working something in her lap, either shucking some kind of vegetables or making some kind of craft. I paid no attention and finished dressing. Neither Dan nor Grover had emerged from wherever they had spent the night, nor had the mystery man whose voice had come from the back room last evening.

I could sense Annie watching me. I was badly in need of coffee, but was afraid to ask. Perhaps they were tea drinkers. Perhaps they were too poor to have coffee. Perhaps they had coffee but made it with water from the pump.

Annie gestured me over with a flick of her head. Her hands remained busy in her lap. Their movement was swift and automatic. I smiled and approached.

“Sit,” she said, nodding toward the stoop. I glanced at her hands. She was working a rosary.

The shock was almost as great as when she had first spoken English. It was not that it was improbable, just that it was so unexpected.

“Catholic?” I said, for no reason at all.

She smiled and nodded, as if I had acknowledged something
important. “Oh, yah,” she said. Her hands worked their way down the beads with practiced ease. I expected something more — an explanation, perhaps, or a question about my background. But nothing further was forthcoming. She rocked in her seat to some inner melody.

We sat in silence as the sun rose. From the yard behind I heard the metal creak of the trailer door, then the banging of the outhouse. Soon Dan made his way across to the car. He was wearing his quilted undershirt. His stained khaki pants were buttoned but not yet zipped. The suspenders hung in loops down his sides. His old deerskin slippers half covered his sockless feet. He looked like someone who had wandered away from a nursing home.

He went directly to the car without acknowledging either of us. After some rummaging in the trunk, he extracted a crinkled brown paper bag and disappeared again behind the house. Annie kept rocking and working her hands. The sounds of insects began to fill the morning air.