by Dawn Dumont
I didn’t even know how to begin. “Um . . . I’m leaving because you think I’m fat.” By saying the words, I would be making the fat real. Instead I chose the far more awkward route of walking out the door after Wha-hoo carrying my backpack and dragging my sister’s hand.
“You’re leaving?” My cousins were stunned. Why would anyone want to leave Big Eddy reserve? Sure people went away for jobs and school and jail. But kids? Kids LOVED Big Eddy. It was made for kids, it was run by kids! It was the last kid stronghold in the world.
I wanted to pretend that it was my sister who wanted to leave. Unfortunately, her sad face would never back up that lie.
“You can stay if you want,” I had whispered to her the night before. She was loyal and didn’t want to stay if I wasn’t there. I felt there was some hope for her after all.
I knew I had to say something. I dropped my sister’s hand and faced the confused people lining the verandah. The muddy yard was my pulpit and it was my obligation to deliver upon them the truth.
“I must leave you. Not because I want to . . . but because I must. You see, I have a brain tumor. And I’m dying. My mom told me I have to come back and spend my last few days with her.”
I thought my speech might inspire a few shocked gasps, perhaps a few tears, maybe even some regret at the ways in which they had abused me. Instead they only stared.
Malcolm bravely broke the silence. “You got a tumor alright. A big fat stomach tumor.”
Everyone snickered. Even my driver.
Aunt Beth told Malcolm to shut up. Then taking a look at Rachel and Celeste’s sad faces, she suggested that Rachel go visit with us in Saskatchewan. The two girls ran inside to pack.
The three of us rode back to Saskatchewan in the back of Wha-hoo’s camper. He offered to let us sit up front. We were smart enough to know that awkward conversation was a fate worse than death. We sat in the back of the truck and discussed the one-week visit. Celeste had had a pretty good time. There’d been cookouts and some rowdy games of tag. She’d even managed to weasel a cabbage patch doll out of Rachel’s extensive collection.
Rachel confessed that she had broken up with Adrian before she left. “In the hallway as I was passing him,” she explained.
My sister and I showed her shocked faces.
“He’s cute but he always wants to be by himself,” she said. “That’s weird.”
We nodded in acceptance of her decision while secretly shaking our heads. Then again, Rachel didn’t know what it was like to be surrounded by nothing but trees and cousins. A few weeks at our house would teach her to appreciate a gorgeous — though somewhat emotionally scarred — young man. Hopefully someday, he would find a way to thank us.
The whole ride home, nobody brought up my weight or my impending death. As each mile took us closer to Saskatchewan, I left the labels further behind me. In Manitoba, I was fat; in Saskatchewan I was normal. Weight like real estate was just a matter of location.
THE BEAVER DAM
SHANE AND DYLAN WERE GERRY AND RICHARD’S foster kids. Geraldine and Richard needed boys because they were ranchers. Nobody told me this; I figured it out for myself. Richard was a real live cowboy who looked after the reserve’s cows.
We met the boys outside Geraldine’s house. In a rare burst of extroversion, Mom had driven us over to Geraldine’s house to visit. “I hear she has some foster kids about your own age,” she said as she pulled into their yard.
“So? Who cares?” I said under my breath, annoyed that I’d been dragged away from my books.
“What are foster kids?” asked Celeste, who was forever curious.
Mom explained. “They can’t live with their own mom and dad so Geraldine and Richard took them in. They even got separated from their brothers and sisters.”
Celeste and I exchanged shocked looks.
Our own family had survived a rickety time a few years before when money problems had forced Mom to split us up. Celeste and Dave got sent to our Uncle Johnny’s house on the reserve while Tabitha and I were sent to our Auntie Bunny’s in the valley. Mom had stayed at the boarding school where she worked looking after other people’s children. Our separation had lasted only a couple of weeks until she found a place for all of us to live. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to us and we were still wary.
“Where is their family?” I asked.
Mom shrugged. “Who knows?”
I made a face at her behind her head. She did not understand the importance of solving other people’s problems, especially kids’. If a child needed something, it was an adult’s responsibility to get it immediately. These boys needed their brothers and their sisters and their mom . . . probably not their dad . . . and they needed them now!
“I’m not discussing this with you,” Mom said. “It’s none of our business.”
Geraldine and Richard lived about ten minutes away from us, high on a hill. Their house was perfectly situated with views of the country from every window. Their driveway went all around the house in a way that would have driven my mom crazy. She said it was a lazy way of avoiding backing up and proper parking; I could tell that it saved a lot of time.
Their house had a special surprise. Just behind it was a long road that led to stables and a few corrals. Down in the corral we could see horses pulling at bales. Right next to the house there were two towering stacks of bales. We could barely take our eyes off them as Mom ushered us into Geraldine’s tiny kitchen.
Once inside, Geraldine just as quickly swept us out the door. “The boys are out there somewhere. Go meet them.”
Obedient and silent, Celeste, David and I walked outside. We were bundled up in coats and scarves with socks on our hands because there was still snow on the ground. We had recently moved from town where we had spent a lot of time playing indoors. As a result we were unfamiliar with making fun by ourselves or using what Sesame Street called our imaginations.
“What should we do?” asked Celeste.
David plopped himself into the gravel and began making truck noises with a rock.
“I know I’m not doing that,” I replied, impatient as usual with my brother’s lack of creativity. “Maybe we could go down to where the horses are and ride them?”
Celeste looked doubtful. “They look pretty big. And we’ve never ridden horses before.”
“You guys are such chickens,” I declared. And then I sat down on the steps. (I immediately lost interest in my plans if they weren’t enthusiastically supported or if I was nervous about carrying them out.)
Celeste and I stared up at the stacks of bales that loomed two storeys high beside us.
“How many bales you think is in there?” asked Celeste. “I think about four hundred.”
“Pfft. Probably more like two thousand.”
“Wanna climb them?”
I was raising the necessary courage to go nearer to the bales when a fair head poked its way out.
“Who are you?” the voice called. It was a squeaky voice, high pitched for a boy. He didn’t look like anyone we’d ever seen on the reserve before. This boy was even whiter looking than Celeste.
We introduced ourselves. “We’re Odie’s kids.” This was our Mom’s nickname on the reserves and it was how people described us when we ran into them on the street. “Look here, it’s Odie’s kids. You can tell by the socks on their hands.”
“What’s your names?” he asked. We told him and then asked his.
“Shane.” Even his name was different.
“Wanna see something cool?” Shane asked.
We nodded.
Shane ran the full length of the pile of bales and then jumped. He flew over the gap like a flying squirrel and landed in the other stack with a couple inches to spare.
Wow. Our mouths flew open. Celeste and I had never seen such daring.
“Holy cow, you could have died,” I said.
“That looked like fun,” Celeste added.
David only nodded sagely. He had always known
that such daring was possible. He was so used to being thwarted by his sisters that he had retired most of his dangerous instincts.
Shane laughed at our amazement, then turned red from the excitement and jumped down the back of the bales. We heard a voice calling his name; it was Richard, his foster dad. Without saying good-bye, Shane leapt off the pile of bales and ran down to the stables, his body crackling with energy.
Another head popped up on the bales. The head was darker, the body longer and leaner. He smiled at us. “You’re Odie’s kids, right?”
“Yeah, that’s us. What’s your name?”
“Dylan.” He chewed on a piece of straw and stared down at us.
“Are you gonna jump?” David asked.
Dylan looked at the other stack of bales. Then he walked to the edge of the bales, stared down at the drop to the ground. “It’s too far,” he said finally. “I could break an ankle or something.”
“The other one did it,” I said. “That other boy, he jumped.”
Dylan smiled and chuckled. “Yeah, that’s something Shane would do.”
Dylan was two years older than Shane. I found it interesting that he knew his younger brother was more daring than him and that it didn’t bother him. At home I had to endure the comparisons with my sister, “Celeste has such pep, and Dawn . . . she sure reads a lot.” They pronounced the word “read” in the same pitying tone you might describe someone with a metal brace on her leg.
Dylan wore the mantle of “the less daring one,” proudly and while it didn’t make me feel better about being the “chicken shit one,” I respected him for it.
“How many bales are in there?” Celeste asked Dylan.
“About four hundred,” he replied.
Celeste smiled smugly at me.
We lived less than a kilometre away, which made us the luckiest kids in the world. At school, Dylan and Shane had already been declared to be the cutest brothers, with Shane having the overall title of “cutest boy in the school.” And they were also the most fun.
When we were at their house, nothing was off limits. We could chase after the cows and swim in the dugout. We could run through the horse pen trying to escape Ruby, the white horse who used to bite everyone on the ass.
Shane glared at her every time we passed her pen. “Ass-biter,” he would say under his breath.
Dylan would laugh. “Nobody told you to go in there.”
“You did!”
“Nobody told you to listen.”
Up on the hill next to the house, the hay bales were a constant source of amusement. Inside them we played hide and go seek which more often than not turned into huge wrestling matches, the soft bales giving us a reason to be violent and take more risks.
In the wintertime we went on skidoo rides. Dylan drove (Shane had been banned from driving after an ill-fated game of chicken with a stack of bales) and the rest of us kids piled onto the sled at the back. The heat of everyone’s bodies and the struggle to stay on would keep us warm in the minus thirty-degree weather. Inevitably the jostling of the bodies turned into a struggle for survival as each of us tried to maintain a hold on the edge of the sled.
I lost the fight one night and ended up falling off into the snow. The sled and skidoo drove away even as I ran and yelled for them to stop. I kept expecting them to turn around but they didn’t. As the light and the sound of the skidoo faded into the distance, I stood alone in the snow and the black night. I stopped yelling. Who knew what I would wake up — a wolf, a bear, a Sasquatch?! So I stood by the skidoo track and waited. Above me, a billion stars filled the sky. If I hadn’t been so cold and frightened, I would have enjoyed it.
The skidoo came around again and Shane jumped off. “I was so scared for you,” he said and pulled me back onto the sled.
Over at our house, we didn’t have skidoos, horses or bales. We had something a better: a beaver dam that stretched a football’s field length behind our house. When spring came along we introduced Dylan and Shane to the mysteries of it.
The dam was a huge collection of dry sticks and logs along with a dozen mud huts half exposed by the water. We knew that the doorways to the huts were under the water and I was always curious to know what it looked like inside. How big would the beavers’ rooms be? Did they make bedrooms as well? Did the beaver kids get their own bedrooms?
Since the beaver dam was surrounded by water it was difficult to play there. We weren’t allowed to play in water — this was one of our mother’s cardinal rules. We swiftly found a way around that rule. You see, falling into the water is something far different from wading in. It’s an accident, an act of God, if you will, and certainly not something you can be punished for.
We took logs and created bridges from one beaver house to the next. Then we dared one another to walk across the bridges. Some of us needed to be challenged, like Dylan who always examined a problem from a few different angles. Others would not do it, even if dared. That was me. There were others though who didn’t need to be dared, people who were always raring to put their lives and limbs in peril. That was Shane and Celeste.
Shane was the first one to run across the skinny log bridging two beaver homes. He laughed at how easy it was.
Celeste was the first one to stand on the bridge. She stood in the centre with a pole held horizontal in her hands. “I am the great Celest-tini!” she said as she tightrope-walked across it.
Shane, emboldened by her daring, joined her on the log bridge. Their combined weight had an immediate effect on the log. It broke in two and let out a loud bark; the daring duo toppled into the water. Celeste ended up standing waist high in the water. Shane, in a decidedly dramatic turn, fell in headfirst.
Dylan and I laughed from the sidelines, proud of our forethought and envious of their lack.
Being that Shane and the great Celest-tini had spankings waiting for them at home, we stayed out late that night. In keeping with his reckless nature, Shane swam under the murky water into one of the beaver houses, and re-emerged with a beaver skull, white and small, no bigger than my fist. “So they really are dead then?” I said, as I held it in my hands. For some reason, I thought we were sharing this dam with the beavers. It seemed impossible that anyone would build something so amazing and then leave it all behind.
I was into God during these years. Really into God. I prayed all the time and I felt that someone was communicating back to me. I had been reading about Catholic saints and how their devotion to God was rewarded with miracles. I wanted a miracle to happen to me — hopefully, the power of flight — so I told Him that I was ready to do His work. A pretty easy proposition considering that nobody had been into sacrificing Christians for at least a thousand years.
“Whatever you want from me, God, I will do. I will be your willing servant. I am ready to serve you. Just tell me what you want and I will do it.”
I sat still on my bedroom floor and listened. Eventually, a voice popped into my head. It sounded like my own voice. I figured God was just using my voice because he didn’t want to drive me insane. The voice told me that I was supposed to help Shane.
“Help Shane?” I asked.
“Yes, help Shane,” the voice repeated impatiently.
I couldn’t figure out what God meant by that. Shane wasn’t in need of my help as far as I could see. He was the handsomest, cutest boy in the school. He could run the fastest and everyone loved him. He would run down the hallway at recess and make roadrunner sounds as he passed people, “Beep, beep.” He would grab at girls’ bums and sing, “feelings, feelings” and we would cover our bums with our hands because that’s what we were supposed to do. He would stick his head into the girls’ bathroom and scream, “Are you having a bloody good time?!” He was all kinds of charming.
At school Shane was king of the playground. A group of boys followed him and copied everything he did. The girls would whisper to one another about him. Once they found out that I was “his girl,” they also whispered about me. There was no need to be jealo
us as Shane had plenty of love to share. He flirted with every girl in turn and then ran on to the next one.
Besides it wasn’t so great being the “special girl.” One winter Shane found some ice in a ditch by the edge of the playground. Soon he was sliding across it.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Why not? It won’t break,” he said.
I took a tentative step onto the ice. It creaked beneath me. “It’s too thin,” I said, as I backed up.
“It’s thick!” Shane said, and then he jumped on it to prove it to me.
The ice cracked and his foot went through. The crack moved quickly towards me and my feet sank. The water was only up to our ankles but I still yelled, “You dumb idiot!”
I slogged out of the water only to see a large fire-engine red coat stalking towards us — it was Ms. Reynolds. She was eight feet tall and husky like a football player. I’d seen her ball out other students, particularly Shane, until they were blubbering messes. I’d never been on the receiving end of her wrath. She grabbed my hand in her huge paw and then Shane’s and pulled us behind her.
I was too scared to ask where we were going. I looked at Shane; he winked at me.
She led us to the front doors of the school. There, in front of a hundred elementary school students, Ms. Reynold’s spanked both of us with her racquet-sized hands. It didn’t hurt since we were both wearing ski pants but emotionally it scarred me for life. To this day I get chills whenever I see ice, red coats, and Reynold’s wrap.
After our beating we were placed in opposite corners and told to stand there for the rest of recess. Little girls wandered close to me and asked what happened. I told them about the ice and about how Shane had told me it would be okay. They nodded sagely; this was exactly why they did not play with boys.