Lazarre | Page 6

the children
were playing with other papooses; and my father was hunting down the
lake. The hunting and fishing were good, and we had plenty of meat.
Skenedonk, whom I considered a person belonging to myself, was
stripping more slowly on the rock behind me. We were heated with
wood ranging. Aboriginal life, primeval and vigor-giving, lay behind
me when I plunged expecting to strike out under the delicious forest
shadow.
When I came up the sun had vanished, the woods and their shadow
were gone. So were the Indian children playing on the shore, and the
shore with them. My mother Marianne might still be hanging her pot in
the lodge. But all the hunting lodges of our people were as completely
lost as if I had entered another world.
My head was bandaged, as I discovered when I turned it to look around.
The walls were not the log walls of our lodge, chinked with moss and
topped by a bark roof. On the contrary they were grander than the
inside of St. Regis church where I took my first communion, though
that was built of stone. These walls were paneled, as I learned
afterward to call that noble finishing, and ornamented with pictures,

and crystal sockets for candles. The use of the crystal sockets was
evident, for one shaded wax light burned near me. The ceiling was not
composed of wooden beams like some Canadian houses, but divided
itself into panels also, reflecting the light with a dark rosy shining. Lace
work finer than a priest's white garments fluttered at the windows.
I had dived early in the afternoon, and it was night. Instead of finding
myself still stripped for swimming, I had a loose robe around me, and a
coverlet drawn up to my armpits. The couch under me was by no
means of hemlock twigs and skins, like our bunks at home: but soft and
rich. I wondered if I had died and gone to heaven; and just then the
Virgin moved past my head and stood looking down at me. I started to
jump out of a window, but felt so little power to move that I only
twitched, and pretended to be asleep, and watched her as we sighted
game, with eyes nearly shut. She had a poppet of a child on one arm
that sat up instead of leaning against her shoulder, and looked at me,
too. The poppet had a cap on its head, and was dressed in lace, and she
wore a white dress that let her neck and arms out, but covered her to the
ground. This was remarkable, as the Indian women covered their necks
and arms, and wore their petticoats short. I could see this image breathe,
which was a marvel, and the color moving under her white skin. Her
eyes seemed to go through you and search all the veins, sending a
shiver of pleasure down your back.
Now I knew after the first start that she was a living girl holding a
living baby, and when my father, Thomas Williams, appeared at the
door of the room, it was certain I could not be in heaven. It came over
me in a flash that I myself was changed. In spite of the bandages my
head was as clear as if all its faculties were washed and newly arranged.
I could look back into my life and perceive things that I had only
sensed as a dumb brute. A fish thawed out after being frozen, and
reanimated through every sparkling scale and tremulous fin, could not
have felt its resurrection more keenly. My broken head gave me no
trouble at all.
The girl and baby disappeared as soon as I saw my father; which was
not surprising, for he could not be called a prepossessing half-breed.

His lower lip protruded and hung sullenly. He had heavy brows and a
shaggy thatch of hair. Our St. Regis Iroquois kept to the buckskins,
though they often had hunting shirts of fulled flannel; and my father's
buckskins were very dirty.
A little man, that I did not know was in the room, shuffled across the
floor to keep my father from entering. Around the base of his head he
had a thin curtain of hair scarcely reaching his shoulders. His nose
pointed upward. Its tip was the shape of a candle extinguisher. He wore
horn spectacles; and knee breeches, waistcoat and coat of black like the
ink which fades to brown in a drying ink-horn. He put his hands
together and took them apart uncertainly, and shot out his lip and
frowned, as if he had an universal grudge and dared not vent it.
He said something in a language I did not understand, and my father
made no answer. Then