Born With a Tooth

by Joseph Boyden

  That summer’s events were quickly becoming local legend when a month later Richard, the Equalizer, came knocking for Remi.

  “You’re joking,” I said to Richard.

  He shook his head sadly. “RCMP’s got two men in custody. They name Remi as an accomplice.”

  That’s when I started laughing, when Richard blushed. I called for Remi and he came to the door, looking guilty. When he saw Richard he began to wail, and that’s when I knew.

  At first, Remi was held on reserve by the band’s police force, in a little cell underneath the station. They let us see him only after Patrick threatened them with words I’d never heard come out of his mouth before. With Richard sitting nearby, we talked to our son, but he had gone somewhere deep into his mind — somewhere neither of us had seen him go before, and a place neither of us could get to.

  “It’s going to be OK, boy,” his father told him.

  “I’ll have you home with me soon,” I said. But Remi just stared down at his stocking feet, drooling. Richard had taken his shoes and belt for fear he’d hang himself. That was the strangest thing to me. Did my son have any idea about such things?

  We stayed as long as we could. Richard had to practically drag us out. Within a week, the OPP came and escorted Remi south by train to North Bay. Patrick and me, we followed, spent every penny we had on a hotel while we waited weeks for trial, and visited Remi every day.

  I waited and worried, left with only little events and remembrances to try and piece it all together. There were dark places, shadows in all of this that I could only guess at. We got us a lawyer from Indian Services, a tiny little Crow woman from somewhere out west. Everyone who knew of her said there wasn’t any better. Her name was Angela Blackbird. She finally began filling in some of the pieces for us.

  “The accused are a Matthew Cross and a Darren Shin,” she told us. We sat with Remi in a little meeting room in the institution he was being held at. Remi was still deep in his mind. “At first, these two tried to pin the whole thing on Remi here, but under questioning by police and the Crown attorney, one of them admitted that Remi only carried a box of explosives that was too heavy for them. This one, Darren Shin, said on record that Remi didn’t even know what he was carrying and that he’s innocent of wrongdoing.”

  Patrick and me, we looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a long while.

  “So what about Remi?” Patrick asked. “Why isn’t he free to go?”

  “That’s the catch,” Blackbird said. I watched Patrick’s smile fade. “The OPP are still investigating and recommended that the Crown press charges of complicity so Remi doesn’t disappear. He’s going to have to go to trial. The good news is, I got him his own trial so he’s not tied in with those other two. They’re both being charged with first-degree murder, on top of explosives and theft charges. I wouldn’t want to be those two.”

  Remi’s trial came first. It made the papers. “Mentally Handicapped Cree Faces Charges for Abitibi Dam Explosion.” Everyone showed up to support us — Mother, Mary, Shirley, Suzanne and their kids. Angela Blackbird fought like a warrior for us. Got Darren on the witness stand. Matthew refused, but Darren had already pleaded guilty to all of it, knew he was doomed. Angry as I was at him, I admired him for trying his best for Remi. The day Darren took the stand in court, handcuffed and with his feet chained, wearing an orange jumpsuit, was the first time since Remi’s arrest that I saw Remi come out of himself a little. He stared at Darren, then waved to him.

  “The accused had nothing to do with the planning, preparation or carrying out of the explosion on Abitibi River?” Angela asked Darren.

  “Nothing,” Darren answered.

  “His only involvement was unwittingly carrying a box of explosives too heavy for the two of you, with no idea of the contents or of your purposes with those contents?”

  “Correct,” Darren answered.

  Then it was the Crown’s turn. “So why did your story change so much from statements at arrest as compared to a week later?”

  “I couldn’t live with myself for lying about Remi’s involvement. I couldn’t pin it on him when he was innocent,” Darren answered. Every last person in the court knew he was damning himself by speaking those words.

  “So what you’re saying is that Remi had nothing to do with this, other than carrying a box, having no idea what it contained.”

  “Correct,” Darren answered. “We befriended him, and tricked him into helping. He’s got an environmentally induced mental handicap, for chrissakes! How hard could it be to fool him?” As if on cue, Remi waved to Darren again, and the court broke out into laughter.

  In the end, it was the judge who was left with the decision. Angela was confident. So was Patrick. “It’s clear to me that the accused was an unwitting accomplice in this act of terrorism and, may I add, murder,” the judge said, his voice nasal. “But as small a role as he played, let us keep in mind the destruction to property and to human life. It leaves me to ask this question: where were the parents of this young, handicapped man that he could be befriended by admitted terrorists and, furthermore, made a pawn by them? I do not blame the child here. I place blame on the parents. With this in mind, I deem it necessary that Remi Chakasim be made a ward of the state until it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that his parents are fit for the duty of his complete welfare. The proper authorities will decide upon his new place of residence, as well as the terms for his release back to his parents’ custody. Case closed.” With that he dropped his hammer, and I watched Remi being escorted out of the court.

  And that is what I’m left with. It has been two months now and Remi is in the North Bay Centre for the Mentally Challenged. I take the ten-hour train ride once a week and spend Saturdays with him. His father fights hard on the phone for his release.

  Darren’s and Matthew’s trial was not much longer than Remi’s. Darren pleaded guilty and got forty years, twenty-five for killing the foreman and fifteen for the explosives. Matthew pleaded not guilty even though the case was sealed shut against him, and got life with no chance of parole for his effort. There was no greater reason for what they did. No honourable plan to help us Cree fight the corporations and government. They simply hated the foreman so bad that they figured he’d lose his job if they blew up his work. Darren claimed in his trial that they didn’t want to kill the foreman. It was just a severe case of wrong place at the wrong time. I believe him.

  I received a letter from Darren the other day. He’s in Kingston Pen and he’s sorry for Remi. Darren wrote me that he hooked up with Indian inmates and is involved in their sweat lodges and ceremonies now. They took him as a brother, even though he told them he’s Japanese. He’s become a celebrity with some Indians for blowing up that dam.

  All I can do is keep faith in Remi’s release. No one’s really talking to us. No one knows who’s in charge, it seems, or what course to take in order to get him back to us. Remi just sank back into wherever that place is that he goes. Two weeks after he was sent away, I sat and talked to him. I held him in my arms and rocked him and hummed him some old songs I hummed for him as a baby. Suddenly he sat straight up and stared out the window and spoke. His voice sounded like someone else’s I’d heard a long time ago.

  “Our world will be covered with water,” he said. “Repent now, sinners. Make plans and be saved.”

  I stared, frightened by my child. All I could do was hug him and cry.

  NORTH

  Home

  LEGLESS JOE VERSUS BLACK ROBE

  No roads connect Sharpening Teeth to the rest of the world. But we got roads here on the reserve, thin and covered in dirt like my nephew Crow. Four streets that form a square. In my dream a motorcycle gang, a bunch of hairy bikers, ugly bastards, roars down First Street, makes a left on Wabun, roars down Wabun, makes a left on Takan Road, roars down Takan Road, makes a left on Maheegan Street, roars down Maheegan and ends up right back on First. They pass like clockwork, every three minutes or so, never able to
get out of second gear, getting madder and madder. Bikers would get bored pretty fast on a reserve like this, I tell you. They’d tear this town up quick.

  It used to be the reserve was so small it couldn’t even fit a full-time drunk. But then the economy worsened and the government shrank Indian benefits and most of the tourists quit coming here in summer and my wife left me. It got so bad I was a sad country song. I started my own little gang of serious drinkers. They call us the Cold Duck Four.

  Booze affects a body in all sorts of ways. You might not eat nothing because you save all your money for a bottle, but still you get a paunchy stomach and soft face. I do, anyways.

  The other weird effect is that when I started drinking, I began growing black whiskers on my face, enough now for a scraggly little goatee and funny long patches on my cheeks. Before I was a drinker my face was smooth as a woman’s ass. My theory is that Cold Duck wine is a ploy of the white man to get us Indians drinking and at the same time to get us looking more like them. It seems to be working. The bastards. But one thing that drinking hasn’t affected is my dreams.

  I’ve dreamed all my life. Most do. But me, I try to live by my dreams. To act in waking hours as I do in sleep. To believe what they tell me. I can’t always act the way I do in my dreams, obviously. I’m not about to wrestle giant, beautiful women with great hunting abilities whose clothes tear off effortlessly. But I try to get meaning from the dreams, to trust them. That’s why, when I dreamt my niece Linda was dead last night, I knew she really was when I woke this morning. She killed herself, I knew. So I walked to her mother’s, my sister’s, to find out how.

  “She ate pills,” is all my sister tells me with red eyes. My sister won’t let me hug her. I know how bad I smell. Linda was all by herself at school in Timmins, and that’s when she did it.

  “Let me help you with the funeral,” I say. There is a purpose for me in the sadness. I stand taller and hold my chest out in order to battle the sobbing that is building inside of me. “I’ll drum with the singers for my niece.” I was once the best. A powwow circuit legend. Lead drummer with Black Water Singers.

  “Father Jimmy doesn’t allow drumming,” my sister says and then tells me to leave.

  I leave and look for Father Jimmy. This funeral will be Indian with the Catholic. I think of my sad niece Linda who slept with boys so they’d like her or because she was too drunk to say no, who ate too much to smother her guilt. She was a pretty little kid whose laugh made my breath hitch in my throat, her laugh was so clean.

  The priest is smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee at the Sky Ranch, staring at Elise the waitress, my relation, who he calls Pocahontas.

  “My niece is dead and I want the Black Water Singers at her wedding,” I tell him soon as I sit down across the table. The wide-eyed look of fear settles back quickly into his squinty eyes. I’ve always frightened Father Jimmy with my stinky, big body and long black hair.

  “So if she’s dead, why does she want to get married?” the priest asks me. He hasn’t shaved in a while and his round face is speckled with sharp grey hairs. My tongue grows thick so that I’m worried I won’t be able to breathe. I get up quickly and leave, half as big as when I walked in.

  People on the reserve tell me I’m a wino. I am known as Legless Joe the Wino. So what if I got legs? What’s in a name? Actually, I got my nickname back in my biker days, on a bad acid trip one night. I convinced myself and the rest of my buddies that my legs had melted off. We cried and wailed about the horrible accident for hours, until somebody muttered, “Poor Joe. Poor Legless Joe Cheechoo.” Needless to say, that got somebody giggling, and before you know it we’re all laughing so hard, a few of us threw up. The name stuck. Now it precedes me. That story was one of Linda’s favourites.

  Drinking isn’t an easy career, considering the price of a bottle of Cold Duck and the three lousy bums I hang with always trying to steal sips off me. My girl Cindy, she’s one of the gang. She loves me. I call her my fly girl. I heard that in one of those music videos before and immediately I thought of her because she’s pesky and likes to get into shit. Henry’s so white he’s yellowy coloured like an old newspaper and he’s always trying to get into Cindy. He came up clearing bush for the railway years ago and stayed. He liked the speed of life around here, of living on Indian time. Henry’s got some mighty weepy cold sores, but that’s only half the reason I don’t like him sipping my Duck. You can’t overlook he’s a white man. A good white man, mind you. But haven’t white men taken enough from us? Silent Sam, the fourth Cold Duck, his mind has been surrounded by a fog not unlike the kind you see on a river in early morning. This is due, I believe, to his over-drinking and is where all of us will be in a few years.

  A lot of white people here on the reserve find it easier to blame my drinking on the fact I was buggered in residential school up in Fort Albany when I was a boy. I let them think this is the reason, if it makes their life any easier. But lots of Indians around here were, and most of them don’t drink at all. A government commission travelled up here a few years ago to chase down allegations and I was one of the only ones who would speak to them. Made me high-profile. Father Jimmy said that being able to say out loud that I been buggered is part of healing. I told him it made me feel like buggering him. But that was a year ago when he first come up to take over the church from the crazy old priest who called us heathens and swore more than me and went berserk during mass one Sunday.

  On this sad morning that Father Jimmy makes fun of me at the Sky Ranch, I leave and head back into the bush to our summer place on the river, away from people. The bad news is already travelling the reserve. Everybody will know by noon. My girlfriend, Cindy, is still sleeping. I can hear her snoring ten metres away from our blue tarp teepee. Bottles and cans are scattered all around, glittering in the sun. I sit down and stare at the river and think about my niece Linda when she was just a skinny little kid with feet too big for her, slapping around town in rain boots. I can see her round face looking up to me, framed by messy braids, her asking me for a quarter to get a Popsicle at the store. Hard as I try, I can’t see her face as an adult. Something inside won’t let me. I hum an old song to myself, and bang time on my lap. It is the Death Song, the Funeral Song, sung by Grandfathers long before they ever knew of white men or Cold Duck.

  It is an Indian summer this year, but still the mornings are cold when I wake up, and soon it will be time to make winter plans. The last three years running I’ve mostly been able to do small things like steal food or break windows, so the band constables are forced to keep me in a warm cell and feed me three times a day. Last year all of the Cold Duck Four was in jail at the same time for a solid month, waiting for the Crown attorney and judge to fly up and condemn us.

  We’d broken into the Meechim Store late at night and ate potato chips and white bread and drank pop until we threw up. Cindy stayed in the cell next to me and Henry and Silent Sam and I communicated with her by tapping a quarter on the wall. It would have been easier to shout back and forth, but tapping felt good and it was a nice break from her gravelly voice.

  The Crown said time served was enough punishment and our lawyer agreed with him, so the next day we were forced by the cold wind to break into the Meechim Store again. We sat there all night, eating and getting bored, waiting for the band cops to show. Finally we fell asleep, and we weren’t discovered until the store opened the next morning. That got us through the rest of the winter. But the judge talked a long time about the three-strikes policy and it makes me think this winter I should be more careful or I’ll end up in a maximum security joint down south somewhere, for the winter and summer and next couple of winters and summers too.

  When Cindy and Henry and Silent Sam wake up, I tell them about my niece. Cindy begins to cry and holds me to her, wetting the shoulder of my shirt. Linda was one of the few people in my family who still talked to me and Cindy. Henry and Silent Sam sit side by side and look out to the river, not sure what to say. Sam has been a part of my
life so long that we are brothers. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve seen my words actually make it through the thick haze surrounding his brain. He’s crying too when he turns around to look at me.

  “We got to drum for her at her funeral,” he says. I nod. Me and Sam used to ride together in a motorcycle gang in our youth. There were eleven of us, called the Apostles. Hard as we tried, we could never find that twelfth member. We agreed to be communistic about the whole thing — no general, no lieutenants, no hierarchy. We rode around the north in summertime, drinking a lot and doing acid, having religious visions and helping people out who were in trouble. Stranded motorists, old ladies with flat tires, lost tourists. We put the fear of God into all of them when we pulled up, and left them with the love of Jesus in their hearts when we pulled away.

  We were into our own Indian Catholic thing, all of us long-haired like the Man and treating others as we liked to be treated. You never saw so many back rubs and good words and rounds of beer bought without complaint as in our motorcycle club. But our gig didn’t last long. We were too nice. Nobody would take the reins. When I think back on those days now, I realize that I was trying to make sense out of the bad part of my youth — wanting to believe that we should love one another, but not in the way adults I trusted at residential school sometimes loved me. Linda adored those stories of my biker days. They always made her laugh hard.

  By the afternoon we’re at our picnic table drinking.

  “My niece was a good one,” I say. The other three nod solemn. “She didn’t need to die.” The other three nod again. “Her mother’s heart is broken for good,” I say. “It is a bad day for the Cheechoo family.”