Two days later, they entered from deep wilderness a town. Ojibwe bark houses, a hundred or more, were set up along the bends of a river. Along a street of beaten snow several wooden houses were neatly rooted in a dreamlike row. They were so like the houses Wolfred had left behind out east, that, for a disoriented moment, he believed they had traversed the Great Lakes. He thought he was in home country, and walked up to the door of the largest house. His knock was answered, but not until he explained himself in English did the young woman who answered recognize him as a whiteman.
She and her family, missionaries, brought the pair into a warm kitchen. They were given water and rags to wash with, and then a tasteless porridge of boiled wild rice. They were allowed to sleep with blankets, on the floor behind the woodstove. The dog, left outside, sniffed the missionaries’ dog and followed it to the barn, where the two coupled in the steam of the cow’s great body. The next morning, speaking earnestly to the girl, whose clean face was too beautiful to look at, Wolfred asked if she would marry him.
When you grow up, he said.
She smiled and nodded.
He asked her name.
She laughed, not wanting him to own her, and drew a flower.
The missionary was sending a few young Ojibwe to a Presbyterian boarding school that had recently been established for Indians only. It was located out in territory that had become the state of Michigan, and the girl could travel there, too, if she wanted to become educated. Only, as she had no family, she would become indentured to the place. Although she did not understand what that meant, she agreed to it.
At the school, everything was taken from her. Losing her mother’s drum was like losing Mink all over again. At night, she asked the drum to fly back to her. But it never did. She soon learned how to fall asleep. Or let the part of myself they call hateful fall asleep, she thought. But it never did. Her whole being was Anishinaabe. She was Illusion. She was Mirage. Ombanitemagad. Or what they called her now—Indian. As in, Do not speak Indian, when she had been speaking her own language. It was hard to divide off parts of herself and let them go. At night, she flew up through the ceiling and soared as she had been taught. She stored pieces of her being in the tops of the trees. She’d retrieve them later, when the bells stopped. But the bells would never stop. There were so many bells. Her head ached, at first, because of the bells. My thoughts are all tangled up, she said out loud to herself, Inbiimiskwendam. However, there was very little time to consider what was happening.
The other children smelled like old people, but she got used to it. Soon she did too. Her wool dress and corset pinched, and the woolen underwear itched like mad. Her feet were shot through with pain, and stank from sweating in hard leather. Her hands chapped. She was always cold, but she was already used to that. The food was usually salt pork and cabbage, which cooked foul and turned the dormitory rank with farts, as did the milk they were forced to drink. But no matter how raw, or rotten, or strange, she must eat, so she got used to it. It was hard to understand the teachers or say what she needed in their language, but she learned. The crying up and down the rows of beds at night kept her awake, but soon she cried and farted herself to sleep with everyone else.
She missed her mother, even though Mink had sold her. She missed Wolfred, the only person left for her. She kept his finely written letters. When she was weak or tired, she read them over. That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things—forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. Sometimes the school seemed like a dream that could not be true, and she fell asleep hoping to wake in another world.
She never got used to the bells, but she got used to other children coming and going. They died of measles, scarlet fever, flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that did not have a name. But she was already accustomed to everybody around her dying. Once, she got a fever and thought that she would also die. But in the night her pale-blue spirit came, sat on the bed, spoke to her kindly, placed her soul back into her body, and told her that she would live.
Nobody got drunk. Nobody slashed her mother’s face and nose, ruining her. Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held your foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth. Another good thing she thought of while the other children wept was that the journey to the school had been arduous and far. Much too far for a head to roll.