Her descent from the embankment and over the crest of rocks that line the shore way can be described as nothing less than terrifying. The rocks catch the wheels of the Ford Ranger and Wren experiences the first moments of regret that she ever dreamed up such a scheme. The front wheels seem momentarily stuck, spinning between two small boulders. The truck feels as though it will fall on its side rather than go forward onto the frozen expanse of lake toward the ice heave that beckons. Wren is in a panic. She calls on the fairies again, to whatever entities might be helping her in this task. It may have been loose gravel or her loose mindset that willed the vehicle forward, but suddenly the wheels spin out from the grip of those frozen rocks and Wren is back on the bumpy ride down the embankment and toward the frozen lake.
Wren drives a quarter-mile across the layer of ice, not knowing if it will hold the weight of the vehicle she’s driving. November is too early to be on the lake. She drives with the window down and her seatbelt unbuckled in case she needs to make a quick escape. This far from the shoreline is a place where the water runs deep; a good place where secrets will be kept. A place where no one will find this abandoned vehicle. It will sink and be taken by the lake and with it, any trace of Billy. Wren stops on the fault line, puts the truck into park and steps out. She’s crying, her memory of Raven’s disappearance still fresh in her mind.
It occurs to Wren that what she’s done is her way of yelling at the universe, of asking, Why did this piece of shit get to live and prosper, and hurt people, and lie and still carry on as though nothing has happened? She curses the rcmp for their inaction on Raven’s disappearance. As she slams the truck door, Wren finds herself hoping that Billy’s disappearance will be met with the same lack of examination. Wren wipes the tears that have fallen from her eyes with the sleeve of her coat. She takes a deep breath, inhaling the good, exhaling the bad. Once she feels centred, she begins her walk back to the shoreline. Wren knows the falling of snow will bury that truck, cover her footprints, and erase any evidence of the crimes she’s committed.
“Fairies, you have conspired. Thank you,” she breathes.
Wren spots a lone coyote watching her as she exits the truck. The air is so quiet even her footsteps don’t make a sound. Wren walks home along the pathway, then through the Village of Buena Vista. There are no streetlights so keeping to herself is easy. She’s wearing dark clothing, helping her blend into the darkness of night and the darkness of her secret, which will soon rest at the bottom of this lake. She hopes her plan will work, and that the ice heave on the lake will break before morning, swallowing the truck.
Memento Mori
What started out as a light snowfall has turned hard and constant. School buses don’t run the following morning. Wren knows this because watching the highway is part of her routine, has been since she and Lord moved back to the farmhouse. Wren pours a strong coffee each morning before her husband leaves for work. She watches the tail lights on his car as he leaves for the city. Eight-thirty in the morning. She can set her clock by it. Today though, that stretch of highway which she can see from her kitchen window is quiet. No school buses. No plows. No traffic.
Wren wonders if she’ll be able to make it out of her own driveway today. She takes a sip from her big mug and walks to the other side of the house to the window that looks toward the east, where the day begins.
The smoke from Wren’s kiln has been releasing all night. She’s been stoking the fire since returning home from the lake. She even got up at four in the morning to add more birch. Quiet, alone, unseen. Now, finally, the flame has died leaving only embers. Wren will collect the fragments from Billy’s remains tomorrow.
Wren decides to throw some clay on her wheel. It is a snow day anyway, so she might as well do something that will amount to good. It’s so quiet outdoors this morning. The thick blanket of snow masks every sound, even the wind is silent. Once indoors, Wren opens a new box of clay. It’s like some sort of homecoming each time she does this. The smell of fresh earth sends her a special greeting, like the clay itself is welcoming her to pick it up and start moulding.
Wren puts on an apron and gathers some slip. She turns on the potter’s wheel. Its hum is always soothing: the sound of creation, reminding her of the wind. As she hunches over the wheel to coax the clay into rising, her mind drifts to times when she and Raven gathered wolf-willow seeds from the bush. Their kohkum had taught them how to pick the seeds and clean off the husk to reveal a perfect, sharp, brown seed at its core. As they removed the outer husk, there was that smell of something wild and free. They’d sit for hours, stringing the wolf-willow seeds into the shape of a necklace or bracelet. A precious memory, and Wren finds herself wishing that her sister was sitting with her now, playing with clay.
She’s happy to be using her pottery wheel again: that whirl of promise that will transform a piece of Mother Earth into a form that signals rejoicing, something that has not been seen in Wren’s studio for months. Not since Raven went missing. Not since her husband encouraged Wren to do pottery with the kids at the women’s shelter. At least her time at the shelter allowed her to find some new kind of purpose. Getting rid of debris and things not useful. Like Billy. Wren watches the mound of clay as it spins around on the wheel.
She says a prayer to her sister: “Today, I make an image in your honour. It will tell the story of strength, and bone black will be the finish. His bones, for all the hurts we have endured but never deserved.”
Crafting and moulding, Wren forms the clay as delicately as dressing a newborn child. She puts her fist in the middle of the mound and it rises. She gently glides her fingers to the outside of the vessel. It needs a lip. Something that will allow it to speak. Within the sound of silence outdoors, the sound of silence within her own heart, Wren coaxes the clay into form. It’s almost noon by the time Wren finishes moulding and finessing this new piece. It’ll have to sit for another day before she can fire it, along with the bone black ash that’s in her outdoor kiln. Bones of Billy.
Wren looks at her long driveway. Snow covered. She’ll call the neighbours down the road for a plow later. Right now, she wants to see if there is a red dot on the lake. Billy’s red truck. Blood of my brother. Wren’s wish is that any evidence of her nocturnal activity will be wiped clean. She hopes the fairies have danced and that lake spirits have taken this offering to rid filth from the earth.
Wren removes her apron and leaves the studio. Minutes later and a short drive down to the lakeside, Wren gazes out towards the middle of the lake. The wind throws her hair over her eyes causing her to lose focus momentarily. The sun shines brightly as the shrill voice of a bohemian waxwing sounds. It jumps from branch to branch along the aspens that grow in the valley. The bird rests in a bush, where it eats the red buffalo berries that continue to hang through the winter months. Wren takes it as a sign from her bird cousin that there will be no red for her to see on the lake today.
Last night’s snow is sticky. The temperature has warmed since yesterday and the snow sticks to the bottom of Wren’s boots, making her feet heavy. There are no footprints in the snow other than the ones she’s making now as she walks. Thick snow lays heavy on the frozen lake as well. She glances toward the panorama and the fault line where she left the truck. Nothing. It’s disappeared, fallen through the ice to rest at the bottom of a very deep lake. There is no evidence of tire tracks on the pathway, nor on the embankment where Wren almost got stuck. Nothing looks out of place; nature’s canvas is wiped clean again by a blanket of fresh snow. By the fairies. Not even snowmobiles would go out on the lake this early in the season, so no tracks like that either. Only clean white flakes. Wren decides to celebrate.
“Red Sea parting, Young Dogs swallowed up,” she mutters to her waxwing friend. “There are fresh cinnamon buns at the gas station. Cinnamon, the smell of comfort.”
Wren returns to her vehicle parked at the end of the street, near an area bald of trees. Wren says a silen
t prayer for what she’s done. She prays for the inner child of Billy’s soul, the child who had lost his way and turned into a man who slapped and raped and punched. That innocent part of his spirit needs to be set free. Now, that part of him that was once pure will be allowed to dance with the fairies again.
Wren slowly makes the sign of the cross before putting her car in gear. A cinnamon bun awaits.
Forgiven But Not Forgotten
By the time she gets back to her farmhouse, Wren’s sweet cinnamon bun is only half-eaten. It occurs to her that while she wants to have feelings of elation, she cannot. What she’s done is wrong, she knows this, even if that piece of shit deserved what he got.
Instead of returning to her studio to revisit her newly created piece of pottery, she goes instead to her bedroom and retrieves a pink rosary from her bedside table that used to belong to Kohkum. Wren feels the need to connect with her grandmother’s spirit. She needs to seek guidance and validation that what she’s done was what needed to be done. No more guilt. It was like putting down a rabid animal, a humane act meant mostly to protect the innocent. Billy felt no pain. He just went to sleep, a slumber from which he never awoke.
As Wren holds the rosary, she’s thinks about prayer, and all the times her kohkum told her that the universe provides if you just ask. The memory brings her comfort. Sitting now at her kitchen island, Wren can see her kohkum at work baking bannock, swirling freshly picked berries in a pot to make a sweet jam. She hears her grandmother’s humming and she can see her gentle smile. Innocent times of love and belonging. Kohkum’s kitchen is the place where so much love was shared, and so much food to nourish body and soul. She thinks of the long walks Kohkum would take with the girls. The smell of fresh sap from trees and the lake-smell of algae carried by a warm breeze as they made their way along the valley. There was no pathway back then but it still was a stretch along the lake that was a bustle of activity, all the way from town to Valeport. There was a little cove of land that housed a dance hall, and local folks would dock their boats along the shoreline to make merry and get caught up on the latest goings-on.
That part of the valley has always been lush and remains so to this day, dotted with sloughs. It’s where families gather for picnics in order to watch scads of geese and ducks nest in the area. Kohkum would always tell the twins that along those sloughs grows a large patch of sweetgrass. It’s what we pray with, she’d often remind them. Then, the girls’ grandmother would say, “When I was a little girl, we did a lot of things differently. We harvested the land. No need to head to a grocery store or drug store. Creator provides here, provides everything.”
Wren can still see her kohkum setting down some tobacco while the girls ate Spam sandwiches with mustard that were packed for the hike. “I set down this tobacco,” she’d say, “to thank Mother Earth, the spirit world and our Creator for bringing us such abundance.” They’d sit near the marshy area alongside the lake, watch the ducks and listen to the voices of frogs.
The twins spent a lot of time at their grandma’s house. Wren remembers one Saturday afternoon in early September. She knows it was September because she can see herself wearing a new pair of jeans that Kohkum had purchased for her as a back-to-school gift. Seems she’d give a gift for almost any occasion, even it wasn’t a real holiday. Her grandmother believed every day was special and deserving of note. This day, Kohkum was teaching the girls how to create designs in beadwork. It’s something she started teaching them back when they lost their first teeth, before they started grade one.
The memory brings a smile to Wren’s face as she thinks of Kohkum giving them big jars filled with hundreds of large pony beads. While she cooked or baked, Kohkum would tell the little girls to separate the beads into groups of different colours. She’d bring out fine wool and have them string the beads according to the colours of the rainbow. Only wool; no sharp needles yet on which to prick their small fingers.
Kohkum instructed that they place three beads of each colour in a line to create a rainbow pattern: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. She told them that rainbows are magical because they represent the meeting place where heaven touches the earth. The girls would practise placing the beads until a very long string of them had been created. That’s when Kohkum would store their works, saving them in what she called her “treasure chest,” which was a shoebox where all the precious items the girls had made for her were kept.
Later that year, Kohkum brought out those stringed pony beads to use as decoration on her Christmas tree. As the twins grew, Kohkum taught them how to thread a needle, then how to string the smaller seed beads which would eventually be fashioned into a basic necklace. Eventually, those handmade necklaces would be given away as gifts to friends and teachers at school.
The girls adored this time, learning Kohkum’s teachings and sharing in her talents. When the girls were seven years old, Kohkum decided the time had come to teach them how to tack glass beads onto leather and make key chains. She told the twins, “Nosisimak, my granddaughters, go upstairs to my sewing room and retrieve the materials.” They knew exactly what would be needed and ran up the big stairwell, challenging each other, “Last one is a rotten egg!”
Once in that comfortable room where Kohkum would spend hours creating beadwork, sewing quilts or piecing together rag rugs, the girls knew just where to look. Kohkum kept all her beads in an old Mackintosh toffee box. It was made of tin, and the beads made a tinkling that sounded like applause each time the box was moved from its place on the shelf. Wren had chosen pink and blue glass beads to go into her floral design. She remembers joking with Raven about how she loved having a sister, but always wanted a brother, too, and that’s why she used the two colours: pink and blue.
Raven had chosen two differing hues of purple. She wanted to make a diamond design. The plan was to make gifts for their mom. Her birthday was coming up soon and Kohkum always said, “It’s more special to give a gift made with your own hands than to go to some store and buy something that anyone else can buy, too.”
The girls were happy to accept the challenge of adhering beads to leather as they’d watched Kohkum do hundreds of times. They looked forward to this new opportunity but before they could begin, the telephone rang downstairs, interrupting Kohkum’s lesson.
Standing here now holding Kohkum’s rosary, Wren remembers that sad moment. It was the first time she’d ever seen her grandmother cry. Kohkum’s sobbing could be heard through the heating vent that led from the kitchen to the craft room upstairs where the girls waited. It was a sobbing that came from deep within, that the girls were not supposed to witness.
A Wound That Needs Reopening
Wren knew that Kohkum was also a twin. The maternal side is where the gene comes from in a family. The girls overheard the phone conversation that broke Kohkum’s heart—that her twin sister Dodi had committed suicide.
Wren has no real memories of Auntie Dodi. She didn’t come around much and the girls knew of her only from photos and other people’s stories. Dodi never married or had children. According to stories told in hushed tones and only ever overheard by chance or eavesdropping, Wren recalls the sad tales of how Dodi spent time in and out of rehabilitation centres. She’d even spent some time in jail.
In one of those sad anecdotes, Wren learned that Auntie Dodi had stabbed a man with a broken beer bottle. It was late in the night after an all-day house party somewhere in the city. As the story goes, a man grabbed Dodi from behind and started dry humping her. Dodi told him to stop. He didn’t, so she smashed the bottle and stabbed him with the jagged edge. He didn’t die, but he likely has a scar, like the scars left on Dodi from years of hatred and abuse.
Wren remembers it is was a godsend that Grandpa Tony came back to the house moments after the phone rang. He was able to comfort and settle Kohkum’s grief, as he’d done so many times before. The young girls could only stand, frozen in disbelief, at the news of Dod
i’s death. Kohkum described to her husband how Dodi had always stood as her protector against Father Hector at the Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School. When that god-forsaken devil would corner them, it was always Dodi who stepped in, offering herself to pain and sin so that her twin sister didn’t have to suffer. It wouldn’t be until years later that both Wren and Raven would come to know the full extent of what went on in those so-called places of learning.
“He dragged her off into a broom closet so many times,” Kohkum told her husband. “After a while, she stopped whimpering when it happened. She’d come back to our room later, sweaty and sometimes bruised. Dodi never told me everything that happened. She never told anyone. But something inside her broke, something that even God could never fix.”
Wren remembers Mooshum Tony holding their grandmother as she sobbed. He held his wife as she managed to weep out the story of how Auntie Dodi died. “The coroner says it was an overdose of sleeping pills along with a twenty-six of vodka. Her heart stopped. They found her in a rooming house. She was naked and had soiled the bedsheets. Landlord sent a bill along with the ambulance attendants who collected her. Says he wants to be reimbursed for damages.”
Wren remembers her kohkum saying that Dodi had no possessions except for a couple of old photos that had to be pried from her hands. One was of Kohkum and Dodi smiling, dressed in simple frocks and wearing white socks. It was a photo that must have been taken when the girls were just admitted to the residential school. The other photo was a picture of Wren and Raven. They were babies and Dodi was holding them both, one in each arm, and posing in front of a Christmas tree.
As the sad memory surfaces, Wren goes to the kitchen to make herself a coffee. She is still holding Kohkum’s rosary. She glances through a newspaper she had the forethought to pick up when she went to town for the cinnamon bun. Buried somewhere near the back of the paper is a small article, easy to breeze past. It describes a priest, Father Hector, now retired, an old man living in the city. His recent court case alleging sexual abuse resulted in acquittal.
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