A Good High Place

Chapter 21

c H A P T e R T W e N T Y - o N e But at least Kachina had known who she was then. She pulls her gray wool sweater over her head and Topini’s red one over hers. They will walk from Bass lake into town and see if they can find some wax or an appropriate oil at the hardware store to refinish the old table. Nothing with any tint to it. Kachina wants the natural color of the wood to show through. And nothing with any lacquer, either. The wood must breathe as it was intended to. Kachina pulls a blue mottled tin pot from the highest shelf. There’s ten dollars and some odd change in the bottom. Kachina doesn’t get paid much for teaching the children in Peshabetown, but it’s enough. Sometimes people want to pay her for her touch, and occasionally she will accept a gift of chickens, eggs, and milk, even money, for her services as a medicine woman. Sometimes they bring bread, potatoes, even some beef. But should she charge a fee, Kachina knows the touch will desert her. Many white women visit with a variety of ailments and the belief that she can somehow fill the emptiness in their hearts. Kachina and Topini don’t move fast these days, but they get where they need to. They walk toward the village, along the banks of elk River. The stumps look alive. lonesome, shadowy figures in the late afternoon light. Kachina feels that stiffness in her left hand again. So she flexes and kneads it as they walk along. The stiffness gets her thinking about the day they lost Topini. How rigid she had been back then. Because of the hate. izusa was right about hate wearing away the part of you that was good. KAcHiNA cAN HeAR A GeNTle rain falling on the tin roof. The roof had once been made of cedar bark and was much quieter, though undependable. She prefers the racket. She has growing pains in her young legs and she rubs them up and down, but the insistent throbbingpullsherfromsleep.Sheisn’tsurehowlongit’sbeenraining. long enough for water to seep into the corners of the shelter and drip onto her feet. She can see izusa and oneida asleep at the far side of the dwelling, resting on tanned deer hides thrown over layers of cedar boughs, which in turn cover handwoven reed mats. Her father should have had a place on the other side of the structure, but her father, that short distance runner, is long gone. like lightning. Hototo is gone as well. Kachina’s flow had begun late the day before, the day they had returned from the white church. “Stay here,” izusa had told her. “Topini doesn’t like it when you’re gone. The others won’t know.” They’d know eventually, Kachina reasons. And there are matters of contagion to consider. To compensate, Kachina has kept her hair braided. Two braids means you walk in balance with Mother earth and The day. one braid means you walk in the very center of that balance. one braid always feels best to her. Kachina feels the first signs of fall seeping through the wool blankets. cold or not, Kachina often wakes with a feeling of dread. A result of the conviction that she must keep her people from disappearing. Not in a literal sense, though that seems a possibility. Kachina thinks it would be more tragic if the Anishinaabek were to 106 L.E. Kimball A GOOD HIGH PLACE 107 be here and be gone at the same time. Kachina knows this is a great want. Which is why she knows she can have only one want. She has not tried to explain this to Monato. instead she’d touched his hard body one night down by Jansen’s corners, behind the old grain elevator. Her pulse had quickened as his hands moved over her bare breasts and down between her thighs. She’d pulled him on top of her,felthisquickreleaseinsideher.Buthisseedhadn’ttakenrootinher heart. She never would have let it happen if she’d thought there was a chance of that. She hadn’t repeated the act and she’d let him assume they would be married, but she had known all along it was impossible. She thinks of Keane. And about love. Years later, she won’t really...