The Retreat

by David Bergen

  The grandmother turned her gaze to the sky and shrugged and said that the school people were wrong. The man looked at Nelson. “Your brother, Raymond, where is he?”

  Nelson glanced at his grandmother, who regarded him and nodded. Nelson imitated her nod, and then began to cry. The man put his hat on and then turned away and walked out towards the car with a weeping Nelson, while the woman gathered up a few of his things. The grandmother called out that Nelson was hers and where were they going with him, but there was no answer.

  Later that night, Raymond was back home and his grandmother told him that the government folks had taken Nelson, and she said that she didn’t know when he was coming back. She didn’t know where he was going, maybe to live with a white family because this is what had happened to Elijah Prince a month earlier. She said that Nelson was strong, stronger than Raymond. Her hands were folded on the table and they were shaking. The next morning she brought Raymond to stay with his aunt Donna, off the reserve about five miles away. Raymond remained there for two months. He did not attend school any more that fall, and no questions were asked, and it would be years later that he’d learn that he should have been taken with his brother, and might have been if the authorities had decided to come back for him.

  Within the first month at his new home, Nelson ran away three times, once almost making it back to Kenora before the police picked him up. Another time, in the middle of January, his adoptive father found him walking on Highway 59, just outside Île des Chênes. Driving back to Lesser, his new father said that Nelson should start appreciating what he’d been given. “You have a mother and father who love you, you have a wonderful home, clothes, food, you have three sisters who would do anything for you. Your name is Nelson Koop, you’re my son now and I’m your father. No one’s going to hurt you. You understand that?”

  It had snowed the day before, and the fields were blown over and everywhere there was a pure whiteness that was blinding in the sun. Nelson looked out the passenger window and studied the fields and imagined walking out into the emptiness. After this last escape he did not run again, though he often thought of it. At the beginning of the year he’d been placed in grade five and he’d done very poorly. Halfway through the term, he was sent down to grade four where the boys made fun of him, though they stayed away from him because he was known for having quick, hard fists. On the first day of school a boy named Benjamin Senkiew had hit him and given him a bloody nose. The following day, passing by Senkiew in the hallway, Nelson attacked him and pummelled his face until he was pulled away by the gym teacher. He was suspended for a week and returned to find that he was neither taunted nor talked to and he grew accustomed to the silence and the grudging respect and the hatred that surrounded him.

  The fall he turned fourteen he joined the football team and quickly became known for his ruthlessness and his disregard for his own body. He came to be accepted, and for a time he went out with Glenda Ratzlaff, a tall, thin girl, but her father disapproved, and so all he was left with was the recollection of her soft hands sliding up inside his T-shirt as they stood in the cold night behind the curling rink.

  As the years passed he relinquished the memories of who he was and where he had come from, though there were times, in the middle of the night, when he woke from a dream in which someone was calling him by the wrong name, and he would sit up and say, “My name is Nelson Seymour.”

  His new parents had never hidden the fact that he was adopted and that he came from a reserve in Kenora; however, his knowledge, his education, his religion, all of this was steeped in the world of Mennonites and the faith of Mennonites, and in many ways he was more Mennonite than Ojibway. One summer, his family rented a cottage on the Lake of the Woods and as they drove through Kenora the familiarity and smell fell down upon him. One morning, very early, he stepped out onto the dock of the cabin where the family was staying. A fog hovered over the water and the rising sun appeared as a weak lamp through the haze. A loon called and then floated into view and the smell of the pulp-and-paper mill carried across the water. A chasm opened up before him and he experienced a sharp ache in his heart. Later, when he went up to the cabin, Mrs. Koop was making coffee. She was wearing her bathing suit for her early-morning swim and she had fastened a towel around her waist. She turned to look at him as if inviting him to speak, but he didn’t tell her what he had seen or felt.

  At the age of thirteen he had become a Christian, and was baptized into the Lesser Mennonite Brethren Church. He wore a purple choir robe over a T-shirt and shorts, and the pastor, when he immersed him, held the back of his head firmly. His father was very pleased with his decision and his mother invited relatives and friends for lunch, and after a meal of rice casserole, corn, and Jell-O salad, Nelson played a brief viola concert for the guests who praised him for his virtuosity.

  And then, in his last year of high school, after years of being offered other people’s ideas of how he should live, he began to make his own choices. He quit school and took a job as a truck driver at the local feed mill; this put money in his pocket. He had a series of girlfriends, of whom the last was Joelle Picard. She was so sure of herself, so easily giving with him, that he began to see himself in a more generous light. And then one night they got drunk together and Joelle teasingly called him an Indian. Nelson leaned into her, took her jaw in his hand, and squeezed until she cried out. As this was happening, he felt he was standing outside of himself, watching someone else twist Joelle’s porcelain chin, and he felt a dismay that surprised him. He never saw her again.

  The following month he stole a pickup and drove west until it ran out of gas. He hitchhiked home and was picked up by a young couple who wanted to know where he was from. He said Kenora, and the girl, who wore her brown hair in braids, turned and looked at him for a long time and then she grinned and offered him some hashish. “This is great shit,” she said. When they dropped him off in Winnipeg, the girl climbed from the car and hugged him, looping her bare arms around his neck. Nelson imagined strangling her boyfriend and living forever with this beautiful girl. The idea did not seem far-fetched.

  In early spring, he left his home in Lesser and lived in Winnipeg with Abe, the brother to his adopted father. Abe operated the elevator out of the Bate Building on McDermot. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor and he offered Nelson the living-room couch, from where he could hear fights on the sidewalk below, gigantic blow-ups full of cursing and threats and ineffectual swings. One night there was a brawl involving fourteen men. Nelson leaned out the window to watch. The police eventually arrived and confiscated the pipes and crowbars and baseball bats. Drunken men were herded into a paddy wagon and taken away. One man was ferried off in an ambulance.

  Abe, claiming Nelson had no muscle on him and probably needed something more manly in his life than a sissy viola, enrolled Nelson in the local gym on Princess where he learned to box in a haphazard fashion. He ran with the other boxers through the streets of downtown Winnipeg and returned to the gym to jump rope. He was not a smooth fighter but he had a dirty streak and it was this meanness that his trainer failed to coax out of him. In the evenings, Nelson walked up Albert Street and passed by the drunks who hung out by the back door of a local hotel. Many times he saw himself standing at the entrance to the bar, on the verge of entering, but then he turned away. He knew that at some point he would travel out to Kenora to look for his family. He was afraid and found all kinds of reasons not to do this until, one afternoon, he hitchhiked east and arrived in the town he had left ten years earlier. There, he asked after his family, and it did not take long to find his brother Raymond living in the cabin near Bare Point. The following week a celebration took place at his grandmother’s house. Cousins and uncles and aunts arrived and his grandmother made blueberry pie and there was a feast laid out on the table: macaroni salad, fried fish, duck soup, Klik, Tang, mashed potatoes, and perogies. Nelson told his cousin Gerald that he had eaten lots of perogies in Lesser, only they were called vereni
ka. Gerald looked at him and said, “That how you got fat?” and he laughed and Nelson saw that Gerald was missing a front tooth. Nelson knew that he was being offered a form of love, but it felt hard and strange and he didn’t know what to do with it. He had called his stepmother that day to let her know where he was, and Mrs. Koop had said that she missed him. “We all miss you,” she said. “The door is open.” He said that he knew that.

  In the evening, late, his sister Reenie sang a few gospel songs in a clear, bright voice. Then she strummed her guitar and asked if Hank Williams would suit, and then not waiting for a reply she sang “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” When she was finished she said, “We didn’t know where you were, Nelson, and they wouldn’t tell us. We were just waiting and waiting for you to come home. Ten years. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Welcome back.”

  That night, after he and Raymond got back to the cabin, he lay in bed and listened to his brother breathing and he thought about his grandmother never really looking at him and no one saying anything about where he’d been, or even asking where he’d been, and he’d felt arrogant and lost and superior to all these dumb people that were supposed to be his family. He desperately missed the Koops.

  He had got a job tending the garbage dump, his brother mowed the grass at the golf course, and in the evenings, after dark, they sat in the silence of the cabin and Nelson talked about boxing and how he enjoyed the feel of his fist hitting another man’s face. One night, about a month after Nelson had returned, Raymond told him that he still remembered when he, Nelson, was taken. “I come home from Charlie’s — you remember him — and you’re just gone. Grandma tells me what happened and I’m thinking you must have turned white as soon as you climbed into the car.” They were sitting at the table. A dog barked outside somewhere. Raymond turned to look at his brother, but he could only see his outline in the dim light of the candles. He said, “Grandma took me straight up to Aunt Donna’s for a while. She only told me later that they were looking for me too.”

  “Yeah? That what she said?” Nelson lit a cigarette and in the brief flare Raymond saw his eyes clearly. “Maybe she lied.”

  “Why would she lie?”

  “You jealous? Wishing you could have gone on that trip?”

  “I didn’t know, that’s all. I didn’t know.” Raymond reached for Nelson’s cigarettes and then, as if to conceal any emotion, he said, “Maybe Grandma did call up the government folks and ask them to take away her Nelson because he was too smart and needed some white people to push some dumbness deep into him. And they succeeded.” He grinned.

  “Fuck you,” Nelson said.

  Raymond drank water from the dipper. Nelson wondered why Raymond didn’t drink beer, if he didn’t like the taste.

  “Not that,” Raymond said.

  “Something else, then? Maybe you’re diabetic?” Nelson laughed.

  “Not interested, that’s all,” Raymond said.

  “I hated Sundays in my home,” Nelson said. “Went to church in the morning and then came home and ate roast beef and corn and potatoes and in the afternoon nothing moved. Stand on the driveway and look out down the road. There was dust and the occasional bike and I thought that life had ended.” He said that there was space here as well, but this space was different and more generous. “Christianity, God, that was everything,” he said.

  “Like Reenie,” Raymond said.

  “Yeah, I guess. She takes it seriously.”

  “Seems so.”

  “I took it seriously. Still do in some ways. It’s clapped on my back like a fucking rudder.” He got up and took another beer and said that the water was deeper than he had been led to believe.

  Raymond looked at him and said that he spoke in riddles and what was that supposed to mean. “If you think you’re better than us, what you doing here?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You think it. Talking about this and that and boxing and God and using big words that I’ve never heard before and letting us know that you play viola, whatever the hell that is, and all the books you’ve read and the girls you’ve fucked and what you doing now? Pushing garbage around on a hill.”

  “Shit. Never said I fucked a bunch of girls. Anyway, boys had to go to St. Pierre and St. Adolphe to get laid. Friendly little Catholic girls.”

  Raymond was quiet.

  “I remember the beginning,” Nelson said. “I cried and cried. Finally, they sent Emily down to me at night. That was my older sister. She’d hold my hand and talk and read to me and talk some more. I don’t remember any more what she said, but her voice was soft and low and she smelled sweet.”

  Raymond said that Nelson had been lucky to have someone like Emily Koop holding his hand. He said that he’d stopped eating for a week after Nelson was taken away, and then one day their grandma had come out to Aunt Donna’s where he was living and she poured milk down his throat until he choked and threw up. She wasn’t mean about it, he said, and she kept repeating that this was for his own good, and then after he’d thrown up a second time she sat him down and made him lick peanut butter off a spoon. She did this several more times until he started eating real food again.

  “I didn’t know,” Nelson said.

  “’Course you didn’t. How could you? You were gone.”

  “You did that?” Nelson’s voice was low and quiet, his face lifted towards Raymond’s.

  “I didn’t cry at all. Just stopped eating.”

  “Didn’t cry, eh? One tough shit you were.” Nelson reached forward and punched Raymond lightly on the side of his head.

  “You could teach me how to fight,” Raymond said. “Show me how to hold my hands.”

  Nelson shook his head and said that fighting was a dangerous thing. “Makes you believe you can take on anybody, anywhere. You don’t want that.” Then he said that the Koops had taught him how to hug. Mrs. Koop was always going on about how he didn’t hug properly, how he always kept his arms at his sides like he was a dead animal, and so she made him wrap his arms around her and squeeze. “Here,” Nelson said, and he reached for Raymond, grasping at his neck. Raymond slipped away. Laughed and said, “Fuck off.”

  Nelson went after him, kicked over the chair and lunged at his brother. Caught him around his waist and threw him down on the wood floor. Raymond fell hard and the breath went out of him, but he swung his elbow and hit Nelson in the ribs, just below his heart. Nelson bellowed and pinned Raymond’s shoulders to the floor with his knees. Straddled him with his crotch near Raymond’s throat. They were both breathing heavily. Nelson was grinning. “Suck mine,” he said. Raymond writhed and fought and then stopped moving.

  Nelson released his brother, rolled away, and lay on his back looking up at the ceiling. He reached for a cigarette and lit it. There was a long silence, and it seemed that neither one of them wanted, or even knew how, to break it. Then Nelson said, his voice quiet, “Surprise is all. That’s how you beat the shit out of someone. Remember that.”

  They shared the cigarette. Then Raymond talked about high school, about Alice, about the island and how he was left for dead by Alice’s policeman uncle. He took a long time to tell his story. He added details he had forgotten, the colour of the sky, the wind at night, the sound of wolves over on the mainland, the hatred in Earl Hart’s eyes. He said that he had not been scared of death, and he had thought, by the ninth day, that he would probably die, and then he’d been rescued. He said that being on the island had helped him understand the pointlessness of his own existence. Not that he didn’t want to live. No, he did. But he had seen that he was no different from that tree, or that rock, or that bird he’d killed, or that fish leaping out of the water, or those clouds above him.

  When Raymond finished talking they sat together in the silence while the candles guttered on the table. Then Nelson said that he had grown up being taught that there was a God who was willing to save anyone who wanted to be saved. “But then I get to wondering what you do with a man like Hart? Can he be saved? Maybe God’s ju
st looking down and laughing at the things we do to each other. Maybe he doesn’t care much.”

  “Well, he made the world,” Raymond said. “And I guess he should care about it. You don’t make something and then turn around and say, ‘This is crap, I’m gonna burn it.’ ”

  “You might.”

  “But you probably wouldn’t.”

  “Know what I think? You don’t know shit.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Okay, how many days to make the world?”

  “For your God, and your story? Seven.”

  “Six, asshole. On the seventh day God laid back and got a blow job.”

  Raymond laughed.

  Nelson called himself blasphemous and Raymond said that he had no idea what that was.

  “You heard the story about Joseph?” Nelson asked. “Gets sold by his brothers?”

  “Joseph who.”

  “Shit. I’ll tell it to you sometime.”

  One of the candles flickered and went out. Outside, down by the creek, an animal moved and the night drifted.

  When Raymond finally showed up at the Retreat it was a Sunday, a week or so later, and Lizzy walked up to him where he stood in his boots and jeans and a red snap-button shirt that was too small on him. He’d grown a moustache and it was minor, somewhat uneven. She noted it, but said nothing. He wore a bandana and his rifle was on a rack in the rear window of the pickup.