Elinor and Rosie studied the photograph.
“Where did you get this?” Elinor asked. “Why do you keep it on your wall with your family?”
Rosie laughed and said Johnny had found it in a second-hand store, in a box with a bunch of other old photographs, tools, and canning jars. She said he was so excited to find his mother. She laughed again. “In a box of junk. He wasn’t sure if it was me. And neither was I.”
Louise was enjoying Rosie. Rosie’s laughter was infectious; her face crinkled and wrinkled, her body jiggled when she laughed.
Rosie went to the fridge and pulled out a large chunk of chocolate cake. She said it was left over from her granddaughter’s eighth birthday party two days ago. The tremor in her right hand worsened as she sliced the cake; she brought her left hand to her wrist to steady the hand. She said she’d seen three different doctors and none of them could explain why her hand shook the way that it did. Some days were worse than others; today was a good day. She pulled out a jar of jam from the fridge, knives and spoons from the drawer next to the sink.
“Why do I keep that picture on my wall?” Rosie asked, standing by the table, cutlery clutched in her hand. “You probably think I’m nuts. Lots would. They’d want to burn the thing, stomp on it with heavy boots.”
Elinor eased herself from the couch, shuffled to the table.
Rosie said she kept the photograph to remind herself. Never again. Every Tuesday, she said, she played bingo. Every Wednesday she wrote letters to the band council, the town’s mayor, provincial and federal officials. The minister of Indian Affairs. She said she told them what was happening on the reserve. She shook her head. “Mostly I tell them about what’s not happening.”
Louise took the photograph to the table. Between bites of cake and cracker spread thick with saskatoon berry jam, Rosie stabbed her finger at the children in the photograph. Frankie read English words before anyone else in the class. George was the slowest at digging up potatoes and carrots. Margaret lost the end of a finger chopping onions. There was blood everywhere. How could such a tiny finger have so much blood in it? Frank ran away. Almost every week he did it. So many times he’d run. Each time everyone cheered when they heard he was gone again.
Elinor had cake crumbs stuck to her top lip. As Rosie remembered, Elinor seemed to slip away and into herself. Her eyelids flickered, her head drooped. She’s not going to talk about the child, Louise thought. Louise tried to get her mother’s attention, but she wouldn’t look at her. Louise stared at the photograph, the man standing in the bushes, slightly out of focus, wide suspenders stretched over his thick body, probably thirty or forty years old. Had he married? Did he have other children? Certainly the man was dead now, but sometimes on their deathbeds people confessed, gave up secrets they’d held onto all their lives.
Louise thought of her friend Mary. They needed to talk about what they’d done. In more than four decades they’d never spoken of it. What if Mary died first and felt compelled to confess, cleanse herself of ill deeds before she died? Even if she didn’t say Louise’s name, it would be easy enough to track her down.
Louise’s father had slipped into unconsciousness within minutes of Louise getting to the hospital. She knew now it was her grief, but for months she’d been angry with her mother that she’d not called Louise sooner, had not called for an ambulance. All that time lost, blood oozing from her father’s body, as Elinor had struggled to get Joseph to the hospital after the car had broken down. So pale he was, only a whisper for a voice. Yet, as always, a steadiness as he smiled at her, thanked her for coming, patted her hand, asked her to take care of her mother. Her father had died more than fifteen years ago. She still missed him so much. On every anniversary of his death, she visited his grave, said a prayer, left a swatch of tobacco. She had always gone alone. She could see now that was a mistake. She should have taken her children, her mother. There could have been a celebration, a meal afterward.
Louise pointed to the man standing in the bushes. “Do you know anything about this guy, Rosie?”
Elinor jerked awake.
Rosie leaned closer to look at the photograph, pulled back and shook her head, then leaned forward again. She rubbed a finger over the glass and the man as if that action would bring him into greater focus. Or obliterate him.
Rosie said she woke sometimes in the night and the room was filled with a terrible smell like rotting meat. “Like the stink of a mouse that’s been dead in the cupboard for two weeks. Awful.
“It comes from this picture,” Rosie said. “I take it outside, leave it there for a few days, burn sweetgrass in the house. I should send the picture back to the store where Johnny got it. But that’s me there, too. So I keep it.”
She jabbed at the man. “I want to say he’s the one.” She turned to Elinor, placed a hand on hers. “But I don’t know if he was. I have to say the truth. I don’t know. But I remember you had a child in that place. And they took her away.” Rosie jabbed at the two nuns in the picture. She jabbed so hard Louise thought she might break the glass. Rosie turned the picture upside down. The back of the picture was covered in brown cardboard, with tiny nails to hold it in place every few inches. There was a brown stain that looked like tea in the bottom left corner. The Scotch tape was dry and peeling. Rosie grabbed the picture, leapt up, opened the door, and threw it out.
The sound of glass shattering. A crow calling. The scent of smoke from a fire coming in through the open door.
“I should have done that a long time ago,” Rosie said, turning from the door. “Some things from the past are better thrown out.”
Louise wished it was that simple.
17
“The Skaters’ Waltz,” loud and scratchy, blared forth from the speakers, bounced off the bleachers, and reverberated amongst the girders of the arena’s ceiling. Alice dropped onto the battered wooden bench, loosened her laces, and rubbed her ankles.
“Look at that pair,” her father said, pointing to an elderly couple, she in camel skirt, red sweater, and navy scarf, he in brown pants and tweed jacket. “They move as one. Quite beautiful.”
“They are,” Alice said.
The music changed to an Elvis Presley love tune and the shouting erupted; yeahs from the girls, boos from the boys.
Alice told him she’d gone to the church archives office.
“And?”
“Nothing really.”
The records custodian, Alice said, with her carefully coiffed grey hair and double-breasted blue suit, reminded her of Greer Garson in the film Mrs. Miniver, although she wasn’t nearly as beautiful. She had a breathy voice that barely rose above a whisper and one eye that turned inward. They went to a basement room that smelled of rubber and old papers and was crammed with file cabinets, ceiling-high piles of wooden stacking chairs, and huge cardboard boxes marked Christmas decorations. The single, bare light bulb made Alice think they weren’t likely to find anything smaller than a rain barrel.
“She seemed to have no idea what I was looking for,” Alice said. “She explained that most records were kept at the head office in Ottawa, not in the local church.” Alice had told her she was there at the behest of her grandmother, who hadn’t long to live. She didn’t think it hurt to embellish things a little.
“It made me nervous,” Alice said, “the idea of having direct contact with something from Gran’s school. One of the people who wrote in the records could even be the child’s father.”
A horn blared. Alice jumped. A voice came over the loudspeaker asking all skaters to leave the ice. Two boys in scruffy sweaters stayed behind until the rink was empty. They raced down the centre of the rink, every inch of their scrawny bodies pushing and surging. They were readying to do it again when an attendant stepped onto the ice.
“There were pages and pages with lists of student names,” Alice said. “At the top of each list was the name of the teacher, some preceded by Miss, Mr., others by Sister and occasionally by Father. I wrote down some of the names to se
e if Gran might remember them.”
The large gates that gave access to the hockey players’ dressing rooms and equipment-storage areas swung open. The Zamboni, the machine that could do in ten minutes what it took three men to do in ninety minutes, lumbered onto the ice and turned right.
“I keep thinking the child was killed, dumped in a snowdrift, or some unmarked grave on the prairie. It would have been easy enough. In a few weeks the coyotes would have found her. Who’s going to believe a kid from a residential school?”
“I don’t think that’s what happened,” her father said.
Alice’s eyebrows arched up. “It’s such a long shot.”
“It is. I still trust Elinor’s intuition. I’ve seen it proved right too many times. Your gran would make a prediction about the weather, or that one of you kids was getting sick, and it pretty much turned out the way she said. She’d say it was going to be a bad year for gophers, grasshoppers, potato beetles. And she was right. She had a sense that your grandfather wouldn’t live a long life. Said that to your mother once.”
“Surely she’s been wrong sometimes,” Alice said.
“Oh, probably. I haven’t kept a scorecard. But she’s so strong about this child I think she’s picking up something, from somewhere.” He laughed. “From the stars, the way the wind’s blowing, how the birds are flying in the fall before they migrate. It’s mysterious, but I trust it.”
The Zamboni, like a harvester in a wheat field, left a wet swath about five feet wide as it followed the curvature of the rink.
“Your mother has her own perceptiveness, but she doesn’t talk about it or use it the way your gran does. Leaving the reserve when she did is a good example. As best as I can tell, it was a horrific time on the reserves.”
“Like it’s any better now,” Alice said.
“Maybe not. Depends who you ask and which rez you’re talking about. Some have strong leadership, they’re pushing back, getting government to come up with more money, or developing their own sources of revenue. But it’s slow.”
The horn blared and skaters trickled back onto the ice.
John had loosened his laces and now tugged at the ones on his left skate. In the middle of looping his laces around the boot, he stopped and leaned back. He said he remembered the day Louise had told him she was Indian. He said he’d always had his suspicions but didn’t want to ask for fear of getting her mad — she angered easily in those days. They were leaving the library. There had been an article in the newspaper about those who had been killed in the First World War, including men from one of the reserves. She said she didn’t understand why they volunteered to fight for a country that treated them so poorly. He asked what she meant, and she blurted out that of course he didn’t know about such things and started walking very fast. He chased after her, said he didn’t know and that was all the more reason for her to tell him. She started to cry.
“I didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen her like that. One of the men killed, she said, was a cousin. Then she told me all of it.
“Her parents weren’t dead; they were living, if you could call it that, on a reserve outside of Regina. She had two brothers, Charlie and Le Roy; Philip had died when he was very young. There were aunts and uncles and friends. She missed them. Everyone was poor, but she said they laughed more than the white people she knew. Even so, she said she hated the rez and would never go back.
“I was shocked. I’d never heard anything like that.” He laughed, slapped his palms on his thighs. “Shit. What did I know about life? I had some vague sense there was another side of the tracks, but I’d never been there. Some friends talked about what went on in the north end, but I guess I was too cautious.” He winked. “Or scared of the back of my mother’s hand. You never wanted to get on the wrong side of her. But mostly I was seventeen, eighteen, growing up in a nice family in the south part of the city.”
His mother, he said, loved to have her hair done and kept up with the fashions. He’d never seen her without makeup. She did laundry on Mondays, cooked fish on Fridays and roast beef on Sundays. Every week was the same. His father wore a hat, white shirt, and tie to his office; he was a manager in an insurance company. His parents played cards with the Rileys on Friday nights. Every family he knew was the same.
“I asked myself, what I was doing chasing after this girl? My mother would figure out Louise in five minutes.” He shook his head, looked out to the rink and the skaters. “Over the years, I’ve tried to figure out why I didn’t run away, right then. Your mother was holding the door wide open. She was practically shoving me through. And if my mother had known the precipice I was standing on, she’d have shouted louder than a fan at a hockey game, jumped up and down, too, ordering me to get the hell out of there. I’m sure there’s a poem that captures the whole scen-ario. I can’t think of it at the moment. I’ll get back to you on that.” He grinned.
“What do you figure kept you there?” Alice asked.
He shook his head. “Who knows. The war had ended a few years earlier, the future seemed full of promise. Maybe it was me finally taking a risk. I’d never been inclined that way. It was my brother who drove my parents nuts — walking the railway bridge at midnight, stealing cheap things from the drugstore, forging notes from my parents to get out of school. Whenever I get that kind of note from a student, I call the parents immediately, check to see if they’ve actually written it.”
Alice grinned at the image of her Uncle William forging notes to teachers, straddling the rails under a full moon. Her father, being a vice-principal, got to deal with all the problem kids. He probably surprised them with what he knew.
“How did I get onto that tangent? The truth is, I adored your mother. I’d never met anyone like her. She was rough, argumentative, brilliant. Clearly a risk-taker, not like most of the girls I’d met. And she had this other side that didn’t come out often. If we got out of town, into the country, by a creek, she’d go quiet and still. She’d shush me. A kind of wonderment came over her. She never talked about what was going on with her in those moments. I suspect it was something spiritual. Like the day we saw that grass snake. Every girl or woman I’d known until then was terrified of snakes. Not your mother. She picked it up, stroked the back of its head, muttered some words, which I now know were Cree, then let it slide off her hand and slither through the grasses.” Her father fell silent and drifted off.
Alice thought of her mother with the snake and then with her caged birds, how attentive to them she could be. It was hard to imagine her mother being a runaway, hiding out, living in some shed. How did she do it? She wished they could talk about those times. Her friends’ mothers recalled their childhood antics, but never Alice’s. It was as if she had never been a child, never had parents, brothers, or sisters. Until her Grandfather Joseph died, they had spent every holiday with her father’s family. She didn’t meet her gran until she was a teenager.
For years Alice hadn’t noticed that her mother never spoke of or acknowledged what was happening to Indians in the province or the country. She started to think differently after she’d been teaching for a few years. So many of the Indian students did poorly. They missed weeks of school at a time, or if they got themselves to school, they arrived late, hungry, schoolbooks lost, homework not done. Lots dropped out by grade eight, if not sooner.
Her father stood up and suggested they do a couple more loops.
“I wish I could feel more optimistic about finding Bright Eyes,” Alice said.
“As you said, it’s a long shot. That doesn’t mean nothing will come of it.”
“But we don’t have any strong leads. It was such a long time ago. Nothing came of the visit with Gran’s friend Rosie.”
They reached the ice and both bent down to take the guards from their blades. John said some things didn’t happen in a straightforward manner, but more in the way that bees travelled. “They seem to be flying about in a haphazard manner. And yet, look what they manage to produce.”
&
nbsp; They waited for a gap in the skaters then stepped onto the ice.
The scattering of snowflakes when they’d arrived at the arena was verging on a blizzard as they left. It was hard to see even across the street. Piles of thick, fluffy flakes made puffy, pointed hats on fence posts and smooth rounds like bread loaves on car roofs. The familiar sounds of winter were everywhere: roaring engines, shovels scraping on cement, the futile spinning whirr of tires on wet snow.
With her skates off, shuffling to her truck, Alice was aware of the flats of her feet, the absence of the tight boot pressing against her toes, the long blade running down the middle of her sole.
The first major snowfall of the season. Alice knew by the thickness and speed at which the flakes were falling that it would continue for hours, leaving two to three feet, or more, before it ceased. The city had been transformed to a sparkling and pristine whiteness. Snowflakes, like autumn leaves, drifted steadily downward. Alice thought of a children’s picture book and imagined a kindly and smiling yellow-haired woman looking down on the Earth as she shook silken filaments from a million milkweed pods. Little dots of wet cold, like effervescent bubbles, pricked on Alice’s cheeks. She held out her palm, waited for a small jumble of flakes to settle on the cranberry wool of her mitten, then returned the gentle travellers to their companions with a single puff.
She cleared the two-inch accumulation of snow from the headlights and windows. Dry and light as it was, the snow dispersed as easily as a pile of goose down. Inside the truck her father trolled radio stations for weather reports.
Alice swatted the snow from her pants and jacket and hopped into the truck.
“Ten inches by morning,” her father said.
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