listened before. Anyway, I now realized that Angus was some kind of cousin to me, as Star was a Morrissey and her sister, mother to Angus, was once married to Alvin’s younger brother, Vance, and yet as Vance had a different father from Alvin the connection was weakened. Had I heard the name for this type of cousin, I wondered, sitting there, or should I ask Mooshum and Ignatia?
Excuse me, I said.
Oh yes, my boy, how polite you are! Grandma Ignatia suddenly noticed me sitting there and stuck me with her crow-sharp eyes.
If Alvin is my half uncle and Star’s sister was married to Vance and they had Angus what does that make Angus to me?
Marriageable, croaked Grandma Ignatia. Anishaaindinaa. Kidding, my boy. You could marry Angus’s sister. But you ask a good question.
He is your quarter cousin, Mooshum said firmly. You don’t treat him like a whole cousin but he’s closer to you than a friend. You would defend him, but not to da dett.
That’s how he said it, da dett. Nowadays most of us will say our ths unless we grew up speaking Chippewa, but we still drop a lot of them from habit. My father felt that as a judge it was important to pronounce his every last th. My mother didn’t, however. As for me, I left my ds behind when I went to college and I took up the th. So did lots of other Indians. I wrote an awful poem once about all of the ds that got left behind and floated around on reservations and a friend read it. She thought there was something to that idea and as she was a linguistics major she wrote a paper on the subject. Several years after she wrote that paper, I married her, back on the reservation, and I noticed that as soon as we passed the line we dropped our ths and picked up our ds again. But even though she was a linguistics major, she didn’t have a word for what kind of cousin Angus was to me. I thought Mooshum defined it best with his statement that I was bound to defend Angus, but only so far. I didn’t have to die for him, which was a relief.
At this point, more people came and sat with us, a crowd in fact, all around Mooshum, and the whole party directed its attention to where he sat underneath the arbor. People with cameras carefully positioned themselves and my mother and Clemence posed for pictures with their heads on either side of Mooshum’s head. Then Clemence ran back into the house and there was a hush broken by the exclamations of small children pushed to the edge of the crowd, The cake! The cake!
As Clemence and Edward were now fiddling with their cameras, my cousins Joseph and Evey got to carry in the extraordinary cake. Clemence had constructed a great sheet cake frosted with whiskey-laced sugar, Mooshum’s favorite, and she had iced it onto a piece of masonite covered with tinfoil. The cake was the size of a desktop, elaborately lettered with Mooshum’s name and studded with at least a hundred candles, already lighted, brightly burning as my cousins walked gingerly forward. People parted around them. I slipped aside once they held the cake right in front of Mooshum’s face. The cake was dazzling. Ignatia looked jealous. The little flames reflected up into Mooshum’s dim old eyes as people sang the happy birthday song in Ojibwe and English and then started on a Michif tune. The candles flared more intensely as they burned down, dripping wax onto the frosting until they were mere stubs.
Blow them out! Make a wish! people cried, but Mooshum seemed mesmerized by their light. Grandma Ignatia leaned over and spoke right into his ear. He nodded, finally, and stooped over the cake and at that moment a stray breeze came through the arbor, a little gust. You think it would have extinguished the candles, but on the contrary. It gave them enough oxygen for one last flare and when this happened the little flames fused into a single fire that ignited the mixture of wax and whiskey icing. The cake caught fire with a gentle whoosh and the flames leapt high enough to ravel into Mooshum’s locks of greasy hair as he bent over with his lips pursed. I still have the picture in my mind of Mooshum’s head surrounded by the blaze. Only his delighted eyes and happy grin showed,