Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

  At the celebratory feast for Kokum, we all sat at her table passing bowls of gravy and plates of bannock and stew. Even the Chief showed up, along with the neighbours, all my cousins, Momma, Roger, my uncles and aunties—seemed the whole damn rez was cooped up in that little three-bedroom house that let hot winds blow through it like an open field. After our meal, all us NDNs sat cross-legged on the floor, looking like kids again, the WWE playing on the TV in homage to Kokum. We told stories and laughed, which may sound like a weird thing to do after the death of the matriarch who held us all together like a glue that couldn’t quit. These days, I hear the house is empty mostly; we never get those same reunions save for Mother’s Day and her birthday. Big old haunted house planted there in the middle of the rez, windows lined with dust, lights stained that old yellow hue, thin filaments on their last legs, everything screaming: witness me.

  “You know, nimama, she caught me one time with your poppa,” my mom said, “right there in front of the house, both just right snapped and making out like sloppy old fish in the backseat of her old beat-up wagon. She flashed the porch lights on and off to break us up and gave me the lickin of a lifetime when I finally came in, tail between my legs like a damn rez pup. I tell ya, that wooden spoon was bound to break in half whipping against my ass—but that’s just the type of person your kokum was, stiff as a goddamn board that never quit, for fuck sakes, we still even cook with that old spoon.” And the room erupted in more laughter as we passed around stories like cigarettes. One of my aunties chirped in, “Your poppa told me she came out onto that porch damn near bare ass with that spoon in hand chasing him off down into the bush, told him, ‘Boy you better git, come around here sloppy as that kissing my girl right in front of my home, will ya?’” And I swear you never heard a room laugh so hard, everyone turning into stand-up comedians all of a sudden. One of my uncles jumped in. “Heard that next time your pops called she told him, ‘Your woman’s gone off to the pow wow with a real dancer, ain’t no swindling pig like your slack ass,’” he said, half with burps and half in that rez slang that made their speech sound as fast as the four-wheeler ripping through the hunting ground. “Then your old pops comes around, sad as all hell, with this right slack apple pie he picked up at Hodgsons and tried to pass off as homemade like Mrs. Doubtfire or something.”

  Momma was in that mode of laughing where she had to slap everything around her and throw her head back like it was about to roll off. “Kokum ate his pie and put him straight to work,” she said. “Made him cut the whole damn yard with a push-mower while all those rez dogs nipped at him. I die laughing every time he used to tell me how he had to cut the entire rez’s grass and kick at dogs that’d pounce up on his leg and just give’r on his legs. Don’t have a clue in holy hell how that woman knew, knew that my belly had you growing up in it. She beat time into our asses, whooped us up into real NDNs. And then your pops, he goes up to her one day, says, ‘Hey Frances,’ and you could see her veins just rise on her neck because everyone knows you only called her Momma or Kokum, and he says, ‘Can you like, you know, do it when you pregnant? I mean like, do you gotta be abstinent and all that for nine months cause it ain’t safe?’ And Momma, she calls me into the room, says, ‘Karen, you hear this boy? He thinks he’s Long John Silver,’ and we both laughed hard enough to get abs. ‘Boy,’ she says, ‘you ain’t gonna hurt no one with that little pecker of yours.’”

  Today, Kokum is beneath a stone marker that says, “In our hearts you will live forever,” in a rickety cemetery overfilled with NDN people. I sit down cross-legged in front of her, feel the flattened prick of new grass poking into my calves, that fresh smell of severed blades and growth all trying to mask the smell of trauma that always seems to permeate graveyards. The heat is beating down on me and my black T-shirt is soaking it all up, so I take it off, tuck it into my back pocket. Bare-chested, I wrap my legs around her tombstone, hold on tightly with my arms wrapped around its tip.

  I want to tell you so many things Kokum, tell you, I think I made it, you know, travelled south and survived. I want to say, I just hope I ain’t changed too much, y’know, hell, I hope I ain’t changed into no emblem of shame. And I know what you gonna say to me, you’re gonna say humility, m’boy, sacred teaching, don’t you know? And I’ll say what humility got to do with shame? And you’ll say humility is just a humiliation you loved so much it transformed. And I’ll say, what the heck does that mean? And you’ll say, boy, you ever swear at me again and I’ll give you a smack upside that bean-shaped head of yours. Just look at these hands, you’ll say. I’d look at them and see palms full of raggedness, lines intersecting every which way, cup of cosmos, bowl of infinite. Just watch, you’ll tell me, just keep on watching.

  I watched too much, Kokum, watched your body disintegrate back into a root, watched your breath expunge and that little line flatten, watched them all discuss how “pulling the plug” was the only gift we had left to give. The hell is left to watch, Kokum? I tighten my body around her, will myself to stone. Why you ain’t take me with you? You said you’d never leave me be, why’d you make me promise you to come back changed if you’re gonna leave me before I do? Why’d you let me leave, Kokum? Why’d you never get that wooden spoon and say, “Boy, get your ass home and visit me right now”? Why’d you let time whittle you to sand before you ask me home?

  Then I let loose a scream that threw those crows back into the sky, and pounded my fist into the ground over and over, cutting my knuckles. I bleed into the earth beside her. Who the hell gonna love me now, Kokum? Whose gonna suck the pain from my skin, teach me to love it into humility? Who, Kokum, who?

  I cry myself into a stupor, lungs inhaling staccato breaths, and I lie there until the sun sweeps across the sky, less a beating heat, more a red morphing into pink, kissing the blue of the night pouring in on the horizon. Hey Kokum? I’m sorry, you know, I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to forget those weekend calls and visit even less; never meant to be drunk the last time I said I loved you before you got sick and couldn’t talk. I never got to say thank you for all those stories you gave me that filled my belly. I’m sorry I let home become this: a stone and fields of grass and a tree. And I’m sorry, Kokum, I’m sorry I never got to show you how I transform.

  There’s snot and tears on her headstone, which I wipe delicately with my T-shirt. I kiss her name and promise I’ll come back, this time for real. I will a smile and head back towards home, Momma is sure to be wondering where the heck I am by now. I walk down the gravel road, heading west, my shirt in my hand. The rez is quiet tonight save for the crickets chirping lullabies in the bush around us; the setting sun is a kaleidoscope now—every colour crackling around its edges. The light dances on me, I can feel its dim heat swirl down my spine and settle into the rivulet on my lower back, it pools itself there while the new cold of the west makes my nipples harden into points. I look back at how far I’ve walked since I left Kokum, a couple of solid kilometres, my shadow now stretching across the road. And then I see it in the elongated shadows barreling from the east: a hunched woman holding my hand made from that illusive prism sky. When I look down at my hand, I see only my T-shirt there—a shirt full of dried sweat and blood and phlegm.

  Maybe that’s why the only bit of me I left was a ghost? I guess that’s all we left each other, eh Kokum, just each other’s spirits? One for you, one for Momma too—maybe that’s why Manito gifted me two? Manito gifted me enough to travel out and in and all that space between, to weave like those old rapids do, and to carry memories as a souvenir between this world and the fourth, where I’ll finally come home and have nothing but my glories to share with you.

  LIV

  The only time an NDN pulls out their own photo album is when someone dies. My dad is in ours, so is my kokum and Mush and Roderick—and now, so was Roger. Whenever we used to bring it out, my aunties and uncles all gathered around and talked stories. The album was our allowance to remember. Everyone came to see the photos with bannock and stew
and dried meat in hand. We ate, we drank, we laughed and cried in unison. My kokum had a story for every photo; stories that redeemed even the alcoholics and the baby daddies, stories that love and scream in pain in equal measure. It’s all there; we’re all there. But here, now, it’s just us two. And there are blank pages for my mom and me.

  When I look back at these old photos, I see my family come alive; I see their youth, but I also see them aging and dying and living their lives. It’s overwhelming to think about all the stories that we’ve made, helped to tell, helped to create—our bodies are a library, and our stories are written like braille on the skin. I wouldn’t trade it for the world; I love the noise, the liveliness of voices that are laughing, arguing, bingo-calling, and telling stories in a too-packed home. In fact, I’d say, that’s my world.

  We’re all here telling our stories in NDN time.

  But the ironic thing I’ve learned about NDN time is that it’s an elixir of an excuse and a toxin of a measurement.

  It’ll kill you, you know, if you love it too dearly.

  And that’s the truth.

  kinanâskomitin

  I write this book with the goal of showing you that Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous folx are not a “was,” that we are not the ethnographic and romanticized notations of “revered mystic” or “shamanic,” instead we are an is and a coming. In nehiyawewin, there are no masculine or feminine attributes, instead we have animations in which we hold all our relations. We are accountable to those kin, be they inanimate or non-human, or be they unabashedly queer, femme, bottom, pained, broken. We put our must vulnerable in the centre and for once I do just that: 2S folx and Indigenous women are centred here. I hold our relations accountable to us for once. Jonny has taught me a lot of things but there are two that I want to share with you: one, a good story is always a healing ceremony, we recuperate, re-member, and rejuvenate those we storytell into the world; and two, if we animate our pain, it becomes something we can make love to.

  I need to thank all of the Two-Spirit, queer, trans, and non-binary folks and allies who have paved the way for me to write a book like this: Gwen Benaway, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tommy Pico, Qwo-Li Driskill, Tomson Highway, Sharron Proulx-Turner, Ma-Nee Chacaby, Beverly Little Thunder, Daniel Heath Justice, Arielle Twist, Chrystos, Deborah Miranda, Gregory Scofield, M. Carmen Lane, Beth Brant, Janice Gould, Aiyyana Maracle, Lee Maracle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Chelsea Vowel, Chip Livingston, Natalie Diaz, and so many others I hold near and dear to my heart. I also want to give a big thank-you, ay-hay, to Cherie Dimaline for showing me that 2S folx can survive and thrive in the apocalypse; Eden Robinson for gifting us with her lovingly pained narrator, Jared; Richard Van Camp for orating Larry Sole into the world, and for guiding me powerfully throughout the writing of Jonny; and to Katherena Vermette for showing me the corners of Winnipeg that have always been heavy with hope.

  Ay-hay to everyone who has helped with Jonny Appleseed’s creation, most importantly kise-manito. I need to thank Aritha van Herk and the entire class of the University of Calgary’s ENGL 694, “One Hundred Pages in One Hundred Days” for all their guidance, mentorship, kindness, and fierce editorial feedback during the beginning stages of this novel: Richard Kemick, Marc Lynch, Michaela Stephen, Donna Williams, and others who helped me in that class. Thanks to Indigenous Arts and Stories for providing me with a one-week stay in the Banff Leighton Studios where I secluded myself to write in the mountains, putting out tobacco every morning for kise-manito, cried remembering too much, and listened to round dance music into the wee hours of the morning as I finished writing Jonny into the world. Thanks to The Malahat Review and Prairie Fire for publishing the earliest segments of this book. Thanks to Gwen Benaway and Brian Lam for your editorial help and empowering feedback. Thanks to Erin Konsmo for the gorgeous cover and working so closely with me during its inception. The work you do alongside NSYHN inspires me to no end. All love to my committee members, who I think of as dear friends and kin: Larissa Lai, Derritt Mason, and Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, who in their own way helped me find the words to write this novel. I owe a gigantic thank-you to Peguis First Nation, Treaty One, Selkirk, Winnipeg, and all of manitowapow for always filling my belly with story. Thanks to Darin Flynn, Elder Elmer Morningchild (okimâw piyêsiw napêw), and Merion Hodgson for teaching me so much about nehiyawewin and speaking me back into my spirits. Thanks to Peter Bernt Hanson, nîcimos, for reading through this manuscript so many times and loving me all the more for it. Thanks to nikâwiy, Tina Whitehead, nîtisân, Krista Whitehead and Tyra Cameron, nistim, Akira Budge, nikâwîsak, Cecelia Stevenson, Terri Cameron, Lorraine Whitehead, Margaret Whitehead, and nohkômak, Beverly Cameron, Rose Whitehead, and Frances Sutherland: you are the avatars who animate Jonny, and I owe you everything. Thanks to nohtâwiy, Peter Whitehead, nîtisân, Cole Cameron and Quinn Budge, and all my cousins, who are really my brothers, Tim, Sidney (Chooch), Wallace (Pap), Tyler, who have allowed me to be as queer and as Indigenous as I damn well want to be throughout my life. And thank you to all the other strong, beautiful, and resilient Indigenous women, 2S, trans, queer, and non-binary folx in my life—this book is for you. Ay-hay, kisâkihitinawaw!

  PHOTO CREDIT: JOSHUA WHITEHEAD

  JOSHUA WHITEHEAD is an Oji-Cree/nehiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks, 2017) and the winner of the Governor General’s History Award for the Indigenous Arts and Stories Challenge in 2016. Currently he is working on a PhD in Indigenous Literatures and Cultures in the University of Calgary’s English department (Treaty 7). Jonny Appleseed is his first novel.