She hissed. What had she come for? Not for painting. She scanned the room and moved toward the trunk. It was as old as she was and almost as tall. Its vaulted lid reminded her of a womb ripe with child. She rubbed a finger over the metal stripping blotched with rust, then jabbed the key at the lock. After a few tries she got the alignment right, but then the key would not turn. She couldn’t remember the last time she had opened the trunk. Probably years ago. Joseph had such strong hands. She smiled at the memory of his calloused fingers stroking her body. She drew all her strength into her fist and banged the top of the chest. Immediately, the pain shot through her wrist and up to her elbow. Jefferys — that was the name of one of those painters. C.W. Jefferys. An Englishman, he’d come out in the early 1900s, painted hundreds of scenes of the Qu’Appelle. Very skilled, she knew, but not to her taste. She liked more colour. And never had she done a painting without an animal, a fish, a bird. She should have given the chest the boot, not the hand. There would be a bruise. Unlike other bruises that frequently and mysteriously appeared on her body, at least she’d know the origin of this one.
Reluctantly, the lock’s internal workings gave way. She lifted the lid. A musty smell imbued with scents of smoked leather, pine, and sage drifted forth. Digging like a dog, she pushed aside blankets, sheets, two pairs of beaded moccasins — one small, the other large — an embroidered vest, and flannel jacket. She burrowed to the bottom until her fingers scratched at the stiff paper. It had been years since she’d looked at the photograph. She started to pull it from the envelope, but hesitated. She should wait for Alice. No. She would look at it now. For so long she’d wanted no one to see the child. She feared someone would find the picture. Sometimes she thought she should burn it, but had never been able to.
Hands shaking, she slipped the photograph from the envelope. So beautiful and peaceful, that pudgy-cheeked, black-haired infant. Her eyes sparkled and smiled. Elinor could see herself in that face.
“Time to come home, child,” she whispered.
Back in her bedroom, Elinor shoved the envelope in the top drawer of her dresser beneath her underwear and socks. None of her socks were anything like the ones Swift Eyes wore. All the times Swift Eyes had gotten herself into trouble because of her socks. Rainbow socks that her mother had knit. Swift Eyes made colours fly and dance. Even in the principal’s office she could do that.
Elinor eased herself onto the edge of her bed and clasped her hands together. The images and sounds from the day she, then named Red Sky in the Morning, and Swift Eyes had snuck into the principal’s office filled her mind.
They had been sweeping and washing the floors in the front hall. They were always cleaning and cooking and tidying at that school. Swift Eyes had stopped; her broom lay at her feet. Hovering at the open door of the principal’s room, she hissed at Red Sky and beckoned for her to come.
Red Sky had never seen a place like the principal’s office. An enormous desk filled half the room. There were chairs made from leather. A couch puffy like clouds. The shelves were crammed with books with gold letters on the covers. The carpets had more colours than her mother’s bead collection. In the paintings, white-haired women wore dresses as large as tipis and men in red jackets and shiny black boots that went as high as their knees rode huge horses with flared nostrils and sad eyes.
Swift Eyes, in her search for shiny coins, left every drawer on the desk hanging open. Red Sky went for the writing stick that lay on the top of the desk. She yanked off the cap with her teeth and sniffed at the pen’s inky smell. The golden nib, releasing its blue liquid erratically, scratched at the white paper as Red Sky printed the letters of her name. E-L-I-N-O-R. The writing excited her, more so than she would permit in her teacher’s presence. She raised her head and looked into the eyes of the naked man on the cross. Had he smiled at her?
Struggling to remember how to form the letters and the order they must go in, she printed more words — tree, water, dog, boy, girl. When she looked again to the cross, she saw her own father, smiling and nodding. Surprise and joy tingled the length of her body. Then came the ache that had been in her heart since he had left her in this place. Even though her father had told her he would return, she feared she would never see him again. She feared she would never go home. It was beyond her understanding why he’d left her at the school.
Her father’s face faded, and through her tears came a mass of brown — hairy, furry wisps of brown. Black-brown, tan-brown, ruddy red calf-brown. Buffalo eyes deeper than the waters in the middle of the lake sucked her into them.
Tom. Tom. Tom. White drum speaking.
Faster.
Tomtomtomtom.
Chanting voices. Stomping feet. Eagle feathers and antelope skirts bounce and jiggle. On and on into the late hours of the night the dancers leap as high as the flames of the fires.
The dancing and singing comes closer. The image of the brown furry head, despite her begging for it to stay, fades. The smell of the animal’s dung lingers, mingling with a girl’s voice that sings about fast waters and silver fish.
Swift Eyes, her bony knees vibrating above the red and green stripes of her socks, shook the coins in her clasped hands to a rhythm of her own creation. Feet stomping, coins jingling, bending and turning, Swift Eyes was in her own world. Red Sky shushed her friend. Swift Eyes shook the coins harder, laughed louder, and tossed the shiny money into the air. The coins, as if held by invisible threads, hung suspended long enough for Red Sky to determine that their sound, despite her best efforts to lunge after them, would not be muffled by the soft carpet. Hitting the pine flooring, they were like hard rain on a tipi.
Red Sky’s fear surged into anger. It had been a mistake to come into the principal’s office. If they were caught …
Barely had the clatter of metal on wood stopped when Swift Eyes scooped the coins back up into her hands and resumed her dancing. Both things — dancing and singing in their own language — were forbidden at the school.
Red Sky commanded herself to leave, sensing at the same time that it was too late. Laughter had started to climb up her throat. She swallowed hard and glanced at the door, nervous and certain that a White Neck would burst in. The vibration in her throat grew stronger. She bit on her fists. The giggle burst from the depths of her belly, over her tongue and out from her lips. Giggles and more giggles tumbled forth. Her eyes were wet with the fullness of her feeling. Her body convulsed with laughter at her friend’s antics, at the thrill of writing at the principal’s desk, reading his books, and sitting on his couch.
As if fueled by her friend’s mirth, Swift Eyes stomped harder and faster while her eyes, fearless, looked to a faraway place. As Red Sky envisioned White Necks filling the room, Swift Eyes flung her head back, let out a whoop, and sent the coins into flight again. Pennies, glistening coppers, bounced and rolled and twirled.
Red Sky rushed to Swift Eyes and threw her arms around her. Clinging to her brave and silly friend, she didn’t care that the embrace wasn’t returned. Neither was it resisted. For a moment, it was only the two of them, two children, two Indian children.
Elinor awoke in a fluster from her musings. Where was the photograph? What had she done with it? Alice was coming the next day. She surveyed the room and decided she must have put the thing in her dresser; there was little other furniture in the room that would suit for hiding things.
She pulled open the top drawer, pawed through her underwear and socks until her fingers scraped on the thick paper. She removed the envelope, kissed it, pressed it to her chest, then returned it to the drawer.
5
Louise slipped the wooden hanger into the shoulders of her grey blazer, hung the jacket on the back of her door. She did up the three black buttons, straightened the collar, and picked a hair from it. The jacket, purchased at Eaton’s, was a favourite and she’d wear it as long as she could. The inside lining had begun to fray and she told herself she must take it to a seamstress. She stepped back from the jacket, undid the top butt
ons on her white shirt, and allowed herself a fleeting thought that she’d been at this lawyering business for almost three decades.
She’d been lucky to get where she had. Barely a week went by without a story, a news item that reminded her of that: A drunken Indian collapsed on the railway tracks. Indian children left alone at home, a fire, two of the four dead. More and more Indian youth coming off the reserves into the cities. She did what she could — financial donations, pro bono work for Indians charged with robbery and violence — but it was never enough.
She leaned toward the mirror and drew a brush through her thick hair. She twirled the tube of lipstick from its sheath, applied the vermilion colour to her lips, and grinned. Better, she thought as she wiped a dot of lipstick from her tooth. It was a ritual she’d established for herself in an effort to shed the stress that inevitably came after being at court.
She settled into her leather chair and rolled it up to her desk. The desk, probably once used in a post office or printing shop, was a huge oak thing with countless drawers and compartments of all sizes. When it arrived at her office she’d wondered what had compelled her to buy it; it wasn’t especially handsome.
She’d found the desk at a country auction house eons ago during a Sunday drive with John and Alice, who was seven at the time. The auction house, a rambling grey building the size of a barn, seemed to appear out of nowhere. The sign on the door said Auctions Every Friday Night. All that remained in the dusty cavernous space that smelled of cigarette smoke and engine oil were a few pressback chairs, a Singer treadle sewing machine, and the large desk, as if it had been calling out, waiting for Louise.
They waited for someone to appear, but no one ever did.
John wrote his name and phone number on a blank page he took from the back of his poetry book. He left the note on the desk beneath a stone. Two weeks later a man called. He spoke in quick bursts and cleared his throat often. He told John he was glad to be rid of the thing. Farmers didn’t want desks; they wanted chairs and tables, dressers, cooking pots and tools, guns and machinery. They could have the desk, the man said, delivery included, for twenty bucks.
Louise pulled out the bottom left drawer in the group of nine small drawers and scooped out a couple of Scotch mints; they had been her father’s favourite candy. These ones were hard and stale, the centres no longer soft. She spit out the candy and tossed it in the garbage. She flipped through a pile of telephone messages, pausing at one from a reporter with the local newspaper. She wasn’t averse to giving interviews; there were times when she enjoyed them, but this one she was going to skip. She slid the pink paper to the edge of her desk for her secretary.
When she’d agreed to act for the Llewellyn brothers, Barry and Elmer, and their project, a year-round amusement complex, she’d assumed everything would be straightforward. Search the title, prepare the usual documents, and send a statement to her clients. There had been no mention of a burial site in the northeast quadrant. She wasn’t sure that the farmers who sold the land to her clients were as ignorant about the burial site as they pretended to be. It created a dilemma for her. While she had never presented herself as one who only represented Indians, she didn’t feel comfortable advocating against them, either. She’d wait a little, see how the case unfolded. She still might be the best person for the Llewellyns, better able than most of her colleagues to understand their opponents’ position.
She yanked papers from her briefcase and reviewed the notes she’d made in court; she was scheduled to return the next morning. It was a sad case of a mother who risked losing custody of her child because she was trying to make ends meet. She’d been doing two jobs, working all day and half the night, and had fallen asleep in the middle of the day from exhaustion. Her three-year-old daughter had slipped out of the house and was hit by a car, left with a broken tibia and several cracked ribs. The father, a drug addict who claimed he was clean, had a steady job. He said he was better able to parent the child and was fighting for full custody. The mother had needed to work two jobs because, until then, the father hadn’t given her a penny to help with his daughter.
Due to cross-examine the father the next morning, Louise reviewed his affidavits, picked through her notes from his testimony that morning. She wouldn’t want the man to look after her cat. He’d spruced himself up to appear in court. His lawyer, whom Louise thought was a scumbag, had asked the father nothing about his history of drug use. For Louise that was a clue that the man’s drug addiction was a bigger problem than they were letting on. And there was another matter that didn’t sit right with Louise. The mother was Cree; the father British, or Irish. No one spoke about the white bias. But she’d seen it too many times.
She swivelled her chair around. Facing the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with thick black volumes of Saskatchewan legal statutes, journals, and reports from the Law Society, she contemplated the pine bookends on the lowest shelf. They had been made by her son, Andrew, while he was in high school. In the shape of a horse head. He’d won a prize for them. Slumped next to the bookends sat a tattered stuffed animal, Catherine’s grey rabbit, Henrietta. She took the toy from the shelf, stroked the floppy ears, poked a finger into the spot where the right eye had been. She suddenly realized she had nothing from Alice’s childhood; she must rectify that.
She cranked her head back so she could see the wrinkled black-and-white photograph of her father that resided on the uppermost shelf. A head-and-shoulders shot, the photo was taken in front of her house a year or two before he died. He was a handsome man, her father. His was a kind and welcoming face — large, gentle eyes, thin lips, and high cheekbones, a nose that didn’t draw attention. He wore a white shirt, black vest, and a baseball cap with the Toronto Maple Leafs emblem. Her father loved hockey; he thought it was the most exciting game. And he loved to skate. Wherever there was a patch of ice, her father skated. It didn’t matter if it was a pond, a creek, or a puddle in the middle of a wheat field. She regretted that she’d not allowed him into her life when her children were younger. For certain he would have had them in skates, watched over them while they took their first strides, cajoled them back up after they fell.
Beside the photograph of her father she had placed his gifts to her when she was called to the Bar: a smooth black pebble and an eagle feather.
She left her desk, as she often did near the end of the day, and stood before the expanse of windows that faced northwest. The mid-afternoon traffic rushed up the wide and uncurving length of Albert Street. At the perimeter of the city, the roadway intersected with the highway that joined Regina to the city of Saskatoon, a two- to three-hour drive away. Louise knew the route of Highway 11 well. The frequently empty road pushed straight north past farmers’ fields, through the Qu’Appelle Valley, and parallel to the banks of the Arm River. A certain grid road east of the highway went to the segment of the valley where she’d spent her childhood.
In the more than four decades since she’d left the rez, she’d returned only twice: when her grandmother died, when her grandfather died. Both visits — even though friends and family had grinned and embraced her, brought out tea and cookies, offered their beds for her to stay the night — she’d been uncomfortable, plagued by a sense of betrayal. Not their betrayal of her, but her betrayal of them. Even if she had wanted to go back to the reserve, visit more regularly, reconnect with those who had stayed, she couldn’t figure out how to do it. Her life seemed so different from that of the people who had remained on the reserve. She assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that no one would want to know what she had become. And she had forgotten who they were. For a person who parlayed words, she was at a loss, didn’t know what to ask of others, couldn’t imagine what to share of herself. The chasm between the two worlds seemed impassable; she could find no bridge to span the gap.
Years later she’d realize how complicated she had made the whole thing, how guilt had immobilized her, interfered with simple conversation. In truth, her cousins and aunties relished the notion of
having a lawyer in the family. They yearned to know more of her life; they wanted to see photographs of her children. All she’d needed to have asked them was how they had been, what stories they might tell of her grandparents.
6
The truck dashed down over the biscuit-coloured slopes of the valley and Alice’s fingers curled tighter around the steering wheel. This part of the drive always gave her a thrill. The Qu’Appelle Valley, and at its base the river that calls katepwewi-sipiy. She sped through the riverbed flats — green-headed mallards paddled around bulrushes and long water grasses — and up over the lip of the valley into an oceanic expanse of prairie.
It was a land that ran uninterrupted, save the occasional weathered grain storage shed or white clapboard farmhouse, until it reached the horizon; a land that she could see to the limits of her vision in every increment of direction, for three hundred and sixty degrees.
The cerulean sky flowed into the earth and the land into the sky.
She was on her way to her gran’s, accompanied by flashes of excitement and fragments of memory that reverberated in her body. Two nights ago she’d stayed late, very late, at Wanda’s. Wanda lived in Regina, where Alice taught school. Wanda had wanted Alice to stay the night, but Alice lived in the valley not far from her gran’s. It wasn’t the first time Wanda had tried to convince Alice to spend the night. Wanda said it was stupid for Alice to leave the city at midnight, one or two in the morning, when she had to return five or six hours later. While Wanda’s reasoning was unassailable, for Alice a decision to spend the night in a woman’s bed was less about convenience and more about stepping closer to who she was, who she’d always been.
She signalled her turn, geared down, and left the highway. Twenty minutes on grid roads and she was at her grandmother’s.
Tears in the Grass Page 3