Silver Totem of Shame

by R. J. Harlick

  Sherry shuffled in the chair on one side of me, while Eric’s sister remained stonily still on the other side. I heard a few sniffles and realized the former mistress was crying. I patted her gently on her knee.

  “I loved him. I really did.”

  “I know you did.”

  We sat in silence, while Sherry wiped her eyes.

  “Wonder what he’s doing to Ern,” Sherry said. “Sure hope he ain’t hurting him. Ern’s not a bad guy.”

  “He’s a bastard!” Cloë hissed.

  At that moment the door to the office opened and the staff sergeant walked out dangling a Ziploc bag. He placed it on the counter. “Could you please come over here, Madame Zakharov, and see if you recognize this.”

  Sherry and I crowded in behind Cloë. Inside the bag lay a flat piece of jade with a thin braided cord strung through a small hole at the top. It wasn’t large, about the size of a tablespoon, and very thin, like stones used for skipping. Apart from what appeared to be the faint outline of a Haida carving etched into its surface, the jade was as smooth as glass, as if from years of handling. The black cord, however, appeared new.

  Cloë reached for the bag, but was stopped by the cop.

  “Please, madame. Do not touch it. It could be evidence in your son’s case. Tell me if this belonged to your son.”

  “It’s his. See the silk cord is new. The old leather one broke about a month ago.”

  “Was he wearing it the night he was killed?”

  “Yes, he was. At least I think so, because I didn’t find it in his belongings.”

  “So you don’t know for certain if he was wearing it or not.”

  “Of course he was. He always wore it, even when he showered. It was very precious to him. It once belonged to his birth mother.”

  “When was the last time you saw your son wearing it?”

  “The morning before he was killed.”

  “Are you sure, madame?”

  Her hands gripped the edge of the counter so hard her knuckles turned white.

  “Of course. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Because Ernest says that he found it on the floor of his carving shed a couple of days before the murder.”

  “He’s lying. He took it off my son’s body after he killed him.”

  “Ernest also says he has an alibi for the time of your son’s death that has been confirmed by the Vancouver police. I believe that alibi is you, Madame Monahan.”

  “Wait a minute. You talking about that Indian kid that was killed in Ern’s shed?”

  “That’s right, madame.”

  “Jeez, I didn’t know that was your kid.” She ran her eyes over Cloë’s blond features as if trying to reconcile it with Allistair’s darkness.

  “He was adopted. His birth mother was Haida. But I’ve been his mother since he was a baby.”

  “Jeez, I’m real sorry. I wish I could help you find his killer. But it ain’t Ern. He was having dinner with Frank and me.”

  “But the police told me that my son was killed between 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m.”

  “Yeah, well, ah, Ern and I went off to a couple of clubs after. You know…. Besides, Frank had to go home to that wife of his and I wanted to party.”

  So much for true love.

  I thought Cloë was going to spit on her. Instead, without another word, she turned and stormed out of the police station.

  After a hasty apology to Sergeant Galarneau, I turned to run after her.

  But the sergeant stopped me. “This won’t be needed as evidence. Could you please give it to Madame Zakharov.” He dropped the baggie containing Allistair’s jade pendant into my hand.

  As a parting shot, I said, “You might want to ask Sherry the name of the man who told her boyfriend to stand under the pole. Could be you can’t rule out Ernest as a murderer completely.”

  Ernest glared at me, while Sherry stood back and scrutinized the carver carefully.

  Thirty-Six

  “Wait up,” I shouted as I raced up the hill after Cloë. With my lungs burning and my heart pounding, I managed to catch up to her at the entrance to the Eagle’s Nest parking lot.

  “Sergeant Galarneau wanted me to give this to you.” Gulping down great lungfuls of air, I held up the medallion.

  She snatched it and clasped it to her breast. “My dear, sweet son.” She kissed it. “I miss you so.” With tears seeping from her closed eyes, she clenched it tightly. Then her anger returned. “That man knew it belonged to Allistair. Why didn’t he return it to me?”

  “Are you sure he knew?”

  “He knew. He made a big deal about it one day when I was picking up Allistair.”

  “Maybe he forgot.”

  “Hardly. It was only a couple of months ago. He was examining it when I arrived and made some comment about it being very old. He told Allistair to take good care of it. Allistair asked him if he knew where it came from, but I don’t remember him answering.”

  “Maybe someone at the Skidegate Band Office would know. Look, Eric’s here. He can take us.”

  We backed out of the way as the blue Honda Civic turned into the parking lot and stopped.

  Eric hopped out. “Out for a walk, ladies?”

  “We were down at the police station,” I said. “I thought you weren’t coming back here before the pole raising.”

  “The men I hoped to talked to were busy. I came back to get my buckskin and then I’m off. Are you sure you two don’t want to come? It looks like the rain might hold off for a while.”

  He glanced up at the clouds that were no longer one solid grey mass. I even spied a line of emerging blue above the mountain ridge to the west.

  “Sorry,” I answered, while Cloë simply shook her head. “How are your hands? Did you have any problem driving?”

  He held up the bandaged palms and grinned. “They worked like a charm, but I’m glad the car’s an automatic. Moving a stick back and forth would’ve been a touch painful.”

  “Cloë and I want to go to the Band Office to see if they know anything about the bracelet. Do you have it with you?”

  He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and passed it to his sister. “I was going to ask around this afternoon. If the band office can’t help, we can do it tonight at the potlatch.”

  Cloë kissed the cold silver and wrapped it around her wrist, probably for the same reason that prompted her to loop the pendant around her neck: to be close to her son.

  “Since we only have one car, do you mind if I drop you off at the pole raising and come back later to get you?” I glanced at his wet hair. His jeans didn’t look too dry either. “You look a tad damp. You should dry off. You don’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon outside in this cold wind with a wet head.”

  He squinched up his face. “Yes, Mummy.” Then he sneezed.

  “See, didn’t I tell you.”

  He chuckled and sneezed again before blowing his nose loudly. But I felt this was more an act than a necessity. Still, he could be coming down with a cold. Serve him right for not putting his hood up.

  “Cloë, you might want to change into some dry shoes.”

  A short while later, Cloë, wearing a pair of light hiking boots, and I were walking up the dirt path to the front door of a squat, white vinyl–sided building that looked more like a bungalow than an office. A bell tinkled when we opened the door, but it took several minutes before a gum-smacking teenager, her head bristling with red dyed spikes, bounced out of a back room. Her boobs jiggled with her energy, while her black T-shirt barely covered the quivering flesh overflowing the waistband of her jeans.

  “Hi. Whaddya want?”

  Cloë explained about the bracelet and pendant.

  The girl hollered, “Cath, can you come out here! You maybe can figure out what these guys want. Somethin’ about jewellery, eh? You know more about this stuff than I do.”

  An equally chunky but older woman, her abundant flesh more tightly cinched into jeans and a red sweatshirt sparkling with
purple sequins, walked out of the same room. Her long black tresses flowed over her shoulders.

  “What can I do for you, ladies?” The woman smiled. “Here on a holiday?”

  “Sort of,” I muttered while Cloë took off the bracelet and laid it on the counter. She removed the pendant from around her neck and placed it beside the bracelet.

  “I’m wondering if you know who these pieces might have belonged to,” she said.

  The woman picked up the bracelet and ran her fingers over its carving and examined it carefully while the young woman picked up the pendant. “Awesome.” She held it up the light. “Hey, it glows.”

  She was right. The jade had taken on an eerie green sheen.

  “Where’d ya get this?” the older woman asked.

  “From my son.” Cloë went on to explain his history.

  “So you saying his mother came from here?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know for certain. I only know that she was Haida.”

  “You don’t know if she was eagle or raven?”

  Before Cloë could answer, the woman answered the question herself. “She’s gotta be eagle clan. Look at those eagles. You’re saying it was hers.”

  “As was the pendant. They were found on her body.”

  The woman continued studying the bracelet. “It’s Haida all right. I recognize the style.” She ran her fingers over the inside. “See here, there are some markings. But they’re too faint to read.”

  “Do they mean anything?” Cloë asked.

  “It’ll be the carver’s mark. Nowadays they etch in their initials or name. But in the old days, they’d use their personal crest.”

  She rubbed her hands over the bracelet. “This is old. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one this old. Used to make them out of melted down silver coins.”

  “Is there any way you can identify who it might have belonged to?”

  “I don’t know enough about these crests. One of the elders might know.”

  “We should ask Louise,” I said to Cloë.

  “If you’re talking Louise O’Brien, she would know,” the woman said. “She knows a lot about the old stuff. But wait a minute, here comes Flo. She might be able to help you.”

  A small, hunched over woman with grey hair, still clad in her red and black ceremonial button blanket, was struggling to open the door. I hastened to help her.

  “Pole raising finished?” the woman asked as the elder stepped into the room.

  The woman seemed a bit out of breath, so I slid a chair toward her. But she brushed it aside. “I’m okay. What’s that you say, Cathy?”

  “I asked if they finally got the pole raised,” Cathy repeated in a louder voice.

  The old woman nodded. “They did. It didn’t take long with that fancy equipment. Should’a used it from the start. That poor, poor man. I’m so sorry for his family.”

  “Yes, a real tragedy,” I said. “We were there this morning when it happened. In fact, he was staying at our lodge.”

  She turned to look at me. “What’s that you say?”

  I started to repeat it, but then thought it didn’t matter, so instead just shouted, “A real tragedy.”

  She nodded. “I don’t know what this is going to do to the Hlgaa K’ inhlgahl Xaaydaga. It is a very bad beginning. The shame continues …”

  While she rambled on I noticed Cathy making sign motions to try to stop her talking. Finally the old woman noticed. She glanced at us, then back to Cathy, and nodded. “You’re right. Best keep this to ourselves.”

  Her eyes alit on the bracelet. She reached up and grabbed it. “Where’d this come from?”

  Cathy pointed to us.

  “How d’you get it?”

  Cloë tried to explain, but the elder misunderstood most of it. Cathy took over and finished by shouting. “They want to know if you know which clan it belongs to.”

  The elder peered into Cloë’s face as if trying to see beyond her pale features. “Son Haida, eh?”

  “Yes, his birth mother died when he was born.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Mary was her first name. Do you recognize this bracelet?”

  The old woman seemed to have no difficulties hearing Cloë now.

  She closed her eyes as she continued to hold the bracelet. When she opened them, her gaze fell on the medallion. She reached for that. “What’s this?” She turned back to Cloë. “This belonged to your son, too?”

  “Yes, it also came from his birth mother.”

  Clasping both objects in her hands, she thrust them toward Cloë. “You take them and go back to where you come from. We don’t want them here.” Turning her back to us, she said to the teenager, “Carrie, take me home now. I’m tired.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “if these items are causing you pain, but it is important that we let Allistair’s Haida family know what happened to him and to his mother.”

  She whipped her head around. “They don’t care. Now go.”

  I started to say more, but Eric’s sister grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the door. We stepped into a sudden downpour. The edge of blue had been only a teaser. The rain had returned with a vengeance.

  “Why did you shut me up?” I asked once we were safely inside the car. The rain pounded against the windows and the car roof. “I think she knows who they belonged to.”

  “She’s not going to tell us. No matter how much you pester her. Did you catch the faces of the other two women?”

  “No.”

  “The minute that old woman started talking, their smiles disappeared and their faces clouded over. I’ve seen those same closed expressions before, on the carvers’ faces whenever I came by Ernest’s shed looking for Allistair. They hated me. They didn’t want anything to do with me. These women don’t want anything to do with us either.”

  I knew what she meant. During a couple of tumultuous times on Eric’s reserve I had encountered the same stony faces from his people, people who a short time before had been my friends. In those moments, I knew that I had become the enemy. I never liked it. It made me feel ugly. But I knew that it had nothing to do with me, rather it had to do with who I was, a white woman, a member of the race who had changed their way of life forever.

  I started up the car. “We’d better get Eric before he gets drenched again.”

  Thirty-Seven

  The Coward

  He let out a war whoop when his brother told him. Served the jerk right. The matriarchs would never make him chief now, no matter how much money the geek had.

  Too bad the kid was dead. But who would’ve thought he even existed? He sure hadn’t thought his cousin had it in her. Yet she produced this boy, and a fine one at that. He would’ve made a good carver, too. He wondered where his cousin was now. Probably dead.

  That’s what happens when we turn our back on our clan. We become adrift, like a piece of timber floating in the sea. Then some big wave throws us onto a foreign shore, where, without the lifeblood of our roots, we slowly wither and die.

  It sure happened to him. He was so upset by the loss of his boat he had to leave the islands. He went to Vancouver, where he got sucked into the booze and drugs. Half out of his mind, he wondered the streets of the Downtown Eastside looking for what, he didn’t know. He never found it. It was the carving that found him. It brought him back to life, back to his roots, back to Haida Gwaii.

  Bro wasn’t so lucky. Although he never left the land of our people, he left us in his mind. He was trying too damn hard to be like a white man, and it wasn’t working. It never would.

  But enough of these crazy thoughts. He had to get back to the story. Time was running out. He wanted to make sure it was laid out on the pole from the beginning to its tragic end. So if he couldn’t complete the carving, someone else could.

  Bro had brought a bottle with him. But he needed to work, so he told him to take it over to Scav’s and to wait there. It was great seeing his brother. It’d been a long time. But for now he needed
to be alone. And he sure didn’t need the booze. It would only mess with his head. But he’d be good and ready for a drink when he finished drawing this next part of the story.

  Like Old Chief, he didn’t have to think hard to come up with a crest for this guy. It had to be a raven to show the guy’s clan. But he wouldn’t make it a proud raven with its chest thrust out as if he owned the world. No way.

  He took up his marker and drew the bird small, half the size of Old Chief’s eagle, and hunched over like the coward Chief Blue Shell was. He outlined a short, blunt beak with a lopsided twist at the end. Though it wouldn’t make the figure symmetrical like totem pole figures were supposed to be, he didn’t care. Chief Blue Shell was a yellow-bellied bastard who didn’t deserve the honour of harmony and balance.

  Sure, clans fought. That was the Haida way. But they didn’t sneak up on each other in the dead of night. No, they announced their arrival by banging their paddles on the sides of their canoes and shouting war cries before swooping down onto the village beach of their rivals.

  But Chief Blue Shell and his men had snuck up Otter Inlet on the other side of the headland and had landed just as dusk was closing in. They were guided by the traitor along one of the secret trails known only to the Greenstones, a trail that took them up and over the mountain and down to the back end of the village, to where Old Chief’s regalia was hidden in the only place where no Haida would dare go — the mortuary house. Though the Blue Shells were as terrified as the Greenstones were of the spirits guarding the dead, they had two men with them who weren’t, two Iron Men who didn’t think twice about entering the house filled with the rotting bones of the clan’s dead and scattering them about in their search for the riches the drunken clansmen had bragged about when they waited by the big river for the gold.

  He drew the raven’s eyes sly and shifty and gave him a long skinny tongue, like a snake’s. To remind everyone of the coward’s terrible deed, he depicted the raven’s talons clutching a bone with two bulbous ends. So there was no mistaking the identity of this raven, he outlined the Blue Shell clan crests, a frog and a sea lion, onto both of its wings. He wasn’t going to let the Blue Shell Ravens pretend their long-ago chief was anything other than what he was: a coward who betrayed the Haida people when he helped the Iron Men.