RAT MEDICINE & OTHER UNLIKELY CURATIVES
BY Lauren B. Davis
Copyright 2011 Lauren B. Davis,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0436-3
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
RAT MEDICINE
I saw the first rat next to where we stored the chicken feed. It was a week before John used his fists on me. I was out by the sacks and felt like somebody was watching me. The hair stood up on places of my body where I didn’t know I had hair. I put down the tin pail I used to scatter the feed and picked up a shovel leaning against the shed. We’d never had no trouble. Living so far out of town like we did criminal types didn’t seem to have the gumption to haul ass all the way out to our place, but there was always a first time. I turned around and there he was, sitting back on his hind quarters like a little rat dog begging for a titbit, up on the shed roof. He didn’t flick a whisker, bold as brass. Just kept looking at me, his little front paws tucked up in front of his belly, his eyes bright as black glass.
“What do you think you’re doing up there?” I said, but of course the rat didn’t say nothing back.
“Don’t think you can get in and eat up all this good feed.” The rat kept looking at me, straight and firm like.
“We got a big old tom cat round here. He’s going be picking his teeth with your bones, my friend.” If rats could be said to smirk, that’s what he was doing.
Now, most people, they really hate rats. Not me. I don’t hate anything about the animal kingdom. Not snakes, not spiders, not coyote, not buzzard. That’s the Ojibway blood, from my mother’s people. My Granny used to tell me, you dream about a rat, you dreaming about some sickness, maybe a bad one, soon to come on. Granny was usually right about these things. I set store in omens, in symbols and signs. It’s all there if you know what to look for. So I looked at the rat, recognised it for a fellow who’d come to tell me something.
“You got news for me, rat man? If you do, you better tell me. I ain’t got all day.” The rat cleaned behind his ears. Then he turned and stuck his bald tail straight in the air and disappeared toward the other side of the shed roof. I tried to get around to see where he was going, fast as my size would allow, but when I looked there weren’t no sign of him.
I didn’t tell John about the rat because I knew he’d just blame it on me. Tell me I didn’t keep the place clean enough. Which was a lie, but true facts never matter much to John when he got a good rage going. I got a couple of old oil drums John kept about the place and put the sacks of feed in there, put old boards on the top and weighted them down with rocks.
When John came back that night he was in a mood even fouler than the night before. His moods had been getting worse for some time. He slammed the screen door so hard I thought the wood frame’d splinter.
“Nell!” he yelled. “This place looks like a goddamn pigsty! What the hell do you do all day?”
There wasn’t no point in answering. He was just looking for a fight.
“C’mon in here and get your dinner, John.”
He sat down at the kitchen table, his filthy work boots leaving marks on my clean floor. He stank of sweat from working at the mill in this heat. ‘Course he wouldn’t have thought to wash up before dinner. I didn’t dare say nothing. I served us both up our food and set the plates down on the table.
“Fat as you are,” John said, “don’t think you’re going to be eating all that. Take half off, Nell. You need to loose some goddamn weight.”
I just looked at him.
“I mean it. You are getting to be a big fat squaw. I can’t hardly bear to look at you.”
I am a big woman, I don’t deny it. I wasn’t always this size, though I never have been small. It was after John Jr. died that I really started packing it on. Seemed like I didn’t want to do much more than try and fill up the hole his dying left. Slipped away in his sleep, silent as a leaf falling in the dark and him not a year old. But I found a way to keep going without turning mean, turning against the force of life. Which is more than I can say for his father. We’d lost the baby more’n three years then and John never did get over it.
That and the farm failing.
John said the reason the farm failed, why the crops all withered up and got ate by every sort of crawling creature, was the land was poison. Said the poison came from up the mine that started digging great wounds in the side of South Mountain. Well I don’t know. Maybe yes, and maybe no. It wasn’t that John didn’t work hard, it’s just he never had his father’s touch. Everything just turned to rot as soon as he came near it. It made him bitter.
The worst was last month, when we couldn’t make the mortgage. It hurt his pride, faced with the choice to go down to Rickett’s mill and beg for work, or hand over the land that’d been in his family for generations to the bank. It was hard on a man, sure hard. Years of too little money and too much whiskey and a small town where a man could never get ahead of his reputation. John liked his whiskey more and more. Me, I never touched the stuff. My mother and grandmother both impressed on me that you didn’t get to be no spirit walker with a bottle in your hand. That might be OK for whites, but it wasn’t for Indians.
So I tried to understand. That’s the way women are, I think, that’s the medicine we carry. To try to understand a man and stay soft about it. But that don’t mean the hurts aren’t there, deep in the marrow.
I looked across the table and saw the contempt in his face. I scraped half my food off my plate, but it didn’t matter. I’d lost my appetite anyway.
That night I dreamed about a rat. It was sitting on the roof, like some sort of weather vane. It faced east and its nose scented every little breeze that came along.
Three days later I was washing dishes, up to my arms in warm, soap-creamy water. I like washing dishes; it’s like meditation, just looking out the window at the back garden. That year I’d put in nasturtiums, because I like their peppery taste and they look so pretty. I got a crop of the three sisters: corn, beans and squash, plus tomatoes, zucchini, carrots and such, set about with a border of marigolds to keep down the bugs. I have a good hand at gardens, although I don’t brag about it, because it sets John off to distraction the way things just seem to jump to life under my fingers.
So, anyway, there I am, looking out the window and day dreaming about the sorts of things a women day-dreams about when her man don’t want to touch her anymore, and I realise there’s a face in the window looking back at me. A rat face. There’s the bugger, just sitting on the windowsill, staring me down. His fur’s all clean and glossy brown and he’s got a white stomach and little pink ears. He reaches out and puts one little paw up against the glass. I put my finger up against the glass on my side. He doesn’t budge and the two of us stay like that for a minute or so, like somebody visiting a prisoner
