“The Metis are people of mixed race. I believe Mae Hembrow was originally Ojibwe.”
We looked blank.
“It’s one of the tribes who used to live around here.”
“You mean – she’s – Red Indian?” I cried, forgetting Hank’s advice.
“If that’s what you want to call them. They don’t like it, being called Indians. I call them First People, or Native Canadians.”
I nearly died on the spot. I’d frightened a – what had he said? A First Person? Whenever I saw a western movie, I was always on the Indians’ side, even against Errol Flynn. And that woman who fainted when she saw me headless – she was a real, live one! The first and only one I’d seen since we got here, which is to say – ever. Outside of the movies. It was as if I’d frightened some god-like being from legend.
“You know, Lindy,” O’F went on, taking my hand in his papery one, “it wasn’t your fault, at all, what happened. But it was a very sweet thing, to try to apologise. I’m sure Bernard Hembrow appreciated it, really.”
“I don’t think so. It just made him mad at us.”
“You have to make allowances for old people.” He smiled suddenly around his cold pipe. “Like you have to for me, and my foolishness. If I say I’m sorry, now, for my mistake, please don’t yell at me and make me shovel the snow!”
I think our mothers seriously considered our all going on living together. When the two lots of money from England were put together, we felt almost well-off! But really, I knew the little house on Taylor Street was too crowded with six of us, and poor Alfie finally settled it by going on strike, saying he couldn’t sleep on the floor any more and racing Cameron every night for the bed in the cupboard-bedroom. Since Alfie went to bed hours before Cameron, he always won, and Cameron had to sleep on the blow-up mattress in the sitting room. He was OK with that because at least the sitting room had a desk in it, but it meant the mothers had to spend the evenings in the kitchen. The radio was a huge old thing that couldn’t be moved, so that meant they had to miss all their favourite programmes. Irene said very seriously that living without Jack Benny (her favourite comedian) was a deprivation too far.
“I have to laugh once a week for my health,” she said.
So in mid-February the Lords left for New Jersey. Captain Lord, from England, had found another relative for them to live with. A richer one, they hoped, or at least one who wouldn’t have to ‘beggar themselves’, keeping them. Cameron looked at the map and saw New Jersey was near New York.
“I’d like to see New York,” he said. Then he said, “Is Willie going to write to you?”
“I hope so,” I said. “She said she would.”
“Can you ask her to describe New York? Then you can read me the letters,” he said.
Ha! Little did we dream!
We remained happy in Taylor Street – maybe even more after the Lords left, though Willie and I cried buckets when we said goodbye, promising to write ‘every day’. But I knew from Sue, my best friend from my old school, that we wouldn’t. I only ever had one letter from Sue and I only wrote to her twice.
And Willie didn’t write for a while. I guess they were too busy getting settled.
“America isn’t Canada,” O’F said. “And New Jersey sure isn’t Saskatchewan. They’ll have a lot of getting used to to do.”
I missed Willie a lot at first. Whenever I had a problem, I asked myself, What would Willie do?
Well. The problem of next door was easy to answer, so I bought a box of Laura Secord candies – the best candies in the world, all kinds, like a patchwork quilt of different-coloured sweets and chocolates – with my pocket money and marched up the scuffed wooden steps and knocked on the screen door. After a while, he came – Mr Hembrow.
“Well?” he barked.
“Mr Hembrow, will you please give these candies to Mrs Hembrow? And here’s a card I made. It’s to say sorry. I really am,” I said.
He worked his tongue around his teeth for a bit, glaring down at me. “You’ve got a nerve, I’ll say that for you. Coming back here after the way I acted.” He reached out slowly and took the box and the card. “You folks living next door now? What happened to the others?”
“They’ve moved to America,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, Little Noisy Mouth will like that. They don’t mind noise, down there – make so much of it themselves they won’t notice.”
I guessed Little Noisy Mouth must be Alfie. Then, just as I was turning to leave, Mr Hembrow said, “You want to come in? Mae’ll want to see you.”
I’d secretly hoped for this. I’d asked Miss Bubniuk about the Ojibwes. They were one of the fiercest tribes around, she told me, for hundreds of years before the white men came.
I followed Mr Hembrow into the house with a thumping heart. It was cold and cluttered, as if no one had cleaned or tidied up for a while. The furniture was even older than ours, and all higgledy-piggledy, and the place was sort of dark, because of the thick frost on the inside of the windows. I knew that only happened if there were no storm windows – a second window that nearly everyone put up when winter came. It was a heavy job, though – maybe Mr Hembrow couldn’t manage it.
There were interesting things there too. A big, framed, brown photo in the tiny hall caught my eye. It was of an Indian – I mean a First People – chief. On the floor in the sitting room was a rug made of some kind of fur that must have come from some really big animal. Could it be a buffalo? There was a stuffed moose-head on one wall. It had glass eyes and looked real. It was quite low down, so it seemed as if the whole moose was pushing through from outside and would soon be standing in the sitting room.
Mr Hembrow led the way through to a bedroom at the back. The house wasn’t like ours. It seemed to have only one bedroom, but it was a good big one. It looked out over a snow-covered yard at the back with quite tall trees, which ours didn’t have. At least it was warm in here. The frost on the inside of the window was half melted, the meltwater trickling down the wall into a mass of old towels.
Mrs Hembrow was lying on the bed, not in it. She was dressed in a long warm skirt and a heavy blouse with a bright orange shawl wrapped round her shoulders.
I could see at once that she was a First Person. She had dark skin and eyes and although her hair was grey, I could see it wasn’t a white person’s hair – it was too heavy and straight. And long. It was in a long plait, hanging down over her shoulder, tied with a ribbon. She was leaning against a pile of pillows and had another fur rug over her feet. Next to her bed was a little table with a lamp and a lot of bottles and boxes of medicine. She was listening to the radio and making something that looked like a basket.
She looked up as we came in.
What would Willie do? I went right up to her. “Mrs Hembrow, I’m Lindy Hanks from England. It was me who scared you that time when you fainted at Hallowe’en. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
She didn’t look surprised or angry – or anything. She didn’t have an expression. Her face was just smooth and blank. Her eyes looked like black holes.
“How did you do it?” she asked.
Mr Hembrow coughed. “My wife always says she saw a woman without a head. I don’t guess she really did. It was the witch, wasn’t it, Mae? Sorry, honey, I mean the bad woman.”
She didn’t say anything. She just kept her eyes fixed on me. And I suddenly realised no one had believed that she’d seen what she said she’d seen. That must have been awful, if they kept telling her she’d imagined it. So I told them the whole story.
“Prove it to him,” she said at the end.
“How? How can I? I haven’t got the dress any more.”
“The head. There was a head cut off – I saw it on the ground. Show him the head.”
Well, there was a thing. The head! I hadn’t thought about it since that night.
“Alfie – er – Little Noisy Mouth – ran off with it. I never asked him what he did with it – I never wanted to see it again. And now he’s gon
e to America and I can’t ask him.”
Mr Hembrow thrust the box of Laura Secord into my hands. He nudged me. “Give her the candies.”
So I did. She opened the box and looked at the yummy pattern of fondants and nougat and chocolates with violets and rose petals made of sugar on the tops. She didn’t say thank you. She took one of them out, bit into it, looked to see what was inside, and then popped it in her mouth and ate it slowly. She looked up at me with those blank eyes.
“Prove it to him. Find the head.”
“I’ll try,” I said helplessly.
When he was showing me out, Mr Hembrow said, “Mae’s people don’t thank you. Saying thank you is kinda rude, like saying you didn’t expect someone to do a nice thing. But she was pleased. We don’t buy that kind much.”
I knew what that meant. That small box had cost nearly three weeks’ pocket money.
“You believe her now, don’t you?”
“Sure I do. It just sounded kinda crazy. Mae’s folks, you know, they’re mortal scared of ghosts and witches and such. They don’t even like to hear ’em named. I shouldn’t have let her go to the door that night but I had my rheumatics real bad.”
Just as I was going down the steps, he added, “You girls did a real nice job that time. I’m sorry I was such a sore-head.”
“That’s OK, Mr Hembrow. I wish I could do it every time.”
He looked at the sky. There was some blue showing.
“Be break-up soon,” he said. “Another month or so. Winters sure go on a piece, hereabouts. Winters go on so long in England?”
“No. What’s break-up?”
“The river. You’ll see. Best sight in the world, when the river breaks up.”
I went home, and I looked for the head.
I searched the whole house – every cupboard, under the beds, down in the basement where the furnace lived. I wondered if maybe Alfie had put the head in there and burnt it up; that’s what I’d have done. But if that was where it ended up, that was the end of the story. I didn’t think it really mattered. Mr Hembrow believed his wife now.
But every time I visited, she looked at me out of those strange holes of eyes and I knew she wanted to see that head again, to look at what had frightened her half to death. She needed to. And I couldn’t help her.
Cameron came home from Nutana telling us all the boys, and some girls, in his class were betting real money on the exact date and time the river would break up. It seemed the ice didn’t just melt slowly. It broke up all at once. I thought this must be something to see, and I asked Mr Hembrow if he knew when it would happen, or if maybe his wife did. I thought First People might have an instinct for something like that.
But he just said, “Wait and see. And when you hear it’s happened, get down there. Stand on the bridge and watch it come.”
One Saturday morning in late March, I heard the phone ring early. Cameron came into our room looking quite excited.
“The river broke up in the night!” he said. “I guessed midnight last night! I bet a quarter on it. If nobody in our class came closer, I’ve won. Twenty-five cents by nineteen – that’s four seventy-five. I can put that down on Jane’s Fighting Ships at Broadway Bookstore.”
I leapt out of bed and threw on my clothes. Taylor Street was further than the crescent from the river. We had to take two streetcars. Everyone on board was talking about break-up. When we reached our end of Broadway Bridge we got off. We could already see what was happening: the river was one heaving, crashing mass of enormous blocks of ice. It was the most fantastic sight! We joined a crowd trooping to the middle of the bridge, and found a place against the parapet.
“It’s like being on an ice-breaking ship in the Arctic!” Cameron shouted above the noise.
As far upriver as we could see, the tumbling, heaving blocks came rushing towards us, some as big as cars. They hit the pointed piers of the bridge, rose up against them with the force of the current, smashing and falling back, one after the other in an endless tumult. It felt as if we were moving – it really did seem as if we were on a ship that was ploughing through the ice, helping to break it up as we went.
“Oh boy,” breathed Cameron. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. This is really something you can’t see at home!”
We stood there until we were half frozen from the cold wind blowing in our faces. We didn’t want to leave. But at last, we had to. We walked back as far as Five Corners and went into Pinder’s Drug Store, where we pooled our pocket money for hot chocolates and waffles with maple syrup. A very rare treat, but we were too excited to just go home.
“Are you really going to buy Jane’s Fighting Ships?” I asked.
He’d been talking about wanting it for ages. It gave details and pictures and diagrams of all the battleships in the world. It was terribly expensive. Four seventy-five wouldn’t be nearly enough.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’m going to do a paper round for the rest of the money. But they’ll let me have it for a five-dollar deposit.”
I didn’t say anything. I thought he should give the money to Mummy. I remembered he’d bought her sweets with the thirty cents he got from the gopher tails. But this was real money. Then I thought of O’F’s empty pipe and suddenly wished we hadn’t bought the breakfast.
What would Willie do? Get a job. Obviously. At twelve you could. At ten you probably couldn’t. But I decided to try. As soon as the Easter holiday came, I’d try.
My friendship with the Hembrows impressed O’F. First because he thought helping to found a whole town was a big deal, and so he admired Mr Hembrow a lot; second, because he said very few people nowadays got to know any of the First People. Most of them were on reservations, way out of town.
Someone else was impressed. Miss Bubniuk.
We were given homework for history about finding out the history of the town. Of course I went straight next door with a notebook and pumped Mr Hembrow for details about what it was like to come west when he was a trapper, back in the 1880s. I wanted to know more about the wars of the Metis with the settlers who were moving north and west to take over more land for farming and hunting.
He told me how he decided to side with the Metis after he met Mae – who had a different name then that meant ‘Leaves Tears Behind’ – and married her. And how he fought against the Mounties in the North-West Rebellion, and about two Indian chiefs called Poundmaker and Big Bear.
Then he told me about the early days of Saskatoon, and a wonderful story about how, after the town started to really be a town, and even to ‘boom’, he was out walking during break-up when the lumps of ice that were bashing against the new railway bridge made it collapse and fall into the river. He actually saw it happen.
I wrote all this up in my terrible writing (I was trying to learn Canadian cursive) – pages and pages. When Miss Bubniuk gave me it back, at the bottom, where I’d been sure there would be an A, was an F, and the words: Have a care for your poor teacher. I can’t see the content for the bad writing.
I burst into tears in front of the whole class and threw my exercise book into the wastepaper basket.
Miss Bubniuk said, “Oh, Lindy, stop – turn off the waterworks!” which made the class laugh, and then she rescued my book and said, “All right. I can’t read your scrawl but you can, so read it to us.”
So I had to go up to the front of the class and read aloud my long, long account, which used up nearly the whole lesson, and at the end I got clapped and Miss Bubniuk took my notebook, scratched out the F and gave me an A plus, telling me to go home and copy it all out again, “In writing worthy of what you’ve written.” (I didn’t. I couldn’t.)
That night I visited next door and read it again to the Hembrows. I expected another round of applause, but Mr Hembrow looked uncomfortable, and Mrs Hembrow hid her face because she was trying not to laugh. I’d never seen her laugh before.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, ready to be very hurt if they criticised it.
But Mrs Hembrow said,
“Bernie, tell the truth.”
And Mr Hembrow said, “I didn’t know you was going to write it all down like that and tell people. I never fought the Mounties, not actually fought ’em. But I did see the railway bridge go down, that I did do, and the rest is the God’s truth. All the history part is right, because what I didn’t live through, which was most of it, I read up on.”
I didn’t tell anyone this at school. But Miss Bubniuk was so excited that she and the principal arranged to send a car for Mr Hembrow to come to school and give a talk to all the grades four and higher, in the big hall. And he talked beautifully, not only about the early days of Saskatoon but about how bad it had been for the First Nations.
“We should never forget what we done to them poor people, and how our country was built on others’ displacement and hardship and losing their whole way of life that’d lasted for thousands of years,” he said.
Then he told Mae’s story, which was so sad – till she met him and he married her – that a lot of the girls were crying. Me too, because I hadn’t known till then that all her family was killed, and that that was why she was called Leaves Tears Behind.
Mummy suddenly became very busy; directing Penny Wise, which was coming along marvellously apparently, was hard work and she had to leave us two evenings a week to go to the rehearsals. Having the Hembrows next door, and with Cameron now being twelve, she thought that was safe. A lot of kids of Cameron’s age babysat for money. She found this weird, but as she said, “Kids seem to grow up quicker in Canada.” And Cameron, of course, was very grown-up for his age.
I didn’t think it was very grown-up of him to put every cent he earned towards his silly old book of battleships, though he did buy O’F some pipe tobacco for his birthday, after I told him he should. I bought O’F pipe cleaners and made him a card with a poem I’d written in it.
Dearest O’F, best of friends
Best of uncles till life ends
On this very special day
May contentment come your way
And fragrant pipe-smoke wreath your head
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