Read Online The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich - Free Book Online

put the air on full blast. The smell seems more bearable at first when I know it isn’t actually Kit, and then I think of the skins and the whole mess of scraping them down and somehow I would rather smell Tatro again. Every time I’ve been tempted to tell him that my mother is an actual American Indian, an Ojibwe, something about Kit Tatro has stopped me—the sight of some newly skinned creature in his yard. Or, as now, a certain look he has, or smell. At least it isn’t far to town. What we call the bank is just an automated teller machine at the center store. Once the store was named Tatro’s, of course. For some reason the place has recently been remodeled on the outside to resemble a general store out of the Old West. The building is low and square with a tall false front and a sign painted with fake old-timey serifed letters. So in a way, Kit Tatro fits there. A hangdog mountain man come down to the settlement for grub.
    “I’ve been doing more research on my genealogy,” he says. “I’ve come a cropper on the great-grandmother’s side, though I still think she must have been an Iroquois. They would have hid it for the shame.” He sounds a note of indignation and despair. “Always the secrecy, the hushed voices! Nobody will say what it was my great-grandfather did, who he married, what she was, who she was.”
    “It’s so complicated,” I sympathize, stopping the car, opening my door quickly. Kit gets out too, and we walk up to the cash machine together. There is a light breeze blowing. I step upwind of him. He lets me go first and studiously looks away as I tap in my PIN. The machine offers me a little stack of money; I take it, and walk over to the store to buy some cream, a six-pack of Krahe’s favorite beer, a can of ginger ale, a newspaper, and a muffin.
    “I think the best kind is lemon poppy seed,” says Kit. He holds out a root beer to show the teen behind the cash register, pays, and we walk out the door together. A ride home is assumed. At least he’s changed my focus somewhat, and I’ve stopped dwelling on Krahe’s lawn cutting. I’ve always been a little curious about Kit’s passion to be an Indian. It seems a lonely obsession—I never see him with other Indians or would-be Natives. And as the point is to have a tribe and belong to a specific people, I wonder what he gets out of his fantasy. But of course, he explains on the way home, his search is about making some connection. Only connect , he says, absurdly, and adds, Maybe E. M. Forster was an Iroquois at heart. Once he knows for certain where to connect, maybe everything about him will fall into place. Then again, maybe Kit Tatro irritates me because at some level I understand his longing and confusion all too well. I let him out at the turnoff to his house, and keep the windows wide open the rest of the way.
     
    When I walk into the house, I see immediately that Elsie is serving Krahe a cup of hot chocolate. He’s gotten a chill—cutting the grass! It upsets me to see that she’s poured the chocolate into one of her favorite cups—exquisitely etched and hand-painted, one of an incomplete set she bought before an estate sale. She’s put the cup under hot water to warm first, then dried it, her little trick, to prevent a skin forming on the milk. She has given up her disapprobation, or her fear of my being used, and she has decided to encourage him, I fear. A low sensation of hurt boils up in me, its source mysterious. Why, now, has she decided to stop looking the other way? Because she can’t. I see now that the grass cutting is Kurt’s way of bringing our relationship into the open. He’s doffed his jacket. They are talking in normal, convivial tones about the town road agent and how he has suggested inserting speed bumps on the straight, paved section of Revival Road.
    “He says he’s clocked some going seventy.” They both nod, together, almost in unison. Then a stiff break, a beat of silence as both remember