Tears in the Grass

by Lynda A. Archer

  Elinor swatted away Alice’s arms and threw down the cane. “Are you listening? I want you to find that child.”

  “I don’t know what child you’re talking about.”

  “Your mother’s sister. Your aunt. My daughter. I was raped in that damned school.”

  Alice’s stomach clenched; a chill passed the length of her body. Her gran was a child. Surely it wasn’t true. She picked up the cigarette case, which had slipped from Elinor’s lap. They needed to get inside. Suddenly, it was cold; Alice was shivering.

  Straining, her body wavering, Elinor pushed herself up. Semi-vertical, she brought her face within an inch of her granddaughter’s. “You must find her before I die. You must bring her home.”

  Elinor swept aside Alice’s extended arm and turned toward the house.

  Forcing her own legs and feet to move, trying to dispel the spinning in her head, Alice followed closely behind her gran. She wondered if her mother knew about the baby. Maybe she did and had dismissed it as another of Elinor’s stories.

  “And no, your mother doesn’t know. I could never speak to her about this. It has fallen to you. I curse myself for my cowardliness in not speaking of it sooner. I only hope it’s not too late.”

  Alice settled Elinor into her rocker and went to make tea. The child could be dead. Certainly very old, she thought.

  When Alice returned with the tray, Elinor fumbled in her pocket, withdrew the envelope, and shoved it at her granddaughter.

  “Open it.”

  The wrinkled and faded black-and-white photograph of the fat-cheeked, black-haired somnolent infant bore a strong resemblance to Elinor.

  “She’s beautiful,” Alice whispered.

  Elinor smiled at the picture. She muttered words in Cree. Words Alice had heard many times. They spoke of thanksgiving and gratitude. “That’s all I have of her. And my memories.” Elinor kissed the photograph. “I want to know she’s all right. I could have kept her. I could have taken her home; it would have made no difference to Mother and Father. But they — at the school — they didn’t let me. Within hours of her coming from my body, they took her. A few weeks later, the photograph was in my cupboard.”

  Elinor took a swallow of tea then shoved her mug at Alice. “Something stronger is required. Whisky. In the bottom drawer of my dresser.”

  Alice found two flasks of Johnnie Walker, like eggs in a nest, snuggled into her gran’s sweaters. Alice poured the amber liquid into her gran’s cup and then, at Elinor’s insistence, put an ounce into her own cup. She wasn’t a whisky drinker. Elinor raised her cup, squinted, and grinned. “To your success in bringing Bright Eyes back to her people.”

  “To Bright Eyes,” Alice said, trying to sound enthusiastic, trying to counter the thoughts that insisted the child had died years ago.

  “She’s alive. I know she has done something fine with her life,” Elinor said. “I’m tired now. Help me to bed.”

  Elinor shed layers of clothing until she was down to a sleeveless T-shirt and underwear that fell straight from her waist, no buttocks to round them out. Breasts flat to her chest, hip bones protruding, flabby grey-purple muscle jiggling on the undersides of her arms, she was as she described herself: skin hanging from bone.

  Alice threw back the sheet, blanket, and the quilt worn thin at the edges from years of being grasped and tugged. She plumped up the pillow. As soon as Elinor’s head was on the pillow, she closed her eyes. Alice stroked back the white hair and kissed her gran’s cheek. So still was the face, so minimal was the rise and fall in the tiny chest, her grandmother could have been dead.

  Elinor’s eyes snapped open. “Talk to Lillian,” she said. “And leave the lamp on.”

  Alice folded her gran’s shawl over the back of the rocker, set the bottle of whisky on the counter, and rinsed out the mugs. Lillian, five or six years younger than Elinor, lived in Saskatoon. When they were children, Alice and her brother, Andrew, spent most of the visits there chasing each other around the playground, playing cowboys and Indians. Her sister, Catherine, read books. Alice was always the Indian, always getting handcuffed or jailed. Inevitably, the jailor nodded off and she broke out, or was freed by an Indian friend, her brother, who soon found the role of warden dull.

  Lillian tried with candies, gifts, and questions about friends and school and hobbies, but Alice had never liked her. Probably she and Andrew, in the wisdom of children, had decided that their aunt was a witch and not to be liked because she told them not to interrupt adults while they were talking. Wash your hands before dinner. Stop teasing the dog. All benign, innocuous requests that any aunt might make of a niece and nephew.

  Elinor was snoring softly when Alice checked on her. In the dim yellow light, her wrinkled face had the appearance of an ancient boulder.

  Who would want an Indian baby in those days? Probably she’d been killed. That would have been easy enough. There were stories about Indian families taking in illegitimate white babies in those days, but not the reverse.

  The wipers struggled to keep up with the deluge splattering over the windshield; the pounding and rattling on the hood and roof of the truck was as loud as a drum band. In the darkness and wet, the road, barely visible, was long and lonely. Alice pulled to the side of the road. She was shivering even though it wasn’t cold.

  It was too late to go into the city. She wanted Wanda. She wanted to snuggle against her back and thighs, to feel the squeeze of her strong arms around her chest, her fingers grasping the fullness of Alice’s breasts. She yearned to hear Wanda’s laughter, even her delight in teasing Alice about her lust and silliness in the bedroom. Mostly, she wanted Wanda to tell her everything was going to be all right. Even though she knew it wasn’t. She’d only known her gran to be a feisty woman. Now there was desperation and urgency. As if there was a deadline. There was a dead line, a rupture in the family line, which might not get reconnected before Gran died.

  And what would her mother make of it? Would this news bring Gran and her mother closer together? Or widen the rift between them?

  She was here today.

  That Indian woman. There were long intervals when she was quiet, busy with the drawing. Other times she talked. Talked to me. Called me Big Brown. Or paskwâwi-mostos. I struggled to find ways — twitching my tail, groaning, blinking — to tell her I’m listening. I think she knows.

  No creature, she said, was as important to her people as the bison. No part was wasted when a bison was taken. All flesh and organs were eaten, blood drunk. The hair was twisted into rope, gathered into clumps for pillows. The hides were used for tipis, moccasins, and robes. Horns became spoons and cups and toys; bones were carved into shovels and pipes, knives and war clubs. Stomachs, bladders, and scrotums served as containers for water or foods.

  Bison were much-revered, she said. The Sun Dance gave recognition to that.

  She snapped her pencil in two.

  It was impossible, she said, to talk to her daughter about these matters.

  The burden had been passed on to her granddaughter.

  I swished my tail as she moved away.

  7

  Alice slipped into her parents’ back garden. The scent of vinegar and sweet apple wafted toward her from the yellow and red orbs rotting beneath the crabapple tree. In the pond, white cartilaginous mouths at the water’s surface made rippling rings and faint popping sounds like the first drops of rain. From the garden she entered the house and the kitchen. One of her mother’s six budgies chirped. Her mother adored the birds; Alice joked that she took better care of the birds than she did of her children. She bought them fancy foods, fed them fruit twice a week, cleaned their cage every Saturday morning, and played music for them. Vivaldi and Chopin to calm them, Spanish guitar and Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass to get them chirping.

  Her father, squatting outside the bathroom, was holding the door between his knees. A tall white-haired man, he wore a baggy yellow T-shirt and khaki shorts. His legs were tanned and slightly bowed; a Tensor bandag
e encircled his left knee. Avid hiker, gardener, and Mr. Fix-It that her father was, Alice was used to seeing Band-Aids, Tensors, and supports on his fingers, wrists, and knees.

  “Why don’t you get a locksmith to look at that thing?” Alice asked.

  “It’s not that complicated. I can do it.”

  “You’ll get stuck in there one of these days,” Alice said.

  “Get stuck where?” Louise asked, coming into the room. She was bundled in a white terry-cloth robe, her hair wet from a shower.

  John laid the door lock, screws, and screwdriver on the counter. The vacant space in the side of the door yawned into the room. He said he’d get the door back together in a few days after he got a part from the hardware store.

  “Honey, we all know your few days will slip into weeks,” Louise said.

  John said he was no more of a slacker about these things than Louise. He reminded her that a bag of birdseed had occupied the kitchen counter for four days before she’d put the thing in the cupboard. “And then, of course, there are the legal journals.”

  Louise rolled her eyes at Alice. “You can see some things never change. Did we have a date for dinner and I’ve forgotten?”

  Alice dropped her keys into her purse. “We need to talk … about Gran.”

  “Is she ill?” Louise asked. She grabbed the kettle from the stove, filled it with water.

  “Not exactly. But kind of.”

  “What does that mean?” Louise asked.

  “We need to sit down. And have a talk.”

  “Is there time for tea?” Louise asked.

  Alice shrugged. “If you like.”

  “Why are you being so mysterious?” Louise asked.

  Alice pulled a chair from the table, a long pine table with six high-backed chairs that she had grown up with. She ran her finger over the black C that had been burned into the finish; her brother had placed a hot cast-iron frying pan on that spot. Alice sucked in a long breath.

  “Just tell me she’s all right?” Louise said.

  “I guess it depends how you define all right. She hasn’t had a heart attack or a stroke, but—”

  “Jesus, Alice, spit it out.”

  Alice leapt up, clenched fists at her side. “Maybe I’ll write you a letter. Sometimes you are so thick. Aren’t you picking up that what I need to tell you isn’t easy to talk about? Not for me, anyway. Maybe it will be for you. Maybe you’ll be out on the street telling neighbours, strangers, judges … your budgies. But it isn’t that way for me. I’ve been dragging this around for three days because this is the soonest I could get here. And I wasn’t going to tell you about it over the phone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louise said. She tugged the tie around her robe tighter and said she was going to get dressed and would be back in a jiffy.

  John washed his hands, squeezed Alice’s shoulder, and suggested the two of them go into the living room.

  John switched on the corner lamp. The white light spilled a cone of warmth. There was a fireplace of natural grey and brown stone, a cream-coloured couch strewn with bright cushions, and two worn black leather armchairs, each with a footstool. The walls were filled with art, mostly work by local Saskatchewan artists, including some of Elinor’s prairie and valley scenes. But there was also some brightly coloured abstract modern that Louise knew her mother hated.

  Alice dropped into one of the armchairs. Most of the time she found her parents’ living room a comfortable space, but not that night. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, shoved her fingers through her hair, and undid the buttons on her sweater. She’d heard her mother come down the stairs and now she was in the kitchen fussing with the tea. Why did she need to bother with tea?

  Her father, ever the one to placate and defuse, asked how Alice was getting on in her new school. She said she liked most of her colleagues; every school had its pain in the neck. She had a good group of students, although a couple of kids, Indian kids, were proving a challenge. In the past she had discussed her difficult students with her father; he’d been teaching for more than thirty years. He loved the profession and seemed to have a way with angry parents and disobedient students.

  “What’s going on with them?” John asked.

  “The usual, I suppose. Often late, homework lost …”

  “Okay, here we are.” Louise swept into the room with a tray on which sat a teapot under a cozy, teacups, and a plate of hermit cookies. She slid the tray onto the coffee table and sat down on the couch.

  “So, what’s going on?” Louise asked as she lifted the teapot.

  “Something you’d never imagine in a hundred years,” Alice said. She sat forward in her chair. “You know that Gran, like most of her generation, went to that residential school. Well, she got pregnant while she was there. And … and … she had a child.”

  Louise finished pouring the second cup of tea and sat down the teapot. “A child? You’re sure about this? She often gets mixed up these days, forgets where she puts things.”

  “Not this time. I am quite certain she was not confused. She was extremely clear. And adamant.”

  “She can be adamant one day and forget what she said the next.”

  Alice wanted to scream, but breathed in and out slowly, searching for how to respond to her mother.

  “Someone had his way with her? Is that what you’re saying?” John asked. “She would have been young.”

  Louise stared at the blue-and-white quilted tea cozy. One side had a brown blotch the shape of a lemon; the bottom edge had begun to fray. She handed a cup of tea to John. She offered the second cup to Alice.

  “All these years,” Louise said, “and she never said anything. Did she tell Grandpa?”

  “I don’t know.”

  John took off his glasses, folded in one shank and then the other.

  From the radio in the kitchen came news of the Olympics in Mexico City. Six thousand white doves released in the opening ceremonies. Then a story about a South African doctor, Christian Barnard, who had completed the world’s first heart transplant.

  “It was a girl,” Alice said. “One of the nuns took her when she was a few hours old. Gran wants to see her. Before she dies.”

  “Before the child, the woman, dies? Or before Gran dies?”

  “Before Gran dies.”

  “But the woman could be dead also, don’t you think?” Louise said.

  “I’ve thought about that, but Gran doesn’t think so. She’s convinced the woman is still alive.”

  John stirred sugar into his tea. Louise grimaced as John slurped the first swallow. Alice blew on her tea.

  “Who would do such a thing?” John said. “Surely he’s dead now. I hope he died a horrible death. Might he have had other children? Did Elinor say his name?”

  Alice shook her head. “No. I’ve barely slept the last three nights thinking about this.”

  “Did your grandmother have any idea where to look for this person?” Louise asked.

  “She suggested I talk to Lillian,” Alice said. “They were at the same school together.”

  “Lillian has never said anything about Mom having another child.”

  “And Elinor. How is she?” John asked.

  “I think she’s relieved she told me. But she’s desperate to find this woman.”

  Louise stared into her cup, took a sip, and set it on the coffee table. “Leave it with me. I don’t have any brilliant ideas at the moment.”

  Alice pushed herself up out of the armchair. She shoved her hands in her pockets, then remembered she’d put her keys in her purse. She said it was late and she had papers to mark for the next day.

  “Will you be all right?” John asked.

  “Don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “Get some sleep,” John said. He gave Alice a hug.

  At the door Louise gripped Alice on the shoulder. “We’ll figure something out. Let’s talk in a couple of days.”

  “I’ve got work to do myself,” John said, when Louise returned to
the living room. “But I think I’m kind of in shock. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  Louise shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m stunned, doubtful that it happened.”

  “You were in one of those schools, weren’t you?” John asked.

  “Yes, for a while. I kept my head down, then I ran away. Some of the nuns were mean, others were kind. I never heard of anything like this.” She stacked the cups into each other.

  John squeezed and massaged the knee that had the Tensor band around it. He undid the metal clips at the end and wound the brown elastic cloth from his leg. He slumped back onto the couch. “I can’t get my head around this. Imagine if someone had whipped Catherine out of your arms within minutes of her leaving your body. And you never saw her again. Ever. I’d kill someone, I would.” He leapt up. “Let’s go for a walk. I’ll not sleep for a while after this.”

  “Oh, John. I’ve got files to review.”

  “They’ll wait.” He held out his hand. “Just to the corner and back.”

  Hands clasped, they strolled along the sidewalk. Two houses away from their house a blue tricycle sat, abandoned, in the middle of the sidewalk. John plopped it at the foot of the family’s driveway. There were five children, and their trikes and wagons were frequently left on the sidewalk or on a neighbour’s driveway or lawn.

  “Were we that bad when our kids were younger?” Louise asked.

  “Don’t think so. I think Jane is a little overwhelmed with the lot of them, and Randy being out of town so much.”

  Louise laughed. “Little and overwhelmed can’t go in the same sentence. Overwhelmed is overwhelmed.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Lawyer. I think our daughter was overwhelmed by your mother’s news.”

  “Yes. I think she was. I wish Mom had talked to me.”

  “Maybe your mother had more hope that her granddaughter, more than her daughter, might actually do something.”

  As much as Louise didn’t like what John had said, she knew there was truth in it.

  At the corner they crossed to the other side of the street. John waved to an elderly man sitting on his porch.