gonna bust out all over you. I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know. You should come home for a while.”
“I can’t. I love him, Auntie.”
“Love! Phooey! Should go back to the old ways! Let your aunties pick you out a good red man. Stay where we can keep an eye on you! You young people! All the same!” She went on for a while, but I didn’t listen much. I knew this part by heart. And besides, I was too busy watching the rats run back and forth from the bedroom to the bathroom.
“Nell? You listening?”
“Yes, Auntie.”
“OK, one last thing. Fat as you are these days, you ain’t gonna be able to dodge him if he comes at you. You offer tobacco to these rats and ask them for a tuft of their hair. You braid it into your hair. That’ll make you nimble like they are. Give you a chance if you need it.”
“I never heard that one before.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t strictly ours, eh? That one’s from Africa. I learned it from that black nurse works with me midwifing. We trade stuff sometimes. Don’t matter. All the same medicine. You just use it, you hear? Spirit rats or flesh and blood, they’ll give you what you need. They’re here to help.”
“Yes Auntie.”
I promised to call her tomorrow and made her promise not to tell my mother, not to tell my brothers, for what good it would do. I know how gossip passed around out on the rez. Wouldn’t be long before everybody knew what was going on at my house. Which maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. Get a few of the old timers burning tobacco for me. Long as my brother Jimmy didn’t find out. He’d be over wanting to kick some white man’s butt.
I went out and offered my tobacco and found a tuft of rat fur up on the windowsill. I braided it in my hair. I picked the herbs. I drank the tea. I smudged the house. I put the red blanket on the bed.
It was Sunday the next day, and I knew John’d be out drinking with his buddies late that night. It could go either way. Maybe he’d just come home and pass out. Maybe he’d come home mean. I slept with one eye open, tucked up under the protection blanket. I didn’t see no rats, but didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad. Rats abandon a sinking ship, or a house where there’s a fire coming
I heard the truck skid through the gravel around 3:00 a.m. He was drunk as a cowboy after a long dry cattle drive. He came in the kitchen, slamming stuff around and stumbling and cursing as he barked his shins and banged his elbows. I heard him pissing in the bathroom, then heard him coming down the hall. He stood in the doorway a few minutes, swaying. I knew he couldn’t see my open eyes, dark as the room was, and I sure wasn’t going to close them, not knowing what was coming. He took a couple of wide-legged steps toward the bed, trying to keep his balance, and finally toppled like a cut pine across my body. I heaved him over and left him snoring on top of the red blanket. Man, he smelled bad. Whiskey and smoke and beer and, although it broke my heart to admit it, some woman other than me.
I got up and went to the living room and cried myself to sleep, dreaming about rats on river rafts and rats in sewer drains and rats caught in traps.
I woke up the next morning to the sound of John puking. I went to fix him some coffee and orange juice, figuring that’d be about all his stomach could handle. I reached into the cupboard to get his favourite mug, the big one with the bucking bronco on the side of it. Sitting in it, with his little pink paws hooked over the top was the rat.
“Morning, little buddy.” I said. The rat jumped out and stood next to the coffee-pot. I opened the ‘fridge to get the orange juice. A rat sat on the stack of cheese slices. He didn’t budge when I reached in. I wondered if he’d learned how to turn the light on in there when the door was closed.
I heard John behind me and turned. He was still in his boots, his jeans, only his shirt was gone, and I guess he’d puked on it. Even mad at him as I was there was a twinge down in my belly at the sight of his naked chest, all hard muscle and sinew, his stomach flat, with pale golden hair running down into the top of his jeans. There was a rat sitting on the top of his head, yanking up his hair between its long pointy teeth.
“Oh man. My head’s killing me.” His eyes were bloodshot and yellowish, like two ketchup-covered eggs with runny yolks.
“Serves you right.” I wanted him to be hurting. I handed him his coffee. The rat on his head jumped off and disappeared into the living room.
“I ain’t in the mood Nell.”
“But I guess you were in the mood last night.” I stood with my hands on my hips. I could feel the hurt starting to switch around to righteous anger. I knew I should keep my mouth shut, but I was too mad, too hurt.
“Leave it alone.” His voice was ragged and dangerous.
“I don’t want to leave it alone. You smelled like a goddamn whorehouse when you came in last night, you bastard. I want to know who you been with!” Out of the corner of my eye I could see a flurries of rat fur, diving under counters, through the window, skittering around door jams and out of the room.
He slammed the cup down on the table, sloshing the coffee over the rim. His hands balled up into fists. He leaned towards me.
“Well you can bet your fat ass it was somebody under 200 lbs.”
Tears sprang to my eyes and my face went red.
“Look at yourself, you think any man’d want you?” He ran his eyes up and down my body and sneered. “You used to be a good looking woman, but now you ain’t nothing but a sack of lard.”
“I am a good wife to you John McBride. I can’t help it if I gained weight.”
“What the hell do you mean, you can’t help it? I ain’t the one stuffing food down your throat! If you’d get off your floppy ass and do some work around this place, maybe you’d lose some of it, maybe I’d want you again!”
“I do all the work around this place! You don’t spend long enough here to do no work.”
“You saying I’m to blame for how disgusting you got? You blaming me, bitch?”
He took two steps toward me and I backed up until I found my self up against the counter.
“I ain’t blaming you, but Goddamn John, it ain’t me who’s the problem here - it’s you!” I couldn’t stop myself. “Out whoring around, mean drunk all the time - I ain’t gonna take it no more, you understand?”
I didn’t even see the blow coming.
Even with the rat fur charm braided in my hair, I couldn’t duck the first punch or the second, or the one after that. I lost count then. He went for my face, I guess, because it would be the place where the hurt would show the most. Proof that there was some small spot in the world where he could have an effect. My nose. My lips. My cheeks.
I went down, and, a gal my size... well, I went down hard and stayed down. I could see his boots in flashes of motion, misted in red.
I think it was all this flesh that saved me from getting worse than I got, and that was bad enough. But I was bundled way down deep inside the womb of myself and even though his hands left bruises, they didn’t break no bones. It didn’t hurt. I kept thinking it should hurt more, but it just
