Born With a Tooth

by Joseph Boyden

  I looked up at the third girl, Minnie, and it was my Minnie I saw in the darkness. She looked over at me and her eyes were black pebbles. She was still young and beautiful after all these years. She was upset that Linda took her own life. Minnie so desperately wanted to keep hers. One of the boys reached out and hugged the tough girl. If I went to hug Minnie, I thought, she would disappear. A dog on a leash yapped somewhere behind the group. I saw that Minnie had permed her hair just like Linda.

  I know just what Weesageechak was trying to get me to do. He was taunting me to cry and shout to this girl who was my daughter’s ghost. He wanted me to make an old fool man of myself. Sometimes he’s as easy to read as a north wind carrying snow clouds. His jokes have turned cruel lately. The dog that’d been yapping began to howl and pull on his leash. I recognized the voice. One of the boys in Minnie’s group walked over and swatted it on the nose. This gave me an idea.

  Standing up, I walked over to my young Minnie’s group. It felt like I was young and drunk on rye for the first time. Weesageechak couldn’t believe my nerve. He barked when I came near. The young ones looked at everyone’s shoes but mine when I said wachay to them.

  “Linda was a good girl,” I said. “She should have stayed with us longer.” Her friends didn’t say anything, just stared at the ground. “I don’t know why she took her life,” I said. “I don’t know if anyone knows.” The dog strained on his leash and whined, on the verge of a howl. I forced myself not to look at my daughter. “Linda should have stayed to experience what all of us older ones have experienced. I want all of you to stay here a long time and see all of the things I have seen,” I told them.

  I reached out to feel each one’s warmth. Minnie shivered when I touched her last. She was cold in her T-shirt. “I’m sorry I left you to check my lines,” I told her. Words I waited sixty years to speak. “All I want now is for you to still be here.” The dog lurched at his chain, howling, and Minnie jumped. My hand was left shaking in the cold air.

  “I’m cold,” she said. “’Scuse me, Grandpa, I’m going to get a smoke and a coffee inside.” The others mumbled and left with her. I sat down by the dog.

  “I said what I needed to,” I told him. He whined and licked my hand. “You are a sonofabitch,” I said, and he howled. I unlatched him from his leash and he trotted off. I looked up at the big moon and laughed.

  Inside, I saw the priest sitting with Mary now. Before he came to this reserve there was another black robe who treated us like we were little children. He could not see the size of our hearts and, because he didn’t understand us, believed they were small. I remember him. I actually told him one time that he didn’t know us, that he did not know how big our hearts were. That made him angry. I watched this one get angry at my grandson Joseph because he drinks and wanted Linda’s funeral to be Indian. I watched as this priest told Mary not to talk to her own brother, and I watched as Joseph left Mary’s house. This priest thought he had no heart at all. This priest is no better than the other. I went over and told Mary to remember the old ways with the new. I told her that we are a people with a heart strong as a drumbeat. I said this in our language because this belongs to us. Poor Mary. I could see she felt pulled in two.

  After that night I didn’t see Weesageechak for a couple of days. I’d gotten him good at that wake by doing what he didn’t expect me to. It is a good feeling to trick the trickster.

  Seeing my grandson Joseph again made me start thinking about drumming and singing. He was once the best singer I had ever heard. He looked like my father and had his size. But Joseph lost his path somewhere along the way. That he wanted to drum at his niece’s funeral was a good thing too, on a bad day. Gitchi-Manitou makes it so that there is always some reason for the death of a relation. In Linda’s death I was able to say what I needed to say to my Minnie, and my grandson saw hope.

  Joseph came to me after the wake and asked me to go to the sweat lodge with him. We got some rocks hot on the fire so they glowed red. Then we brought them in the lodge and closed the flaps up tight and sat naked together, praying and singing, pouring water on the stones so that the heat burned our lungs and all of the bad poured out of our bodies. After, I teased him that I got drunk on his fumes in there, that he’d lost all the weight of his liquor. He smiled and looked happier than I’d ever seen him. I was happy too that in our loss, good things began to come.

  That night I sat by the river and listened to him drum again. I let the sound of his voice carry me up above the river and onto a cloud where I dreamed I was with Linda and she told me that she was OK and that she was sad for what she had done and how she had hurt her mother. I held her hand and we smiled at one another. Before she left me in my dream, Linda told me that the drumming and singing were a good thing to hear again, that the drumming was our heart, our little heart growing big, that the singing was the children not born yet, talking to the Grandfathers who were gone. It was our way of surviving through everything we had to survive. Linda had grown wise since crossing over to that place where I visited her.

  As I stood outside the church before her funeral, Weesageechak showed up in his ugliest-dog-in-the-world costume, but he kept a distance, worried I had another trick up my sleeve. I waved to him and he barked. An old nun I’d known for many years came up to me and we talked a short while. I said to her, “Hello, Sister Jane,” and she said, “Hello, Mr. Cheechoo,” and we talked of Linda when she was a little girl, and how she always wore her rain boots, rain or shine. That nun and me, we had a good laugh together. She asked me to sit with her during the mass.

  When that priest began telling us that Linda could not go to heaven because she committed suicide, Sister Jane began to shake. But I wasn’t angry. I knew Linda was already there. I watched my granddaughter Mary raise her head to look at this priest, and then I watched all my relations who had come from many different places raise their heads too. We all raised our heads up as if we were one big person, growing bigger by the minute.

  And then it came. A single drumbeat from the back of the church, travelling through it the way I once saw lightning travel through water. And then it came again, then again. The priest, he didn’t like that. He shouted and began to walk towards Joseph and his beating drum in the back of the church, but by the time he got to Linda’s casket we had already stood as one, blocking him from going farther. All of us who knew how circled the drum and beat it with him, using our hands, our shoes, our palms. We lifted our heads up and tightened our voices and sang a song for Linda and for her mother. For all of us. I looked to my granddaughter Mary, her dark eyes Linda’s, Minnie’s. I looked to my grandson Joseph and he looked to me. I looked around me at all my relations around this drum, and to Sister Jane, who’d come to join us. We all stood in a circle and lifted up our voices to Linda and to Gitchi-Manitou, to God. And I began to feel something good that I’d not felt in a long time.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As always, my son Jacob, I’d walk a continent for you.

  My northern friends: William Tozer and family, the best and craziest bush pilots and guides in Northern Ontario. The world, for that matter. Remi and Rachel Chakasim, you’ve inspired me with your quiet strength and wisdom. Judy Wabano of Peawanuck, thanks for your translations and friendship. Shane Enosse of Moosonee, Linda Smith, née Goodwin of Kashechewan, Stephen Spence of Fort Albany, all artists of incredible talent. Ed Metatawabin and the Metatawabin clan, you were inspirations long before you knew me. Meegwetch to all.

  My southern friends: Rick Barton, you’ve pushed me to succeed. Joanna Leake and Jim Knudsen, patient teachers extraordinaire. My trinity of trouble and eternal drinking posse, Joe Longo, Jen Kuchta, and Mike Mahoney. Jay Poggi and John Lawrence, epitomes of New Orleans art and music in human bodies.

  My family: Mayer Hoffer, you are a blood brother for saving my life. David Gifford, prestigidateur with a paint brush. My four sisters, Mary, Veronica, Julia, Suzanne, my three brothers, Bruce, Francis, Raymond, and my three half-sisters, Angela, T
heresa, and Claire, it would take pages and years to thank you enough. Mom, how’d you do it? I love you. Amanda, the best editor and trapeze artist I’ve ever known.

  For Amanda, my flying girl

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of Penguin Canada

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Cormorant Books Inc., 2008

  Published in this edition, 2013

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Joseph Boyden, 2008

  The following stories have been previously published: “Born With A Tooth” in Black Warrior Review and Potpourri; “Shawanagan Bingo Queen” in Cimarron Review and Blue Penny Quarterly; “Painted Tongue” in The Panhandler.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Boyden, Joseph, 1966–, author

  Born with a tooth / Joseph Boyden.

  Originally published: Toronto : Cormorant Books, 2001.

  ISBN 978-0-14-318801-8 (pbk.)

  1. Indians of North America—Ontario, Northern—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8553.O9358B6 2013 C813’.6 C2013-903591-5

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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