The Cast Stone

by Harold Johnson

  “It’s not that old. I helped your grandfather build it not long before they both passed away. Actually, we built it twice.”

  “Twice?” Benji turned to his father.

  “Yes,” Ben was flooded with memories so strong that he lost his words for a second. “Yes, we built it twice. You see, the old cabin, the first cabin was right here where this one stands. It was getting pretty rough and Dad decided to build another one. I wasn’t teaching during the summer so I came to help. We built another cabin just over there, and Mom and Dad lived in the old cabin while we built the new one. When we were done we moved Mom and all the furniture into the new cabin. The plan was to use the old cabin as a shed, someplace to keep Dad’s traps, and sleigh, and stuff.

  “But Mom didn’t like the new cabin. It was in the wrong place. It was only twenty feet, but it was in the wrong place. So they lived in a tent and me and Dad tore down the old cabin, tore down the new cabin, and put it back up where the old cabin was.”

  “I can understand that.” Rosie moved to keep Rachel from crawling off the blanket. “You get used to something and it’s hard to change.”

  “The only difference was the place. The new cabin was the exact same size and shape as the old cabin. Even the windows and door were in the same place. She just didn’t like where it was, not how it was.”

  “Place is important.”

  “I suppose.” Ben realized for the first time that it might be, as he watched Rosie in the exact spot where his mother used to sit, sitting exactly the way she sat with her legs tucked back beside her. “At the time though, I thought she was just being old and silly. That was a lot of work for Dad and me. He was almost eighty.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you helped,” Rosie placated. “A little work probably didn’t hurt.”

  “Oh, it hurt all right,” Ben remembered as he looked back at the heavy log wall.

  “Did you come here often?” Benji wanted to know.

  “Every summer from when I first went to university until they passed away. I haven’t been back here since.”

  “Every summer?” Rosie questioned. “Never saw you on the reserve.”

  “Never went there. I’d come out and stay here. Was no reason to go to the reserve.”

  “So how come you didn’t move here instead of building your place next to my mom?”

  “This is a hard place to live. No road, no electricity. Not bad in the summer, you can come by boat, or in the winter you can come by snow machine, or dog team the way Dad used to, but it’s not good in the spring and fall.”

  “Why’s that?” Benji came back from examining the construction of the cabin, how the logs fit together in the corners.

  “Because when the lake freezes you can’t use a boat, and you can’t walk on it until it’s thick enough. In the spring it’s the same thing. The ice gets rotten and you have to wait, sometimes it takes two or three weeks. Wasn’t bad when I went to school on the reserve — I got a holiday,”

  “Couldn’t you put a road in?” Benji was thinking construction.

  “Too much muskeg, we’re kind of on an island here. The lake on one side, but behind here — ” Ben waved a wide sweep toward the east — “it’s all muskeg. No way to get across. Anyway it would ruin it.” He liked this place just the way it was.

  Mice dirtied the floor of the cabin, dragged in litter, chewed the mattress and spread out the cotton lining. Squirrels made much more of a mess. They dropped the leftovers of their meals in piles, chewed holes through the walls, widened gaps between the logs. Birds took advantage of the squirrel holes, moved in and built their nests mudded to the pole rafters. One large nest hung from the ridgepole, the log that Ben and his father struggled to put into place. The south-facing windows were stained with years of dust and grime so that the light took on an orange hue where it fell on the floor, adding to the abandoned feel of the cabin.

  “They’re taking back their land.” Elsie spoke philosophically as she followed Ben inside.

  “Yeah, Mom would see it that way too. But in her lifetime that floor would shine.”

  Benji examined a calendar hung from a nail, February 2001. The picture was of a 1962 Oldsmobile coupe, the one that had the unique wrap-around windows, bright green and enamel white.

  “Nobody’s been here in awhile.” He voiced the obvious.

  “It’s isolated.” Ben moved to look over Benji’s shoulder, looked for February 10th. The day they found his father, found him sitting under a tree only a half day’s walk up the trapline. “He must have got tired,” his mother had said, and before the snow melted that spring she got tired too and they buried her beside Dad.

  “This would be a great place for a still.” Benji sized up the cabin, measured its cubic feet, considered its isolation, the spread of the pines, and the solidity of its structure.

  “Over my dead body.” Ben was firm.

  “Oh, I don’t mean for drinking.” Benji realized his gaff. “I mean ethanol, for fuel.”

  “Not even ethanol.” Ben remained firm. He felt ghosts stirring, an uncomfortable stir.

  “Come on, Ben.” Benji wanted to say ‘Dad’, but wasn’t sure how his father felt about that yet. “Think about the money you could save. That truck of yours must suck up a lot of cash in a year. Maybe even burn it in your boat.”

  “No, I agree with your dad.” Elsie too felt the ghosts. “Not here.” She saw the homemade curtains, saw through their raggedness, saw the wood cook stove with its stovepipe still going through the ceiling instead of tumbling behind, saw a place where a woman once cooked and baked.

  “What’s with him?” Rosie asked Elsie. She had caught a look on Ben’s face as he came out of the cabin and headed toward the old garden area, a slightly pained look.

  “Nothing.” Elsie now looked bewildered. She had not seen anything.

  “What were you guys talking about in there?”

  “Nothing much. Benji was imagining using this place as a site to set up a still, but Ben wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I guess not.” Rosie sat up slightly, looked away from Rachel who lay on her back and kicked and waved and tried to talk through a voice that could only coo and bah. “Alcohol was what killed us. They didn’t beat us in war, they used booze to take everything away from us and then used it to keep us down.”

  “I know, you’ve always said that. But what’s Ben’s reason?”

  “He learned it the same place that I did. Right here in this cabin. Our trapline and the Robe trapline come together right there at the first point on the lake. I used to come over here to visit with Eleanor, listen to her stories, learn her beadwork patterns; she’s the one that hated alcohol the most. I think old Adolphus might not have been so dead set as his wife was. He was easier going. Well not easy going I guess, more quiet in his ways. He didn’t talk much, usually just stood there and smiled a lot, at peace kind of.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Oh, I was young, before I got married and started having kids. After I met your dad I never did come back here. But I remember all her stories, and I’m pretty sure Ben does too.”

  “What kind of stories?” Elsie probed. Stories were always good. She stretched out on the quilt and played with Rachel’s bare foot, tickled it to see her wriggle and laugh.

  “Old time stories, how they used to live. Stories about the Treaty, lots of stories about the Treaty, kind of like she wanted someone to remember that.”

  Benji now stood just off the blanket where the three females sat or lay, listening, so Rosie helped to fill him in, gave him something he could use without ever looking directly at him.

  “Treaty was signed just up at the end of the lake there where the river begins, 1889. She said it was in winter and all the Indians were there when the treaty commissioner and the police came by dog team from the south.”

  “Eleanor wasn’t there.” Elsie calculated years to 1889.

  “No, she was old even when I knew her, but not th
at old. She heard the stories from her dad, he was there. You see, Eleanor was the youngest of her family, the baby. Her dad was already an old man when she was born, so she was raised special. She stayed home with her parents until they died.” Rosie added a little gossip, just a little, just for spice. “She was almost an old maid by the time she married Adolphus, and he was younger than her, not much just a few years, but still younger.” Elsie looked up at Benji, guessed that he might be younger than her, maybe.

  “Eleanor used to say that Treaty wasn’t what was written on the paper.” Rosie fell back to a more formal recitation for this part. “The commissioner promised we could live like before, then they forced us to live on the reserve, pulled us off the land. She didn’t like that. She said the reserve was supposed to be just a place where Indians could go if they wanted to go to school or learn to be farmers, but if the Indians wanted to stay in the bush they could.” Rosie let Rachel play with her dangling hand, let the little girl swat and pull at her fingers. She looked down at her granddaughter, away from Elsie and Benji, as though she was telling the story to a younger audience.

  “Her family came from further north along the Churchill River, moved down here because that area was getting trapped out. You see the Churchill used to be the first fur trade route, they trapped it out first. When there was nothing left, some of them moved into Chipewyan country. Eleanor thought that was why they don’t like us Cree very much. But her family came here, not just for the trapping I guess. I sort of got the sense she was telling me they moved here to get away from the missionaries, but she never came right out and said it.”

  “What was wrong with missionaries?” Benji wanted to know.

  “Nothing.” Rosie continued Eleanor’s conciliatory manner. She wasn’t going to say anything bad about anybody. “It’s just that Eleanor’s family was traditional, kept the old ways. I guess the Christians looked down on that sort of stuff.” She remembered why Benji was there and went back to the story she had begun with the purpose of giving him some sense of his lineage.

  “Let’s see if I remember this right. Her dad was Moise, that was his Christian name, the one he used when he signed at Treaty time. Everyone knew him as Wapos. Wapos had a brother they called Sikos and a sister Piso.”

  “Rabbit, Weasel and Lynx,” Elsie translated for Benji’s sake. “And Piso never married. Eleanor said she had six kids but was never seen with a man. She used to live by herself. Had her own dog team, did her own hunting, set fish nets by herself, everything.”

  “Where did she live?” Elsie couldn’t place her.

  “Everywhere. When she got tired of one spot she packed up and moved somewhere else, built a new cabin, planted a new garden, wherever her mood took her. The last place she lived was just past where the Treaty was signed, up the river a little. I remember visiting her. She wouldn’t speak a word of English, old Cree, a little hard for me to understand sometimes growing up on the reserve like I did. She was at Treaty signing too, had her own stories about it.”

  “You knew somebody who was at Treaty.” Benji spoke slow, unbelieving.

  “Yeah, a few. Are you calling me old?”

  Benji fumbled. “No, no I didn’t mean it that way, the opposite in fact. I always thought the Treaties happened, like a really long time ago, you know. I can’t imagine anyone, not even my dad, who might have known someone who was actually there.”

  “Look around, the land hasn’t changed. In real time it was only yesterday that white people came here.”

  Benji had no means of grasping the enormity of Rosie’s statement. It was simply and completely beyond him. He changed the subject. “What about her kids, that Piso woman, what became of them?”

  “Some of them are still around, not many though. Philip Charles would be her, let’s see . . .” Rosie consulted her inner genealogical chart. “Philip would be her great-grandson.”

  “Is that the guy who walks everywhere, the one people call Traveller.” Elsie tried to connect the name from the chart to a person.

  “Yeah, that’s him. Just like his great-grandmother, too free a spirit to ever settle down.”

  “What’ja doin’?” Rosie asked as she came up to Ben.

  Finally separated herself from that baby, he noticed. “Oh, just looking over the old garden,” He pointed with his toe at the long wide leaves growing up through the grass. “Hey, check this out. The horseradish is still here.”

  “Horseradish.” She made a sour face.

  “Yeah, Dad really liked it. Mom wasn’t much for it. He ate it on almost everything, ground it up and mixed it with a little vinegar.”

  “To each their own, I guess.” The sourness was still on her face. “Looks like the catnip survived.” She was over near one of the remaining corner posts, the one that still held a pole rail angled down to where another post had rotted and fallen over. She knelt beside the pale-coloured bush, plucked a single leaf and gently nibbled on it to draw out the mint flavour as though to remove the taste of horseradish.

  Ben responded with a slow “Oh yeah.” He remembered catnip. Remembered a cup of tea, a blend of catnip and muskeg leaves that drained away any residue of stress a day might leave on a body. “Mom would be happy to know that was still here.” He too plucked a leaf to nibble on. The mild mint taste brought back other memories. “Dad used this to bait lynx. Worked like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I believe it.” Rosie closed her eyes for a few seconds while her mouth moved ever so slowly, alone with her spit and her tongue and the roof of her mouth and the sweet mint. “Oh, so nice, so nice.” She opened her eyes. “You were lucky to have them as parents.”

  “Dad, was more the potato gardener. Had a bigger garden down there a ways.” He pointed east. “For potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, that sort of stuff. Mom took care of this one closer to the house. Used to be flowers all along that fence line.” He half turned toward where Benji, Elsie, and Rachel were approaching. “I wonder.” He remembered something. “I wonder if the raspberries survived.”

  They had. Large ripe berries weighed down thick thorny branches. “So, why did they grow raspberries?” Elsie asked around a mouthful, crunched tiny seeds with her back teeth. “Instead of picking wild ones? They grow everywhere.”

  “Why walk.” Ben answered as he plopped a single dark, thoroughly ripe berry into his mouth, and another. “Raspberries don’t take any looking after.”

  “I remember years when there weren’t any wild berries.” Rosie stood waist deep in the bramble, held Rachel high on her hip, held up a berry for the little girl to grasp in her fist and mush into her mouth. “Just makes sense to have a patch you can look after, especially in dry years.”

  “Self-sufficient.” Benji ate a handful at a time, picked until there wasn’t any room left in his cupped palm before filling his mouth and himself with tart sweetness.

  “No, they didn’t go to town for very much.” Ben looked around. The rabbit pens looked to still be in relatively good shape, the chicken wire stretched across the doors might need a few staples to keep out weasels, maybe replace a few rotted floorboards. The asphalt-shingled roof had done what it was intended to and protected the low pens from the weather. He remembered rabbit soup, potatoes, onions, thickened with flour, lots of salt and pepper. They could have gone out and snared rabbits instead of hauling in feed every autumn, but why walk. The work of cleaning out the pens rewarded them with manure for the gardens to grow the vegetable leftovers that helped feed the rabbits. A good cycle.

  Monica felt a tinge of jealousy, not toward Rosie for being out with Ben, not even toward young and pretty Elsie. It was the sight of Ben and Benji each with a hand on opposite sides of the bow of the boat, pulling it up onto the shore, working together. She’d had less than half of an uncomfortable day with her son, and here he was, working beside his dad as though they had known each other all their lives. She had not even acknowledged to Benji that his father was Ben Robe of Moccasin Lake. He must have researched that for himsel
f, not that it would have taken much. How many professors named Ben would have taught political studies . . . ? Internet searching could provide present addresses. The thought bothered her deeper. If Benji could find Ben with the little information he had, so could Homeland Security if Abe gave him up.

  “Hey, guys.” She hid her anxiety and grabbed the bow of the boat to help. But the boat was as far up the beach as it was going by the time she got there.

  Hershel Rosche arrived not long after the Second World War on a shiny new diesel train. He liked Prince Albert, a young city, a city that would grow, become something. It had potential. He liked the wide sweeping North Saskatchewan River, liked the architecture of the hotel on Central Avenue, and Indians, the first he had seen since his arrival in Canada, there on River Street, going into a fur buyer’s store. Hershel followed them in. He carried a small heavy leather case that he occasionally shifted from hand to hand, but never put down. He walked around the tiny store, pretended he was looking at the scarce merchandise, the six used rifles leaning against the wall, the bins of blue steel spring traps, and the coils of snare wire. He was there to see real Indians. He listened in while the Indian negotiated in his own gentle fashion. Both parties to the negotiation knew that there were other fur buyers and that some of them were only a short block up the street.

  Hershel watched the Indian shake out a lynx pelt, hold it out at shoulder height and look down at where it touched the plank floor. Without words, he told the fur buyer. This is a large lynx, not a medium, it’s worth more.

  The buyer stood behind the counter, sifted pelts, not looking at them anymore, just moving them to keep his hands busy. “Tell you what. I like you, Adolphus; you’re a good customer. Fifty dollars for the whole pile. What do you say?”

  Adolphus didn’t answer, he touched the pelts, moved a mink, shiny black over toward his left, sorted through the pile for another, slightly larger mink, and placed it beside the first. He might have been sorting out the pelts by species, but he might have begun to package them up.