In the latter third of the month, an English woman anthropologist came to visit the village, housed, by arrangement of the Indian Agent, with a couple who were among the very few of the tribe who were not Christians and did not attend church. When Mark went to call on her and offer any help he could, he was at once rebuked.
She was a large, mannish, grey haired woman who informed him that her visit here was a fulfilment of a wish of many years standing.
‘Since I was a girl,’ she announced, ‘I have been interested in the culture of the Quackadoodles.’
Mark said hastily, ‘I had trouble with that word too. It took me a month to learn it. The Indians pronounce it Kwacutals.’
‘Young man, for the past century in England this band has been known as the Quackadoodles and as the Quackadoodles, it will be known for ever.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
Mark asked if she would like to see the church, and when they entered, she saw at once the new insulated sidings which had caused him so many blisters.
‘How much better it would have been to have left the rude studding,’ she said sadly, and he told her that even with the plywood the flowers on the altar at Christmas had frozen solid in the water that held them.
She did not hear him. What a shame that Christianity had come here! If the white man had not intruded where ‘he was not wanted, where he did not belong, even now, protected by the mountains and the river, the village would have remained a last stronghold of a culture which was almost gone. Mark tried to say that no village, no culture, can remain static.
‘I have often thought that if this lovely and magnificent land belongs to anyone, it is to the birds and the fish. They were here long before the first Indian, and when the last man is gone from the earth, it will be theirs again.’
After this encounter Mark left the lady anthropologist alone. But he could see her sometimes, going around the village in her brogues and tweeds, with her notebooks and her pencils, asking innumerable questions of everyone. At the end of ten days, she knocked at the vicarage.
‘I have completed my work except for one thing. The raven.’
‘What about the raven?’ Mark asked.
‘That’s just it. There is a mystery about the raven they will not tell me. If I ask one of the Indians, he says he knows but he can’t translate it. When I ask the chief, he says he knows, but the older Indians know better and I must ask them. And when I ask the older Indians, they say they knew it once and cannot remember.’
Mark promised to help her, and went straight to Mrs Hudson with his problem, who said she would arrange it.
‘It is a long myth,’ said Mrs Hudson, ‘and T. P. Wallace knows it well. He is going on a five-hour trip tomorrow on his son’s seiner, and if the lady anthropologist cares to go along, the time should be ample.
The Englishwoman never mentioned the trip, and Mark did not question her, but late on the night of the day it was made, old T. P. came to the vicarage to apologize.
‘We had bad luck. We went into Knight’s Inlet and on the way back we hit a very strong tidal sweep.’
‘You told her the myth?’
‘Certainly. I started the minute we left the float and I didn’t reach the end until we returned. But you know, boss, she was so seasick, she didn’t hear me. All she could say was, “Oh, ghastly, ghastly”.’
On the afternoon the lady anthropologist left, the tide was out and the seaplane could not put down on the river, so Mark and Jim took her to the float in one of the canoes.
‘The water’s lower than it has been for some time,’ he explained. ‘Now, if we get stuck on a sandbar, you stay in the canoe. We’ll get out and push.’
The anthropologist said she would do her part. She wanted no favours.
‘No, no — the water’s very cold.’
And, sure enough, the boat grounded and Mark climbed out in his rubber boots and Jim, also.
‘Now?’ asked the anthropologist, rolling up her slacks, and out she stepped — into a hole and up to her armpits.
When the seaplane arrived and took her, she did not wave, and they watched the plane disappearing into the blue sky.
‘Oh, ghastly,’ Jim said with an exaggerated English accent. ‘Ghastly — ghastly.’
But the vicar had a new word also.
‘Quackadoodle, let’s go home.’
At the end of August Mark received a letter from the Bishop who wrote that he had been informed by the RCMP that the tribe had spent now a total of $6,000.00 on liquor at Alert Bay.
‘When you bring the first four boys out to school, plan on at least three weeks’ vacation. This will give the fishermen a chance to make their own peace with the old people. And when you return and the first man knocks at the vicarage to say he has no money to feed his family or to repair the outboard motor of his canoe, you will say, “You will fish and hunt to feed your family. You were born with a paddle and a fish hook in your hand. Use them.” ’
14
IN THE LATE SUMMER MARK AND JIM took the boat for its annual overhauling on the long journey to Vancouver. With them went the four boys who were to be the first of the tribe to attend the white man’s school in a world of which they knew nothing and which knew nothing of them.
Chief Eddy took them in the largest canoe with all their assorted bundles and boxes, and the tribe gathered on the black sands by the river’s edge to see them off.
‘You will write. You will come home at Christmas,’ Keetah said to Gordon, and he answered, ‘I promise you. I will write. I will come on the seaplane,’ and his eyes were bright with eagerness, like the eyes of the three younger boys, and none knew that when the canoe left the shallows and the current took it, he was leaving his boyhood behind and would not find it again.
But the old knew it. The old knew this was another bit of the slow dying of all they held dear in their own race. And because he could not bear to see the look in the old eyes, Mark hurried the boys into the canoe, easing the tension with small jokes. Jim started the outboard motor, and they were off.
One afternoon on the trip down-coast they hid out a gale in a deserted village, the boys pitching horseshoes in a clearing white with broken dam shells. At night the boys slept on the floor, and at meals in the galley Mark drilled them in the little amenities of the big wide world: ‘May I have another glass of milk, please? — Would you pass the bread, please? — Excuse me. — I beg your pardon. — How do you do? — And when you shake hands, press a little.’ And he remembered that none of them had ever seen a shower, and drew a picture of one, explaining it carefully. ‘This is the hot water faucet, and when you turn it on, be careful not to scald yourself,’ and Gordon asked, ‘But how do you wash your hands and face in this little box without getting your clothes wet?’
When they had finished the small amenities, it was Jim who introduced them to the larger ones.
‘When somebody calls you a dirty Siwash, what will you do?’ When one of the younger boys answered him, Mark said quickly, ‘No, you won’t. None of that. You will make a joke of it. You’ll laugh and you’ll say, “What’s the matter, paleface?”, and remember something: that in the sports at school you’ll be as good as any white boy and far better than most, and they will respect it.’
The trip down was full of laughter and anticipation, and when at last they entered the lovely harbour of Vancouver, there stretched before them was their first large city.
They slept on the boat, and by day, while the work was being done on the engine, Jim and Mark introduced them to the parks, the pavements strangely hard to their feet, the noise new to their ears.
Once Mark took them out to dinner to their first large restaurant, and Gordon said to him, ‘They are staring at us,’ and Mark answered, ‘Nonsense, they are staring at me and my clerical collar.’ On the way back to the boat they passed three young Indians, loud-spoken, ill-kempt and slovenly, and he felt the boys stiffen with enmity.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘They belong to a southern tribe. We do not know them. We have never had anything to do with them.’
Mark took his examinations to handle the boat alone. His sister, who was his only close relative, came from Victoria to meet him and they had a fine luncheon in one of the finest hotels. Mark’s talk was almost entirely of the village, of the Indians, of the little amusing happenings. Since he was used to it, he did not heed, consciously at least, the sadness she could not keep back from her eyes.
When he looked up some of the friends with whom he had attended college, he realized with a shock that he no longer talked the same language. They spoke freely of their problems and assumed they were his also. Had he noticed how many young people there were now who seemed to find in life no challenge? And how did he handle the growing materialism in which so many people feel no need of faith and consider the church almost an anachronism? And Mark answered that in an Indian village the challenge was obvious to all, to stay alive men had to depend on each other, and that everyone came to church, even the agnostics and the atheists. They came out of respect for the church itself and for the man who served it, and because there were few settlers in a six thousand square mile area who had not been done kindness by the church, its hospital ship, its men, and repaid it.
On the last evening Mark had dinner with a professor under whom he had studied, the older man asking him many questions of his life in the village.
‘You’re growing more and more like Caleb,’ he told Mark. ‘You’ve dropped yourself overboard in some quiet inlet, too busy living your faith to think of yourself at all. We’ll have to watch you, Mark. You’ll be wearing a white stole at Yuletide.’
‘With mud on my cassock? That’s one place where you failed me. There was nothing in my training that told me how to remove mud from cassocks.’
‘I’ll put it in the curriculum. Caleb spoke to the students last winter. The week before he came, we’d had a famous theologian whose words sent the students scurrying to their rooms to argue half the night. But Caleb was like a cool wind from the north, or the smell of fir in the sun. No great theological problems. No debatable tenets. He spoke simply of his life on the up-coast, and often humorously. I remember watching the faces of the students as they listened, and I was sure I knew the look on the faces of the first ones who met long ago in some little hidden room in Antioch.’
When the holiday was over, they started up-coast to Powell River. Now the boys had seen enough of the world to sense the size of the battle ahead, and they were like Jim the first night Mark had met him — quiet, poised, and proud. Even at dinner in the galley there was no joking, and when on the second day they tied up at the float at the marina, old Caleb was waiting.
‘I hate goodbyes,’ Caleb said to Mark. ‘Let’s make this fast,’ and Mark agreed.
‘I’ve found fine homes for you,’ Caleb told the boys. ‘A doctor and his wife are going to take Gordon. They have a son of their own and the doctor has a small cruiser he uses for weekends. He can use a good hand. And as for you three — a widow’s going to make room for you so you’ll all be together. She has a big, old house and two grown children of her own. This morning she called to ask me what she could prepare for dinner that you would especially like. Nothing like a familiar dish to make a man feel at home. And when I said you’d like seaweed and óolachon, she laughed, and said she didn’t have an óolachon in the house but did I think you’d settle for apple pie?’
When the boys had all their belongings moved to the float, there was one bad moment. Mark held out his hand to Gordon and he said, ‘You will be lonely, and you will be afraid sometimes. I was lonely, and I was afraid when I went to your village. Both are an inescapable part of every life.’ He shook hands with each of the boys very formally. He watched them pick up their luggage and follow Caleb up the ramp, like a small, proud army. Then he was in the cabin, starting the engine, while Jim coiled the lines. They were off. Neither looked back.
On the second day when they drew near the area of his patrol, Mark felt the quickening, the growing eagerness of one who conies home after an absence that seemed very long. How well he had come to know the landmarks; the turn at Broken Island. The last of the lights at Chatham Sound. The rock that was always covered with cormorants where he never failed to blow the whistle to watch them lift as one — and settle. He knew the pass where the porpoise was, and if he were blindfolded, surely he would know the place in the Johnstone Straits where the sea begins to roughen when the wind is against the tide. He knew the rocks that were marked on no chart as the Indian knew them, because he had scraped his keel on them on some dark night.
When they came into Kingcome Inlet and approached the float, he was like the man who comes to the door of his house, feels the weight of the day lift from his shoulders, and thinks, ‘Thank God, I’m home.’
Then they were in the small boat going up the inlet into the river, past the log jams and the snags, towards the white-barked alders across from the village.
How had the drinking gone? In the entire holiday the question had been lying in his mind waiting an answer. But the village seemed utterly at peace. No one reeled down the path. No one lay inert, sleeping it off in the bushes. And Chief Eddy, who was painting his canoe on the bank, waved and came forward.
‘How is it, Ed?’
‘Okay, boss. Everybody’s broke, but no one’s dead. You might say it’s settled down, and it’s all due to Sam.’
To Sam, who had never done anything right in his life? Mark could not believe it.
‘He collided with some fish. He made a lot of money. He spent most of it on liquor, and with what he had left he bought a washing machine, and brought it up the river in his canoe. But he was so drunk he hit the snags, tipped over, and lost it.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Did wonders for his wife, boss. You’d never know her. She beat him over the head with a skillet and locked him out of the house, and she wouldn’t let him in until he agreed to let Ellie go out to school. I expect they’ll be over to see you tonight.’
‘I’ll be here, Ed.’
When Mark entered the vicarage he saw that it had been freshly cleaned and dusted. On the kitchen table was a loaf of bread, still warm from the oven. The Indians had known somehow he would return this day.
15
ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF MARK’S RETURN from his holiday, Marta asked him to dinner, and she did not ask Jim also, which was unusual.
‘After the dinner the old will come,’ she told him. ‘They have something to request.’
‘You don’t suppose they are still grieving about the drinking, or the boys going out to school?’ Mark asked Jim. ‘You don’t suppose they are going to leave the village again?’
Jim did not think so.
‘If this were it, I am sure I would be told. It is something which concerns only the old.’
At dinner Marta did not mention what it was the elders wished. She asked of the holiday in Vancouver and she asked of Gordon and the boys.
‘The younger ones will adjust more easily,’ Mark told her. For Gordon it will be harder. He is much older than the boys he will meet at school. But he will endure, Marta, and he will win his battle.’
After dinner there was a knock at the door and the elders entered : Mrs Hudson, T. P., Peter the carver, and several others whom Mark did not know well, who still thought in Kwákwala, dreamed in Kwákwala, and spoke little English.
When they were seated there was a long silence, as the old watched Mark intently and soberly. It was not the drinking that had brought them here. It was not even the loss of the young. It was something that led back into the deepest beliefs of the tribe, and Mark sensed it and waited.
T. P. spoke for them.
‘We have come about the ancient burial ground,’ he said. ‘Except for the weesa-bedó, it has not been used for many years.’
‘And you want the body of the weesa-bedó moved to the new graveyard. Is that it, T.
P.?’
‘No — he is well where he is. In the early days we buried our dead in a square box and we placed the box about a third of the way up a large tree, and we cut off the limbs below the box so the animals could not reach it, and later, other boxes were hauled up by ropes and each family had its own burial tree.’
‘I have seen them.’
‘Later we cut down a large tree ten feet from the ground and on its stump we built a house, and in the house we placed ten boxes and sometimes more.’
‘I have seen them also.’
But now many boxes have fallen from the trees and other trees have fallen on the grave houses built on the stumps. The bones of our ancestors lie scattered on the ground, and the old totems and the carvings are broken and beyond repair.’
‘If this disturbs you,’ Mark said, choosing his words carefully, ‘we can build a large communal grave and in it we can place all the boxes and the broken carvings. And if you wish in the morning I will go with you and the older men to start the clearing.’
The old people rose.
‘It is well,’ T. P. said. ‘I will stop by for you in the morning.’
The next day, the fine weather holding, Mark went with the elder men of the tribe, and what had seemed so reasonable a project became suddenly huge and macabre.
The little path that led to the ancient burial ground was overgrown. When they had cut their way through it, they saw that the year’s windfall had been severe and that the old grave houses and the boxes that had fallen from the trees were covered with brush and branches.
For five days the men of the tribe worked at the clearing, and when this was done, Jim and other younger men went up the huge spruce trees with ropes to lower the grave boxes that were still intact. Where any box had fallen and touched the ground, only bones were left, but where the boxes had remained in the air, the bodies were partially mummified, the wrists still holding the copper bracelets, green now and paper-thin; and beside the heads were ancient water vessels placed there in case the soul of the dead thirsted on his journey.
I Heard The Owl Call My Name Page 8