She knocked twice, waited a few seconds, then tried the doorknob. The door opened. Of course it opened. Despite repeated reminders, her gran always left her door unlocked. It wasn’t forgetfulness. And maybe her grandmother was right and there was no need for it. All were welcome in her home and to what little she had there. And if there was a fire, her gran said, it would be easier for her to get out. She laughed at the notion that a fire would stand by, blowing down its own flames, suppressing its heat while she, Elinor, fumbled with the lock on the door.
Diminutive beneath the mass of white hair that flowed almost to her buttocks, Elinor beckoned for Alice to come. Alice kneeled beside the rocker and followed the knobby finger pointing toward the window and the deer that stepped through the long grass.
As if he knew they were watching, the animal stopped and turned toward them.
Elinor dropped her arm and leaned forward.
The deer flicked his tail. His tongue, the colour of mulberry, encircled his mouth. Then he was gone, engulfed by the bushes.
They sat in silence.
Alice marvelled at the animal’s jagged expanse of antlers. She’d counted at least three prongs. She stroked her gran’s hand, aware of its coolness, the purple blotches, and the advancing translucency of the skin.
“The deer, apisi-mosos, have always fed our people,” Elinor said, “all over the planet. Elk, reindeer, and caribou. Moose.” Elinor licked her lips. “Make some tea, honey.”
Alice took mugs from the cupboard, milk and margarine from the refrigerator. She asked her grandmother what she had been eating the past few days. With the exception of salt, pepper, a bag of sugar, and a couple of cans of fruit and soup, the cupboards were empty. The fridge wasn’t much different: a quarter of a bottle of milk, a half-loaf of bread, margarine, two eggs, and one apple. The butcher’s white tape was still intact on the package of sliced ham Alice had left a few days earlier.
“Food is of little concern,” Elinor said. “I know in my body my time is coming. Some things must be told before I leave.”
“Are you trying to hasten your departure by starving yourself? What things?”
Alice smoothed margarine then sprinkled sugar over a slice of bread. She cut off the crusts and shoved the pieces into her mouth. The plate of yellow, quartered bread she placed on her gran’s lap.
“Things from the past,” Elinor said. She chewed awkwardly, dentures clicking. For so many years, she’d thought it was better left unsaid, no point stirring up the anthill. Finally, she realized her thinking was faulty. She looked around for someone to tell but found no one. She’d been waiting for someone to come forward. But no one was going to ask her. She must look into their eyes, watch their actions, and decide who was ready to listen.
“It’s not about living in the past,” Elinor said, “staying back there. But each generation must know of the past so they can pass it on to the next. So you can pass it on to your children.”
Alice pulled the footstool near her grandmother. She’d given little thought to children of her own.
A mouse, grey and tremulous, appeared at the corner of the kitchen cupboards, scurried along the base, and disappeared into an opening that Alice couldn’t see. The creature could expect a safe journey through her gran’s cupboards, where no mousetraps or poison were used. And the same was true for the spiders. Whereas another might whisk away a clump of white fuzz in the corner of a ceiling, or swat at a grand expanse of intricate webbing between the posts on the porch, her gran spoke of respecting all life forms, learning to live alongside one and other.
“Some days I think my head will burst for all the chattering inside.” Elinor slurped her tea then clicked her tongue and lips together. “Did you put sugar in?”
“Yes. Can’t you taste it?”
Elinor took another swallow. “Barely. I think you skimped on it. Listen. Do you hear that?”
Alice had heard nothing. But she accepted that her grandmother was in communication with the spirits of other life forms. Humans were not the only ones who had something to say: trees wept, waters chuckled, animals whispered, and there were little people who swam in the marshes and lived where the saskatoon bushes grew.
Elinor closed her eyes and started to rock.
Alice knew the rocking would get more vigorous. The first time her gran had gone into one of these states, Alice had been frightened, wondering if Elinor was having a seizure, a stroke. She’d asked if she should call a doctor. “What for?” her gran had snapped. “What would a doctor know about visions, matters of the heart, communications from other times and other creatures?” He’d tell her she was nuts and want to pass electricity through her head. What was the sense of that? She didn’t want to become a light bulb. Then she was angry. Rattling on in Cree, words that Alice didn’t know. The only word that came through was her mother’s name, Louise.
A jolt passed through Elinor’s body and she jerked upright. Her mug rolled from her lap. A trickle of tea disappeared into the rug.
“When I was a child,” Elinor said, “the second or third night in the tipi, after we had moved onto the reserve, I had a dream.”
The dream, Elinor said, went on for many nights, each night continuing from the one before. Her pony came to her in the dream. He had died — halfway through the long journey from the west to the lands they’d been given in the treaty. In the dream she wept when she saw him. He willed her to climb on his back. They travelled for many days, every few days in a different direction.
In the south, Elinor said, at the bottom of a dry, sandy valley, a snake, its back brilliant in stripes of yellow and red, grinned. Tongue flashing, black eyes challenging, it struck, biting the horse on the front leg. The pony fell down instantly. For seven days and seven nights he lay still. Elinor stroked his face and brought him water and sweet grasses. She thought she’d lose him again. Her heart ached. On the fifth day, when she was getting weak from hunger, a rabbit came. She killed him and left tobacco in gratitude. Saskatoon bushes dripping with berries shot forth from the earth.
The morning of the eighth day, the pony shook his head, pushed himself up, and faced the throbbing bulge of the red sun. He told Elinor to climb on his back. At first he only walked. As the sun got higher in the sky he gathered speed until he was galloping faster than he had ever gone. Elinor shoved her fingers into the long hairs of his mane and clung fiercely. She dug her knees into his belly; she feared she’d fall off, so fast was he moving.
“I held on,” Elinor said, “hard. With every muscle in my body.” Elinor rocked gently.
Beyond the confines of the cottage, dark clouds were assembling.
“Life goes faster and faster,” Elinor said. “You have to hold on. You don’t know when Snake will attack and how long the poison will stay. Wrap your legs around something warm and strong. Take care of it even when it seems it might desert you.” She closed her eyes and nodded for a time.
“Our people,” Elinor continued, “have stopped holding on. So many have let go of what has spirit in its belly. Drinking and fighting, leaving the children on their own. Too many stupid deaths. Like a river, our people must claim their own course. Only a river decides how it will flow; only the wind knows when and how strong it will blow. We must remember and give thanks for all that the Creator has given.”
Elinor leaned toward Alice, within an inch of her face. “There are other voices, other things that must be told. They tear at the inside of my head like Hawk at a snake or mouse. All we have are our stories. And the land. All this time spent in this place, and what’s left? Puffs of air that make up words and stories. Does your mother speak nêhiyawêwin?”
“I’ve never heard her.”
Elinor shook her head. “She can. That was her first language. Her grandmother held her in this chair and spoke only nêhiyawêwin to her. It makes me sad.”
She rocked and hummed a song in Cree that Alice didn’t know.
“A language,” Elinor said, “is like an animal. It breathes and m
oves its own way. Like an animal, a language watches and tells others what only it can see. What the crow sees and chooses to speak of is different from that of the wolf and the frog. But each creature has valuable things to say. Just like an animal, once a language is destroyed, there is no getting it back.” Elinor laughed. “There’s another way that words are like animals. Do you know?”
Alice shook her head. “No idea.”
Elinor pinched her granddaughter’s forearm. “Words can bite and words can lick and soothe, just like the teeth and tongue of an animal. We were forbidden in that school to speak our Indian languages. Those who were caught had their mouths filled with soap or bound shut. The binding was so tight it left a mark for all to see. The mark lasted for hours, sometimes days. Many gave up the words they’d learned from their parents. A few persisted. Slowly, the feeling crept in that there was something wrong with how we talked.”
“Some of my students speak their own languages. Cree, Saulteaux,” Alice said. “I wish I knew what they were saying.”
“You should learn.” Elinor rubbed her lips together, bit at the bottom one for a few seconds. “Has she ever told you her name?”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
“No.”
“She was called Prickly Bush with Many Flowers. She was born when the wild roses were in bloom. Maybe because the winter had been mild, the bushes were covered in blooms, the air filled with their scent. She was a beautiful baby.” Elinor stared into the distance. Baby. There was another baby that was also beautiful. She’d promised herself that today she would speak of her, remove the plug from her mouth.
“And Louise … that name came from Louis Riel.”
Riel, Elinor said, had patted the top of her head when she was a young girl. For years, Elinor said, whenever she got scared she’d remember that hand on the top of her head and feel calmer.
“I’m tired now. I need to rest. Only for a short time.” She squeezed Alice’s hand. “Don’t leave. I have something to show you when I get up.”
Alice drew the shawl around her gran’s shoulders and tucked it beneath thighs and knees that had the scrawny architecture of a grasshopper leg. She had students taller and heavier. In one movement she could sweep her grandmother into her arms and cradle her like a baby.
She hugged her gran, lingering in the musty smell of tobacco and the softness of her hair.
On the porch, Alice swept away cobwebs and leaves. Sloppy raindrops slapped onto the steps then broke into little droplets. Dark clouds hung over the valley. Alice wondered what her gran needed to tell her and why she didn’t get on with it. Then she was swept away by memories of Wanda. It seemed she was always thinking of Wanda. In the grocery store, during recess at school, for sure during the drive between her house in the valley and the city.
They’d met at the lumber store, waiting in line to pay. Alice was buying sandpaper, Wanda a tin of wood stain. When Alice got to her truck, Wanda was sitting on the front bumper. A week later they were in bed, crawling over each other’s body like ants after sugar.
In high school, when Alice’s friends were swooning over lanky baseball players and football hulks, Alice was secretly following the ups and downs of cute, ponytailed cheerleaders or suppressing a crush on one of the tanned and muscled participants in the girls’ high jump. There was always one she found especially attractive: a girl with a crooked grin, thick thighs, and firm butt, who moved over the bar in the high jump in the slow, sleek manner of a jaguar.
Alice told no one of her urges. She was bereft of words to describe the throbbing and tingling that happened in her body during overnights, when she was camping, whenever she shared the same bed with one or two friends. Although uncomfortable with these sensations, they also excited her. The warmth of a taut back could do it, or a head of hair swung in her face. A squishy bum cheek or a nipple was the worst. The heat that came off those places even though they were covered in flannel pajamas or cotton nighties made her blush. Sometimes the nightie rose high and there’d be the patch of hair and the mound, thinner or plumper than her own. She wanted to touch that place, see if her friend’s gave the same pleasure as her own.
She told herself it was hormones and she’d grow out of it, but she hadn’t.
The sound of her gran hacking and coughing — she wished she’d smoke less — drew her back into the house. She crept to the bedroom and peered through the half-open doorway. Although there were no curtains, the room was almost dark from the huge saskatoon berry shrub that was plastered against the window. Her gran was quiet now, the quilt pulled over her head.
Her gran seemed nervous and fidgety today, not like her usual self, one who didn’t hold back on what she wanted to say. Alice didn’t mind that, but she knew her mother hated it.
Elinor heard Alice’s footsteps and pulled the quilt over her head. How could it be so difficult, this speaking about a child, a lost child, her child? It wasn’t as if she, Elinor, had done anything wrong. But whenever she thought that, the should-haves rushed in like vultures after a dead crow. She should have pushed the child’s father from her body; she should have run harder, faster, longer. She should have told her parents, Joseph, anybody, right away. She should have started looking for Bright Eyes sooner.
She flung the covers off, sat on the edge of the bed to gather her courage, then shuffled to her dresser. She pulled the envelope from beneath her socks and shoved it in her pocket.
The rain had stopped; the clouds were on the move. There were patches of water on the porch, and although it hadn’t rained long, it was enough to settle the prairie dust for a day or two. Elinor loved the scent of the soil and grasses after a rain, as if the Creator had wiped away the film of dirt and stink, made everything fresh and clean. She wished the news she had for Alice was like that.
Alice was strolling through the garden, bending down every once in a while to tug out a weed. It wasn’t fair, Elinor thought, that she was going to send her granddaughter away with such worry on her mind. She was a good girl. And a good teacher; her students were lucky to have her. She bought books and clothes, games for poor children at Christmas. She took apples and bread, cookies for those who arrived at school with empty stomachs. And she never used the strap to get children to behave. Elinor chuckled. But Alice had been a handful for Louise. She didn’t want to read books, do puzzles, or sew. She wanted toy guns and she wanted to ride her bike and chase around the neighbourhood with her brother and his friends, playing cowboys and Indians. It was always a battle to get her into a dress or skirt.
Gripping the banister with both hands, Elinor crept down the three steps and made her way to her willow chair, which sat in the corner of the garden. Alice came over and squatted beside her. The sun, trailing a swath of magenta and orange, dropped behind the hills. The air was beginning to cool. House sparrows in the bushes chirped frantically in the final hour of daylight.
“When I was a child, we saw apisi-mosos almost every day,” Elinor said, “sometimes four or five together. In the spring there were fawns, lots of fawns. Sticking close to their mothers, they’d move as one. We’d have great feasts. Now, those who hunt for the sport of it, for the antlers, leave the carcasses, with red meat clinging to the bones, rotting in the woods. Bring me some tulip bulbs next time. Lillian says they like tulips in the spring.”
“How is Aunt Lillian?”
“She calls me when she’s got nothing better to do.”
“Maybe she calls because she’s your sister.” Alice watched her granny’s knobby fingers fumble over the cigarette case.
“You’re right. The past few months she’s been calling every Thursday morning. I’ve caught myself looking forward to it. We talk about the old times — ôyê. I think she misses the old days, too. Damn thing.” She handed the cigarette case to Alice.
Alice pinched the bottom half into itself and pulled back the lid. Like a box of crayons or pastels, the pearly-white cigarettes, their papers twirled at each end, lay snuggled in
a tight row.
“That young fellow from the village still rolling for you?”
“You mean Jeremy? Yup. Faithful as the seasons.”
Elinor took two short puffs of her cigarette then started to cough. She hacked and spit through a billow of smoke. As soon as the expectorations had settled she took another drag.
“I needed that before I could begin,” Elinor said. “You won’t forget the tulip bulbs. Red ones. Lots of them. We’ll plant them together. Red ones for fire; red ones for red people.” Elinor patted Alice’s shoulder.
They sat in the afterglow, the exuberant chatter of the sparrows eclipsed by the darkness that hovered in the wings of the day.
Alice, shivering, did up the buttons on her sweater. “Let’s go in.”
“There’s lots of time for that.” Elinor had a distant look in her eyes. “When I was ten … or eleven, it’s not important … my father took me to that school, the white man’s school at the end of the valley.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “Three or four years I was there. It seemed like a lifetime.”
A single star shone in the cobalt sky. A breeze, carrying the scent of the river, sighed through the bushes.
“A child came there,” her gran said, “warm and brown-skinned, born in the darkness. No rejoicing and singing. No ceremony for finding a name. I called her Bright Eyes. And then she was gone.” Elinor dropped her butt at her feet, where it joined a community of paper fragments.
“Never have I not been able to hear her cry. Hers is the loudest of all those that have passed on. She calls for me to bring her home.” Elinor, her eyes bursting from their sockets, turned toward Alice. “I want you to find her. Bring her back to her family.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard me. Bring her back. That’s simple enough.”
“Let’s go in,” Alice said. She held the cane before her gran and reached out to help her get up.
Tears in the Grass Page 4