My grandfather packed his tools into his canoe and outfitted himself to camp along side those trees for as long as it would take. After he got to the place and set up his camp, he examined each tree for rot, chose one and cut away the branches from the smoothest and most symmetrical part of the trunk. He carefully marked the trunk all around and used an ax, saw and wedge to remove a section that would make the body of the drum. Once he had that section, he rolled it to his camp, where he would hollow it out. He already had a pile of smooth rocks heating in a blaze and he kept that fire going, feeding it hotter and hotter until the rocks glowed red when he rolled them from the fire with a piece of ironwood. He used a pair of antlers to place each rock exactly where he wanted it - on the heart of the wood. The stone burned itself in, leaving a shallow, charred hole. Once the stone cooled he replaced it with another, and so it went, a tedious, exacting process. The time it took seemed endless but my grandfather needed that time now, because the drum could not be made with a wholly conscious plan. Parts of its making had to be dreamed.
Then all of a sudden, the men heard that the outfit was completed. Simon Jack was seen in the woods from a long way off flashing, gleaming, beaded everywhere. He was a riot of flowers and vines. Every inch of his clothing was covered. He wore a beaded vest and beaded breaches trimmed with otter fur. It was the most extraordinary clothing that anyone had ever seen and he wore it constantly. He didnt take it off to go to sleep or for the dirtiest work. The outfit grew stiff and began to reek, but Simon Jack kept wearing it. He wore it for one whole winter on his trap line. He was still wearing it when he came out of the woods in the spring with a load of furs. By now he had become an object of pity. Although he was avoided because his odor he had become spectacular, people left food out for him, on stumps, where the dogs could not reach. He had no where else to go. Barred from his own cabin, chased from the tent that Ziigwan'aage now shared with a younger man, he took to sleeping in barnyards, wandering the ditches. He showed up anywhere people gathered hoping he'd be fed.
And to think, said the old men, at one time he was well off. He had all he could want. A wife, children, knowledge and powerful songs. Now he has only has the clothes he wears. Which though stinking had held together. In spite of his claw like broken nails and the matted balls of hair that hung down beneath the hat, in spite of the filth crusted along the neck of his shirt and the perfectly glossy black , engraned dirt that had become his skin, his clothing had fallen to ruin. The fully beaded sashes and epaulets and leggings had lost not a single stitched bead. Nothing had unraveled. The colours held. The cut beads still glittered at the flowers centre. Manidoominensag, little spirit things, that is the word for beads in our language. They are more then just decorations. They had a life of their own. It was how perfectly understood that the women whom Simon Jack had bragged of dominating - the young one he'd gotten pregnant and the first wife, that spring wolverine - had known just what they were doing. They had trapped him. It was he who donned the suit, after all, clothes that supposedly illustrated for the world his wives meek devotion. But those were not just flowers, not just vines, not, as i said, little beads. Those spirits were his arrogance for all to see. Filth and brilliance. they were Simon Jack inside out. |
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November 2017
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