Free The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich Page A

my arms, take up the whole bed, close my eyes. I try very hard to put Krahe out of my mind, and after a while I succeed in drifting into a delicious state of half-sleep. I love to fall through that transition alone, to feel the gentle prickling of my body lifting off, the fluttering of my mind as it releases images, talk, pictures that begin to lose reference until they take on a dream irrationality. Tonight there is the brilliance of Krahe’s white shoes and socks methodically striding back and forth across the dead lawn. There is my mother’s earnest and disquieting betrayal. Chocolate steaming in figured cups. The drum gradually falling asleep beneath its quilt. Then, as I am tumbling toward sleep through the brain’s dark, I see a tarp of battered canvas, frail seedlings, a painted bear and the white arrow at its heart.
     
    I am much more familiar with the Sweet Mansion and its furnishings than are most who come to dine. The Greek Revival mansion was built by the New Hampshire mill owner Henry Sweet, who worked hundreds and maybe thousands of young women into early graves and created of their dead-hearted misery and the electricity generated by the millrace he owned an illuminated park for his children. The glow cast from the high plateau of Goodie Hill, the setting for the mansion and its grounds, could be seen far into Vermont and was used to guide aircraft down the Connecticut River well into the 1940s. The children kept up the property into the second half of the last century and then sold the place to a developer. Elsie handled the estate sale, which was surprisingly paltry as all of the furnishings and heirlooms had long been divided up among the many Sweet descendants. The developer speculated by building a dozen houses on five-acre lots on one end of the property, and used the proceeds to restore the mansion and open it as a restaurant, which was his dream. My familiarity with the contents of the place is the result of having scouted out and sold most of the nineteenth-century (we try not to use the word Victorian) furnishings to the owner. Almost none of them are original to the mansion, but they look as though they are because we took such care in finding good pieces from that period.
    I am sitting across from Kurt, knees under a starched white cloth, in one of a set of Belter tiger-oak rococo chairs, in a corner of what was once a formal parlor. He is dressed as himself once again, a rumpled shirt of some rugged mixture of silks and cottons, a beautiful tweed jacket, jeans worn in for real, not distressed. He runs his fingers across the top of his head. His hair is longer than he usually allows it, and I notice as I always do when it is a bit too long that he has really got quite beautiful hair, thick and springy, with a wave to it. He is one of those men who’d turn heads if he let his hair grow out, become a streaked mane. Maybe he’d be insufferable, I think, maybe he’d never even look at me. Then I’d be safe.
    “I can’t stop thinking about Kendra today,” he says. “I feel heavy.”
    “What do you think of when you think of Kendra?” I ask.
    His face freezes to a careful mask, but after a little while he smiles and his features soften. “You know what I think of? How she traced her hand and drew a beak on her thumb and made a turkey. You know, the turkey hands they make in kindergarten at Thanksgiving. She made one for me last year as a kind of joke.”
    “A sweet joke.”
    “I know.” His hand on the water glass trembles a little. He takes a drink. “What do you do with it,” he says. “What do you do?”
    There is nothing to say to that.
    “She was lucky to have you as her father. You were a good father” is all I finally come up with.
    “Do you think so?” He searches my face, his eyes bleak, his stare endless.
    “Yes, I think so.”
    He nods. He keeps on staring at me. “Faye, I know she’s gone. And I sometimes feel you slipping away, too, please don’t slip