Silver Totem of Shame

by R. J. Harlick

  “In its day Llnagaay was one of the most important villages in Haida Gwaii. I’ve seen photos taken from around the time of Old Chief. There must have been more than twenty-five longhouses with a good thirty or more poles of all varieties. I think Old Chief had at least five in front of his longhouse, which, of course, was the largest.” She grinned. “Our chiefs always had to have the biggest and most of anything. We’re a competitive lot, we Haida.”

  “No different from other peoples I know.” Eric chuckled. “It looks as if the potlatch has wound down. Can we drive you home?”

  Apart from twenty or so people cleaning up, the hall was empty. Many of the tables and chairs were already stacked against a far wall.

  “Thanks, Eric, but Becky promised to take me. Here she comes now.”

  We watched the long-legged young woman approach, her satiny hair swinging to the rhythm of her confident stride, her new earrings dancing. She held a basket overflowing with potlatch gifts.

  “You ready, Auntie?” she asked. “Wonderful potlatch, wasn’t it? Especially when you consider how badly things started out. I think Harry behaved very respectfully, don’t you? He’ll make a good Chief Greenstone.”

  “I’m sure he will, child. Still, until we find out who cut those ropes, we will always have that stain on our clan.”

  Louise started to get up.

  “Wait, we almost forgot,” I said, suddenly remembering. “We have a bracelet we’re hoping you might be able to identify.”

  “That’s right.” Eric withdrew the gleaming silver bracelet from his jacket pocket and held it out to Louise.

  Becky sucked in her breath. “That’s Allistair’s. I recognize the eagle and salmon design. In fact, Auntie, now that I—”

  “Where did you get this?” Louise cut in. She appeared shaken, her face stark with shock. I could see her aching to touch the bracelet, but something was preventing her.

  “It belonged to my boyfriend.” The young woman didn’t hesitate to pick it up. She ran her fingers over the cold metal and kissed it. “This is the bracelet we had the fight over. If only I had accepted it … he wouldn’t have gone to the carving shed and …” Her voice faded, while her tears covered the bracelet’s eagle.

  Louise’s lower lip trembled. “Please, tell me where you got this.”

  “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” I was worried by her sudden frailty.

  “Don’t worry about me. Just tell me where it came from.”

  “Like Becky said, it belonged to Allistair, my sister’s adopted son,” Eric answered. “It once belonged to his birth mother. You recognize it, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “It was mine.”

  “Did Allistair’s birth mother steal it?” he asked.

  “May I touch it?”

  Becky gently placed the bracelet into the elderly woman’s hands. This time she didn’t hesitate to run her trembling fingers over the gleaming silver. As Becky had done, she brought it to her lips and kissed it.

  “The mother may have been my daughter.”

  “You had a daughter?” Amazement washed over Becky’s face. “What happened to her?”

  “She left her homeland a long time ago, before you were born, child. She was a year younger than you are now and the youngest of my three children. She was my little angel.”

  “But you’ve never talked about her. I’ve never seen a photo of her anywhere in your house.”

  Louise remained silent, her eyes glistening with tears. She continued to stroke the bracelet.

  “Lizzie was my dear sweet little girl. After two sons, I was thrilled to finally have a daughter who could follow me as Matriarch. When she was young she absorbed all things Haida. She was a model child. But when she hit her teenage years everything changed. She spurned me and her Haida roots. She took up with a bad crowd and started drinking. I think she might have even tried drugs. There was nothing her father or I could do. Any attempts we made to help her only seem to make her behaviour worse. One day she was here; the next she was gone. We never saw her again.” She stopped and closed her eyes as if grappling with long-suppressed emotions.

  “She disappeared at about the same time as a sailboat that had been docked for a couple of weeks at Queen Charlotte. We discovered that she had been spending her nights with the owner and his two friends. When the police eventually located the boat on Vancouver Island, the owner vowed that my daughter had gone willingly with them and left the boat when they reached the island. The police were never able to prove otherwise.

  “Thinking that she would probably go to a city, my husband made several trips to Victoria and Vancouver, but never found her. A couple of years later, our marriage died. He blamed me and wouldn’t let me forget it. I’ve never forgiven myself either. If only I hadn’t been so hard on her.” She shook her head. “I was a bad mother.”

  “Please, Auntie, don’t say that. You’ve been like a mother to me, a wonderful mother.” She bent over and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Louise. These things happen,” Eric added, glancing in my direction.

  “They sure do,” I agreed. “My mother and I didn’t get along either, but I realize now that neither of us was to blame. We just have conflicting personalities. I imagine that was probably the case with you and your daughter.”

  Conflicting personalities was putting it mildly. We’d been like oil and vinegar. Mother never stopped haranguing me and I never stopped shouting back at her. In fact, my ultimate solution had been to run away, though she wasn’t the only reason for my leaving Toronto. Still, even though I stayed away from her for a good five years, she knew I was alive and well and living at Three Deer Point. She’d hammered the good daughter too far into me. I’d dutifully kept in touch with pro forma phone calls.

  “I guess your daughter was wearing the bracelet when she left,” I said.

  Louise nodded. “The bracelet disappeared at the same time she did. I figured she’d taken it to sell for drugs. Though I’d always wondered why she didn’t take my wallet at the same time.”

  “If it’s any comfort, she didn’t sell it. She was wearing it …” I paused, hesitating to tell her. But surely she suspected. “When she died.”

  She sighed. “Although I hoped and prayed life had turned out well for Lizzie, deep down inside I knew as only a mother can know. When she didn’t contact us or anyone else in our community, I suspected she was dead, either killed by those men on the boat or later from too much drinking or a drug overdose.” She kissed the bracelet again, then placed it carefully around her wrist and patted it as if saying “welcome home.”

  “Please, can you tell me what you know about her?”

  Eric told her what little we knew of her tragic death. Although he left out the part about her being a prostitute, Louise filled that in for herself. “There is only one way a young native woman with no high school diploma and an addiction can keep herself in alcohol and drugs, and that’s on her back.” She shuddered. “My poor angel. But she left the gift of life. Please tell me about my grandson.”

  “You should hear it from my sister, who loved him as if he were her own,” Eric said. “It’s getting late, Louise, and you look tired. I can bring Cloë over to your place first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, it’s been a very difficult and long day. But I need to know something else. Another family valuable disappeared with my daughter. A pendant made from a green stone. Do you know if my daughter had it with her when she died?”

  Forty-One

  There was no changing the elderly matriarch’s mind. Though she was almost keeling over from exhaustion and needed Eric’s sturdy arm to guide her to our rental car, she was determined to visit Cloë right away.

  “Why is this pendant so important that it can’t wait until morning?” I asked, once we had loaded ourselves into the Honda. It was closing in on midnight and we were all struggling to keep our eyes open.

  “Does it have any carvi
ng on it?” she asked, ignoring my question.

  The road was wet from a recent rainfall, but the sky was clearing, with stars glinting intermittently through the scudding clouds. A gale-force wind buffeted the car as we rounded a bend. In the side-view mirror, I watched the headlights of Becky’s father’s truck waver behind us as it caught the same gust.

  “Yes, but it’s quite faint.”

  “Are there any markings on the back?”

  “I didn’t look. Do you know what the greenstone is? Is it jade?”

  “I suppose it could be. I never thought about it. We’ve always called it hlgaa k’ inhlgahl, meaning ‘greenstone.’”

  “Is your clan named after this greenstone?”

  “No. The name is much older.”

  “Why is the pendant so important?” I asked again.

  “The greenstone has been in my family a very long time. It goes back to the time of Old Chief and has been passed down from Matriarch to Matriarch. The bracelet is more recent. My grandmother’s father made it for her mother out of silver coins. Curiously, he carved the old Greenstone Eagle crests into it: the eagle, salmon, beaver, and frog. The man who became Chief Greenstone after Old Chief changed the clan crests to the ones you saw on the new totem pole.”

  “Why did he change them?”

  “As much as Old Chief was admired in his day, he suffered a terrible shame before he died. His nephew who took over didn’t want to be reminded of this shame.”

  “Is that why several elders who saw the bracelet today refused to have anything to do with it?”

  “Unfortunately we Haida have long memories. Events of long ago, particularly shameful ones, aren’t easily forgotten … or forgiven.”

  Cloë’s bedroom window was dark as we drove up to the main lodge.

  “Eric, it looks like Cloë’s asleep. She was pretty tired. Do we really want to wake her up?”

  “Please do,” Louise replied. “It won’t take long. I just want to know the greenstone is safe.”

  It had been a good twenty years or more since she’d seen the pendant, surely she could wait another day. Her persistence begged the question, if it was so important, why hadn’t she moved heaven and earth to find it along with her daughter?

  “I’ll nip inside and get it from her, while you two stay here, okay?” I suggested.

  “You’ll need this.” Eric passed me the front door key.

  I signalled for Becky to park behind us and wait with Eric and Louise.

  Feeling more lead-footed than fleet of foot, I tramped up the stairs to the front door. The wind had managed to push most of the clouds from the sky, revealing a tableau crowded with a trillion dots of light. Far below, the running lights of a boat chugged through the channel toward the docks. Even in the lee of the building, the wind still managed to whip my hair into a frizzy frenzy.

  When I placed the key in the lock, the door creaked open. Figuring the last person had forgotten to shut it tightly, I crept inside and gave the door an extra push to ensure it remained closed. I could hear a television in one of the rooms on the same floor; otherwise, the place was as any hotel would be after midnight, deathly still.

  A brass lamp at the far end of the sitting room provided enough light for me to see my way to the stairs leading up to Cloë’s floor. Two of the three doors on the second-floor landing were firmly closed and there was loud snoring coming from one of the rooms. But the door to Cloë’s room was partially open, which made no sense. Surely she would keep it locked.

  “Cloë, you awake?” I whispered, pushing the door open farther.

  Was she even here?

  Maybe she couldn’t sleep and had gone for a walk or was waiting for us in our cottage? But surely she would’ve locked the door … unless she’d been too upset to care.

  Worried, I gingerly pressed the door open wider and the landing light poured into the dark room. “Cloë, it’s me, Meg,” I whispered.

  Cloë was here. I could make out her shape under the thickness of the white duvet, her long hair sprawled over the pillow. So why was the door open? Had someone been in her room? I glanced around nervously, but nothing appeared disturbed, nor were there any shapes that didn’t belong.

  “Cloë, wake up. I have something important to tell you.”

  I tiptoed to the bed, expecting her to wake up at any moment. But other than the steady rise and fall of her breathing, she remained motionless. I hesitated touching her, in case I scared her.

  I ran my eyes over the surface of the night table and chest of drawers, hoping to see the medallion but failing to spot it in the dim light. My fingers touched her earrings and a couple of rings and felt the buttery softness of her leather purse, but they didn’t feel the coldness of the stone. Last time I’d seen her, she was wearing the pendant. Maybe she wanted to continue to feel the memory of her son close to her skin. I would have to wake her.

  I touched the shoulder peeking out from under the duvet. “Cloë, wake up.”

  No response.

  I shook her gently.

  Still no response.

  I noticed a dark splotch on the white pillowcase next to her head and reached out a hand to touch it. It felt sticky. When I held my fingers up to the landing light, I saw blood.

  I shook Cloë more vigorously. “Come on, wake up!”

  I grabbed the phone on her night table and dialed 911.

  With the promise that the police and ambulance would be here within minutes, I ran back outside to Eric.

  “Something terrible has happened to your sister. You’d better come inside.”

  Before he had a chance to ask me what was wrong, I was racing back up to her room with him clambering up the stairs behind me.

  “Slow down, Meg, and tell me what’s going on.”

  “I don’t know whether she’s been shot or what, but look at all the blood.”

  He snapped the light on beside the bed and leaned over his sister. He held his hand to her forehead and felt the pulse at the side of her neck. “She’s alive. Thank God. Cloë, can you hear me?”

  He gingerly turned her head one way, then the other. “I don’t think she’s been shot.” He patted his fingers gently over her scalp and stopped near the top of her head. “I feel the wound here.”

  Blood clung to his fingertips.

  The rising sound of sirens cut the stillness of the night.

  Cloë groaned. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Are you okay?” Eric asked.

  “God, my head hurts.” She reached up to the spot Eric had found. “What happened?” She struggled to get up.

  “Leave her alone. The girl needs time to collect her wits.” Louise, her breathing heavy, pushed her way around us and gently settled Eric’s sister back down on the bed. “Does it hurt anywhere else, child?”

  Directly behind her, Becky shrugged as if to say “I tried to stop her.”

  “No, just my head. What time is it? It’s still night, isn’t it? What’s everyone doing here?” She tried to sit up again, but Louise, sitting on the bed beside her, kept a hand firmly on her shoulder, forcing her to remain down.

  The sirens drew close and stopped.

  “It’s best you stay lying down. That nasty bump on your head might make you dizzy,” Louise said.

  “I remember,” Cloë said. “It’s coming back. I woke up and someone was in my room. He, I think it was a he, was rummaging through my things on the night table. I could see a pinpoint of light shining on my rings. I must’ve made a noise because he turned the light on me. Then everything went black. Are the rings still there? One of them is my diamond engagement ring.”

  “Yes, they are,” Eric said. “So you didn’t recognize him?”

  “It was too dark. I just remember a black shape leaning over the table.”

  “I know what he hit you with.” I pointed my toe at a slender black object about twenty-five centimetres long lying on the carpet.

  “It looks like an argillite totem pole,” Louise said. “That could giv
e you a nasty bump.”

  She started to reach down to pick it up, when a voice from the landing yelled, “Don’t touch that!”

  In walked Staff Sergeant Galarneau, and behind him two paramedics.

  “Good evening, messieur-dames. Please move away from the victim and let these paramedics do their job. And don’t touch anything, okay?”

  As one of the paramedics leaned over Cloë, she suddenly brought her hand to her neck. “It’s gone,” she cried out. “My son’s pendant is gone!”

  Forty-Two

  Time Is Running Out

  He felt goddamn awful. He should’ve never drunk that bottle last night. Cheap booze’d do it every time. Made you feel like crap. But he could never convince Bro to spend the extra bucks for some good stuff. Still, it was as much his fault as his brother’s. He knew it was rotgut stuff and yet he downed almost a full bottle on his own.

  He sure didn’t feel like doing any drawing today. No way. His hand shook too much and the hammers pounding away in his head made thinking hurt. While the booze had dulled the pain last night, it was in full flare this morning.

  Hell, Bro was still passed out on the ground where he’d fallen at whatever hour of the morning they finally finished the two bottles. Even the downpour hadn’t woken him up, although he looked pretty well dried out now, except for his arm lying in a pool of water.

  He poured what was left in the cold teapot into his mug, swished yesterday’s tea around his mouth and spat it out. Tasted like hell; but at least it got rid of the booze taste. He should make a new pot, but no way he felt like going through the effort of lighting the stove. He swirled more tea around his mouth and spewed it out onto the ants crowding around the last splotch of tea. Weren’t fussy eaters, were they?

  He must’ve slept in a bad position. His back hurt like hell. No way he could spend the day bent over the log, drawing. But time was running out. He had to get this story finished before they came for him. From the way Bro talked last night, it could be any day.