It is late, probably two or three. Linda catches me awake, staring at the ceiling fan as it traces endless circles in the dark. This happens often. When she first moved in I told her it was the noise of the cars outside our apartment that kept me from sleeping. We live above the Chippewa Bar in Crivits.
“You should take something, you know, like a pill,” she had said. She doesn’t say anything about it anymore, just turns onto her side, facing me, and sighs. I think she is trying to see what it is I am looking at reflected in my eye. So finally tonight I tell her the truth, “There are things that keep me up at night which I cannot tell you.” She turns onto her other side, and I think to myself, “I am twenty four. I am too young to have secrets, too old to have dreamcatchers.”
I did not always have trouble with sleep. When I was a child living with my mother on the Potawatomi reservation up north of Crivits, I slept well. We were not Potawatomi, we were Ojibwa, but we lived on the Patowatomi reservation because there is no Ojibwa reservation. But I slept well, and every morning I woke up early and ran into my mother’s room to sing the sun awake. We lived in a small square house, and my mother’s bedroom had a window on the east wall. She had her bed facing the window so that every morning we could watch the sun come up together. I crept into her room when it was still filled with twilight and the Earth outside was black and blue. I don’t know if she was already awake or if she did not sleep at all, but when I came in she was always sitting up with the pillows stacked tall behind her, waiting for me to come to her so the day could begin. I climbed onto the bed and put my head on her belly facing the window. Through her thick skin I heard the noises, the soft, padded squealing of the restless morning stomach, and once, when I was very young, she told me that they were voices inside her singing the sun awake.
Linda’s stomach does not make noises. But then again, she is not Ojibwa. She is Dutch. Tonight I think about the morning voices. I tell her the chocolate keeps the voices in her belly fat and tired, and they sleep in. She looks at me funny, says, “I don’t like chocolate.” I know this, and when she sees I am not serious she makes playful jabs at my side. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep so that I do not keep her awake.
We keep a dreamcatcher nailed to the headboard behind our bed. It was her idea.
“I wanna have more Indian stuff around,” she had said. She was talking about decorations. I don’t understand decorations. I would rather have more windows.
I asked my mother once where the voices in her belly came from. It was a Saturday morning in January, and the sun glistened off the icy tree limbs in the distance.
“They are my children,” she said.
“I am your child.”
“You are my baby. You are my miracle baby. You are special.”
“Where do the voices come from? How are they still inside you?”
My mother pressed my head tighter to her belly. Her calloused fingers ran through my hair in calm, even strokes.
“Sometimes children don’t want to leave their mothers. Sometimes they are afraid of the world, so they stay inside to keep old women like me company. There was a time when babies traveled from the circle of the womb to the circle of a wigwam, and were raised in the great hoop of the Ojibwa nation. It was right that way, and the children were happy. Then when the whites came, the children were born in square beds in square rooms, placed in square cradles and raised in square houses. Stubborn old women like me don’t have many babies anymore. Most of my children did not want to leave the circle world for the square. You were the only one brave enough. That is why you are my miracle baby.”
I get out of bed slowly so as not to wake Linda. My feet stick to the floor of the small kitchen. I bend the ice cube tray and put a couple in a glass and pour some water. The water here is no good. It is too sweet and in the morning I cannot drink it. When I met Linda she was telling a tall man in a grey suit about how good the water is here.
“This area is full of spring-fed lakes and the well water is like nothing you can get in the city. It’s real natural. Just ask this man.”
I was sitting by myself at the bar waiting for my cheeseburger and they were sitting at a booth close by. I could not help but hear her desperately trying to sell the Burns farm. She is a real estate agent.
“The water here tastes like piss because the pumps are too close to the landfill,” I said.
The tall man wrinkled his forehead.
“Really?”
I looked at Linda and thought she was pretty. Her blonde hair was clean and straight, and the cut of her suit made her look sharp and powerful, like a man but pretty. She had rectangular black glasses which made her look smart and organized.
“No, I’m just kidding you. I came here for the water. Everyone knows it’s good.”
The man’s forehead unwrinkled and he smiled a small smile.
“Oh, good.”
After the man had left she sat next to me.
“Thanks for the help. I don’t know how much good it did, but thanks,” she said.
Maybe she really likes the water. I still think it tastes like piss, but it is what we have. I place the glass in the sink and go back to bed.
My mother died when I was nineteen years old. It was then that I left the reservation. I did not know where to go, so I stopped in Crivits for the night, not expecting to stay. I paid for a room above the bar with the money my mother kept in a coffee can in the cupboard. Then I met Linda and here I am now, twenty-four, living a life I thought I never would with someone who does not understand me. But the world is a scary place, and I guess I wanted a new home so badly that I would have traded anything for it.
She bought the dreamcatcher three weeks ago. There is a man in Middle Inlet who sells old things. After a day working at the bar I came up and found Linda sitting Indian style on the bed with the dreamcatcher nailed to the headboard behind her and a big smile on her face. It was made of a pine bough bent into a hoop and coated with birch bark. Strips of rawhide fastened a net of twine to the hoop and there was a feather hanging from a beaded strip below it. It is not Ojibwa, and I was relieved because of this.
“It’s a real one”, she said, sticking her smiling head toward me like a turtle so that the skin on her neck stretched. “The man I bought it from said it was like a hundred years old or something. It cost me a fortune, but nothing is too good for you, my big strong Indian man.”
The sun is rising now. Linda is awake and I rest my head on her belly. There are no voices inside her, but as the glowing disk of the sun rises above the tree line I can hear in my head the songs which my brothers and sisters sang so many years ago. I will never tell Linda that I stay awake because I do not want to dream of my mother, of her weeping in a bed of broken hoops beneath the Earth, which Linda has endlessly plotted and traced with property lines. I will not tell her because it is not her fault. It was my choice, my trade. I just close my eyes, curl up, and feel the gentle liquid warmth of the sun all around me as we sing awake another day.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Born in Wilmette, Illinois, Bart Scagnelli was educated at the University of Iowa and now lives and works in Chicago. This story is part of a collection titled Left Foot Creek and Other Stories. Feel free to contact him at bart.scagnelli@gmail.com.
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