Writers Conference | University of North Dakota

35^th Annual UND Writers Conference: 35th Anniversary Writers Conference
Presidential Lecture: Louise Erdrich
March 24, 2004

Dr. James McKenzie: Hey, Dan. Am I right, the last time we removed the walls in this room for a Writers Conference event was when Truman Capote was here in about ’76?

Crowd Members: No.

Dr. James McKenzie: No? More recent? Okay.

Crowd Member: Edward Albee?

Dr. James McKenzie: Well let’s bring to--Edward Albee. But we had a hockey game at the same time.

[Audience laughter]

Remember? And we had to move Albee here to five o’clock so that the University of North Dakota hockey team, which is how I describe it, could be watched by the audience here. So, that was Edward Albee. That was a year or two later.

Crowd member: Tim O’Brien?

Dr. James McKenzie: Tim O’--I’m not sure.

[Crowd murmurs]

Anyway, okay this is not a class. You’re not here to hear me. But I have one other announcement to make which is – this is my true function – I have ... Someone brought me a Hilton Garden Inn room key that was lost. So, if you think you can’t get into your room tonight, I may be able to help you.

[Audience laughter]

President of the University of North Dakota, Chuck Kupchella.

[Kupchella gestures and points from audience]

Yeah, go up there. Thank you.

[Applause]

Charles Kupchella: Thank you, Jim – Dr. McKenzie, and welcome, ladies and gentlemen. What a great turnout and so much of a mix of folks from all over. Students, it’s just great to see all of you here.

I can’t tell you how delighted I was when Dr. McKenzie first came to me and said, "Would you be willing to make a Presidential lecture a permanent part of the ... of the ... the writers ... this writers program that we have here and have had for 35 years?" Even after he explained that it wasn’t that I would get to give the lecture.

[Audience laughter]

I was just going to ... just going to have to sponsor it, I was still very excited about it. But, you know, for a fleeting moment, I thought, "Gee, at last, the world might be just about ready to recognize that textbooks are really an art form." But, no.

[Audience laughter]

Didn’t happen. Course, if there’s a little tinge of bitterness that comes out here tonight ... in my introduction tonight, that’s what it’s all about. ‘Cause I think it’s ... you know, I think it’s a little harder to write when a chapter has about 130 references in it than when you make one up.

[Audience laughter]

You know, but ... [clears throat] And to make matters worse, I have a son who just wrote a ... it’s a children’s book. Now, get this, it has 300 words in it. Most of the book is Warren Henson’s illustrations. And when you now hit "author Kupchella" on the Internet, his book comes up first.

[Audience laughter]

And that really gets to me. So, ah...I guess I would like to, before I introduce the speaker, just say a word about Jim McKenzie and all of those who are involved in putting this program on each year. What a magnificent tradition. I know it was started back when –

[Audience applause]

Yeah. It started back when Jim McKenzie was just a little boy.

[Audience laughter]

But, of course, since he came along and took it over, it’s gotten bigger and better and more wonderful as a part of this university ever since. So, thank you, Jim and all of those who help make this possible this time and for times to come.

[Audience applause]

So, as I suggested, the University of North Dakota, this week, is proudly celebrating the 35^th anniversary of the Writers Conference. And one of the ways we decided to mark the long, outstanding history of this event is to invite back to our campus North Dakota’s two most distinguished living writers. Tomorrow night in this room, you’ll have the opportunity to hear Larry Woiwode, North Dakota’s poet laureate and currently a visiting writer in our English department.

But tonight, it’s my distinct pleasure to introduce this year’s Presidential lecturer, a writer who has accomplished much since her first appearance on this campus in the fall of 1983, Louise Erdrich. Back in ’83, she had just published a slim volume of poetry, Jacklight, and one of ... one or two of the stories that would become chapters in Love Medicine, her first novel. That novel went on to win the National Book Critics Circle award and a number of other awards and proved to be the first of eight internationally celebrated, interrelated novels. These novels have achieved the rare distinction of both best-seller status and widespread literary acclaim. And I wonder if that might ever happen with a textbook someday, but that’s another thing.

[Audience laughter]

Fiction, however, is not Louise Erdrich’s only area of significant literary achievement. During that time, she has also published two more collections of poetry, three works of children’s literature, two works of nonfiction, and a ninth novel, The Crown of Columbus. It’s collaboration with the late Michael Dorris. During this past year, she published what amounts to a literary hat trick. (And I hope you all appreciate the significance of that particular metaphor here at the University of North Dakota [audience laughter and applause] and this week especially, yeah.) Three books in three different genres: her widely celebrated new novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club; a new collection of poems, Original Fire; and a book of prose that can help us all see more deeply who we are up here in the northern plains, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country.

This last little book, the National Geographic’s literary travel series, a series that last year’s Presidential lecturer, Oliver Sacks, also has written for, returns repeatedly to a central question: "books, why?" It’s a good question for the beginning of a writers’ conference and Louise Erdrich offers many possible answers to that question. And my own favorites among those she’s given are "to keep one’s balance" and "because they are wealth, sobriety, and hope." Louise Erdrich’s writings, especially her rich, seemingly endless vein of fiction, offer us all a balance of wealth, sobriety, and hope and is recognized, as one critic has noted, for its complexity and for its poetic, touching, gently sarcastic and humorous voice. Erdrich delves into how Native and European-American cultures come together, clash, fall apart, and at times, figure each other out and learn to love. What could be more relevant for us here in the river ... Red River Valley and for people the world over, in fact?

I cannot end this introduction without a word of encouragement to the younger writers in the audience here tonight, especially the students. Our distinguished speaker’s publicity information notes that long ago – it can’t be that long ago really – she worked variously as a hoer of beets, a waitress, a flagger at a construction site, and in a state mental hospital. So, take heart, young writers. There are thousands of possible paths to this stage ... this stage right here, and to the ... kind of distinction that she has brought and ... and her ... and she can now claim.

You employers out there and others, watch out! You never know how attentively some bright young North Dakota student, some beginning writer, some Louise Erdrich might be doing her job of hoeing beets, flagging vehicles at a construction site, or whatever, and you may live to find interesting parallels to situations you might half-remember, but interpret differently. Characters with an oddly familiar feel to them, but different, too, popping up in acclaimed works of fiction translated and read the world over. Books, why? Well, we’re about to find out more reasons, so would you all please join me in making North Dakota’s own distinguished novelist, poet, and writer extraordinaire, Louise Erdich ... Erdrich feel welcome here tonight, Louise.

[Audience applause]

[Erdrich appears on stage and shakes Kupchella’s hand]

Louise Erdrich: Oh, please. [continued applause] [laughs] Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s ... It’s wonderful to be here. And ... I’m very ... I’m really overwhelmed. You know? There’s so many ... so many of you have come and ... and I’m so happy to be able to read to you!

When I ... When I was hoeing sugar beets, I ... I couldn’t have imagined this in any way. [laughs] Thank you, President Kupchella, for a really beautiful introduction. I will hope to have that textbook at the bookstore [audience laughter] that we run in Minneapolis. And I’d like to also acknowledge and thank the sponsors of this . . . of this wonderful event. And also to give Dr. McKenzie a big round of applause. [claps] He’s done an incredible job

[audience applause]

[laughs]

Tonight, I’m going to read a story that I would dedicate ... I wanted to dedicate to my mother. She couldn’t make it ... is under the weather. So I’d like, instead, to dedicate it to my sister, Angela, and my brother-in-law, Sandeep. Angela Erdrich, Sandeep Patel are doctors on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, not far from here. I understand there’s a number of people, students and other people, who’ve come ... come over from the reservation, and I ... I ... I’m so glad because this particular story is inspired by something my mother told me about a young boy growing up there. And it was something she just told me as we were driving along, a very ... a very intriguing little piece of ... of memory that she had about a boy who played the violin secretly because his parents did not approve of ... of ... of that instrument. It is associated with ... with ... maybe too much mirth sometimes. Maybe they had gotten a little strict in their Catholicism. At any rate, he played it in the woods. And he played it with ... with that wild plains wind blowing ... blowing those notes away from the house.

That was a little piece of the inspiration, and the other was a name. And I really believe in names, the power of names. This particular name is an Ojibwe name, Shamengwa. That ... that name is so beautiful: Shamengwa. It means "the monarch butterfly," and I was told by a very dear friend about a man named Shamengwa whose arm was twisted up along his side, and that’s all I knew of him. These two came together into a story that I’m going to read, and I haven’t been able to read it before, so I’m really excited to read it. And I want to ... I want to make sure that everyone in the back can hear. [pauses] No? Not ... not ... can’t hear? [pauses] Now can? All right. Okay. And the muzak is off the back. [laughs] This is good! Very good. [Takes a drink of water.]

Shamengwa.

At the edge of our reservation settlement, there lived an old man whose arm was twisted up, wing-like along his side, and who was, maybe for that reason, named for the butterfly. His name was Shamengwa. Other than his arm, he was an extremely well-made old person. Anyone could see that he had once been handsome, and he still cut a graceful figure, slim and medium-tall. His fine head was covered with a startling white mane of thick hair, which he was proud of and every few weeks had carefully styled and trimmed by his daughter, who traveled in from the bush where she lived just to do it. He was fine-looking, yes. But there were other things about him.

He played the fiddle. How he played the fiddle! Although his arm was so twisted and disfigured that his shirts had to be carefully altered and pinned on that side to accommodate the gnarled shape, yet he had agility in that arm, even strength. And, with the aid of a white silk scarf, which he chose rather than just any old rag, of course, Shamengwa had tied his elbow ever since he was very young into a position that allowed the elegant hand and fingers at the end of that damaged arm full play across the fiddle’s strings. With his other hand and arm, he drew the bow. The music he played was more than music – at least, what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling, feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with those powerful moments of true knowledge which we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear, and also surprising pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often, something shatters like ice, and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music ... was in the music somehow, or in the way that Shamengwa played it.

Geraldine, a dedicated, headstrong woman who six years back had born a baby, dumped its father, and finished her educational degree, sometimes drove him to fiddling contests. He was well-known. He even won awards, prizes of the sort given at local or North Dakota state musical contests – engraved plaques and small tin loving cups set on plastic pedestals. These, he kept apart from the other objects in his house. He placed them on a triangular scrap of shelf high in the corner. The awards revealed patches of corrosion in the shiny gilt paint. He didn’t care. He was, however, somewhat fanatical about his violin.

He treated this instrument with reverence. He fussed over it, stroked it clean with a soft cotton hankie kept in the cupboard, laid it carefully away every night in case ... a case constructed to its shape. The case was lined with velvet faded by time from a heavy blood red to a pallid and streaked violet. I don’t know violins, but his was thought to be exceptionally beautiful. Its sound was certainly human and exquisite; and it was generally understood that this violin was old and quite valuable. So ... when Geraldine came to trim her father’s hair one morning and found him on the floor, his good hand bound behind his back, his ankle tied, she glanced at the cupboard even as she unbound her father, and was not surprised to see the lock smashed and the violin gone.

I am a tribal judge, and things will come to me through the grapevine of the court system or the tribal politic ... tribal police. Gossip, rumors, scuttlebutt, BS, or just flawed information. I always tune in. I even take notes on what I hear around. It’s sometimes wrong, or exaggerated, but just as often there is contained a germ of useful truth. For instance, in this case, the name Corwin Peace was on people’s lips, although there was no direct evidence he had committed the crime.

Corwin was one of those I see again and again. A bad thing waiting for a worse thing to happen. A mistake, but one that we kept trying to salvage, because he was so young. He was a petty dealer with a car he drove drunk and a string of girlfriends. He was, unfortunately, good-looking, with the features of an Edward Curtis subject, though the crack and vodka was beginning to make him puffy.

Drugs now travel the old fur trade routes, and where once Corwin would have sat high on a bale of buffalo robes or beaver skins and sung traveling songs to the screeching wheels of an ox cart, now he drove a 1991 Impala with hubcaps missing and back end dragging. He drove it hard and he drove it all cranked up, but he was rarely caught because he traveled such odd and erratic hours, making deals, whisking to the Cities, heading out the same night. He drove without a license. That had long ago been taken from him. DUI. And he was always looking for money – scamming, betting, shooting pool, even now and then working a job that, horrifyingly, put him on the other side of a counter frying Chinese chicken strips. He was one of those that I kept track of because I imagined I’d be seeing the full down-arching trajectory of his life. I wanted to make certain that, if I had to put him away, I could do it and sleep well that same night. So far he had confirmed himself, and now, although the violin was never seen in his possession and we had impounded the Impala, the police kept an eye on him because they were certain he would show his hand and try to sell the instrument.

While we waited for him to make his move, there was the old man, who quickly began to fail. I had not known how much I loved to hear him play. It wasn’t that I heard him every more than once or twice a month, but I found, like many others, I depended on his music. After weeks had passed, a dull spot opened and I ached with a surprising poignance for Shamengwa’s loss, which I honestly shared, so that I had to seek him out and sit with him, as if it would help to mourn the absence of his music together. One thing I wanted to know, too, was whether, if the violin did not turn up, we could get together and buy a new, perhaps even a better instrument. I hesitated to ask him, as though my offer was a selfish thing. I didn’t know. So I sat in Shamengwa’s little front room one afternoon, and I tried to find an opening.

"Of course," I said, "we think we know who took your fiddle. We’ve got our eye on him."

Shamengwa swept his hair back with the one graceful hand and said, as he had many times, "I was struck from behind."

Where he’d hit the ground, his cheekbone had split and the white of his eye on that side was an angry red. He moved with a stiff, pained slowness, the rigidity of a very old person. It took him a long time to straighten all the way when he tried to get up.

"You stay sitting. I’ll boil the tea." Geraldine was gentle and practical. No one ever argued with her.

Shamengwa lowered himself back into the padded brown rocking chair and he gazed at me, or past me, really. And I soon understood that, although he spoke quietly and answered questions, he was not fully engaged in the conversation at all. In fact, he was only half present, and somewhat disheveled, irritable, neither of which I’d ever seen in him. His shirt was buttoned wrong, the plaid askew, and he hadn’t shaved the smattering of whiskers on his chin. The white stubble stood out against his skin. He didn’t seem glad that I had come.

We sat together in a challenging silence until Geraldine brought two mugs of hot, strong, sugared tea and got another for herself. Shamengwa’s hand shook as he lifted the cup, but he drank. His face cleared a bit as the tea went down, and I decided there would be no better time than this to put forth my idea.

"Uncle," I said, "we would like to buy you a new fiddle."

Shamengwa took another drink of his tea, said nothing, but put down the cup and folded his hands in his lap. He looked past me and frowned. I did not think this was a good sign.

"Wouldn’t he like a new violin?" I appealed to Geraldine. She shook her head as if she was both annoyed with me and exasperated with her father. I didn’t know where to go from there. Shamengwa had closed his eyes. He leaned far back in his chair, but he wasn’t asleep. I thought he might be trying to get rid of me. But I was stubborn, and I did not want to go. I wanted to hear Shamengwa’s music again.

"Oh, tell him about it, daddy," said Geraldine, at last.

Shamengwa leaned forward and bent his head over his hands as though he were praying.

I relaxed now, and I understood that I was going to hear something. It was that breathless, gathering moment I’ve known just before the witness breaks, the truth comes out. I am familiar with it and although this was not exactly a confession, it was ... it was something generally not known on the reservation. Shamengwa had owned his fiddle for such a long time that nobody knew, or remembered anyway, a time when he’d been without it. But there actually had been two fiddles in his life.

There was his father’s fiddle, which he played as a boy, and then another, which came to find him through a dream.

My mother lost a baby boy to diphtheria when I was but four years old, said Shamengwa, and it was that loss which turned my mother to the church. Before that, I remember my father playing rigs ... reels, jigs, but after the baby’s death, he put the fiddle down and took the Holy Communion. My mother, out of grief, became strict with my father ... [coughs and takes a drink of water] with my father, my older sister, and with me. We understood why, and let her do it, but we all thought she would relent once the year of first mourning was up. Where before, we had a lively house that people liked to visit, now there was quiet.

I don’t believe my mother meant things to change so, but the sorrow she bore was beyond her strength, as though her heart was buried underneath that little stone, as well. She turned cold, turned away from the rest of us, lost her feelings. Now that I am old and I know the ways of grief, I understand she felt too much. She loved too hard. She was afraid to lose us, as she had lost my brother. But, to a little boy, these things are hidden. It only seemed to me that, along with that baby, I had lost her love.

My sister took up the cooking. My father became good friends with the priest and, gradually, we accepted that ... the lively, loving mother we had known wasn’t going to return. If she wanted to sit in the dark all day, we let her. We didn’t try and coax her out. More often, she spent her time at the church. She attended morning mass and she stayed on, her ivory and silver rosary draped in her right fist, her left hand wearing the beads smoother and smaller until I thought one day for sure, they would disappear between her fingers.

One day, while she was gone to church and my father and my sister were also in town, I began to poke around and soon enough, I came across the fiddle that my ... my mother had forced my father to stop playing. So there it was. I was alone with it. I was now five or six years old, but I could balance a fiddle, and before all of this, I had seen my father use the bow. I got sound out of it, all right, but nothing satisfactory. Still, the noise made my bones shiver. I put the fiddle back carefully well before they came home and climbed under the blankets when they walked into the yard. I pretended to sleep, not because I wanted to so badly, but to keep up the appearance of being sick, but because I could not bear to return to the way things were. Something had happened. Something had changed. Something had disrupted the nature of all that I knew. This deep thing had to do with that fiddle.

After that, I contrived as often as I could to stay alone in the house and, as soon as everyone was gone, I took that fiddle from beneath the blankets in the blanket chest and I tuned it to my own liking. I learned how to play it one note at a time, not that I had a name for each distinct sound. I started to fit these sounds together. The string of notes that I made itched my brain. It became a torment for me to have to put away the fiddle when my parents and my sister came home. Sometimes, if the wind was right, I sneaked that fiddle from the house even if they were home, and I played out in the woods. I was always careful that the wind should carry my music away to the west, the emptiness where there was no one to hear it.

But one day, the wind might have shifted. Or perhaps my mother’s ears were more sensitive than either my sister’s or my father’s. Because when I had come back into the house, I found her staring out the window to the west. She was excited, breathing fast. Did you hear it? she cried out. Did you hear it? Terrified to be discovered, I said no. She was very agitated and my father had a hard time to calm her. But after he finally had her asleep, he sat an hour at the table with his head in his hands. I tiptoed around the house, did the chores. I felt terrible not to tell him that my music was the source of what she heard. I did know it would have helped him if I admitted the truth. But now, as I look back, I consider my silence the first decision I made as a true artist, musician. That I must play was more important to me than my father’s pain. It was that clear. I said nothing, but was all the more sly and twice as secretive.

It was a question of survival. If I had not found the music, I would have died of the silence. The rule of quiet in the house became so rigorous, my sister fled to the government boarding school. But I was still a child, and if my mother and father sat for hours uttering no word, where else was my mind to take itself but to the music? I saved myself by inventing these songs in my brain. As of yet, they hadn’t thought of school. The stillness in my mother had infected my father. There are ways of being abandoned, even when your parents are right there.

We had two cows, and I did the milking in the morning and evening. If my parents forgot to cook, at least I had the milk. I can’t say I ever really suffered from a stomach kind of hunger, but another kind of human hunger bit me. I was lonely. It was about that time that I received a terrible kick from that cow, an accident. She was unusually mild. A wasp sting, perhaps, caused her to lash out in surprise. She caught my arm and, although I had no way to know it, she shattered the bone. Painful? For certain, it was painful, I remember. But my parents did not think to send me to a doctor. They did not notice, I suppose.

The pain in my arm kept me awake, and I know that at night, when I couldn’t distract myself, I moaned in my blankets by the stove. But worse was the uselessness of the arm in playing the fiddle. I tried to prop it up, but it fell like a rag doll arm. I finally hit on a solution, a strip of cloth that I have used ever since. I started tying up my broken arm at that early age just as I do now. I had, of course, no idea that it would heal that way. I only know that, with the arm securely tied up, I could play, and that I could play saved my life. So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. I was shaped.

Well, there was bound to come a time when I slipped up. But, by the time it did, I was already fourteen years old. My father, my mother, and I had gotten used to our strangeness by then. I went to school because the truancy agent finally came and got me. School is where I got the name I carry now. Shamengwa, the black-and-orange butterfly. It was a joke on my "wing arm." Now, even though a nun told me that a picture of a butterfly in a painting of Our Lady was meant to represent the Holy Spirit, I didn’t like the name at first. But I was too quiet to do anything about it. My bashfulness about the shape of my arm caused me to avoid people even when I was older, and I made no friends. Human friends. My true friend was hidden in the blanket chest, anyway, and the only friend I really needed. And then, I lost that friend.

My parents had gone to church, but there was on that winter’s day some problem with the stove and smoke had filled the nave, and everyone was sent straight home. So my mother and my father arrived when I was deep into my playing. They listened, rooted by the surprise of what they heard. For how long, I do not know. I finally noticed the cold breeze that swirled around them. I turned, and we stared at one another with a shocked gravity that my father broke at last by asking, "How long?"

I did not answer, though I wanted to. Seven years! Seven years.

He led my mother in. They shut the door behind them and he said in a voice of troubled softness, "Keep on."

So I did. And when I quit, he said nothing.

Discovered, I thought the worst was over. I put the fiddle away that night. But next morning, waking to a silence where I usually heard my father’s noises, hearing a vacancy of presence before I even knew for sure, I knew the worst was yet to come. My playing woke something in him. That’s what I think. That was the reason he left. But I don’t know why he had to take the violin. When I opened the blanket box and saw that it was missing, all breath left me, all thought, all feeling. And for a while after that, I was the same as my mother, cut off from all the true, bright, normal ways of living. And I might have stayed that way, gone even deeper into the silence, joined my mother on the dark bench from which she could not return. I would have lived on in that diminished form, except that I had a dream.

And the dream, it was simple. A voice. Go to the lake. Sit by the southern rock. Wait there. I will come.

Well, I decided to follow these direct orders. I took my bedroll and a loaf of bannock and I sat myself down on the crackling lichen of the southern rock. That plate of stone jutted out into the water and from that rock, I could see all that happened on the lake. I put tobacco down for the spirits and all day I sat there waiting. Flies bit me. The wind boomed in my ears. Nothing happened. I curled up when the light left and I slept, stayed on the next morning, and the next day, too. I saw birds, strange-feathered, unfamiliar, passing through on their way to somewhere else. Listening to the water, another music, I was for the first time comforted by sounds other than my fiddle playing. I let go, nibbled the bannock, drank the lake water, rolled in my blanket. I saw three dawns and three nights, I watched the stars. I thought I might just stay there forever, staring at the blue thread of the horizon when, suddenly, a small bit of the horizon’s thread detached [coughs] and darkened and preceded forward slowly. I observed it only with mild interest, but the speck seemed to both advance and retreat. It wavered back and forth. I lost sight of it and then I would see it again, cresting over a wave.

It was a canoe, but either the paddler was asleep or the canoe was drifting. As it came nearer, I decided it was adrift. It rode so light in the waves knowing ... nosing this way and the other. Always, it ended up advancing straight toward that southern rock and straight toward me. I watched until I could clearly see there was nobody in it before I even thought about why [clears throat] I had come to the place. Then the words of that dream returned. I will come to you.

I dove in eagerly and swam for that canoe. This arm does not prevent that; I’ve learned, as boys do, to compensate. I thought perhaps the canoe had been badly tied or slipped its mooring, but no rope trailed. The canoe had lost its paddler somehow, gotten away, perhaps the high waves had coaxed it off a beach. I somehow pushed that canoe in to shore, then pulled it up behind me, wedged it in a cleft between two rocks. Only then did I look inside at the gear it held. There, latched to a crosspiece in the bow, was a black case of womanly shape that fastened on the side with two brass locks.

That is how my fiddle came to me, said Shamengwa, raising his head to look steadily at me. He smiled, shook his fine head, and spoke softly. And that is why no other fiddle will I play.

They picked up Corwin Peace pretending to play that fiddle at a Fargo mall – let’s just say Columbia Mall – [laughs, audience laughter] and they brought him to me. I have a great deal of latitude in sentencing. In spite of myself, I was intrigued by Corwin’s unusual treatment of that instrument, and so I decided to take advantage of tradition and to set precedent. First I cleared my decision with Shamengwa. Then I sentenced Corwin to apprentice himself with the old master. Six days a week, two hours in the morning. Three hours of practice after work in the early evening. He would either learn to play the violin or he would do time. [audience laughter] Now, in truth, I didn’t know who was being punished, the boy or the old man. [audience laughter] But from the house now, at least, we began to hear the violin.

It was the middle of September on the reservation. The morning chill, the afternoons warm, the leaves still green and thick in their final sweetness. All the hay was mown. The rice was beaten flat. The radiators in the tribal offices went on at night but, by noon we still had to open the windows to cool off. The woodsmoke of parching fires and the spent breeze of diesel entered and sometimes, the squall of Corwin’s music from just down the hill. The first weeks were not promising. [audience laughter] Then the days turned uniformly cold, and we kept the windows shut, and until spring the only news of Corwin’s progress came through Geraldine and from reports made by Corwin’s probation officer. I didn’t expect much, but Corwin showed up every day at 10 A.M., and it was not until the first hot afternoon in early May that I opened my window and actually heard Corwin playing.

"Not half bad," I said that night, when I visited Shamengwa.

"Oh, he’s clumsy as hell, but he’s got the fire," he said, touching his chest. I could tell he was proud of Corwin, and I allowed myself to consider the possibility that something as idealistic as putting an old man and a hardcore juvenile delinquent together had worked, or had had some effect, or hadn’t yet ended up a disaster. [audience laughter]

But the lessons in that relationship outlasted the sentence, and that summer, we heard slow improvement. Fall came again, and we closed the windows. In spring, we opened them, and one or two times we heard Corwin playing. Then Shamengwa died.

His was an ideal and peaceful death, the sort of death we used to pray to Saint Joseph to give to us all. Asleep, his violin next to his bed, covers pulled up to his chin, found in the morning by Geraldine.

There was a large funeral with the usual viewing, at which people filed up to his body and tucked flowers and pipe tobacco and small tokens into his coffin to accompany Shamengwa into the earth. Geraldine had placed a monarch butterfly upon his shoulder. She said she’d found it that morning on the grill of her car. Halfway through the service, she stood up and she took the violin from the coffin, where it had been tucked up close to him.

"A few months ago, Dad told me that when he died I was to give this violin to Corwin Peace," she told everyone. "And so I’m offering it to him now. And I’ve already asked, will he play one of Dad’s favorites for us today?"

Corwin had been sitting in the back and now he walked to the front, his shoulders hunched, his hands shoved in his pockets. He was extremely sad. The sorrow in his face [clears throat] surprised me. It made me uneasy to see such a direct show of emotion from one who had been so volatile. But Corwin’s feelings seemed directed once he took up the fiddle and he began to play a song typical of our people because it began tender and slow, then broke into a wild strangeness that pricked our pulses and strained our breath. Corwin played with passion, and there was enough of the old man’s energy in his music so that by the time he finished everyone was in tears.

Then came the shock. Amid the rustling of Kleenex, the dabbing of eyes, and discreet nose-blowing, [coughs] Corwin stood gazing into the coffin at his teacher, the violin dangling from one hand down at his side. Beside the coffin, there was an ornate communion rail, and Corwin raised that violin high and he smashed it on that rail, once, twice, three times to do the job right. I was in the front seat, and I suddenly found myself standing next to him, as though I’d been prepared for this kind of thing. I grasped Corwin’s arm as he laid the violin carefully back beside Shamengwa. But then I let him go, for I recognized his gesture was spent. My focus changed from Corwin to the violin itself then because I saw, sticking from its smashed wood, a roll of paper. I drew that paper out. The stuff was old, [clears throat] and it was covered with an antique, stiff flow of writing. The priest, somewhat shaken, began the service all over, and I fit the roll of paper in my jacket pocket. And I was at home, and it was late in that evening before I finally read what had been hidden in that violin for all these years.

This is the last part, and it’s on that old piece of paper.

I, Baptiste Parenthau, also known as Billy Peace, leave to my brother Edwin this message, being a history of the violin on which on this day of Our Lord, August 20, 1897, I send out on the waters to find him.

A recapitulation to begin with: Having read of LaFountaine’s mission to the Iroquois, during which that priest avoided having his liver plucked out before his eyes by nimbly playing the flute, our own good Father Jasprine thought it wise to learn to play a musical instrument before he ventured forth on his mission into the wastelands. [coughs] So he set off with music as his protection. He studied and he brought along his violin, this noble instrument which he played less than adequately. If the truth were told, he’d have done better not to impose his slight talents on the Ojibwe. [audience laughter] Yet, as he died young and left the violin to his altar boy, my father, I should say nothing against the good priest. I should, instead, be grateful for the joys his violin afforded my family. I should be happy in the happy hours that my father spent tuning and then playing the thing, and in the devotion that my brother and I gave to it. Yet, as things ended so hard between my brother and myself because of the instrument, I find myself imagining we never knew the violin, that it never had been brought before us, that I never played its music or understood its voice. For when my father died, he left the fiddle both to my brother Edwin and myself, with the stipulation that we – were we unable to decide which of us should have it, we were to race for it as true sons of the great waters, by paddling our canoes.

When my brother and I heard this declaration read, we said nothing. There was nothing to say, for as much as it is true we loved each other, we both wanted that violin. Each of us had given it years of practice; we’d whispered into its hollows our secret joys and taken hold of its sorrows. That violin had soothed our wild hours and courted our wives. But now we were done with the passing of it back and forth. And if it had to belong to one of us two brothers, I determined it would be myself.

Two nights before we set out in our canoes, I conceived of a sure plan. The moon slipped behind some clouds. I went out to the shore with a pannikin of heated pitch. I decided to interfere with Edwin’s balance. Our canoes were so carefully constructed that each side matched ounce for ounce. By thickening the seams on one side only with a heavy application of pitch, I’d throw off Edwin’s paddle enough – I’d throw off his stroke enough, I was sure, to give me a telling advantage.

Ours is a wide lake and full of islands. It is haunted by birds who utter sarcastic or sorrowing human cries. One loses sight of others easily, but sound travels skewed, bouncing off the rocks. We love it well, and we know its secrets – in some part, at least. Not all. And not the secret that I put into motion.

We were to set off on the far northern end of the lake and arrive at the south, where our uncles had lighted fires and brought the violin, wrapped in red cloth, set in its fancy case. We started out together, joking. Edwin, you remember how we paddled through the first two narrows, laughing as we exaggerated our efforts, [coughs] and how I said, as what I’d done with the soft pitch weighed on me, "Maybe we should share the damn thing after all."

But you laughed and said that our uncles would be disappointed, waiting there, and when you won the contest, things would be as they were before, except all would know Edwin was the faster paddler. I promised you the same. Then you swerved behind a skim of rock and took what you perceived to be your secret shortcut. As I paddled, I had to stop occasionally, and bail. At first I thought I had sprung a slow leak, but in time I understood. While I was painting on that extra pitch, you were piercing the bottom of my canoe. I was not, in fact, in any danger, and when the wind shifted all of a sudden, and it began to storm – no thunder or lightning, just a buffet of cold rain – I laughed, and I thanked you. For the water I took on actually helped steady me. I rode lower, and I stayed on course. But you foundered. It was worse to be set off balance. You must have overturned.

The bonfires die to coals on the south shore. I curl in blankets but I do not sleep. I’m keeping watch. At first when you are waiting for someone, every shadow is an arrival. Then the shadows become the very substance of dread. We hunt for you, call your name until our voices are worn to whispers. No answer. In one old man’s dream everything goes around the other way, counterclockwise, not-sun-way, which means that the dream is of the spirit world. And then he sees you there in his dream, going the wrong way too.

The uncles have returned to their houses and pastures. I am alone on the shore. As the night goes black, I sing for you, brother. As the sun comes up, I call. White gulls answer. As the time goes on, I begin to accept what I have done. I begin to know the truth of things.

They have left the violin here with me. Each night, I play for you, my brother, and when I can play no more I’ll lash our fiddle into the canoe and send it out to you, to find you wherever you are. I won’t have to pierce the bottom so it will travel the bed of the lake. Your holes will do the trick, brother, as my trick did for you.

Now, of course, that canoe did not sink to the bottom of the lake. That was one thing. Nor did it stray. That was another. Sure enough, the canoe and its violin had eventually found a Peace, Corwin Peace, through the person of Shamengwa. That fiddle had searched long, I had no doubt of that. For what stuck in my mind, what woke me in the middle of the night after the fact of reading those papers, was the date on that letter. 1897 was the year. But the violin spoke to Shamengwa and called him out onto the lake in a dream more than twenty years later.

"How about that?" I said to Geraldine. "Can you explain such a thing?"

She looked at me steadily, as her father had.

"We know nothing" is what she said. I was to marry her. We took in Corwin. The violin lies deep buried in the arms of the man it saved, while the boy it also saved plays for money in a traveling band now and prospers here on the surface of the earth. I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and to tell its stories. That’s who I am. Mii, Mii’sago iw. [unclear]

[audience applause]

Thank you. [beckons Dr. James McKenzie to the microphone] Thank you. Thanks. Sure.

Dr. James McKenzie: In case you don’t know it, Louise Erdrich is a wonderfully generous woman and she . . . she’s willing to answer questions. If you’ll agree to repeat them if people don’t come to the microphone, so everyone can hear what the question is. And she also will sign books for a while afterwards and . . . but she’s . . . I don’t know how long she has her [unclear] with her.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah.

Dr. James McKenzie: So, any questions?

Louise Erdrich: Those of you who need to filter out, please feel ... don’t feel ... shy, just ... thank you for coming.

Oh, yeah? [audience member asks question] What’s my connection with the Turtle Mountains? My mother’s name is Rita Gourneau. She is the daughter of Pat and Mary Gourneau, and they’re a wonderful couple of people. They ... my ... my grandfather was tribal chair, real storyteller, and I ... I ... I didn’t grow up there. I grew up in Wahpeton. I was enrolled there and my main connection was visiting back and forth and then my mother’s influence, her stories, what she told me.

Yes?

Audience Member: You write a lot about music yourself in your books. Do you have any personal connection to music?

Louise Erdrich: Well, I was taught piano by a Franciscan nun. That’s a real connection. [laughs] [audience laughter] I went to those little musical contests in Bismarck. Where I ... I froze. It was ... it was terrifying, but ... so yeah, I ... that and I just love ... I love music. It ... it has something that nothing else can do. It just can go straight in somehow. [motions toward heart]