“Do you mind me asking where you got to?” Victoria said. “I was worried.”
“I’m sorry,” Gloria said. “When we pulled in here, I suddenly felt sick.”
“You should have said something.”
“I know. I don’t know what it was, maybe the single picnic table. It looked so alone. Those clumps of wildflowers. The solitary outhouse. Everything single. I thought about Glenna, and the sadness just gushed over me. I had to be alone.” She pointed to the left of the picnic table. “If you go through that clump of trees to the other side, there’s a road, just a couple of dusty ruts in the middle of the field, I suppose the farmer uses them. I started walking, crying, remembering Glenny, how it had always been the two of us, right from the very start, inside my mother’s womb, the two of us. Except when we were born. Glenna led the way; I came out six or eight minutes later. We did everything together. ” She laughed. “Like two humps on a camel. Until the middle of high school, we were always together. In the last few years we started to do things separately, but we talked every day. She had her friends, I had mine. But we were still each other’s best friend.”
She returned Victoria’s handkerchief, shoved her hand in the breast pocket of her blouse. “I found this on that dirt road. It’s so perfect.”
Victoria drew her finger over the mouth cavity, around the tiny orbs that had once been eyes. In its entirety, the skull was about the size of a walnut, perhaps a little bigger.
Glenna had had a fascination with bones; Gloria did not. Glenna said people took bones for granted, but without bones nobody would be walking about. We’d all be slithering around like snakes and salamanders, slugs and worms. Glenna saved chicken, beef, fish, and pork bones. She had been ecstatic the day they’d come upon a cow’s skull in a field. She liked to impress upon people that without bones, we’d have no idea what dinosaurs were like.
Victoria had never given any thought to bones. Like most people, she took them for granted. She was sorry for Gloria’s distress.
The patter on the car roof had begun to slow; a patch of blue appeared in the dark sky.
Victoria closed her eyes, clasped her hands in her lap. She realized how frightened she’d been about Gloria, how worried she’d been that she’d not get to Elinor.
Gloria put her hand on Victoria’s. “We’re almost there. Soon you’ll see her. Are you excited?”
Victoria smiled. She said she felt like a kid who’d been given a new bicycle. She was excited but also scared. Would she be able to ride it? Would she wreck it? How was one supposed to feel, she said, at meeting the person who has given you life? But you have spent your entire life having had no contact with her. “Sometimes I need to pinch myself that this is happening. Are we really going to get there? Will the car break down? When you disappeared, I worried something had happened to you and I’d be stranded. I’d get there too late. She’d have died.”
34
At the stream’s edge, a muskrat, its plump, wet body shiny in the sunlight, scurried along the bank then slithered into the water. From the walking trail that overlooked the stream, Elinor waited on a bench for John. She welcomed the warmth of the mid-morning sun on her shoulders and neck. A child’s voice, exuberant and chirpy, drew her attention. The girl, her blond hair in pigtails that stuck out from the side of her head, pedalled a red tricycle. Her mother followed a few feet behind. Elinor smiled. When the two came abreast of Elinor, the girl climbed off her trike and sat beside Elinor. Her mother said, “Emily, don’t bother the lady,” but Elinor said it was no problem.
Elinor asked Emily how old she was and the girl held up five fingers. Her mother laughed and said she was only three, almost four. Elinor drew her hand over Emily’s head, relishing the fine silkiness of her hair.
Emily asked Elinor how old she was. Her mother told her she shouldn’t ask such things. Elinor chuckled and said she didn’t mind; she often asked herself the same question. She turned to Emily, held up her hands, and opened and closed her fingers several times.
“I’m very, very, very old,” Elinor said.
Emily’s eyes opened wide; a solemnity came over her face. “Are you going to die soon?”
Emily’s mother gasped.
Elinor smiled. “Very soon.”
Emily patted Elinor’s hand, told her to be careful of the mosquitoes because they made bad bites, then hopped on her trike. Elinor’s heart throbbed and her throat tightened. So precious. Children were so precious. She wanted to tell the mother to watch over her child, to keep her close. Elinor urged her body up from the bench and she shuffled along the path. A young couple, holding hands, walking briskly, veered around her.
If asked what her life had become, Elinor would say she lived in a dream state. Sometimes everything was clear, colourful and bold. Other times she was confused and lost. She yearned to wake up, even as she knew that dreams were to be cherished for the wisdom they brought. Like the web of a spider, she was strong yet fragile, able to break apart at any moment.
John came alongside her, said he’d had to go farther than he thought for her Coke and asked where she was going. She told him she was keeping the blood moving through her heart; she feared if she stayed still too long it would thicken and come to a halt. John suggested they walk to the next bench and she could have a swig of her Coke; that would keep her ticker going a little longer.
With Elinor gripping John’s arm, they crept along to the next bench. The Coke was cold. She coughed and sputtered as it slipped down her throat, but it gave her a jolt. John told her he’d planted the potatoes and beans; the spinach was up in the cold frame. Elinor said she hated spinach. John said it was good for her. Elinor grunted. She asked him to tell her about his school. John said there wasn’t much new to tell. She asked him about the boy who’d sawed off his fingers in shop. What did they do with the fingers? John laughed and said it was a good question. He didn’t know what became of the fingers. Shortly after the incident, the family moved to another school and he had to confess he was glad of it. Elinor wanted to say that at least they had the freedom of choosing another school.
“Why do you think Dickens wrote that book? There’s that young fellow, Pip, he’s an orphan, hardly a penny. He gets involved with these rich folks. And then he gets this inheritance. He acts like he was never poor, wants nothing to do with the people and places he came from. Even the family that was good to him. I don’t understand how people can do that.” She slapped John on the thigh. “You’ve never tried to forget where you came from. Not like my daughter. So much of her life spent putting distance between herself and her roots. Not healthy. Where would all the plants be if they gave up their roots?”
“Dead, I expect,” John said.
“Exactly. Do you think it’s stupid of me, that I keep reading the Dickens book?”
“People read the Bible over and over, don’t they? And if you get something from it, what does it matter?”
Elinor nodded. “I suppose. But the Bible’s different from a storybook, a novel.” She unbuttoned her sweater, stood up, and they continued on the path.
“I wouldn’t say this to my students, but they’re both stories, aren’t they? Stories about people getting themselves into messes — jealousy, fear, greed, love, and lust. Theft and killing, too. And sometimes there is justice and resolution.”
“I wonder why I keep reading the thing.” She stopped walking, ran her tongue over her lips, then turned to John. “I’ve felt like an orphan, homeless in a way. Lots of our people feel that way. I guess Pip gives me hope. He strayed a long way away, but he finally came home. That’s it. It’s the coming home.”
When they reached the car, John asked if she had enough energy to go to her house. Without hesitation, she said yes.
As soon as they were out of the city, beneath the canopy of the prairie sky, the flat expanse of the land all around her, she sighed, knowing that was what she had needed. She thought she might weep when the road dipped into the valley, and she saw its tawny, soft
flanks, the curve of the dark river at its base. They drove along the valley floor, past the garden centre, the white chip wagon, past black cattle grazing, a couple of abandoned sheds, rusted green and red chunks of farm machinery. They crossed over a bridge of wooden planks that spanned a marsh, then through a village of a few houses, a hotel, bakery, and Co-op store. Another ten minutes and they pulled into her driveway. She’d not been to her house since the incident that had landed her in hospital. It wasn’t much, the turquoise cottage with porch across the front, outhouse behind, and garden plot that had been totally taken over by weeds. At least the windows were all intact and it seemed no one had bothered the place.
They strolled through the property, stopping from time to time for Elinor to contemplate the tiny berries that had just set on the saskatoon bush, the rusted shovel that had been left out all winter, a six-inch hole dug near the corner of the house — a badger’s work, she suspected. She laughed as she stood outside the fence of the garden area. The fence did nothing to fend off the weeds, which were easily a foot and a half high. She squatted and tugged at a few of them with little success. John asked if she had any seeds in the house. She said she wasn’t sure. John continued to pull weeds while Elinor rested in her wicker chair, sucking in the scent of the earth, basking in the sun like a snake on a rock.
“Look at this,” John said.
“What is it?”
“Tulips.” In the area that he’d cleared of weeds, a couple of tulip plants had sprouted.
“The ones Alice and I planted last fall. Victoria will enjoy those. She’s a gardener, it seems. In the photograph, she’s holding roses and clippers. Never cared for roses myself. They need too much attention and you can’t eat them. And they’re not too happy about you cutting them, either, all those thorns.”
John suggested they go inside. Elinor told him the spare key was beneath the porch to the left of the top step. She shuffled behind him, the tall grasses and weeds rustling against her skirt and socks.
John pulled open the screen door then wiggled the key into place.
Elinor stepped inside. Alice had taken some of her things to Louise’s, so everything was not exactly as she’d left it. Her lumpy navy blue couch with blankets and squishy pillows remained, as did the little pine table covered with magazines, ashtray, arrowheads, and dried tiger lily flowers near the window. She snatched up her box of roll-your-owns. Still six inside, now crisp as late-summer grass. Such a waste. The kitchen counters were covered in mouse droppings. She pulled open a drawer and found a bundle of straw, strips of cloth, shells and husks of seeds and nuts: a mouse’s home for the winter months.
John opened windows and propped open the door. He found the broom and swept the kitchen. Elinor chuckled to herself; she had so rarely swept, even when she was living in the house. She wandered down the hall to her bedroom. Alice must have made up the bed, something she, Elinor, rarely did.
She went to her trunk. If something had happened to the trunk, she wouldn’t have the photograph, and finding her child might never have gotten off the ground. She thanked the Creator for that. She’d wondered who had slipped the photograph into her little cupboard, the one thing in that whole school, except for her bed, that she thought of as her own. It wasn’t, of course. Everything in that school belonged to the church. Even the children. They were like a bunch of ants living in a colony, crawling over one another. Ants probably had more sense of direction and purpose than any of the children in that school.
She sat on the edge of the bed and sniffled.
Bright Eyes was the only good that came out of that school.
She rolled onto the bed and closed her eyes. The swish, swish of the broom scratching over the floors washed over her. Like the little waves on the lake in the early morning, before the wind got up and set them churning and frothing. She slipped into the dream world, back to the time when she and Swift Eyes were sweeping the floors at the school. In the dream their brooms were huge; they grew larger with each sweep. They swept through doors, walls, and windows, sent stoves, desks, and chairs from their rooms. Lights, frying pans and pots, beds and outhouses went flying. Socks and aprons, sheets and towels, potatoes, onions, and carrots. Nothing was spared. Not even the nuns and priests. They were swept onto the prairies, far into the distance, back, back into another time.
The light was thin. The window in her bedroom was covered by saskatoon berry bushes that had grown as high as her house.
She didn’t know how long she slept. She knew she had dreamt but remembered very little of it. She figured it must have been a good dream because she felt happy and rested. She didn’t get up. Eventually, John came to check on her and she pointed at her trunk, said she wanted to get into it.
John pushed back the lid. Elinor pulled out sweaters and socks, blankets and hats. When she got to Joseph’s old jean jacket with the hawk embroidered on the shoulder and his ochre deerskin vest with panels of red, yellow, and blue beading, she stopped. She clung on to the garments, brought them to her nose. She smiled and chuckled, said she had never had them cleaned and she could still smell Joseph on them. Although she had tossed the other items into a pile on the bed, Joseph’s clothes she laid carefully and separately away from the others.
“Is there something in particular you’re looking for?”
“Moccasins,” Elinor said. “My mother’s.” She asked John to search; the trunk was too deep for her to reach to the bottom.
John pulled out more blankets and sweaters, pillows, a drum, a pair of snowshoes, and laid them on the bed. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up two narrow boards with leather strapping across them.
“Tihkinâkan. A cradle board. I carried Louise in that. She hated the thing. Never liked to be tied down.” She laughed. “I suppose I should have taken that as a clue.”
John kneeled at the trunk and dug down to the bottom. “Are these them?” he asked. He held up a pair of flattened, stiff brown moccasins. The soles were black; only a few beads remained on the uppers. They gave off a distinctly smoky smell. Elinor took them from him, cradled the moccasins in the palms of her hands.
“It’s all I have of her. Still Like Stone. That was my mother’s name. She was so calm, so steady in all ways. Sometimes I wish I was more like her. She was a healer. Whenever one of the children got hurt, one of the elders was sick, my mother was called to them. Sometimes I’d go with her. People were calmer after my mother had been with them. A few days later, they’d say the pain was gone, they could walk better, their faces had a smile on them.”
She turned one of the moccasins over, stroked her finger the length of the black bottom. “Oh my … the stories these slippers could tell, the places they have been. I want these for Victoria so that she can know of her roots.” She turned to John. “When will she come? Any news?”
“I expect it will be any day now. As soon as tomorrow, maybe.”
Elinor grinned and nodded. “Not any too soon.”
35
A plane, loud, low in the sky, passed over the house as Elinor sat in the garden mid morning. The drone of the plane faded, replaced by children’s voices, giggling and calling from the neighbour’s yard. Such fresh sounds, like the sparkle of rushing water in springtime, like the joy when she first held Bright Eyes. A joy that was soon eclipsed by fear because her mother and aunties were not there to help her. Naively, oh so naively, she’d hoped and believed that Man Face would replace her own mother in that moment when she took the child, said she’d wash and clothe her. And the lies Elinor had been given for hours and days after that. That the birth needed to be registered … that they must make sure Bright Eyes was healthy … that they had to bathe her, get all the mucus and blood from her so she could breathe better. On and on it went. When finally Elinor knew her baby was not coming back to her, she didn’t know she was able to be so angry.
For the first few days she refused to eat or get out of bed, saying her stomach ached, saying she was sore down there. That worked for a while, and t
he nuns and teachers let her alone. The young nun even brought her a piece of toffee, trying to entice her to eat, but Elinor refused. She tucked the candy away for another time. At night her friends brought her a hunk of bread, a piece of potato. As soon as the lights went out she’d whisper with them, hoping they had seen the baby, that they’d found out where she had gone.
But there was no news of her child. It was as if Elinor had never given birth.
A couple of her friends were bold. They asked the nuns where Elinor’s baby had been taken. The nuns said there had been no baby; they should stop with their stories. Some got the strap, one swat for every time they said the word baby. A few weeks after she gave birth, Elinor dreamt of her father. Tall and straight, hair to his shoulders, he was standing at the edge of their camp, the circle of tipis behind him. He was watching a hawk circling and circling, plunging to the ground then rising up with a gopher in its talons. In the dream Elinor was young, four or five years old, she’d not yet been taken to that school. She wept for the gopher hanging limp in the bird’s claws. Her father told her it was the way of the world. There were the strong and the not so strong. Even so, the gopher had its own strength. There were many more gophers than hawks, and they were skilled at tunnelling into the earth, hiding away from those who might hunt them.
The morning after the dream, Elinor woke early, before the others. In the dim morning light, she sat on the edge of her bed, looking over that room. Thirty or forty cots, every one the same, each with one pillow, each with one thick black or grey blanket. But no two girls were the same, even though the nuns strived for that. On her right, Mary Kathleen, her long arms flung off the bed, whimpered and jerked; she did that most nights. On Elinor’s left, Helen slept curled in a ball, like a dog, at the foot of her bed. When Helen first came to the school she cried herself to sleep every night. The crying stopped when Elinor invited her to come into her bed. Elinor was happy to have Helen in her bed but the nuns soon put a stop to it.
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