by Peter Unwin
“Scrapings?”
“I’ve talked to him, he’s willing to take some scrapings for the lab. That ought to settle it.”
She could tell that in Arthur’s mind that it was already settled.
“This is not going to be good,” said the voice.
“No,” she said.
“For your husband I mean. Your ex-husband.”
“Do you want to know about my husband?” she said suddenly. “When he was a child, he never played cowboys and Indians. His mother told me. He played cowboys and Metis. Guess who won?” She had no idea why she was telling this story. She hung up the phone and watched four pigeons shoot like bullets outside across the frame of the window.
21
LORETTA RAMSAY
At length the grown-up daughter began to beat the war-drum, mutter wild songs and question destiny, or, as they term it, “dream.” She had a dream, in which it was revealed to her that the only method by which to obtain consolation — that is revenge —, was by sacrificing her lover.”
JOHANN GEORG KOHL, 1860
WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT SHE WAS doing Loretta Ramsay began her search for herself in the crevices of her body and the body of boys and young men. Later, she searched in men, older men. She enjoyed their bulk. It was the first place she thought to look. There had been a mother, but she didn’t look there. As far as she was concerned her mother was dead, even though the woman lived in a bungalow on leased land belonging to the Golden Lake Band where she watched television and scissored coupons from newspapers delivered to her door every day.
There had been a father, but he was gone. What she remembered of him was a room, darkened with the shut door indicating he had been there in the first place. Sometimes that door opened and she saw a man who looked like him in the darkness, looking for something on the floor, his wallet? For her? He had a face made of stone. She knew someone else was in there as well. Her, sitting on the floor. The room remained dark, but sometimes the door opened and she discovered that by force of her own mind she could make it close.
There had been a father. For a time, he drove the freight trains but his trains had the habit of jumping track and ending up in a farmer’s pasture or in a field of mustard. He drank and he gambled with a group of men who came up from Minnesota in a black car and went back over the border with eighteen years of his savings. After that, he became a lineman on a lightly-used section of track, and ran several trap lines up the Goulais River, taking out pine marten and mink. Sometimes a fisher pelt brought in two hundred and fifty dollars and he’d be gone from the house for weeks. She delighted in his absence. She wanted her father to be dead and frequently said he was dead. His ship, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mesquite, broke up on a reef in Lake Superior while retrieving signal buoys, he died attempting to rescue a shipmate. She liked the sound of it, and the way it swelled her presence.
Through the years, she saw a succession of counsellors and juvenile probation officers, and social workers and a gentle forensic psychologist with a Sigmund Freud beard and pipe-smoker’s cough who felt obliged to remind her, softly, that her father had shot himself on a railway siding between Kenora and Thunder Bay over a gambling debt. Surely, she had some feelings about that? He also felt obliged to remind her that her father had been a bigamist in the manner of more than one railway man; possessing a family outside Kenora, and another far down the line, under the same name but slightly different spelling, in Weyburn, Saskatchewan.
She searched for herself in old alleys of brick or in grotty highway underpasses, drinking wine with two boys from the Pays Platt Band, twin brothers, one of them deaf and subject to savage teasing. She fell easily into drink and drugs and music that left her ears ringing. For four months she clutched a soggy paperback by Carl Jung and read it emphatically until her eyes swam. She searched for herself on dance floors fired by strobe lights, in rooms of sullen, skinny men who wrote poetry and survived on Jamaican weed and The Diaries of Anais Nin. Mostly she searched with crayons and markers on any surface she found. She found herself in the eyes of men desiring her. She told lies easily without expecting them to be believed by anyone, or caring.
There had been a grandmother, Glen, a schoolteacher who for ten years had taught school in a passenger car of the Canadian Pacific Railway that stood uncoupled on a siding by the sawmill outside Keewatin and was heated by a coal stove. Every morning the deer came to the windows to muzzle seed from the hands of the kids. She had seen photographs: Glen unfathomably pretty with hair up top and held in place by pins. Through those pictures, she discovered she had a fondness for old things, for looking things up, for the archival nature of everything. She examined pictures of the warm faces of the Cree kids, grinning next to the blond braids of girls who were not Cree and whose eyes were as big as plates.
Glen put the money away for her after her father was found in the snow. During the years of her mother’s retreat into beekeeping, and a range of wilder therapies that saw her confined to an orgone box and screaming “mother” while writhing on the floor with people she’d never met before, her grandmother took care of her. Glen believed the dark was coming and that it was a woman’s duty to turn the lights on. She died of pulmonary thrombosis, seated in a chair with a Reader’s Digest turned face down on her lap. There was a will. She’d put away money for Loretta’s schooling.
The young woman came to the city, filled with notions of snobbery and homosexuals and criminals who didn’t know how to quarter a moose or dress a deer. She entered Toronto at the end of a twenty-hour bus ride across the Shield. In Toronto she met snobbery and homosexuals and criminals and cold people. But she also met women on the way to the bingo who walked the streets in flip flops with their hair in curlers while clutching a ferret in their arms. She met grifters and sharpers and Eritrean cab drivers who had been tortured with burning cigarettes and showed her the scars. The city took her in. She felt the eternal greatness of cities, that they accepted you as you were. They accepted her. Even in misery. The city had no interest in what had happened to her. The noise, the clutter, the banging, the shouts, the fresh rolls, white cups of coffee in the morning, clattering pigeons, Farsi and Hebrew, Portuguese, Italian, Pashto, French, choruses of languages she was free to not understand. She feasted on the city and it feasted on her in turn: she sprawled in the lounges of the Ontario College of Art with a nineteen-year-old girlfriend who’d made love to a Basque bomber on a trip through Spain with her parents. She was aware of the young men, their laughter, their shoulders, seated together. She had a classmate whose father had been murdered by Mossad agents. She let an elderly poet touch her thigh. “Remarkable,” he’d uttered, with great conviction, “Remarkable.” The city needed her. It fed on young women, grew flush on them. She knew that. The city would starve to death without her. The subways did not run, the streetcars stalled without her. Without her the city simply would not go.
She teemed with herself and laughed a great deal and stayed out late. She was nineteen. She sat in cars driven by men named Kenneth or Tyler. Sophisticated men, she knew not to trust them. She came to accept the shadows and complexity of the city. She felt secrets and ghosts pressing her on the subway platforms and in the coffee stalls. She rode streetcars and lived on Chinese noodles and all-day three-dollar breakfasts. She studied at the New School of Art, under a Mohawk painter named Robert Markle and every Wednesday afternoon they all got drunk after class, sometimes before class. The whole class got drunk. “What kind of Indian am I,” Markle asked them. “I’ve never climbed a tree and I hate fish.”
“I want you to look at your work,” he told his students. They smelled the beer and the cannabis drifting off of him in sheets, it was not yet nine o’clock in the morning. “I want you to look very closely at your work and try to understand why it’s such shit.” He burped and went out to use the toilet.
When the streetcar lurched beneath her, or the birds woke her in her bed, she forgot that s
he was searching for anything or anyone. She stood in front of the Chaim Soutine canvas at the art gallery and watched the colours spill into each other, like the fogs that came up off Lake of the Woods. She missed only the land, the landscapes that she saw when she closed her eyes. She loved the fog, the city fog too, when it rained. She smelled homemade wine fermenting in the basements of entire neighbourhoods. She watched loud men drop hard ceramic balls on sandy bocce courts. Reggae music cracked through pulverized speakers from second floor windows without curtains.
She was an artist. She worked as a waitress in the lounge of a fitness club downtown to make money. The money left as easily as it came. She wore a red Danskin, a red skirt, and pantyhose with a tinge of blue in them. Men looked at her. They gave her money. One afternoon a man with black hair called her to his table. “Here, beautiful,” he said, and reached out and held her forcibly around the wrist. She thought he was going to break it. With his other hand he daubed a piece of bread roll in the steak juice on his plate and smeared it along the inside of her forearm. When he finished, he flicked the bread to the floor at her feet. “You can pick that up if you want, beautiful.” His friends laughed, some of them were embarrassed but held their drinks and laughed again in an embarrassed way. They were rich and successful men. She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror before removing a lipstick from her beneath her belt and tracing her face on the mirror, a quick vague outline that she examined for a moment and then drew four squiggly power lines, like snakes, or thunderbolts, from her head to the exterior of the glass.
She lived by herself in a room with high, arched windows above a pizza parlour that catered to students. She painted on blocks of Masonite that she found stacked behind a hardware store. She read the poems of men who threw themselves off bridges and the decks of steamers. She read the poems of women who had killed themselves. She read the visions of Black Elk, she read Carl Jung on the visions of Black Elk. She read Pictographs, Petroglyphs and Paradigms of the Apocalypse by Paul Prescot. She sought herself out in libraries and in the blank cream-coloured interior of the provincial archives building behind the hospital.
It was in that place she came to herself. Under the gaze of a smiling, watery-eyed security guard who followed her step by step through the room where she found the origins of her raven hair. She found it on the banks of Loch Leven in a fifteenth-century monastery already in need of repair.
Loretta Ramsay sat on an upholstered swivel chair as the sickening lurch of the microfilm unspooled in front of her, the snapping click, the rewind, the knobs and dials, the click, the rewind, the stomach-wrenching spool of text across a grey screen, skidding to a stop at some useless place. It was like she was guiding a submarine underwater. Click. Stop. Turn. Click. There. Ramsay. More Ramsays. She uncovered Ramsays who emigrated from Scotland in the fifteenth century having lost their Culdean faith and its Druid origins. Ramsays who settled in Burgundy where they became Ramezays and entered the nobility from the fiefs of Boisfleurant and La Gesse. They came like pestilence across the Atlantic, riding wicked ships, she saw them, she rode with them in their sickening quarters, in sickening storms, the vessels listing so steeply that the lanterns hanging from the ceiling knocked against it. Claude Ramezay landed in Canada 1685, married the daughter of Pierre Denys de La Ronde and began to write nasty letters to the French Governor. He incurred massive debts, proved himself a military incompetent. His son died in the wreck of the Chameau off Cape Breton Island in 1725. Two decades later, a man named David Ramsay laid siege to this same island. He was a ship’s boy in the Royal Navy. It was an age of war and violence and slavery. These are the first traces of herself.
This is him, she decides, she knows, she had always understood that such a moment was coming. The man in her dreams in which the blood pours into the soil. The cause of those memories in which her mother is on the carpet, holding her hands to her face. The shut door. David Ramsay. All of those murdered women. The missing ones. The ones found dead. She feels sweat on her back. Her stomach is in turmoil. What is happening? She sees a face looking at her from the dark blue screen. Her face. The eyes are too big, they see too much. She sees a time, only yesterday, she was a girl, sketching Ronnie Whiteloon on a rock on the shore of Lake of the Woods, thrilled by the romance of Ronnie Whiteloon. Her heart is sticky with boys. She hangs around the perimeters of tribal pow-wows, swaying and dancing in the clockwise circle, sniffing at sweetgrass, smiling, observing herself as much as others.
Then she found her family name on the genealogical rolls of Lake Erie settlements going back to the 1780s. Her forerunners built the Port Dover Road out of rough planks. She read carefully: “instructions and constitutional rules pertaining to the alienation and dispossession of Indian lands.” Her first sisters jounced along that road, pregnant, in groaning wagons — “no lawful surrender of land from Six Nations to the …” One of many migrations undertaken by people with common names.
Then he appears, the man emerging from the woods with a hatchet in his hands. She begins to dream him. Not every night. Not every time. He was in her. She comes from him, he who is not human. She saw him. In the woods. Standing over them with the moon on fire.
22
KETTLE CREEK 1771
In the fall of 1771 Ramsay undertook a trading expedition with his 17-year-old brother. They travelled from Schenectady, N.Y., to the mouth of Kettle Creek, on the north shore of Lake Erie, and from there went some miles upstream to winter with a group of Indians, mainly Mississauga Ojibwas. Exactly what happened during the winter is not clear.
DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY, VOL. V, 1801–1820
THE FAMILY SLEPT HEAVILY ON mats made of cedar bark. The nighthawks soared over them and plucked moths from the sky. The oldest slept at the end, his face blackened in grief for his mother. A wound in the shape of a crescent moon had hardened on his face. A Potawatomi had put it there with a stone.
The man lay in the slumber of Ramsay’s English liquor though he preferred French brandy from the paddler Racicot, whose nose had been taken off by a bear. To Racicot, he happily gave otter pelts in exchange for French brandy. The pelts went out in canoe brigades all the way up to the Sitka and the Russians, the men singing obscene French ditties they’d taught to the Indians who sung them well enough but did not comprehend them. They could not fight, the French, but they could sing. The brandy he drank with his family. He preferred it to Ramsay’s watered-down English stuff.
David Ramsay lay ten yards away on the dirt with his hands bound. His brother, drunker than them all, shivered in a coat that was too big for him. He had done nothing wrong, the Mississaugans had not thought to bind him. David Ramsay’s breath burned with his own rum, diluted with water from Kettle Creek. That is what they called it, the traders who filled their kettles there. It had a name. The Indians called it something else. They did not know what the Indians called it.
“Wake up,” he hissed. His brother lay beside him, a boy, wearing a British coat.
“Wake up you Gordie bugger!”
The boy grunted.
“I who was ready … struck him with a spear upon the breast, and following my blow, rammed him through … he called out that he was killed … I turned about and struck that person with the shaft of my spear. By the light of the moon which shone bright I saw another Indian come to the door … I sprung out and struck him with my spear in the breast, and killed him also.”
DAVID RAMSAY, 1772
IT HAD BEEN A NIGHT in July, the full moon was in the sky. The one they called Wandagan appeared in the door of the post at Niagara. He spoke words in English and Mississaugan. He wanted rum. You want rum, said Ramsay. He took the spear and pushed it directly into the man’s throat. The two women entered behind him, both of them drunk on Ramsay’s watered rum. He killed the first one with a hatchet blow to the skull. The other woman put her hands to her mouth and Ramsay struck her with the blade. The bodies barely moved. Wand
agan’s children came toward him. He reached for the skinning knife, then thought better of it, he would not waste its edge on children.
“WAKE, YOU BUGGER. WAKE UP!” Ramsay awoke from the memory of his spree, and tasted his own blood. His hands were tied with a leather thong.
“You buggers!”
He shouted into the night and into the face of his former commandant who had ordered him confined to the guard house at Montreal in the hope of having him hanged. Buggers, he shouted at his brother who would not wake. Ramsay grunted and slapped his bound body on the earth.
“God almighty.” His brother’s snores became thick, abortive snorts. With difficulty Ramsay managed to loose a stone with his foot and to kick it at the boy, splashing dirt on him. The boy’s eyelids fell open: a look of ripe astonishment on his face.
“Brother!”
His brother’s voice came to him from the forest with the bleating of mosquito hawks, and the peeping of frogs from the ponds and swamps. Crickets screeched in his ear like mad fiddlers. He saw his brother curled on the matted grasses, bound hand and foot. The occurrences of the last two days came back to him; the Mississaugans appearing from the vines. One of them steps forward and says in perfect English, “You have been mad and drunk all winter” and strikes David at the knees with a club. They knew already about the killings at Niagara. The leader, the speaker of perfect English, the one with black paint on his face, looked at the young Ramsay and gave instructions to imprison him. David they bound hand and foot with thongs, tied his hands to his neck and kept him pinioned like that for several hours. He remembered a fire, the gutturals of their speech with its rough Ks and short booming grunts. The rum came out and he saw the thick, squat keg of his brother’s supply. The Indians had passed it among themselves like a pipe. The one painted in mourning had approached them with the keg. “Drink with us or you will be stabbed,” he said.