The Painted Drum (21 page)

Morris found the pile of blankets and stepped into the tumbled ash and debris of what had been the house. He put his arms around Ira and lifted her out. He shook her and kept talking to her until finally she could hear him. She grabbed his hand.

“Bernard’s place,” she said, understanding that Morris had found signs of her children. “They might of took the woods.”

By the time Ira and Morris reached the house, it was light out and they saw the tribal ambulance team was already pulled up in the plowed drive. They ran, stumbling. The children were in back, wrapped in heated blankets. The EMT showed them to Ira, but when they stared at her their eyes looked frozen. She kneeled in the rescue truck, waiting for them to blink or move. When they slowly closed their eyes she grabbed for them, but they were all right, just falling asleep. The EMT told Morris to get in front because of his eye condition, then he told Ira she couldn’t ride with her children, but had to follow with Bernard. There wasn’t any room for her and they had to keep these children stable, he said, though really, it looked as though they’d all come through it.

“They were dressed pretty decent anyway, it saved them. I don’t think they’re even gonna lose their hands or feet.”

“Their ears and noses look okay too. And they kept a core temp. Don’t listen to Bug,” said the other EMT. “Of course they’re not gonna lose something. Make old Bernard crank the heat up and you follow us. We will not speed but we’ll keep the light on and hit the siren if anybody gets in our way.”

Morris sat in front, strapped in, with gauze packs on his eyes, dripping saline.

“Reach behind that bandage and put those drops in, Popeye,” said the driver.

“Popeye?” said Ira.

“Nickname,” said Morris.

Then they were off; Ira and Bernard followed along in his truck. Her head was tucked down. She was breathing in a panicked way, moaning a little with each breath. Bernard drove steadily along behind the ambulance, his tough old hands out of their gloves, gripping the wheel. He wore a plaid parka and a gray hat with padded flaps. He kept his eyes on the back of the ambulance, frowning in concentration. The wind was up, blowing the snow in snake swirls across the road. The cab of the truck finally began to warm.

“That’s Chook’s son, Morris,” he said, jutting his chin at the ambulance. “Ma’iingan. He can’t see nothing. Legally, he’s blind.”

“Well he drove me to the house. It’s burnt down. Just ashes there.”

Bernard looked over quickly at her. He hadn’t known this.

“That’s why your kids come through the woods.”

“I went to the agency for emergency fuel, some groceries.”

Bernard could smell the smoke and stale booze on his old friend’s daughter. He knew she had done some partying, too. He didn’t ask, or speak of it. He listened to her tell him about the people at the office and how the fuel truck would get out there later this morning and there wouldn’t be a gas tank or a house to heat. She said that she could pick up a box of commodities at any time that day. She could have yesterday but didn’t have a ride.

“I’ll pick it up and have it at the hospital for you. They will keep your kids a few days, I bet. How come you never called me? I could have given you a ride.”

“I didn’t have no phone. I just went out to the road and waited and hitched in. Once I was there, I never thought of you, but I could of gone over to the hospital and caught you when you got off.”

If you weren’t drinking, Bernard thought, but he just shrugged.

“Well, I had a day shift for once, lucky thing. I was home because of it. And Morris, he got you out there somehow. And your kids made it, safe.”

Ira’s face was wet. Tears were leaking from her eyes now and her nose was running. It wasn’t the pain from thawing out her hands and feet.

“I’m not a bad mom. I had a few drinks,” she said. “I was gonna…well, I did get some food off Morris’s brother. Then he dropped me off with Morris. I knew there was something wrong.”

“They said it was close,” Bernard said. “Your kids were going hypothermic when they got to my house. Those emergency guys hooked your kids up right away to their warm IVs and got their temperatures regulated. That girl of yours, that Shawnee, she’s a strong one.”

“You got it,” said Ira.

“Something else,” said Bernard.

“What?” said Ira. Now that she was getting warm, now that the blood was swelling painfully in her hands and feet, she fought sleep. She was sinking into it, leaning against the seat-belt strap. Her head lolled down; she jolted herself upward.

“She said that she heard the drum,” Bernard said. “She said the drum told her where to go. It was pitch-black in the woods. My lights were out. She found me anyway.”

“So you were up at night, drumming in the dark, having your own little powwow,” Ira mumbled, dropping into sleep. She began to breathe deep and light.

“No,” said Bernard to himself, after a while. “No, I wasn’t. That drum is still covered up in the corner, where it always sits. I was asleep when they broke my window.”

A hospital is a world apart, running day and night by its own rules. Ira had stayed in the hospital for only a short time when her children were born. Her father had been in the hospital a few weeks but then he died at home. She hadn’t ever stayed overnight with him. So the way things worked at the Indian Health Service hospital was new to her. The first day passed in getting the children settled, in watching them, talking to the doctors, calibrating each step of their recovery. That night, Ira fell asleep on a plastic recliner in her daughters’ room. The chair was slippery and hard but reclined at a good angle. She’d certainly slept in worse places. The next morning, she woke stiff and sore, but that could have been from running through the snowy woods. Shawnee and Alice were in a double room and Alice still had the IV drip with the plastic catheter taped fast to the back of her hand. She was too weak to use the bathroom and the nurses had fixed an overnight diaper onto her, which humiliated her. She wouldn’t speak. She lay very still with her eyes shut, pretending to be unconscious. During the night, Ira had risen every time the nurses had come in to check the children. They used a finger tube to read their respiratory rates and oxygen levels. They checked pulse, temperature, and blood pressure. After she was sure that the nurses were satisfied, she had gone into Apitchi’s room. He had a fever. She had dragged her pillow and blanket in and stayed with him for half the night in a chair identical to the one in her daughters’ room.

Ira knew or was related to some of the nurses who had trained on special IHS scholarships and then come back home. One, her cousin Honey, had always said that she was going to be a nun, but ended up as a nurse. She was a strict Catholic. As Ira helped Honey and the other nurses tend to one and another of her children, they talked to her and got the story. No one blamed her outright. But the Indian Child Welfare was going to conduct an interview with her, no question, and then speak separately with each of her children. The head of that department had scheduled a case worker from ICW to come by the hospital.

Honey brought fresh clothes, and Ira showered in the bare tile bathroom next to Shawnee’s bed. The water washed down black at first, and Ira remembered the soot and it seemed very long ago. She turned the water up as hot as she could stand it. There was a big plastic bottle of all-over body-wash shampoo fixed to the wall of the shower. She used a lot of it, and then stood under the hot dribble like a grateful dog, she thought, just like a grateful animal. The bathroom was full of steam as she dried off with a tiny, thin hand towel. She hadn’t wanted to ask about getting a real bath towel. She skimmed her hair back in a ponytail and checked her purse, but she didn’t put on makeup. Looking plain was good, she thought. She never could look good again. She would never leave her children for a minute.

Once she was clean, it felt like she really lived at the hospital now. She still felt fuzzy—too much had happened. She wished she had a cup of coffee. A woman came into the girls’ room. She carried a briefcase and held a clipboard, and she wore a full-length down coat, mukluks, and St. James Bay woolen mitts. Looking straight at her, Ira’s heart jumped. It was the wife of John, the woman with the neat white scar that cut across her lips. Her name surged into Ira’s mind. “Seraphine!”

“Yes, boozhoo! We’re getting a blizzard sometime today,” she informed Ira. “We’re really lucky it wasn’t yesterday.”

Ira was glad she’d said
we
; it would have been an accusation if she’d said
you
. Seraphine left the room and Ira followed her silently, numb in her thoughts. They went down the hall and entered a little office with a wall of gray shelves and cabinets, stacks of papers and boxes of tongue depressors and rubber gloves. A dead computer and a fake plant were on the desk.

“Let’s just squeeze in here, it’s private,” said Seraphine.

There was a padded desk chair and metal folding chair. Seraphine swept her hand at them both and let Ira choose where to sit. Ira took the metal folding chair.

“Now let’s go over things,” Seraphine said. There was a pen chained to the top of her clipboard. A tribal ID hung from her neck on a bright pink, canvas ribbon. Her dress was stone gray with soft little sage-green flowers on it. Seraphine’s face was extraordinarily beautiful, finely made, a haughty Michif face. Her skin was the pale gold color that white people broil themselves on tanning machines to achieve. John was right, thought Ira, his wife is very good-looking. He had also said that she knew medicines, and Ira wondered if she would act all spiritual. But Seraphine was quietly matter-of-fact.

“First of all,” she said, after she had confirmed Ira’s basic information, “what are you now doing for a living?”

“I sew a lot. Quilts and powwow outfits. And I bead. I had a thousand-dollar men’s fancy regalia burn up with my house,” Ira said, remembering and missing, as she would now for years, something lost in the fire.

“That’s a chancy living.”

“True.”

“I think I saw one of your bead yokes—I know your style.”

“All my dad’s things are gone now, too,” Ira went on, and a strange feeling overtook her momentarily. Those things that had burned were all that her father had left behind in his life. Now there was nothing to remember him by but his grave. “Oh, no,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” Ira touched her face.

“Tell me what happened the day before yesterday,” said Seraphine. “Can you explain why your children were left alone for an extended period? I have to set this down in my report, so take it slow.”

“They weren’t alone,” said Ira, “they were with Shawnee.”

“Shawnee is a minor. The law says you can’t leave your children with a minor overnight. Of course, you’re under tribal jurisdiction, but the judge usually upholds the same standard.”

“I didn’t know it was against the law.”

“Have you done this often?”

“Never, no, maybe once. This was an emergency. I went to the office to get some heating assistance and a food voucher or whatever. You can ask the personnel, Itchy Boyer, some others. I hitched in but I had trouble getting a ride back.”

Seraphine made some notes on her pad of paper, then rested her clipboard on her knees.

“Look,” she said, “I know all about it. John told me.”

Heat flooded Ira’s face. How much was told? What had John said?

“Morris gave me a ride out to my place.”

“And John and you walked to Morris’s place.”

Ira hesitated. “Yeah.”

Seraphine frowned at her paper, then shook her pen to get the ink to flood into the tip.

“Hey,” said Ira suddenly. “I met John at a bar, but he was only interested in getting me to Morris’s place. He gave me money for groceries.”

Ira rubbed her hands together. Her skin was tender.

“Okay,” Seraphine said, writing down some words. “So far your stories match.” She was only joking, and she smiled as she wrote, but Ira felt her throat go dry and scratchy. If Seraphine wrote up a bad report on her, what? Could they take her children? Her breath snagged in her chest. Seraphine kept talking. “So you met John at a bar and he gave you money for groceries and then left you over at Morris’s house.”

Ira nodded. The red cotton placket-front blouse she was wearing, the too large bra, the baggy black pants, and the hospital slippers made her feel poor and beggarly. But I am poor and beggarly, she thought. Everything I have is burnt. She remembered Shawnee’s school pictures. Her breath caught. And now this woman is going to ask me if I had sex to get the money. But I can honestly tell her that I did not, though I would have, but would have doesn’t matter. And Morris can tell her, too.

“Morris knows,” Ira blurted.

“Morris knows what?”

“I’m really tired,” said Ira, wiping her hand across her face. “Can I go back to my kids? I lost my daughter’s school pictures in the fire.”

“I just have a few more questions.”

Ira leaned across the desk, put her head on her fist. “Okay.”

But Seraphine didn’t ask about why John gave her money or why Morris gave her a ride. She was more interested in where Ira thought she might stay while she applied for emergency housing and got on the waiting list for permanent housing.

“I don’t know yet,” said Ira.

“Well, you’ve got to find somewhere,” said Seraphine. “We can put you and your children in the women’s shelter for a month, maybe, starting in a couple of weeks, but before that we’d have to put them in foster care and you, I don’t know…” She touched the scar on her lips.

“I’ll find a place,” Ira said. “Bernard maybe. He might let us stay with him. I don’t know. It’s pretty far out there.”

“That’s a problem.” Seraphine nodded. “You with no transportation. I’m going to ask your daughters some questions now. I need to find out how the fire started.”

And do you need to check my story out, Ira wondered, see if they saw me getting high on drugs or I beat them up or fucked Morris on the living room rug while they were eating breakfast, not that we have a rug anymore, or a living room, and the whole thing that started it was there was only breakfast, only oatmeal.

“Okay,” said Ira. “You go talk to them.”

Ira went back to Apitchi’s room. He was hot, limp, in a very deep sleep. He didn’t stir when Ira kissed his forehead. Ira peered closely at him. Then she pushed the nurse’s call button and went out the door.

“There’s something wrong with him,” she said to a nurse. “Come in here. Please. You’ve got to get the doctor to look at him. There’s something wrong.”

“We’ve got a chest X ray ordered,” said the nurse, brushing past her, “and we’ll probably get him on IV antibiotics. The doctor was here while you were gone and they think he maybe has pneumonia. It’s probably pneumonia,” the nurse said, as though that was reassuring. “Do you want to help me,” she said, seeing that Ira looked stunned, eyes filling with tears, “do you want to help me get him ready for the X ray?”

Ira nodded and tucked his blanket in around his feet.

“We can wheel him out,” the nurse said.

Ira kept her hand on Apitchi’s head as they made their way down the hall. His hair was rough, thick, and matted. They had given him a sponge bath but there was still soot behind his ears, she saw, and a black line at his hairline, and soot in the corners of his nose. He didn’t smell like ash, though, she thought, bending over to kiss him again as the elevator took them down. He smelled like a little boy. He was named Apitchi for the robin that made its nest just over the door and raised its babies the summer she was pregnant. Alice was named for her mother and Shawnee for the prophet. Ira’s father had been religious, he had named them with spirit names, too, and he had brought Ira back from the Cities when her husband left her. He had helped her obtain a legal divorce and he had given them all of his veteran’s pension money and his social security.

They went down to the X-ray room. Ira had to stand behind a lead shield. Apitchi was shrinking, she thought, into his sleep. But the nurse assured her that she’d seen plenty of children with pneumonia and every one of them had gotten well.

Once Apitchi was settled back in his room and got his antibiotics, Ira thought she’d better go back and see the girls. Shawnee was sitting up in bed when Ira entered the room. Her hands were wound in soft clubs of gauze and she was trying to work the remote control on the television. The TV was suspended between the girls, opposite them on the wall.

“Here,” said Ira, taking the remote control, “what do you want?”

Shawnee looked fixedly at the screen and shrugged.

“Alice?” Ira was carefully pressing channels.

Alice frowned at the television. They let their mother flip through the channels, twice over. Finally Alice raised her arm, the one without the IV. “I want that one.”

“Okay.” Ira put down the remote control and sat next to Shawnee, but Shawnee said, “Mom, could you get off the bed? I need to lay down.” Ira got up and helped arrange the covers over her. Shawnee’s feet were bandaged, too.

“How do they feel?” said Ira.

“Bad,” said Shawnee.

“Can I do anything?”

Shawnee stared briefly at her mother, then looked away. It seemed to Shawnee that she had been on a long trip, that she had gone somewhere far away and her mother was left behind. Her mother was back in a place where nothing had happened to Shawnee, but in truth everything had happened. She had been to the edge of life. Apitchi and Alice had gone there too. Shawnee had dragged her brother and her sister back. She hadn’t allowed them to die. Or herself, either. Now that she was back on this earth, she was lonely. She wanted someone to say to her,
Shawnee, you saved them
. Not to look at her with eyes that said,
You burnt the house down
.

Ira put her hand out to stroke Shawnee’s hair, but Shawnee jerked her head away from her mother’s touch without taking her eyes from the television screen. Ira sat down and put her hands in her lap and pretended to watch a man coaxing an alligator from its underwater den. She was wondering if Seraphine had told her children something that set their minds against her, or if they were mad at all, but maybe just surprised to be in a hospital. She thought that she should talk to Shawnee and Alice about what had happened.
I should find out, I should know, I am their mother
, she thought. But at the same time she dreaded knowing any details because all of it, every bit, was her fault. She had put her children in that danger, she had left them, and knowing more about what they had suffered could only make her feel worse. It reflected her failure to protect them. Also, she had a bad instinct. It was growing in her. Ira was afraid that at some point, when she was very tired maybe, she would say to Shawnee,
How the fuck could you have burnt down the house? Our only place to live? All we own? Gone? How the fuck?
Ira was so afraid of blurting this out that she got up suddenly, and left the room.

She sat with Apitchi until his fever let go, his skin cooled a little, and he no longer frowned in his sleep. When she returned to the girls, a nurse was giving them extra milk, juice, pudding, crackers, and they were eating every bit. It was still an hour before the lunch trays would come. Ira was hungry. Yesterday there had been an extra tray sent to the floor and one of the nurses had brought it to her. So she’d had an entire dinner—turkey, gravy, beans, mashed potatoes, even a coffee. She had eaten every scrap on that tray. But there had not been an extra breakfast this morning. Ira was hoping there would be an extra tray at lunch again, and she did not want to leave the floor in case she might miss it. But she also wanted to find out how Morris was.