by Angie Abdou
I think of the reserves and the Indian Agents, of the schools with their nuns and priests. I think of ʔinismin’ xa·xa· separated from her own mother. It’s not easy, but I make myself remember her in a community, our community, that made her feel shame for what she was. I remember that she lost her language and the ways of her mother’s people. I make myself remember that I belonged to the town that let that happen. I lied so that I could belong. We made “Mary” what she became and acted as if we were doing her a favour.
That is the truth.
But I am only ten years old. One. Zero. A number to hold onto with each hand.
(I do want to stay.)
I find the strength to clasp Lucy’s hand. “Actually, Mama, let’s go home.”
“Yes,” she laughs the word warmly into my face. “Actually, let’s.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Tamara squeezes yet another bowl of food onto the crowded picnic table, this one steaming with corn on the cob. “I cooked none of it. Sam did it all. The least I can do is ferry it all out here.”
I scan for something I won’t mind eating. Nicholas and Lucy warned me before we came: “We’re guests, Eli. You eat what they give you. Be polite.” And: “You can’t live on cheese pizza and peanut butter sandwiches. Whatever they serve, you put it in your mouth and be nice. Remember your manners.”
Yes, yes, I remember. But it’s not like we’re actually guests. Not at Sam’s. We’re over here eating nearly once a week now. Nothing fancy, usually, just Sam’s “Famous Burgers.”
I make quotation marks with my fingers when I say “Famous Burgers,” but Sam doesn’t mind. We both know his burgers come frozen straight from the supermarket. All he does is cook them up with a slice of cheese and a little ketchup on a white bun. Just the way I like them actually.
But today’s dinner feels special because Mary is visiting from the city with her mom, Lillian. Tamara looks all nerves, finding reasons to pace between the back door and the picnic table, until I worry she’ll wear a path straight through Sam’s nice lawn. It’s hot out, and she’s worked up a moustache of beaded sweat. I want to tell her to sit in the shade with a piece of watermelon, but nobody tells Tamara anything. I don’t actually believe it when she says Sam made all this food—potato salad and cornbread and fresh guacamole and salsas and marinated beans and warm bannock bread and a basket cut into the half shell of a watermelon and filled with at least six different kinds of fruit. Tamara might not want to say so, but I think she’s just about done it all. Sam does only burgers.
“Eli!”
I hear Mary before I see her, and I feel as happy as she sounds; her voice lifts me. She runs out in front of Lillian, and she’s coming at me so fast her hair flies out behind her, and nobody seems surprised to hear her voice when she calls my name. “Eli!”
Sam won’t like how short her jean cut-offs are, but the length of her shorts is none of Sam’s business anymore, and Mary isn’t looking at her uncle. Her looks are all on me, and she talks fast about her new school and dance lessons and all the surprises of the big city with its subways and shopping malls and waterparks and her mom’s new boyfriend who does maintenance at the rink and sometimes lets her ride with him around and around on the Zamboni and her mom’s job working nights cleaning a clothing factory and how sometimes her mom brings home the extra fabric and how Mary babysits now too and is saving for a sewing machine so she can make her own dresses from the free fabric and how if I come for a visit she’ll take me to the biggest mall and we can ride the biggest indoor roller-coaster and how it’s a crazy hot summer in the city just like it’s crazy hot here but their city house has air-conditioning and you don’t even notice the hot if you don’t want to and there’s an outdoor pool near their house too and for five dollars she can spend the afternoon there with her friends and if I come she’ll take me with them even if I am younger because she’ll tell them we’re such old, good friends I’m practically like her little brother and she thinks one friend of hers has a little brother my age and maybe I can be friends with him too. While these words pour over me, Sam winks my way as if to say, “I told you she would talk when she was ready to talk.”
Over dinner, Mary runs out of city stories, and we listen to the adults talk. It’s the quietest she’s been with me since she reunited with her mom and moved away.
Sam has pulled the table into a spot of shade, but we’re all squished so close we’re still hot and sticky. Every time I lean toward Mary I feel the skin of my arm unpeel itself from Tamara. All of the adults drink beer except for Lucy and Mary’s mom. Lucy and Lillian have cans of lemonade instead and look at each other kind of shy when they clink their cans together while everyone else does cheers with their bottles.
The adult talk turns serious as always, like these guys really can’t help themselves even when we’re trying to have fun. Nicholas tells about taking some elders on a tour of the new ridge expansion at the mine. He sounds achy, like he did after Grandpa died. “I told those elders,” he says, “that in the bigger picture, this project is nothing. In terms of the whole valley, it’s a small, small undertaking, a minor disruption. But when you look at that one mountain, it will seem big. I wanted to prepare them, and to give them the wider perspective.” Nicholas rubs three fingers hard against this forehead like he can push the wrinkles right out if he tries hard enough.
“And ...?” Tamara pushes him on, but her voice stays nice and she passes him more of her fancy potato salad filled with things I don’t want to eat.
“And ...” Nicholas scoops salad as talks. “One of the elders cried. He looked at the hole we’d made in the mountain, and he cried. He didn’t say another word until we got back to the truck and even then only, ‘I didn’t expect that. It makes me very sad.’” Nicholas raises his face from the bowl when he says the elder’s words, but stares off at the Lizard Range. “I didn’t want to make the old guy sad.”
Lillian looks off to the trees as if maybe she will find the answer to Nicholas’s problem there, as if the cure to the old man’s sadness might be written in the branches. But I wonder if she looks there because she knows—the way Tamara and Mary and I know.
I do not let my eyes follow hers.
Lucy puts her hand around the back of Nicholas’s neck. She asks him to tell us the one about the domestic goat at the mine site, and then Nicholas is off about the co-op student who asked him how he knew it was a domestic goat? “As a trained scientist, I take one look at the chewed-off rope around its neck and I can tell you—”
We all laugh. The sun settles in behind the mountains, and I pull closer into Tamara’s side at the quick chill. She wraps her strong arm around me and kisses the top of my head, and this all feels so real and full that for a second I let myself imagine it’s all there is—that the here and now is everything. I won’t turn to the woods. I know the others are still there, flickering in the receding light, standing tall among the trees and the shadows. I know if I turn to the forest, if I squint exactly the right way, I will see them, all of them, waiting.
We don’t need to talk about it, Mary, Tamara, and me. We can see the old people. We can hear them too, when we listen, always.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I started Eli’s story, I thought I wanted to write a horror novel. I got a fair ways into that endeavour before I realized that what I really wanted to write was exactly what I normally write but with more emphasis on haunting. Thank you to Andrew Pyper and Nick Cutter whose terrifying horror novels were inspirational while I headed down that first path.
There’s a saying that goes: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” I’m grateful to have found myself in the right room at various stages of this project. Thanks to Michael Helm and Christian Bök, whose intelligence and insight shaped my thinking and, therefore, this book. Michael Helm said various cryptic things like “write into the dark” and “make it fall apart one more time and maybe then you’ll know what it is,” mysterious words
that changed my course. In fact, readers who don’t like the book should direct all complaints straight to Michael. He works at York. Google him.
Mountains of gratitude to my writing partner Andy Sinclair, who has stuck with me and Eli through many reincarnations. Thank you, thank you, and thank you.
Special thanks to my friend Richard Wagamese who taught me “Yes.” Before a (very white) audience on Denman Island, he said: You can’t undo the past. You don’t have to feel guilty about the past. You don’t even have to apologize for the past. All you have to do is say YES. Yes, this happened. We can start there. In that moment, I realized that this book (then in progress) would be my yes. The first time I wrote these acknowledgments, Richard was still in the land of the living and I could have thanked him to his face. It breaks my heart that I didn’t and he no longer is.
While in the midst of Eli’s weird world, I had a glass of wine with three women I admire, and we talked about ghosts and Carl Jung and grandfathers reincarnated as crows. Thank you to Cornelia Hoogland, Sharon Thesen, and Kate Braid.
Much of the writing of In Case I Go happened in the piece of heaven that is The Banff Centre of Arts. Thank you to the generous and insightful faculty of the Mountain and Wilderness Writing Program, Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome. A big thanks also to the rest of my Banff crew: Erik Boomer, Eva Holland, Ben Jackson, Harley Rustad, Sarah McNair-Landry, and Susan Purvis. And to my mom and dad, Johnna and Frank Abdou, who took wonderful care of my children for the three weeks I was at Banff, and so many other times.
I’m also grateful for treasured friends and givers of wise advice: Hal Wake, Steven Heighton, Janice and Randy MacDonald, Trevor Cole, Gordon Sombrowski, Kevin Allen, Keith Liggett, Gyllian Phillips, Shelagh Rogers, Ginger Pharand, Jody Keon, Timothy Taylor, Doug Brown, Tim Anderson, Wayne Arthurson, and John Vaillant.
I didn’t intend to write a novel featuring Indigenous characters. Once on that path, I needed to call on a lot of help. I started with Frank Christopher Busch, a member of the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and author of Grey Eyes. Frank also happens to be my cousin; my Syrian grandfather Frank Abdou (who first came to Canada to work in mining) is Frank Busch’s great-grandfather. Frank’s careful reading and advice made In Case I Go a better book, which gave me the confidence to approach Ktunaxa Nation Council for further advice and collaboration. Thanks, cousin!
Once I realized I’d accidentally written a historical novel, Ron Ulrich from the Fernie Museum saved me with his vast knowledge and invaluable advice. For the Fernie Museum, thanks also to Laura Nelson and Lori Bradish and all the other staff and volunteers.
Thanks also to: Ollie and Katie who give me good reason to try to understand this crazy life; my husband Marty, who tolerates my strange writing hobby and feeds me, literally; Manijeh Mannani, Veronica Thompson, and all my other colleagues at Athabasca University; Chris Bucci, early reader; Emma Dressler and Fernie Heritage Library people; Maxine Thompson who often entertained the kids downstairs while I wrote the book upstairs; Kevin Patterson for his boat and his company; Kara Stanley and Simon Paradis for conversations about Elijah; Vanessa and the other Soar Cycle Sisters for keeping me sane through it all.
Thanks to the All-Star crew at Arsenal Pulp Press: Brian Lam and Robert Ballantyne (publishers), Susan Safyan (editor), Oliver McPartlin (book design), and Cynara Geissler (marketing and promotions). Huge gratitude to you all!
The biggest thank you goes to the Ktunaxa people I have met on this unexpected journey. I’m forever grateful for their gratitude and generosity and patience and kindness. Thank you especially to the Ktunaxa Nation Council’s Cultural Liaison Natasha Burgoyne (for multiple readings and consultations), Anna Hudson (for enthusiasm) and the Ktunaxa elders (for input and permissions and for not being nearly as intimidating and scary as I thought they would be), especially to “Fudge” for making me laugh when, in response to my confession about being nervous, he said: “Well, you’ll either get over it or you’ll get used to it.” True. This book took me on a trip very different than the one I intended. The best part? These beautiful Ktunaxa people I met along the way.
photo: Kevan Wilkie
ANGIE ABDOU has a PhD from the University of Calgary and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Athabasca University. Her first novel, The Bone Cage (NeWest Press), was a finalist in CBC’s Canada Reads competition in 2011. She is also author of The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass), Anything Boys Can Do (Thistledown), and Between (Arsenal Pulp Press). Angie divides her time between Alberta and British Columbia.