Winter Child

by Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau

  “I’m going in …”

  Gabriella waded through the icy water; a muskrat swimming in her direction brushed up against her: a surprised cry and the small creature disappeared only to resurface closer to shore. She proclaimed the water magic with its silken touch that enveloped her in its calming essence, guiding her into its tranquil depths.

  Closer to the horizon, a maze of ice interlocked, cracked and crashed, its walls warmed by the sun; in the distance, two birds frolicked in the blue of the sky, too far off to be identified. The pair flew, cartwheeled around each other, a lustful dance if ever there was one, then, in one dive, in profile, the sleeker of the two was seen to be a bald eagle. Their dance brought them directly overhead where they waltzed for a short while, long enough to inspire Gabriella to cry, “Oh, my God!”

  Gabriella threw herself at her friend, her face radiant, and exclaimed, “It’s just so beautiful! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  “But I had nothing to do with it!”

  Their laughter rang out across the lake.

  She hoped her friend would return to Sardinia full of Abitibi’s colours and fragrances. Gabriella. Whose hands released cool energy as she massaged away the pain in her lower back, the pain that fractured her nights into bouts of sleeplessness. Who massaged her scalp and eased her migraines; who found it hard to believe when she thanked her for her magic healing touch.

  At long last, the sun made a days-long appearance, hot and bountiful from sunrise to sunset; summer’s solstice approached, its light more lasting, gaining on the dark. They pulled on hiking boots to climb Aiguebelle’s hills on the very day the park opened, its name taken from those same pre-Cambrian hills. The surface rock formations date back not millions but billions of years and are among the oldest on earth. At one point, the waters separate, heading either north or south, giving the very territory its name, Abitibi or watershed. A sacred name.

  Her legs felt heavy as they climbed, lead seemed to flow from the rock and cling to her body, rooting it to the ground; a squirrel sat on her foot to nibble on a pine cone. Standing before the precipice overlooking the lake hemmed in by two rock walls and straddled by a steel-cable bridge ending in an odd sculpture of a giant bear, Gabriella could feel the power through the soles of her boots; she took fright and tried to cry out, but her throat seized up and she gave nothing more than a squawk. Her friend slapped Gabriella’s back so she could take her next breath. A blue butterfly flitted about her face and landed on her cheek, a long, gentle kiss while its wings beat softly. Since she was poised to bite into an apple, the butterfly flew to her thigh, where it continued to fan its wings open and shut to the beat of her pulse. An eagle screeched and wheeled overhead. Filled with wonder, Gabriella burst into her childlike laugh.

  life

  A woman in me

  suffers immeasurable pain.

  And yet my flowers, my love

  and my affection blossom still.

  | JEANNE-MANCE DELISLE |

  I still have so much sorrow, it’s as though I will never be comforted, my son, ever … yet I feel you here. I can’t help but smile despite my anguish, which comes and goes, retreats at times when I remember that you no longer suffer, that you exist like a star, distant but real and radiant or like the unseen breeze caressing my cheek.

  Cry with me, lean your sky against my forehead, gather the angels around us. Tell me that the earth is beautiful, that the horizon has a place for me. Your phantom fingers float over the strings of your soundless guitar; tell me I owe it to myself to live and that all music hasn’t died with you.

  I am a lustrelost woman who hides behind her autumnal beauty, her abundant leaves dying with the seasons’ suns, her foliage quivering still in the winds of life, all for the memory of splendour to be shared with you when winter has passed and I reach the end of the path lined with stones that wound my feet. At times, the ground becomes brittle, thins into November’s frozen sheet of water. I have turned to ice, all day long fishermen drill their holes in me, freeing bubbling springs of hurt; tell me, does ice suffer when pierced? The quicksand of sleep, a gentle slipping away, silken, murky danger; crusty eyelids, the queasiness of unfulfilled stupour as night falls, no assurance of a return to daylight; I sleep the way others raise the mind-numbing bottle or inhale the white powder that unfurls spirits’ wings. Mine fold behind the same desire for annihilation felt by those who drown themselves or set themselves on fire; solitude stretches across my pillow, imbued with sadness, yes, but at least it won’t leave me, it will honour its promises.

  Today the day attached itself to the top of a fir tree with clouds for wings like an angel atop a Christmas tree; my footsteps led to the forest, I looked for myself in vain. I have not heard from you for many weeks, yet silence ferries each of your words, my son, their power standing tall next to trees, tender on fresh moss and as sharp as ice at spring breakup. Word lies on its side and offers itself to latecomers, poets and dreamers borne on a love for all that stirs and goes silent; it hisses like a furious snake, cracks like a rock sundered by cold, rumbles with the earth’s entrails, punctures the heavens like a supersonic plane and chants the song of lovelorn whales.

  Never will the imprint of your moccasins be erased from glistening snow or spring’s muddy paths.

  I sought spells by magicians, medicine women keepers of occult incantations to deflect misfortune and its icy grip. They say fruit irrigates the blood, that fruit’s pulp destroys the traces of unworthy visitors, nocturnal strangers who bare their teeth and clutch at our sheets revealing stiff arms of bone. And yet fairies had placed a horn of plenty at the foot of your cradle.

  You thought your stamp as an artist was nothing, could never be in vogue or worthy of framing. What nonsense! Just look at the ultramarine existence of your inner seas, silent, camouflaged by the flamboyant strokes you destroyed. You hesitated, pigment dripping down the canvas, unable to see the country taking shape like a luminous spectre under the trace of your palette knife: behind mountains, flat burnt sienna amassed above the delicate thread of your lifeline. The beauty of the world was yours for the taking, pulsing in your tubes of colour, extending beneath the fibres of your brush and obeying the magic of your gestures; nothing you made was counterfeit. I recognized the occasional flash of pain in your eyes when you thought I’d dozed off unmindful of your presence; one day, perhaps you would have gone beyond the barbed wire that tore at your skin — planted by your fears long ago — to silence fear, protect the child from his loneliness, his sorrow, open the dam to your belly, let all your voices triumph over confinement and you would live still, your children would dance, joy lodged in their retina like an arrow, look too at their heart beating under the fabric of hope, it’s they who would drive away dame skeleton.

  If I told you that my own magic is born of terror, of the flight toward an always-elusive day, from the black line to the white line, that I keep watch along the horizon’s curve, a butterfly on the firing line, I long for sleep, for the wild bird clamour of my thoughts to die down and recede into oblivion forever. I wait for you to return in my dreams.

  But the storm is rising, so I set down on the table a fragrant cup of coffee and the keyboard beckons my fingers. I can feel your presence when cold creeps in, when snow dusts my window; I can no longer see the shadows at the edge of the forest, nor the salt and pepper of birch and aspen trunks on the ptarmigans’ mound.

  The gloom erases the ash-blond silhouettes of spruce on the hill across the way, the roar of wind slices through the silence of dawn; I am snug, in the warmth of well-being, in a moment of truce, worries lulled, nestled close to the comforting purr of the wood stove in the face of winter; my love is of the utmost rigour, like your mutation into a snowflake spirit tumbling against the frosted pane that blurs the outline of the world beyond, one I sense bent on going about its business, its work on behalf of the universe flinging human beings about in a magma of blood and nameless viscera. The house creaks and complains at the contortions of its fr
ame, nails explode in muffled bursts.

  Often strength fails me, unravels and a veil of sadness drops, either to be rolled into a wad or left to be torn to shreds by the violent gusts ridden by the spirit of the taiga’s manitous. From dawn to dusk, the day’s tasks obscure the shadows looming over me, the scythe’s silhouette concealed inside, they calm the convulsions of my hand gripped with panic and repulsion at the thought of larvae crawling over my corpse, penetrating my nostrils, exiting through my eyes.

  Your breath stays with the Bear clan, the clan of our joys and sorrows. I remember the simplicity of days spent in the warmth of tents or makeshift shelters during treks in search of geese or antlered creatures; the pursuit of dreams has little of the thrill of the hunt we left behind in the sparse woods of our past.

  The life you never knew.

  But mornings return, nights recede breathing deep of the world’s plenitude, my love, you departed triumphant to meet the Northern Spirit, toward the path of our ancestors, those who carried life’s burden in stone tools and robes of hide; to what trembling will my heart be invited during the dance of uncertainty? Anguish tugs at my sleeve and draws my gaze to the light of stars ablaze in the infinity of nocturnal space, where you now dwell.

  I borrow the words of a beloved poet to say to you that your peace settles on me like snow.

  Among the Oglala Lakota people, traditional purification practices entail four days of intense, rigorous trials during which participants fast and drink very little. After Gabriella returned to Italy, another friend invited the child’s mother along to Dakota for her sixteenth and final initiation rite; she would serve as her friend’s moral support and assistant during the demanding spiritual ritual. There are moments in life that arrive wholly unannounced, free of expectations or demands, paths that open onto the unknown with utter unpredictability. Anouk, her Innu friend, told her, “I’m not sure why, but you have to come with me to the land of the Sioux. Many Innu and other Québécois take part in the ceremonies.”

  She had always wanted to see the site of Wounded Knee, the Black Hills, the Badlands and the likeness of Crazy Horse carved into the mountain. She had planned to travel there with her son someday, acquaint him with landscapes and peoples other than those found in his part of the world, maybe lead him as far as Arizona to participate in First Nations’ healing ceremonies, telling herself it might be a salutary shock to his system that would free him from his addiction. They never got the chance to go.

  During the road trip, eagles soared overhead; she knew her friend was a great mystic but hadn’t realized to what extent. Anouk shared a picture of her twenty-year-old self: mini-skirt, a tattered blouse, high-heeled thigh-high boots, visibly drunk. At the first Sioux hamlet, the destitution on display along its potholed sidewalks, unpaved roads and dilapidated homes distressed her deeply, similar to the First Nations’ villages in her home region of Abitibi. Soldiers back from Iraq, mutilated, encased in wheelchairs — the only luxury item in sight, a gift from their country — begged while clutching a bottle of beer.

  The sun was so hot she felt dizzy when she had to leave the air-conditioned car. They would camp on site. She had serious misgivings about staying in this scorching, treeless territory. South Dakota verges on immense plains, such a contrast to her land of woods and lakes. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to participate in the same grueling ceremonies as her friend — she felt too fragile and far from physically strong enough — so she didn’t know why she had come.

  Cool, pleasant nights tempered the days’ heat; their hosts had erected plank roofing under which the guests watched the dancers, in near total comfort.

  The next day, she helped Anouk prepare her initiation regalia, a long flowered calico dress and red fabric wristbands adorned with wild sage picked on site; she was told to be careful when she ventured onto the plain because its wild grasses hid rattlesnakes. She and her friend ate together that evening for the last time: from then on Anouk would sleep in the teepee with the other dancers who, with rhythmic steps, would circle the sacred tree under the brutal sun for the next four days and, on the last day, undergo the sacrificial scarring. Anouk told her, “You might find it hard to watch us, but remember that, for me, drinking myself into oblivion was much worse!”

  At the break of dawn, though exhausted, she obeyed the sudden clamour ringing through the camp and crawled to the tent opening. The Nakota language, a clash of guttural, abstract, foreign-to-her-ears words, reverberated in the clear morning air, pierced by the rallying cries of booming voices. The men formed a double row, down which the women entered the sacred space in their beaded dresses, each forehead bound by a leather band, advancing slowly, with small chiming steps thanks to the bells they wore around their ankles. As the deep drumbeat sounded in the raw light of the rising sun, it was the warriors’ turn to rush to the centre and execute a frenzied sarabande inside the circle of the women’s round dance. They were stripped to the waist, their torsos and faces painted, their cries ricocheting off the walls of already sweltering air, their hair, either loose or braided, bouncing on backs glistening with sweat. Loincloths were festooned with red, blue and yellow ribbons decorated with silver tin cones colliding against each other: a discordant tumult, a drum roll, the sound of the dancers’ bells in the two-step, the drummers and their rasping chants. Her pulse raced and thumped as certainty like a gong rang in her chest. Instinctively, she knew: she was where she was meant to be. She breathed in the animality of the dancers’ frenzied whirling mixed with the smell of hot sand, admired the fierce vitality and wild determination of the Sioux, their brown flesh streaming with sweat, streaked black from the dust they raised as they tumbled and spun.

  And so it would continue for four days.

  A strange phenomenon intrigued her.

  Alone in her tent each day, she rose at dawn when the warriors’ greeting to the sun rang out: OKKA! The guests gathered around a space set apart by short red and blue sticks where a man handed a sprig of sage to four people chosen at random, who then became the bearers of the ritual pipe, which they presented to the participants gathered in a circle. She was chosen every single day, and yet there were at least two hundred other candidates for the millennia-old ritual. She waited patiently for the gift she felt Anouk had promised her, the one to come from her time among the Sioux.

  On the last day, the heat eased thanks to a wind announcing a coming storm, and she decided to acquire a memento on her own flesh of her stay among this open-hearted, generous people, so resolute in the spirit of sacrifice. Large eagles rode the raging winds overhead whose force had yet to make itself felt on the ground. She stepped into the long line of people waiting for a notch to be cut just below their shoulder. Word was that actual physicians were the ones making the incisions, she told herself it couldn’t be any worse than a vaccination.

  She spotted him from a distance and wondered whether she wasn’t dreaming, he was so strangely familiar with the woolly hair he wore in a long braid, his regular features set off by the slight crook of his nose, his matching lips; he made a quick incision into each volunteer’s flesh and an assistant handed him clean scalpels, placing the used ones in a wicker basket. When her turn came, he hesitated for a moment, his gloved hand encircling her arm. He looked at her, a question in his eyes; she felt flushed or maybe very pale, near terror-stricken, a moment of total confusion, then, without hesitation, he carved four bleeding furrows into her skin. He was left-handed.

  She felt nothing. Neither on her flesh or deep inside. Transfixed.

  It was he, the church man.

  She felt outside time and place and desperate to talk to Anouk, but her friend had to spend one last night in the teepee sharing her first food and drink with the other female dancers. Violent squalls laid the tents almost flat, the days of ceremony were drawing to a close and to the west, where the final sunset shone blood-red, terrifying clouds swarmed the skies streaked with lightning. From inside their shelters, the warriors sounded the rallying cry a
nd drums echoed once more, making her heart beat even faster. The male dancers were magnificent; barely clothed, they threw themselves into the sacred circle, breaking into full-throated guttural song. Once again, their feet stomped the earth in a wild round dance. After several minutes, the gusts changed direction, returned to the east, forcing the sombre cloud masses to skirt the site. The amazed campers couldn’t believe their eyes and gave thunderous applause to the Sioux’s nature-attuned performance. She laughed in astonishment, dazzled by the phenomenon, and ran to a hill to witness the imposing spectacle: on one side, a sky glowing pink and orange from the last rays of the sun, on the other, the sombre storm clouds, still illuminated by the flash of multiple, ephemeral arrows, and between the two a round opaque moon, the promise of a clear night. She turned back toward the camp and gave a start: the physician, the church man, stood nearby and had been standing there for she didn’t know how long, contemplating the same scene in silence. Behind him, the teepees and tents had stopped shaking, people had lit fires and stars shone in the eastern sky from which gentler breezes carried the perfume of sage and sweetgrass. His voice with its metallic rasp cut through her like a knife, sending a shiver down her spine.

  “But you speak French?” she asked, just as he said, “So you’re a friend of Anouk’s?”

  He burst out laughing, “Why not? I live and work in Quebec.”

  At the moment, he had to leave, to catch a plane that evening, no time to get to know each other better, however … he pulled a business card from his wallet, she started speaking, words tumbling over each other, all the while thinking she should show some restraint, but he had to know, he must know. “I’m here to heal from the death of my son, just a few months ago … and to meet you.”