The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich Read Free Book Online Page B

question, and laughed again until they laughed all afternoon and it was time to go.
    Sugar Point
    Asin showed his ten fingers twice and told the boys only that long ago their people, the Anishinaabe, had turned back a horde of soldiers. Nobody intended for the fight to get so out of hand. But it had! It had! Asin twisted his fingers together. How he wished he were a Pillager!
    Those warriors of the Pillager hid among the trees when the soldiers marched in to take their leaders prisoner.
    Nobody intended it to start, they say. A boy stacked their rifles. One went off!
    Asin made an explosive sound and raised an imaginary Winchester. He shot and shot, pulling back at each recoil.
    One soldier down, another two. A wound to their head man and then another. He is killed. We don’t attack them—just kill the ones who stick their heads up. We could have killed them all! Asin’s face worked. We could have killed them all. But because we showed our power, they brought us food and blankets. They made us more promises. We were not punished because they knew we were in the right. On that day, the only day we shot the whiteman, we won. We should do it again.
    Warriors
    The boys did every chore after that as warriors. If they were sent out to net fish, they worked as army scouts. The fish were the enemy. They netted and killed as many of the warrior fish as they could. The boys carried on their victory celebration far out on the lake, then came to shore and gutted all their enemies and put them up on drying racks.
    They snared rabbits, hunted muskrats, gophers, any animal, with ferocity of purpose. They pestered Asin and Bagakaapi about warrior ways, learned that a war party was signaled to assemble by a deadly symbolic red glove. They carefully sewed one of tanned deerhide, dyed it with mashed cranberries, stuffed it with sage and stolen pipe tobacco. They kept it hidden in their blankets. Each brother kept the red glove until he wanted to declare a war party, then it was sent to the others in turn and the time was set for them to convene. Sometimes they attacked fallen timber, reduced their enemy to stove lengths and kindling. Surprised, their mothers praised them. They gloated proudly. Peace, the only one of the children who had ever actually waged war on a whiteman, thought her brothers were ridiculous.
    Peace Roy
    She had authority, though she was shy. Her eyes quickened with understanding, and she moved with deliberation. She was meticulous. Her smile flashed ironically, her eyebrows lifted in amusement, but she rarely spoke. She was guarded because, like her father, she was emotional. She was precious because she was the only daughter. Her hands liked to stack, smooth, fold, and slice. Her brain counted everything her hands touched. Again, like her father. Her grandmother and namesake had given Peace a few of her freckles. A shade darker than her skin, they dusted her nose and cheekbones. They were truly visible only when she was angry or upset. When she laughed, as she often did at the absurd things her brothers did, her laugh was soft and breathy. Her brothers felt like they were being tickled with a brushy wand of grass.
    Peace was the first Indian to work in a bank. She cleaned the floors.
    Later, much later, she became a teller and then a manager. Indian people came to the bank just to look at her and see for themselves that one of them knew how to handle the whiteman’s white metal, zhooniyaa. It was this stuff, this material of no possible use, that their parents and grandparents had been forced to admit into their lives. Americans seemed glad to perish over pitiless coin and paper, which now controlled their destinies but seemed, still, in its essence a symptom of madness.
    Peace began cleaning floors at the bank when she was twelve. She got out the mop and bucket after everyone but her father had left the building. When she was done, Augustus taught her how the bank worked. When they went home, she was supposed to pass