788 The American Century: Literature since 1945Just how he becomes aware of this is exemplary for Welch’s fiction. He discovers
that his grandfather is not the man he supposed but someone called Yellow Calf.
This secret of his ancestry is never stated; it is simply understood, as Yellow Calf talks
to him about the past of his family and his people. “It was you, Yellow Calf, the
hunter!” the narrator says, to nobody but himself. “And so we share this secret in the
presence of ghosts,” he then recollects, “in wind that called forth the muttering
tepees, the blowing snow, the white air of the horse’s nostrils.” Returning to the
family land, he finds he has two tasks to perform. One is the burial of his grandmother,
which is recollected in a tone of typical graveyard humor. “The hole was too short,”
the reader is told, so someone had to jump up and down on the coffin until “it went
down a bit more, enough to look respectable.” Just prior to this seriocomic act of
piety, the narrator has another, quite unexpected job to do, one that is dirty,
dangerous, and slightly ridiculous. He has to rescue a cow that has become stuck in
the mud. The job is done with a will; and the performance of the job is described
with a sly humor but serious attention to detail that lends it a modest heroism. One
release from nothingness, it seems, is the one the heroes of Joseph Conrad and Ernest
Hemingway found: in work, patient, practical attention to the task at hand. Rain falls
just after the task is finished. “Some people ... will never know how pleasant it is to
be distant in a clean rain, the driving rain of a summer storm,” the narrator concludes.
“It’s not like you’d expect, nothing like you’d expect.” This is a small thing, perhaps,
but a small, good thing. Along with the small ceremonies due to ancestors, the small
consolations of the senses are like a good deed in a naughty world. They may not
promise redemption but they provide a kind of temporary emotional rescue. That
may not be enough, Welch intimates, but it is all that we can have.
Like James Welch, Louise Erdrich has devoted much of her career to writing a
tetralogy. Of German and Chippewa descent, Erdrich grew up in the Turtle Mountain
Band of Chippewa, in North Dakota. And in 1984 she published the first of four
books set on and around a fictional Chippewa reservation in her homestate. She has
since returned to that small imagined world in a number of later novels, including
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and The Plague of Doves
(2008). Titled Love Medicine, the 1984 novel consists of a series of free-standing
narratives told by various members of two families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines,
living on the reservation between 1974 and 1984. Appearing in one another’s stories,
their fates intertwined, the narrators mix humor and despair as they tell stories of
survival that focus in particular upon women. The second novel in the series, The
Beet Queen (1986), begins in 1932 when two children, Karl and Mary Adare, leap
from a boxcar. Orphaned, they have come to seek refuge with their aunt Fritzie. The
story then spans forty years, taking in what is for Erdrich a characteristically large
gallery of characters. Erdrich is particularly adept not only at intercalating narratives,
weaving the stories of several people together into one, densely layered tapestry, but
also at linking story to history. These are all extraordinary people; and Erdrich is not
averse to stepping beyond the realms of naturalism, into folktale, myth, ritual, and
magic realism, in order to tell their tales. But she, and her storytellers, are always
aware of their connection to the ordinary community. And she, in particular,GGray_c05.indd 788ray_c 05 .indd 788 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM