by Peter Unwin
“I’m not doing anything,” Paul heard her say. “What are you doing?”
Nothing. She was doing nothing.
The excitement coming out of the next room blew palpably through the hall. He remembered suddenly the way she bit her bottom lip; it had appeared to him as the most breathtaking gesture he’d seen. She’d told everything, her family, her “fucked up family,” as she put it, her lovers, many of them despicable, the exalted position of art in her life, a stranglehold she had called it, a stranglehold. It reassured him that there were still young people in the world who were getting strangled by art. She gloried in art, she gloried in the vision that allowed her to see through hypocrisy in all its stupid ways. She was on fire with herself. Karl Marx to techno pop, from College Street to Kenora. There were times when she was nearly overwhelmed by the brilliance of things and herself.
He shut the folder on her rebel and lover. Insurgent, the reporters called him, activist. They called him a terrorist, or a Mohawk, or Mississaugan; coded words to indicate other, Native, that impregnable thing. He was of the people, first people, Paul had come in second. Or third. He was not impregnable. She was talking on the phone to a man who founded his race beneath the snow-bent boughs of pine trees and stole the sun from a woven box. He was also, according to reports in the news, in default on support payments for three children and facing public mischief charges for pointing a fishing spear at a redneck during a standoff at a Caledonia condo development.
He heard them chuffing in the laughter of their excitement with each other, and prepared to leave this place in his humiliation. Quickly, foolishly, he tried to reassemble her clippings to the order they held before he had mangled his way through them. There was nothing to keep him here.
His knuckles dragged the table skidding a sheaf of papers off a clutter of other papers. He saw exposed a black and white reproduction of a watercolour he had seen before, a James Peachey work of a Loyalist encampment on the banks of the St. Lawrence. An officer mooned importantly in front of a young woman in the foreground. Behind them a row of neat white tents stretched against the shore, a pretty, transitory city made of canvas, and above it the solid detailing of the clouds. The reproduction was dull and barely discernible in places. But the title glared. DAVID RAMSAY, MURDERER. The article was stapled together in the top left corner. That staple astonished him, an act of fastidiousness that was remarkable in the tangle of her life as he knew it.
David Ramsay — Indian Killer.
The piece had been photocopied from a forty-year old Beaver Magazine; Paul recognized the formal typeface and found the byline: Smithers Donaldson, a University of Calgary professor who, if he remembered correctly, was dead, had collapsed following a lecture on the apocalyptic mythology of the Pawnee ten years ago. He had met the man.
He heard her from the kitchen. She would be at the table, her legs folded, her arms wrapped around her knees, an image that was stunning to him. David Ramsay — The Indians captured him and tied his hands to his neck. She’d underlined the text. He saw that half the article was underlined. His gaze slid from one underscoring to another; we have reason to believe that David Ramsay has passed beyond the reach of God Almighty…. the subject of our present visit is the murder of eight of our Indians three of whom were killed at Kettle Creek…. ‘After killing the first Indian I chewed thirty balls of lead…. I thought it a pity to shoot an Indian with a smooth ball … after killing and scalping the woman.…’ Paul looked up slowly at the painted boards slanting against her wall, the primitive rendering of a face torn into two — he evidently performed the same atrocity on her children, one a mere infant … agonized mothers with bellies sundered, the children uncomprehending and amputated. The knife was highlighted with an almost photographic intensity. After which he took a hatchet and killed all of the sleeping …
The page turned here; Paul was about to finger it, but stopped. I’m the distant offspring of someone famous. Serving him a plate of pickerel, she’d said that to him.
The distant offspring of someone famous.
Mad as a hatter, mad from all the lead.
After killing the first Indian I cut lead and chewed above thirty balls, and above three pounds of Goose shot. For a moment he saw a mouth of blackened teeth, stinking with rum or brandy or both, gnawing through three pounds of lead, spitting the ragged bits into a pouch.
Mad as hatters. Within the space of three weeks he killed …
“What are you doing?”
She’d put down the telephone and stood in the grey darkness glaring at him.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said truthfully.
She came to the table and covered up the David Ramsay article. “You have to leave. Someone’s coming over.”
“I’m leaving,” he said, feeling suddenly foolish, even idiotic, as if he had thrown everything away.
In a moment she was back at her painted boards, crouched again and swaying. He heard her humming a song that he did not find comprehensible and finally he closed the door behind him and she disappeared.
16
END OF THE WORLD
LINDA KNOCKED AROUND THE HOUSE in the long days of something she didn’t have a name for. Her marriage, she thought, or life. It seemed important to attach a word to it. The end of time. The time in which words and worlds lost their meaning. The bottom of the ninth. Two out. Her husband was in or not, he was drinking or not. She found the sticky rings of his spent scotch glasses over his scribbled notes: the command for the final destruction of the world is in the hands of the four gods of the directions. At the bottom of the page he had written, to himself, See all notes on Pawnee apocalypse predictions. Do!
A postcard came in the mail addressed to him, an invitation to an opening at a Spadina Avenue gallery. Medicine For A New World (works on rock and Masonite by Loretta Ramsay (Waunathoake.) Her photograph was on it. The young woman was dressed in black and white, adorned with shells; a tan face, narrow, piles of black shining hair. Loretta Ramsay Waunathoake crisscrosses the country of the human heart. Her ancestral blood traces to Deseronto’s landing at the Bay of Quinte, a family line that begins with a Fort Hunter Mohawk and an unknown missionary at Tyendinaga. She is a Time Keeper of the Eastern Door, and her work avenges the crimes that call to us from the past and haunt our dreams. She read the card with some distaste. The opening was to take place in a second-floor studio warehouse above the Miss Saigon restaurant where she and Paul had once intended to eat their first matrimonial lunch.
She felt dismissive of all them, Loretta Ramsay, the jaded movie stars who announced themselves one quarter, one half, or one thirty-second Native. Everyone so desperate to be something else. To be authentic. She got up from the sofa and went to the fridge where she removed the postcard, holding it in her hand as she had several times before.
Paul entered the room with a small plate heaped with eggs. He was extremely fussy about his eggs, like Descartes, he told her, and brought them up to his chin with disapproving glances, before wolfing them down.
“A presentation of her most recently executed motifs,” she read out loud to him. “Can you tell me why artists have to execute their paintings? Why can’t they just paint the damn things? Why must they execute them? Like Louis Riel for god’s sake. Execute, really.” Paul wiped the yellow scrabble off his lips. He had no answer, he was gone deep into his own place, that existed in the spaces of his grey eyes.
SHE DID NOT ATTEND THIS gala. She missed the Loretta Ramsay (Waunathoake) opening. Paul attended. He did not expect her to come, but he asked. He thought it was what adults did, to ask. She remained at home on the sofa, like a life raft, the television barely audible; a stream of flickering blue agitation glowed from the face of it and filled the room. The most cherubic of newsmen wearing a considerable amount of eyeliner reported that birds were dropping from the sky above Swan Hill, the tiny corpses scattered on a highway in northern Al
berta, like tufted sticks. It had to do with a marketplace in Shanghai, he said, where birds were kept in small cages. Like go-go dancers, she thought. What ever happened to go-go dancers? They had all gone-gone. They had dropped from the sky. Like the birds.
With a blanket over top of her, she spent the evening leafing the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Volume V; Craig, Creighton, Cruikshanks, Curtis, Davan, Davies, and Dease; Educated in both Ireland and France, John Dease became a doctor …
Doctor Dease became a doctor and was dead like the rest of them. Before you could say “Doctor Dease, please come to emergency,” he was dead. If you have been written about, she brooded, if your photograph has been taken and somebody is looking at it, you’re dead, you belong to the legions of the shades. When you die, she remembered, you turned into a star. It was an old Pawnee idea, according to Paul. The idea calmed her. She would take her place among the stars.
PAUL CAME HOME AT MIDNIGHT with a cautious bearing, smelling of wine. “I’m drunk,” he announced and went upstairs singing and then gargling in the bathroom, a cavernous noise that had grown comforting to her. The gargles, groans, and giggles of their life together comforted her, had always comforted her. She depended on them, took them for granted. She heard him shut the bedroom door. She could join him. Go upstairs and get in bed with him and be nearly content in the familiar warmth that brooded from the both of them and had for years. Instead, she remained on the sofa with her dead friends about her, rustling from the past in the great dictionary of the dead. It was the formality of those written lives that comforted her. They lay there on the pages of history in their grim Canadian glory, stumbling across half-eaten human hands staked to a fire pit outside Sault Ste. Marie, knocking ice off their own bodies with an axe handle, starving to death, eating their tents and fur diapers that had been “beshit in a thousand times,” eating buffalo testicles, and fried eel sagimate that caused a man to piss a hundred times a day.
She closed her eyes and read her life:
Linda Richardson; a woman of exceptional intelligence and beauty, spent the last days of the final millennium on the sofa in the aftermath of an unsatisfactory carnal affair with smartass journalist Arthur Gratton, while her husband, Paul Prescot, the world’s greatest authority on aboriginal rock art (east of the Rockies) made a fool of himself chasing after the hope of renewed youthfulness in Loretta Ramsay (Waunathoake) part-time waitress, painter, artist, who had assumed a Native background in an increasingly common search for authenticity.
Good luck with that. Authenticity. Nobody knew where it was anymore. She smiled, somewhat gloomily. Her eyes grew leaden. De Bonne, had a successful but unremarkable career, in 1803 was empowered to hear cases involving crimes committed at sea. De Burgo (see Burke). She didn’t. Decoinge, François, one of the best fur traders the North West Company ever had. Dejean … Delancey, poisoned by a disgruntled female slave. Who was that female? They never made it into the book, those disgruntled female slaves. Was there another kind, she wondered.
The words, so many words, tiny, microscopic, thick as plankton. Her father had gifted her with a galaxy of words. More words than she could ever read in a lifetime. Like music, more than she could possibly listen to in her allotted years. She went back over the last lines that had passed blearily in front of her eyes; Demasduwit (Shendoreth, Mary March, Waunathoake) Then she rose and checked the spelling against the card magnetized to the fridge. Waunathoake. A saintlier woman than me would find this funny, she thought. Or contemptible. She returned to her moorings on the sofa and read the page and a half of text, Waunathoake, B.C. 1796 married Nonosbawsut and they had one child who died as an infant, 1820 at Bay of Exploits, Nfld. It was an old story she remembered somewhat, a story that had been expounded breathlessly in a classroom from her childhood by a grey woman with large ears. Her classmates had called their teacher “the elephant lady,” and she had terrified them with a dramatic digest of dubious interpretations of aboriginal history in particular; “Eskimos” who lived in snow houses, said “mush” and had babies by rubbing noses together. Indians who tied Brébeuf to a stake, cut out his heart, and ate it. Linda had thought of this as her first sexual act, the erotic beginning for her, having her heart hacked out of her chest and held up to the sky by a boy with dark eyes.
The Elephant Lady was wont to enlighten them, day after day it seemed, with what she called “The Last of the Beothuks,” a phrase that to Linda had the ring of one of her mother’s musicals to it, and was rendered with some lip smacking. Beneath a framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth in a blue dress and a pearl necklace, the Elephant Lady subjected them to an eager account of a people hunted down for sport, until the last one of them was dragged from the forest to spend the final year of her life in a cage where folks lined up and paid money to see her. She could not avoid a notion of this woman as the original go-go dancer dancing in a cage to psychedelic light.
As a school girl, she had accepted the story without skepticism. She wasn’t sure exactly how it differed from the last of the Mohicans, and soon it blended into a vague school board doctrine that held Hurons to be good and Iroquois bad because they ate Father Brébeuf’s heart without bothering to cook it. “This is what he suffered for Christ,” moaned the teacher, “for these Indians, ransomed for the Son of God’s blood!” The woman clutched her skinny self and stared at them, her fingers indicated it was all their fault. A strange heat filled the room and Linda suspected there would be no end to having her heart cut out and eaten by boys.
Twenty years later, she had read her husband’s article The Archaic Dorset And Beothuk Peoples of Newfoundland. The Beothuks, according to Paul, had largely died of tuberculosis, their lungs gone, or they had been killed in clashes with trappers and European fisherman, and frequently they had died in an ongoing war with the Mi’kmaq over resources. One of the last of them, a woman known by a variety of names, was kidnapped by a British raiding party who then killed the woman’s husband for having the audacity to want her back. His killers were placed on trial, acquitted, and his widow led a short and dreary life as a domestic servant before she died horribly of tuberculosis.
Linda lay on the sofa listening to the heavy substance of her husband crushing the mattress above her, groaning the bed legs against the old floor of the house.
Waunathoake, she read it again, alarmed that the rise and fall of the green phlegm in the woman’s throat was taking place in her own throat. The woman, heaving on starched sheets hour after hour in a room lit by lamps, wondering what was happening to her body, her baby dead, her people, her man? Linda let it all collapse beneath her eyelids, a desolate Labradorian landscape of stunted trees, eight gaunt men, black rags against a sky without sun, guilt-ridden bodies, murmuring recitations of prayer, having arrived at the end of life really. At last, they lay the woman’s body on the ground hoping that some of her people would claim her, surrounding her with gifts of sewing needles and musket balls.
Linda startled awake, unsure of where she had been, then retrieved the heavy book from beside her, and finished reading the tale. The story ended with a last remaining band of Beothuks who gathered up Waunathoake’s body and lay it next to her husband’s. Years later a group of white men in a failed attempt to make contact with the Beothuks found her resting place, a few shredded bits of black cloth whipped in the wind, the crows raving and hollering over top.
Linda got off the sofa and stood in the room staring out the window at the illuminated dome of the Greek temple. One thirty in the morning; it burned a warm amber from inside. Ghosts, she thought. Every building in the city was filled with ghosts, crouching beside the furnace, where the skis were held together with frayed string; Mississaugan women groaned in labour, or tossed glowing hot stones into woven baskets filled with water. The spirits of people who came before her, the laughter of their children, the barking of skinny, tethered dogs. They struggled to be remembered.They could not stay hidden. Their whispers came up from the earth, and
through the floorboards and lived in the air. They whispered to her.
Waunathoake. Loretta Ramsay. Linda Richardson.
Standing rigidly in the room, she was suddenly angry. She longed for the thrilling life as much as anyone, often two shots of Bush-mills or a puff of hash did the trick. In a pinch she could un-shelve her dust jacket first edition of Under the Volcano and open it anywhere, “where did we go … in what far place did we wander hand in hand.” In more extreme cases, a tall man with a navy tattoo.… Aside from men, books, and television reruns of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, she was not sure what she had the right to ask for. Certainly not to wrap herself up in suffering that wasn’t hers.
Linda attempted to calm herself. So what if someone had given herself a Native name? People did. She could do it. Linda Prescot, née Richardson (Thanadelthur, Pocahontas, Madonna, The Iron Lady) daughter of a sultry Basque flamenco dancer, disguised herself as a boy and was hired on as carpenter’s helper to Cook’s fateful voyage to Vancouver Island where she was kidnapped by the Swampy Cree and forced to become North America’s first exotic dancer. She again reminded herself, without pride or shame, that she was the bone-white progeny of ancestors from the coal pits of Northern England and treeless enclosures of Scotland. She had little desire to be otherwise.