Charity Read online

  Dorcas happily bagged the fish and took it up to her work bench behind the cabin to clean it.

  Gustie turned to Jordis, “What are those scars on her arms?”

  “Very old.” Jordis poured all her attention on her fishing line.

  Gustie pressed her. “Did something happen to her as a child?”

  “She was young, but not a child. She did it herself.”

  “Hurt herself like that? To leave scars like that?” Gustie was shocked.

  “My ancestors thought that scars on the outside healed faster than those left to fester on the inside.”

  “What happened?”

  “Her first husband and children all died. Small pox. Her grieving was to cut herself. To feel the pain. To bleed. To make a flesh sacrifice. Many ways to look at it. As the wounds healed outside, they also healed inside. That was one of the theories, anyway. The spear point in her bundle—she did it with that.”

  “Do your people still do that? Self-inflict wounds like that?”

  “Some maybe. Not so many since the white man’s religion has taken over. If they do it, they do it in secret so I do not know. They have taken away the old ways. Many do not even remember them. I only know things that she has told me. She remembers a great deal.”

  “She doesn’t talk much, except recently, since you’ve been here. Is she always like this with you?”

  “No. I have noticed it, too. She is very...” Jordis was interrupted in mid-sentence by a tug on her pole. She pulled in another good sized walleye—all they needed for their supper. They drew in their lines and went up to the cabin.

  Twilight hovered over the lake a long time before giving way to darkness. The verdancy of trees and grasses slowly faded into shades of gray, indigo and black. A lone cricket began tentatively its scratchy evening song.

  Dorcas had been gone all day, perhaps gathering plants, perhaps visiting her sacred place.

  Gustie had awakened from a late afternoon nap to an empty cabin in which darkness was already gathering in the corners. She had wondered where Jordis was when a sound down by the lake, like the snapping of a branch, had called her outside. In bare feet, Gustie picked her way over the rocks and tufts of weeds down to the water’s edge. Jordis, her back to the shore, stood hip deep in the water. She pulled off her shirt and draped it on an overhanging branch with the rest of her clothing, revealing her broad bare back where the shadows of the leaves played. Rushes, quickened by breeze and the stirrings of the water, swayed like an echo against the curves of Jordis’s body.

  Gustie walked into the water, still making no sound, fascinated by the pattern that seemed to move on Jordis’s back as she waded farther out into the darkening water. Strange—those leaf shadows dancing across Jordis’s flesh. She was too far out from the trees now, and Gustie realized there was not enough light to cast a shadow on Jordis’s dark skin. Something was there. The night she had seen Dorcas rubbing something on Jordis’s back in the lamp-light suddenly came back to her.

  Jordis turned and saw Gustie staring at her. “If you are coming for a swim, you had better take your clothes off.”

  Gustie looked down at the water already above her ankles and soaking rapidly up the fabric of her skirt. She unbuttoned the skirt, pulled it over her head and tossed it on the branch next to Jordis’s things. She did the same with her blouse and her shift. She tried stepping out of her bloomers without getting them wet and maintaining some modesty but was unsuccessful. She almost lost her balance on the slippery stones and got them soaked anyway. She thought she caught a look of amusement on Jordis’s face. Gustie took a step forward, and another. Crow Kills was thrillingly cold as it rose up to her knees, her thighs, and when it reached her belly she sucked in a breath, panted a little, and continued to wade out. Her feet tingled as they pressed into the mossy lake bed. She kept wading till she was on a level with Jordis in waist-high water.

  Gustie and Jordis were the same height, though built quite differently. Gustie—slender, with long arms and legs, small wrists, delicate bones. Jordis—broad, muscular. Her hips and breasts full. Gustie thought there was a shining about Jordis—her skin, her hair, her eyes. Always a shining. Gustie often felt pale and drab next to her, and old, but at that moment she was not conscious of herself at all. She put her left hand lightly on Jordis’s left shoulder and gently turned her around so she could look at her back. She felt Jordis stiffen but not resist.

  Gustie shuddered and whispered, “Oh, my Christ.”

  Ridges of white flesh, like twisted ropes, formed a web of scar tissue that crisscrossed, biting into the smooth brown skin. What had looked like a shadow of dancing leaves was a hideous caricature of the leaf itself.

  Gustie cupped her right hand, dipped into Crow Kills, and poured water slowly over Jordis’s back. Jordis arched slightly then relaxed.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Sometimes. It gets tight and pulls. Sometimes it itches. Sometimes it has no feeling at all. Water and Grandmother’s ointment help. She says it is not as bad as it used to be. It was not treated properly...at first.”

  Gustie’s left hand remained on Jordis’s shoulder. With baptismal motions she continued to bathe Jordis’s back.

  “How did you get this?”

  Jordis took a deep breath. The moon rose over Crow Kills and let fall a trembling beam across the water. “I was nine years old and my brother George was twelve before we ever went to school.

  “Our mother kept us hidden, but she could not hide us forever. The Agency got wind of us, and we were picked up and hauled off to an Indian school run by a minister and his wife. A few other teachers. I did not even mind going. I looked at it as an adventure. I had no idea of what was to happen except they told me I was going to learn to read books, and I would come back to my mother when it was over. My brother was wild with fear. He was older—maybe knew more of what we were in for. I do not know. He turned sullen and would not speak at all. A little kindness might have helped him get over it, but at the school, they saw his long hair and before they even spoke to us, or fed us, or let us rest, they had to have it off. His beautiful long hair. ‘Here, little boys do not have long hair,’ they said. ‘Only little girls have long hair. You do not want to be like a little girl, do you?’

  “They humiliated him. Then, in front of all of us, they cut off his hair.” Jordis paused and Gustie continued pouring water over her shoulders, across the top of her back and the back of her neck. Jordis relaxed and put her head down as Gustie massaged the lake water into the ridged flesh. She kept her head down and went on softly, “That night, in the middle of the night, I got out of bed and found the kitchen. I took a knife, and I cut my hair off, too. When the matron saw me in the morning she started howling and pulled me in to see Everude. He was the preacher. I will never forget him. An ugly red-faced man always in a black suit.

  “It was not that they cared about my hair. Some of the girls had their hair cut when they came to the school. I guess they had lice. I had no lice! They did not care about my hair—what made them mad was that I defied them. I did something on my own. An Indian! A girl. Those teachers and preachers...you know, they loved Indians all right as long as we were docile—like dogs—and showed we wanted to be like them. If we showed any resistance, they were no better than the soldiers who poured lead and whiskey into our fathers and grandfathers.

  “I decided...I was only nine, but I decided, if they made my brother, a Dakotah, cut his hair, I, his sister, a Dakotah, would cut mine too. They did not understand it. My brother is dead. He wasn’t made for changes. It is easier for the women. The changes. The men could not do it. The whiskey. Always the whiskey.”

  “It’s not only your people who have trouble with whiskey,” Gustie said as she kept the water flowing on Jordis’s back.

  “Maybe not, but like everything else, it falls harder on us. I have kept it short. For my brother. I will always kee
p it short. For my brother’s hair will never grow. So my hair will never grow long.”

  Gustie continued to bathe the outraged flesh of Jordis’s back.

  “They starved me all that day. The next day I started classes. I think I enraged Everude even more by being good at my studies. I learned English. We had to. They hit us if they heard us speaking Dakotah. I learned to read, and I read everything and made a game of passing their tests. And every time my hair grew out a little, I hacked it off. After I had been there about a year, Everude had had enough. He said I would be ‘severely punished’ if I ever did it again. Cut my hair. My hair had become the most important thing in his life, and in mine! He was a mean man, and I had no doubt that I would get a beating. Beatings were common there. Usually a few straps in the horse shed with a belt. I knew I could take it. The next morning I showed up at breakfast with my hair hacked off down to the roots. I was some sight!” Jordis chuckled and turned slightly, leaning into Gustie, balancing herself by resting her hand in the curve of Gustie’s left arm. Gustie continued to massage the cool water into her back.

  “I did not even get all the way through my bowl of oatmeal and piece of dry bread before he yanked me from the table and dragged me to the shed. He made me take my dress off and lie face down on the floor. He beat me with a horsewhip or some kind of whip.” Jordis’s hand tightened on Gustie’s arm. Gustie stopped her massage and held her in the lightest embrace. Jordis spoke her next words slowly, between her teeth. “I did not give him the satisfaction of making a sound.”

  She paused and then went on. “He whipped me until I fainted and left me on the floor of the shed. Later, one of the teachers and the cook carried me to my bed and dressed the wound. He would not let them call for a doctor. It did not heal, and I got very sick. They thought I was dying and somehow the cook got word out to Grandmother. Why they were so afraid I would die, I don’t know. The graveyard out behind the school was full of dead Indian children. Grandmother came at night to see to me. The students and the teachers kept quiet about it. Only Everude did not know she was with me almost every night. Obed Everude. He collapsed one day. They called in a doctor for him. Did not do any good. Something wrong with his heart. I never saw him again after the beating.”

  “You must hate him.”

  “Not for what he did to me. What he did to my brother. George was a good boy. Would have been a good man. They broke him. Taught him just enough so he could read the label on a whiskey bottle. After two years, he ran away from the school, started drinking and got into a knife fight in Wheat Lake. He was killed. He was only fifteen.

  “I guess I knew what was going to happen to him as soon as I saw his face that day they cut his hair. That is why I fought so hard. I thought if I fought, if I resisted, it would carry us both through somehow. I studied too. I knew that to really fight them I would have to know what they knew.”

  Jordis lifted her head and said abruptly, “Let us swim,” and ducked under the water. Her movement was so fast Gustie was left standing in an embrace with the darkness. She looked around for Jordis and became alarmed when she did not surface immediately. Finally, Jordis’s head emerged. She was treading water far out in Crow Kills.

  “You are still there,” Jordis laughed and flashed a wide smile that caught a moonbeam, making her dazzle, as she had that first day on her pale horse in the sun.

  “I don’t swim.”

  “I will have to teach you this, too. If you are going to live by a lake, you must swim.”

  Am I going to live by a lake? Gustie thought. Her head was swimming, even if she wasn’t.

  Gustie floated and splashed about. It was childish, since she couldn’t go any deeper, but she didn’t care. Occasionally she paused to watch Jordis swimming in deep water. Then Jordis disappeared only to bob up again at her side, pushing back her black hair that streamed water over her face.

  Gustie looked with dismay at her still wet clothing hanging limply from the tree-limbs above them. Jordis saw the look, and touched her lightly on the arm. “Stay here.”

  Gustie stood obediently, watching Jordis stride out of the water and slip up the bank into the cabin. She returned with a blanket wrapped about her under her arms, and another she held open for Gustie.

  She comes to me in the water. Walking slowly into the water she comes to me. Like a frightened, brave white bird she comes to me. She touches me, and I give her my story. She could have anything of me. All my stories. The ones told, those still only dreamed. Ahh. All the dreamed stories are hers.

  Gustie lifted her head from the nightgown and shook her head to clear it from thoughts of the past. She hesitated and then, with a feeling of protective tenderness, removed the gown from its hanger and folded it carefully. She opened the trunk that rested at the foot of her bed. She did not often look into this trunk. It was full of smallish dresses in light pretty colors, some books of poetry, one of which lay open. Gustie turned it over and read from the last lines of the poem on the open page:

  She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace.

  She did not finish it but turned the book over, still open, and face down again upon the clothing. She laid the folded gown over the book and closed the trunk.

  She was afraid to wait any longer. It was only a matter of time before he found her little house. She left and did what she had never before felt she had to do out here in this Dakota land—she locked her door.

  Lena stood before the mirror. The blue dress she was wearing had been hanging clean and pressed in her closet. She’d ironed it again that morning. Four years ago she made the dress from the best piece of cloth she could afford. Why spend all that time working on something if it’s not going to be good to start with? So she bought the best, and took two weeks to sew it, borrowing her mother-in-law’s sewing machine for the long seams and doing the rest by hand in tiny, even stitches. The bodice was softly gathered at the waist. She had inset a narrow lace collar not called for in the pattern. She never followed a pattern except in the basic form of a garment. All the finishing touches were her own—a few more gathers for softness, an added bit of lace at the neck or sleeve, a sash or a belt to dress a thing up or down. One dress would last her for years and never look exactly the same twice.

  That morning she had tried a small fabric rose at the neck, but it was too much. “This is no party I’m going to,” she muttered and threw the rose on the bed. Nevertheless, she was determined not to look somber, either, as if she had anything to be ashamed of, or anything to fear. She was a respectable woman and was going to look respectable, and that was that. She settled on the dress, plain, with no flowers, a simple belt in matching fabric. The blue dress brought out the cornflower in her eyes and highlighted the natural rose of her cheeks. I still have my complexion, she thought. Staying out of the sun does it. Not like Ma Kaiser, nasty old brown thing.

  She held her handkerchief in one hand and her pocketbook in the other, then laid them down to run a comb through her hair even though it was already perfect, lying in auburn waves about her head and pinned into a loose bun at her neck. She picked up the handkerchief, a plain white linen square around which she had crocheted a scalloped edge, tucked the purse once more under her arm, and approved her reflection. She went into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. It was seven-thirty in the morning. The hearing was not until ten o’clock.

  She pulled her dress smoothly about her before she sat. Her Bible lay on the kitchen table and she opened it to the Beatitudes.

  Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth...

  She read the eleven verses in the book of Matthew, and read them again, trying in vain to dull the edges of her anxiety. She turned to her favorite Psalm, which never failed to comfort:

  I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

  Divine assurances helped but did not completely alleviate her desolation, her longing for human comfort. Where was everybody? No one from Will’s family had called upon her. No one from her own. She had not personally notified her family, but news traveled like prairie fire in Stone County. Gustie was the only one she could count on, and now she had disappeared again. Where in Sam Hill did she go all the time? She peered through her curtains at the overcast sky. She really didn’t need gloomy weather on top of everything. The Kaisers’ excuse would be Pa’s funeral preparations. She didn’t know how she was going to get through this day. Still clutching her handkerchief, she rubbed the space between her brows.

  There was a light rapping at her door.

  Now who in blazes? Before she could get up, the door opened and Tori walked in, in his baggy farm clothes, smelling like he hadn’t scraped his shoes well enough after morning chores in Peterson’s barn. She put her arms around him crying, “Oh, Tori. I’m so glad. So glad you’re here. Here take your shoes off. Leave them on the porch. I’ll clean them for you later.”

  “Mr. Peterson give me the day off. Come to go with you.” Torvald was twenty-two, with mouse brown hair and fair skin. He was small and looked too delicate for farm work. Lena worried about him all the time.