PERMA RED
By
Debra Magpie Earling
BlueHen Books
Trade Paperback, ISBN 0-399-14899-X
296 pages, $24.95
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
Remember the name Debra Magpie Earling. Her steady, rhythmic sentences remind you of Hemingway but her characters are more complex. The narrative description is poetic as Louise Erdrich, shorn of any stylism. The story is as real as James Welch s Winter in the Blood but told with more skill. And as Sherman Alexie puts it, her novel Perma Red has been circling around my life. In truth, it is a fine work.
It begins this way: When Louise White Elk was nine, Baptiste Yellow Knife blew a fine powder in her face and told her she would disappear. She doesn t, but her troubles, tied closely to Baptiste, nearly kill her.
Louise is a beautiful yet wild girl her hair red, her eyes flashing from brown to green. She s caught in the web of her own untamed spirit, searching for something she doesn t know:
She saw
herself standing before twilight watching her image in water, the bottomless
pond gurgling. If she could see herself
in the shadowy dusk at the moment darkness eclipsed her face she would see her
real self. But that moment never came.
What arrives instead is Baptiste, smoking kinnikinnick, his tongue as red as a salamander. And he knows things instinctively, no different than a wild animal knows by instinct:
He knew long
before anyone else when the first Camas had sprouted. He would inform his mother the night before
the flower would appear and he was always right. He knew stories no one but the eldest elder
knew but he knew the stories without being told.
If Louise is beautiful, Baptiste is dangerous. His mother Dirty Swallow casts spells on others and lives with rattlesnakes. When Baptiste was young, the Catholic nuns tried to lock him up, but he could not be bound by walls or locks.
He became a
large man with sweat-rimmed, tight-armed shirts. He didn t dress to please anyone but himself. He did not talk just because he was spoken
to. He became an Indian who was not
afraid of being Indian, the worst kind, the kind nobody liked, neither the
Indians nor the whites, the kind of Indian who didn t care if he was liked.
Louise
fears him, is repelled by him, and yet she is drawn to him, and she does not
understand why. She is a prize sought
not only by Baptiste but other men as well men who risk everything to possess
her, such as the reservation policeman, Charlie Kicking Woman, who loses his
wife over Louise; and the white man, Harvey Stoner, who s grown fat from
dealing in allotment land, who ll kill to have her. Throughout the story resound echoes of
Robinson Jeffers
But it is Baptiste
who comes for her first and last. The
first time he calls through the screen door in early morning with the sun over
the mountains and golden trails of light on the high hills. He brings a stallion,
But theirs is a brutal and hard love, as is life across the reservation, something Earling does not shy from the signs in the bars announcing NO DOGS OR INDIANS ALLOWED, the impenetrable distance between humans, their inability to find a way to one another, the beating Louise suffers at the hands of a drunken Baptiste, the half-moon scar on her breast from the broken end of the bottle he tried to kill her with.
Occasionally, but rarely, the distance collapses to something tangible, something you can hang onto. When it does, it s akin to the still river place, where the river lies calm, surrounded by the small movement of waves; and only in the shadow of a cloud can you see the silver currents writhing water within the deadly hoop. Baptiste points to the spot. There, he warns Louise, the water is hungry. And so it is; quick to drown the unwary.
In such a world, where even the calm of the river is deceiving, Louise and Baptiste face not only their own self-destructive spirits, they also must survive winter, the old foe of the plains Indians that drove them to starvation and surrender. In bitter cold, their poverty is crushing. Dry snow snaked through the walls, sifted through the weather-cracked floors. Louise wakes to the siltlike snow covering her face and her chin-high blankets. To walk to the store, she must wrap her feet in newspapers, stuff them in her father s old boots, and wrap each finger in catalog paper and shove her hands deep into wool socks. When she finds shelter in a warm bar with Harvey Stone and his money, his ability to buy her anything, Baptiste appears in rags, hunch-shouldered and freezing. She shuns him, pretends he s not her husband, leaving her heart the size of a tablet of seltzer Stoner threw in his water glass.
She had never
been ashamed of her Indianness, except in that moment when for a meal and a
warm ride home she had denied her husband.
The winter, along with the violent events that unfold with it, nearly kill them both. In a desperate act of survival, after Baptiste endures a beating that would have killed many lesser men, he remembers how his mother taught him to pray with his hands open and his arms outstretched, his hands empty to the sky for he had nothing in this world. From behind him blows a sudden wind, whistling through his thin coat, moving across the river and changing its appearance:
And this was
what he knew, what had always been before him, a healing within his grasp. And he saw the great light, a simple gift,
that was all the light he had ever seen, from the smallest lick of the moon on
a black river to the shine of long grass on a windy day.
In halting half-steps, sometimes back steps, Louise and Baptiste work their way to something they haven t known before a kind of acceptance, a willingness to see life differently. Until the end, we don t know if they ll crater into tragedy or not. Hope tugs us forward, and in the skilled hands of Earling, we must turn the page to find out.
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