Little: A Novel

By David Treuer

Back in print, with a new introduction, the memorable debut by the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

The grave we dug for my brother Little remained empty even after we filled it back in. And nobody was going to admit it.

So begins Little, first published by Graywolf Press in 1995 when David Treuer was just twenty-four. The narrative unfolds to reveal the deeply entwined stories of the three generations of Little’s family, including Stan, a veteran of the Vietnam War who believes Little is his son; Duke and Ellis, the twins who built the first house in Poverty after losing their community to smallpox and influenza; Jeannette, the matriarch who loved both Duke and Ellis and who walked hundreds of miles to reunite with them. Each of these characters carries a piece of the mystery of Little’s short life.

With rhythmic and unadorned prose, Treuer uncovers in even the most frost-hardened ground the resilience and humor of life in Poverty. From the unbearable cruelty of the institutions that systematically unraveled Native communities at the turn of the century, to the hard and hollow emptiness of a child’s grave, Treuer has orchestrated a moving account of kinship and survival.

In his new introduction, Treuer, now among the foremost writers of his generation, reflects on the germ of this novel and how it fits into his lasting body of work centered on Native life. More than a quarter of a century later, Little proves as vital and moving as ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781644451908

David Treuer

DAVID TREUER is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the award-winning author of the novels, Little and The Hiawatha. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

Book preview

Introduction

I began writing this novel in 1989 when I was nineteen years old and I finished it five years later when it was published by Graywolf Press in 1995. I was twenty-four and convinced I had arrived. I hadn’t, of course, at least not in the way I imagined. I thought I would be bejeweled in awards; that I would immediately get all of the choice magazine assignments; there would be a movie (in the manner of Merchant Ivory). And I would get to spend my free time at parties with my heroes. None of that happened. All of which is to say I was terribly young when I began it and young when I finished it. And the book reflects my youth, such as it was. It also reflects, in its own way, my ambition.

And I was ambitious. I wanted to create an Indian world, with fully realized Indian characters, without recourse to what felt to me (and still does) as the tired tropes and shortcuts of nature affinity, innate spirituality, and wise old grandmothers who dispense tough love and real magic. I wanted a cast of multiple first-person narrators (with third person for the single non-Native actor in the novel) all of whom are reluctant, shy even, to talk about themselves and their feelings. They deflect by talking about everything but themselves, and it is Donovan, the older brother to the title character, who does a good deal of the talking. This approach felt honest to me. I wasn’t raised Christian so the idea of confession (which is at the bottom of first-person narratives) didn’t make sense to me. I was raised on my tribe’s reservation where if we confess anything, ever, it is an account of everything everyone around us has done wrong.

Early in the manuscript’s life, in the spring of 1991, I had the incredible good luck to get into professor Toni Morrison’s long-fiction workshop. I was not an easy student. On the very first day of class Professor Morrison asked the six of us to share what we were working on. I don’t remember much about what the other students shared because I was nervous and I felt intimidated. But the student next to me (legs crossed, hair floppy in a way I thought of as so Princeton) said in a kind of lazy Capote-esque drawl: "My story is set on Martha’s Vinyard and the main character is a half-breed whose mother is the town drunk … I seethed until it was my turn. Since I was so insecure, I didn’t know how to do much other than attack. I’d rather not talk about my book. I’d rather talk about why I write, I said through gritted teeth. I write because idiots like this—I pointed to Capote with my thumb—don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. I’m Ojibwe, from the Leech Lake Reservation, and … Morrison listened while looking at the contents of a manilla folder on her lap. Her gray dreads motionless. Her face motionless. When I was done, she looked up. Says here you’re an anthropology major. Yes. Teeth still gritted. You write better than most anthropologists. Pause. Is that supposed to be a compliment? Her eyes widened. I had surprised her. Yes, actually. Yes, it is. And then I woke up to my situation. Oh, I managed, oh, thank you." I think I amused her, though I never thought to ask. I like to think she was fond of me, though I didn’t think to ask that either. But there was something there because we worked closely on what would become this book through that class, all the next year when I was her advisee, and on until I was in copyedits with Graywolf Press. Here I got lucky again. But just as the novel itself doesn’t resemble a straight line, neither did the path from manuscript to publication.

My agent, Irene Skolnick—one of the old guard—sent it out. Everywhere. The novel was rejected at least thirty times and I felt like I lived in a state of eternal rejection. But it hadn’t gone everywhere and then Irene sent it to Fiona McCrae who had just joined Graywolf Press and it became the first debut novel she acquired. Fiona was (and is) a great editor and she did hero’s work untangling my sentences, giving scenes a more compact and buoyant shape, and helping the book emerge out of itself (the only place books really come from). She asked tough questions about the characters, their motivations, and their place in the book. The book, thus, has two very different mothers and I was lucky enough to have two very different mentors, though they shared an attention to detail; shared a fierce commitment to the power of the word; shared a belief that working the words could eventually make them work for the story.

And then the book was typeset. It was given cover art. It was copyedited. My girlfriend took my author photo. The book was reviewed and around the same time, miraculously, it was published. A paperback sale followed. So did French, British, and, strangely, Greek editions. Reviewers liked it. Some readers liked it too. I had, however, not arrived where I thought I should arrive. I was not a best seller. I didn’t win any big awards. Mine was not the name on people’s lips when they whispered at parties where I didn’t appear about the next great thing. But I, surely, had arrived somewhere even though it’s not where I thought I wanted or deserved to be. I had arrived at the beginning of a writing career, not at its highest point.

The book, Little, was imperfect and complex. A story about a community with a mute boy at the center of it, where different members take up different parts of the narrative and share and shoulder the mute aches of those around them with a strange white priest from Iowa who orbits this ad hoc community—never settling in, never really belonging to it—and describes its outer limits with that orbit. The character Little is at the center of the story and so is a terrible secret: he is the product of rape by a man who is killed in the church immediately afterward. Some characters know this, others don’t. And it’s the play between knowing and unknowing that animates much of the action. I didn’t have the sophistication when I was younger to accurately describe it but today I could probably say it’s a book about the weight of sadness in the world. That probably makes it sound heavy. I’m not sure it is. Because there is a brand of joy in it, too: the joy found in the power of imagination and in language itself.

Now I’ve had the chance to fix some of my many early mistakes. I’ve smoothed it a bit. I have a much less complicated relationship with language and with beauty now—both of which I thought should exist for their own sake but now I feel should serve the story rather than the other way around. I’ve tried to address this. I’ve left in some of the more embarrassing bits (there is a lonely bison in one scene, and an overreliance on easy reservation signifiers like fry bread, beer, cigarettes, and hopeless sex in many others). For better or worse, they deserve to remain.

Some of my themes remain too. I wasn’t concerned, in the early 1990s, about ancestrality, about how closely my writing clove to Ojibwe story or storytelling or Ojibwe culture. In all honesty I don’t think there’s much of a connection to a tribal past at all in my work. But I was concerned with durability. And it’s no wonder: I began this book around the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s initial landing in the New World. The question of Indian durability, of our insistence on not just survival but life itself, was my response and that is something that has carried through all my work. So, too, was my preoccupation with the way language and narrative shape the texture and sense of our lives. And also: the way that history is rather less like a sequence of past events (or, in the case of Native lives, a list of injustices we have managed to survive) as much as it is a force that lives through us. These preoccupations have bled into my subsequent fiction and I carried them with me into Rez Life and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee as well.

In closing I should say that going over the manuscript twenty-five years later has been altogether odd. I remembered something I had managed to forget over the years. Time might well heal wounds, but it also buries other things in those scars. Because now I remember Little had an antecedent, one of the first stories I ever wrote, which completely disappeared from the manuscript. The story was impossible. In it an aging grandfather wants to take his grandson fishing. The grandfather is desperate for the outing. His son, from whom he is somewhat estranged, is against it but agrees if only to make him feel better about his relationship with his father. During the trip the grandson falls out of the boat and drowns when the grandfather is too weak, too arthritic, too old to lift him back in. The story unfolds in the present tense from the perspective of the grandfather who can’t admit he caused his grandson’s death to his son on the phone. Instead, he invents a fish story: he tells his son about a huge pike he hooked, how hard it fought, how well he played it, how it was too big to get in the boat, and how the fish got away. The grandfather is in an impossible situation. He can’t admit he killed his grandson but he must tell his son that the boy is dead. And so the fish. And so the story about a man who can’t say a thing because he can’t bear the weight of that thing. I doubt the story was good, but the tensions in it, the impossibility of the predicaments inside it, were the real germ of the novel that came. How did I forget this? How did I manage to remember it?

Another oddity of the process was that I found myself choking up as I read it. I don’t think I got emotional because the writing is that impressive. I’m old enough now to know better. I think I got teary because the book is better than it should be considering I wrote it when I was so very young and knew next to nothing about anything. I got emotional because it’s only now, twenty-five years later, that I realize how lucky I was back then in the forest of my youth; how terribly lucky I was to have the chance to write and publish and, most of all, to be read. I think, too, that this was the first time reading this book when my mentor—who died two years ago—can’t. Before: her eyes were in the world. They looked at things. They looked at me and my words. And now they aren’t. Now they can’t. And I miss her. But she took the book seriously. And she took me seriously. And I loved her. And so Jeannette and her orange remind me of my professor. And the pollarded trees outside the nursing home are the trees that line the graveyard where my father rests. And the sand where they bury Little is the sand where my mother’s body rests just west of our ancestral village of Bena, Minnesota. And the words form a kind of secret map, a set of nodes that thrum my past—growing larger with every day. And that’s why it’s been a sweet sorrowful thing to look at them again and to have the people and places of my family and those I love and the landscapes and seasons that shaped us come, forcefully, unbidden, to life. And life is both a sum and a subtraction. And that, after all, is what the book is, finally, about.

David Treuer

Bemidji, Minnesota

2021

Little

• I •

A Whole Heart

Donovan • 1980

The grave we dug for my brother Little remained empty even after we filled it back in. And nobody was going to admit it. Nobody. Everyone at the housing tract we called Poverty avoided the bare fact, the empty grave. Tucked back up in the woods, Poverty had no witness, and since there were only seven of us living in the two remaining houses that hadn’t been gutted or broken, we had no one to explain it all to. We had no one to hand it to, fact by fact. So, even without the body, everything remained the same.

Stan still thought he was Little’s father. During the wake he shuffled between the empty coffin wedged in the corner of the living room and the front steps sagging under the weight of the clustered beer drinkers.

My boy, he slurred. My boy, my boy, my boy.

He still believed the signs. His six fingers and Little’s. He thought it meant that they were blood related. Little’s hands had been deformed since birth, his fingers fused into huge claws, three clubby fingers on each hand, ready to grab onto anyone who entered his orbit. Stan still believed the signs, though he had six fingers on his left: his right had been blown off in Vietnam, which is why we called Little Little Stan.

My boy’s gone, Stan mumbled into Jeannette’s hair, which hung in a gray knotty braid. She grimaced and turned the frying-pan handle inward on the stove so he wouldn’t spill the hot grease from the fry bread on himself. Protecting him like a child.

When he swerved outside, the old twins, Duke and Ellis, tried to swoop him up in the stories they told on end, tried to lure him into sleeping off the booze in the back seat of their Catalina. They tried to still him under their wings, and when that didn’t work, they blocked him physically from going down to the lake to stare across the cold April water at the water tower blinking its red eye above town, seeing nothing.

Celia just sat on the torn plaid couch, her arms crossed, her foot kicking out from under the eave of her dress. She didn’t comfort Stan or respond to Ellis’s hugs or Duke’s jokes. She didn’t look at the empty coffin where her son, my brother, was supposed to lie.

We didn’t even have the body, not even his clothes, his hair, no memories of anything he ever said. Nothing but his one word, You.

No pipe man came, though the Catholic priest stopped by. With quivering red-knuckled hands he came to deliver his condolences and a frozen ham wrapped in tinfoil. Jeannette met him on the front steps. He handed her the ham, its metal skin winking in the April light. He said he would give Little the last rites.

We stood: Duke in midjoke, Jeannette with her hands on her hips, Violet leaning to see out the door from where she was scooping Jell-O salad into a bowl. Our eyes were bleary with menthol smoke, our hands busy with caffeine. We squinted at the priest who sawed back and forth on the steps.

Not in my house, Jeannette said.

But …, he stammered.

No.

His soul, said the priest, hopelessly, toeing a bottle cap on the lowest step.

I imagined holy water arcing onto the lace curtains, the priest bending over an empty coffin, creasing the egg-smooth pillow with his thumb. Ham was one thing, but irony was something we would not accept from a white priest from Iowa.

He turned and walked back to where his car waited. The pale blue car crunched its way back to the highway. We never saw him again.

On the second day of the wake Duke and I drove to town to borrow a bigger coffee maker from the bingo hall. The Pontiac Catalina that Duke and Ellis claimed was their mobile home hummed along the pitted asphalt, lifting and diving along the frost heaves. Anyone at Poverty would have put them up in their house, even Jeannette would have let them in ours, though it was crammed with Stan, Celia, and me. Stan’s sister, Violet, was living in their mother’s house across the way. No one lived there now except Violet and Jackie. Their mother, Rose, left when I was small. The other houses were in various stages of ruin; two had burned, one was sagging slowly to the ground from water damage, and the other was split in two by a white pine knocked down in a storm. But Duke and Ellis stuck to their car.

Are you sure they’ve got a pot to spare? I asked. Silence was too much for me. Silence felt like the only thing we had.

It don’t matter who it was, Donovan, said Duke.

What?

It don’t matter.

What doesn’t?

Duke gripped the steering wheel with his left hand as he fished around in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.

Little’s dad, he said carefully as he bent his head down from the wind to light up.

Do you know? I asked, shifting in my seat.

He nodded, but kept his eyes straight ahead.

Just like it don’t matter who left you by the road.

It does to me.

Just take care of your ma, that’s all.

The wind swept in and I looked out at the tan fields. The snow was finally gone. One match would be all it would take: the smoke would curl off the fields, lick the fence posts, and jump into the trees. Sparks would whip up in the sky, far, far overhead. Our little corner of the world could be gone like that.

We never shut off the coffeepot during the four days before we buried the coffin. At night the on switch glowed red, blurred by the cigarette smoke that hung in the house like fog.

Violet kept it going, filling cups when they were getting low, banging the grounds into the plastic garbage can, and filling the coffeepot up again. Duke joked, saying that Poverty alone was keeping an entire nation of Colombians in work. She kept the coffee hot, ran to the store for more creamer, and stalked the house emptying ashtrays. She washed them but they were never dry enough. When people rested their cigarettes in the grooves, they sizzled and burned unevenly, the white paper leeching brown.

She straightened the sheet thrown over the only table, put half-eaten ham sandwiches in the fridge, and made sure that her daughter Jackie was with me.

I picked around slowly, moving from person to person like I was shuffling from room to empty room in a house swept clean. Everyone was in storage.

My ma ruffled my hair.

It’s not your fault, she said, picking the ratty couch apart with her eyes. Celia. The one who raised me after Duke and Ellis found me cast-off, half-frozen in an abandoned car.

I picked around. The rest of the summer Jackie and I spent scuffing our feet, stealing beer to drink at the dam. Stan watched us from the fishery window where he worked as we threw the empties over the spillway.

But on that day, that bright funeral day, we didn’t go to the dam. We couldn’t bring ourselves to trust the water. We didn’t even have the body to put in the grave, no words of his to remember like river rocks to turn over looking for something skittering away in the murk like the orange dart of a crayfish.

You see, Little didn’t speak. It wasn’t that he couldn’t. All he had ever said was you. He wasn’t stupid. It was a choice. Like Duke, he chose not to tell what he knew.

So that day, when the grass was still dead, we took the opportunity not to lie to ourselves, but to lie to everyone else. We lied to each other about what he meant, what his life meant, and, in turn, what we and our lives meant. We dug the hole to show our determination because we had nothing to put in it.

We dug on a rise by the lake behind Poverty. We pushed the shovels, shiny and slick with use, past the mat of pine needles. They scraped away easily like so much skin. We cut the black soil off first, soil not close or thick enough to be real sod, and it crumbled in a heap. Then through the sand that warmed and slid past our shovels. It kept slipping back into the opening and leveled at the bottom and we patiently lifted it out. It reminded me of a joke Ma told me once: What gets bigger the more you take out? A hole.

A heart, maybe.

That’s what it seemed like, though I didn’t get it at the time. Little had offered his one word, like punctuation after the punch line. You.

A hole. A heart. A whole heart, it kept on getting bigger and bigger. We dug with the sun on our backs. It warmed its way through our shirts, though the wind off the lake was still cold. The ice had only gone out the week before.

Duke told me to climb down inside and lift out the shifting sand with a bucket. I scooped the sand into the plastic ice-cream pail and handed it to them where they piled it in a shifting heap. The hole got bigger but the sun couldn’t get down inside. Right there at the bottom I knew the joke was right. The more sand, the more rocks I moved, the more roots I chopped out with a dull hatchet, the emptier it got. I knew from down there where we dug for Little, but couldn’t put him, that there had to be something we were digging for.

We dug and dug, looking for reasons. We would have kept on except Jeannette came outside, wrapped in one of Stan’s flannel shirts, wondering what was taking us half the day. At seventy she had that old-lady way of making everything you do seem so stupid, as coarse and plain as rough lumber.

That there hole’s big enough to drive your shitty car into, she said to Duke and Ellis.

We stopped then.

Everyone came out of the house and stood around, pretending discomfort when the discomfort wasn’t at his death. It was at the why of his short, speechless life.

The older ones, Duke, Ellis, Jeannette, Violet, Stan, and Celia, kept lying to each other, shifting their weight from foot to foot, squinting at the sun. Jackie and I stood, too, until they out-patienced us, until we split and ran to the hayfield across the road where we raced the giant dandelions like the three of us used to.

The dandelion heads were as big as oranges. Each seed looked like a miniature parachute, like what Stan said he had jumped with in the army. We plucked them off a plant that had escaped the winter underneath a turned-over water trough and held them between our fingers, high above our heads, and let them go.

We raced them across the fields, over the turned-in hay and clods of dead grass and up, up over the trees, the bent, twisted jack pine and the ignorant red pine. We raced them that day as we did every summer, holding the seeds up and just letting the wind take them. I felt they went farther, were carried higher than before: past all the old places, beyond the old lines and boundaries of the reservation, the lousy jobs, the no money, the beer. We flung them as far as we could because we knew that we had nothing to do with it, no control over where they landed. We never could do anything with them anyhow. They were too light.

It was the wind that took them, carried them across the sky up into that pale blue, powder blue like my ma’s faded-out dress. Up into that color the wind took them and I don’t believe they ever settled down, but scattered away.

Jackie fell asleep with her head on my stomach. I looked where those seeds were blowing. Not because I wanted to know, but because I knew I couldn’t.

In later years all of us at Poverty dressed up our stories about Little, gave them wings, and let them go. And since there was so little to tell, they took off, circled higher, and, like the dandelions, never touched the ground again.

After it got dark, we walked back to Poverty, toward houses where beer tops were already popped and the television was on. Jackie went home where Violet tucked her into bed even though Jackie was nine. I went out to the hole.

I stood at the edge of the grave. It was just as they left it: gaping and empty. The sand looked crustier and the topsoil had lost its deep black glitter. It was still empty because there was nothing to cover.

All of the talk: Stan claiming that he was the father, Violet thanking God because her child wasn’t like that, Jeannette suffering us with her silence, the twins’ balance in which Duke jabbered and Ellis thought. It was all open and out, but like the dandelions we threw, there was nothing stable about us. All the talk and the silence, the secrets kept or known gradually began to change shape during the time of his funeral. They acquired new habits and grew beyond what Poverty and the reservation had previously allowed. Even later when I knew the truth and held it to me like a long-lost friend it gave no comfort, offered nothing of itself, and passed on. The importance of knowing had long since faded. The hole got bigger the more we

Reviews for Little

[froxgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel of hardscrabble life in a town bordering an Ojibway reservation in Minnesota, in a housing tract called "Poverty", after President Johnson's War On. Three generations venerate the land - the descriptions of which are the true beauty of the book - and there's interference in the form of Vietnam, the Catholic Church, and the brutal weather. Jeannette and her twin brother lovers have two children after Duke and Ellis rescue her from servitude in an Iowa home where she was placed by the church in 1918. They walk from Iowa back to Wisconsin on an old Indian trail. Neither their children nor grandchildren can make much progress nor put much distance between themselves and destitution, but they stay close to the land and to each other. There's an elemental sadness and hopelessness living side-by-side with family love and interdependence that remains with the reader.

[lyndainoregon · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lyrical writing and a strong sense of place can't save this novel, which leaps from narrator to narrator back and forward through a span of years as it tells the intertwined story of a tiny community on the Chippewa Reservation of northern Minnesota.

Relationships are complex, with "family" defined more by emotional ties than genetic ones, and multiple vignettes flash by in search of a plot. The title character, a physically and mentally challenged boy, is little more than a thread wandering through the scenes without either tying them together or giving them depth.