by Tom Wilson
We drive through the mountains on treacherous roads, like grey ribbons that run around the waist of giant snow-covered beasts, and out across the desert no man’s lands. There are a million spirits out there tugging at the steering wheel; they want us to crash and join them for eternity, but Thompson’s wits are too sharp and his heart is too pure to be dragged in by their tricks.
Nighttime, lost in America, where we charge out in the darkness past the drunk drivers that killed Johnny Horton and Clarence White. We keep going, feeling the legends of the land all around us, visiting the shrines and looking for the nails that were used to hang our heroes to their crosses. This is the road we read about, and it ends at the Joshua Tree Motor Inn. The holy land.
The Joshua Tree Inn is like getting to drive around in the car that Hank Williams died in, and sure there’s some sicko tourist curiosity and shallowness that goes along with the thought of what happened there, but deep down we’ve known all along that we had to come to the place where we belong.
The silence is like no silence I have experienced in my life. It comes on and rolls over me with a slow, hot breeze that has travelled a thousand miles over three states of desert, collecting the whispers of Indians and the heat of Mother Earth’s breath to finally reach me. I light up a smoke, stand up on the roof of the truck and look out over the giant.
The desert embraces me like no other landscape anywhere in the world. I fill my lungs with the burning air, let go, and we drive back to town to our motel. Once we’re there we are surrounded by a quiet, peaceful retreat from our usual grind of Holiday Inns and dressing rooms. We eat the remaining weed cookies we bought up in Denver and go swimming in the ancient concrete pool outside our motel room door and take a short walk over the meditation sand and past the erected shrine for Gram Parsons.
Thompson drinks cans of beer and we play guitar in the desert night.
The sky is lit up like a line of poetry.
These are precious moments for sure.
Somewhere out there in wild America we have finally found the peace and love we’ve always heard about.
THE LONG ROAD HOME
I am flying on the speed of my dreams. Heading down the 401 towards the Quebec border, I am on my way to meet my sisters, Lynn and Tracy, for the first time. The saliva in my mouth is thick like motor oil as I sit in the back seat of the car, nervous, practising my smile in the rear-view mirror.
I am on my way to the mystical land of my missing family. Kahnawake, the patch of land that lies beneath the Mercier Bridge, the home of my mother and father and my ancestors. The land of shape-shifters, corn bread and steak, ironworkers and all the legends that came to life in stories and gossip around our kitchen table when I was a kid.
I stare in the rear-view mirror and slowly, silently mouth the words “I am a Mohawk.” I repeat it over and over again like a quiet prayer. Saying it will make it real. A faith I am trying to believe in. The car rolls on.
I am nervous and excited and I have brought the two closest people to me on earth along for the ride. Actually, they are bringing me. I am the guy sitting in the back seat, after all. Thompson is behind the wheel and Madeline is in the passenger seat. These two have stuck by me, pulled me out of the ditch, dusted me off and saved my life with their true loving hearts many times over.
They never lost faith in me. I wrecked the family and they crawled out from the wreckage and hung on tight. Now they’re behind the wheel, steering me down the road on the next ride. They are warriors. They are my heart. Because of them I haven’t been hardened by this life. I don’t have to question who I am. I live every moment with them and for them. They’ve given me the greatest gift. Awareness.
As we turn off the highway and onto the reserve, the world changes. Not in a way that would impress or shock you. It’s not like the trees and the sky change. But inside my chest I can feel the difference, as if I am visiting a life I’ve lived before. A flash of emotion, a shift in the light and the warmth of home.
The reserve is all around us now. There is no turning back. We drive past the golf course, tobacco stores and stands, craft stores and the graveyard into the heart of the town.
I look out between the front seats, out through the windshield, and a fog I’ve been in my entire life begins to lift. I know this place. I dreamt myself here as a kid. Dreams that were fantastic. Dreams that took me to times and places that I knew were real.
I’d cruise the Saint Lawrence Seaway and come swooping down these roads on John Lazare’s back. My grandfather, sturdy and sure of himself, not a word spoken but I could hear him singing as he carried me. I’d climb off his back and walk through the deepest blues and greens of graveyards and step into the black shadows cast by the great bridge. In my dreams I was safe, surrounded by the ghosts of my ancestors.
Still, I’m a Hamilton guy. I spent Christmases in Kahnawake as a kid and watched lacrosse games on the Six Nations reserve but I haven’t really seen how people live on a reserve. I do remember John Lazare. He was an elected chief, an important man, and he lived in a small house and was considered well off. When I was talking on the phone with my half-sister Lynn Beauvais, I had no idea what kind of life she was living. How could I know or assume anything? It was a blind spot in my mirror and that was the problem. For all intents and purposes I am an ignorant white man.
By the time our car pulls into town and hits the centre road, Lynn is on the phone asking where we are, what is taking us so long. She’s already bossing me around, acting like an older sister. I tell her we are on the reserve and heading her way. She tells me to look for the old stone building and that she and Tracy will be sitting on the front porch waiting.
Sure enough, as we round the corner and turn up the church road we can see the house. A massive old building that looks like it has been brought back to its original glory from three hundred years ago. Lynn lives there in the beautiful stone heritage building that was built by the French army in about 1735, well before the Mohawks were ushered onto the land surrounding it known as Kahnawake. It has been the centre of government business and acted as a court house and post office, was the only building with a phone, and it acted as a kind of morgue for the thirty-three men who died in the 1907 Quebec bridge disaster. The place looks like it is filled with spirits and time travellers and my sister is running the whole show.
Thompson pulls onto the paved driveway that leads into a three-car garage. We step out of the car and into a rush of mid-afternoon summer heat. Leaving the air-conditioned car is like stepping out of an oxygen tent. Everything slows down to a crawl. I round the corner of the house and walk towards the front porch, and there are Lynn and Tracy. My sisters. I don’t know which one is which.
They are both about my age with beautiful round faces and eyes full of life and excitement. “Hey little bro.” I recognize the voice from the phone calls. This is Lynn. Her voice is full and direct and has a distinct Kahnawake accent. She stands up out of her chair and greets me. Tracy is smiling bright and wide behind Lynn. She moves to greet me and it almost looks like she is climbing off Lynn’s back to do so.
Tracy I know is more soft spoken and she speaks English without an accent. She is almost laughing at the moment. We all are pretty pleased with ourselves, I must say. I introduce Madeline and Thompson. They are bursting with smiles too. This is one happy bunch of Indians, I think.
Lynn leads us inside the house. It is perfect, immaculate. The front double doors open into a grand entrance hall, all ancient wood from thousand-year-old trees. Wood that came from a land that had not been touched by European hands. It looks like a museum. The staircase leading up to the balcony on the second level must be fifteen feet wide.
The ceilings are twenty feet high and everything is manicured and shining bright. I laugh out loud as I follow Lynn across the 250-year-old hardwood floors. I call out behind her, “Hey Lynn, you’re like the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Kahnawake.”
We all step though the kitchen and out to the back deck. The yard is bea
utiful. Perfectly landscaped and in the middle is a giant heated salt-water swimming pool. Lynn digs into a cooler and pulls out four beers and a can of Coke for me. We sit around a large round patio table drinking, smoking cigarettes and smiling at one another.
Lynn tells me I look like our dad. My eyes and my brow line are just like his. Then she orders me to show her my feet. All the Beauvais men, it seems, have the same-shaped feet and a bump sticking out of their ankles. I pull my boots off and my socks and put a foot up on the table. “Oh yeah, oh yeah, there it is, that’s the Beauvais foot for sure.”
When she gets excited her voice rises into spikes of falsetto and her early Flatbush roots come out. She immediately sounds like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. Lynn does all the talking but Tracy does plenty of quiet investigating from across the table. She smiles the entire time. There’s a joy busting out of Tracy.
The conversation slips and dips in and out of Beauvais history. The kids talk about growing up with me and their mom. We all reveal a bit of what we’ve been up to and missing out on for a lifetime, but we speak as if we’ve just been away on a weekend getaway, or a short vacation. “Boy is it good to be back home and you’ll never guess what happened and who was there etc. etc….”
Everything is just as normal as can be.
Lynn does say that she wants to keep my visit a secret from her other brothers and sisters—Thea, Leslie, Ann Marie, Chris and Kyle. Louis Beauvais had six kids with his wife. Then there are me and Tracy who’ve been floating out there in the world. We’re all the products of Louis Beauvais’s good looks and charming personality. Lynn and the family have proof of me and Tracy through DNA results and the good old Beauvais foot test, but are there others? Nobody knows for sure. Our father may have been a big, handsome, lovable playboy, but that isn’t something the family wants to talk about. And they certainly don’t want to be confronted with living proof of it. No siree.
Lynn remembers meeting Tracy when they were still little girls. From time to time, Louis would take Lynn along on his dates at the golf course. It may have been on one of those occasions that Tracy’s mother, Tracy, Louis and Lynn all came face to face. Apparently when Tracy and Lynn made contact again a few years back and Lynn announced it to her siblings, the news did not go over well.
Lynn wants to keep our visit on the downlow. None of the family is to know anything about it. “Sure thing,” I tell her.
Lynn shifts her attention over to Thompson. I can see her staring at the side of his head, squinting like she is looking into the sun. She says out loud, “Oh my god, Thompson, you look just like Tehoriwathe.”
Tehoriwathe is the son of my brother Kyle. If there was any doubt concerning me, any lack of faith they may have had in their “foot test,” any second thoughts about whether I am in fact their brother, their blood, it’s Thompson who wipes all that away.
Now, even though I am meant to be kept under wraps, Lynn just can’t control herself. She needs to see Thompson and Tehoriwathe standing side by side. “Who wants pizza?” She gets on the phone and orders up some pie. She sits back down and says, “Let’s have some fun.” Half an hour later the pizza is delivered by someone who truly could be Thompson’s twin, Tehoriwathe. It seems it is not just our feet that we Beauvais men have in common.
From what I can gather, Lynn was very close with our father. “Our Father who art in heaven,” Lynn loves to joke. She knows how to dish it out, and she knows how to take it. She is the eldest in the family, and that includes Louis’s illegitimate offspring, Tracy and me. The way Lynn talks about our father now, after all these years, there was obviously some blood-on-blood magic that trumped any wrongs they did to each other.
Lynn has the same fondness in her eyes and softness in her voice when she talks about our brothers Christopher and Kyle. The brothers are a couple of lady-killers. Big, strong ironworkers all their lives. Lynn loves to talk about the projects they’re working on. It’s ironwork talk. It’s all about pride and pain and money and the bonding that goes on between workers and families. Lynn speaks the same way generations of women have spoken and the way future generations will speak about the ironworkers.
“Your brother Christopher. He’s on a big job in New York. You ought to see what they’re working on. It’s the same concept as Rockefeller Center. Different buildings, shopping centre, one called the shed,” and she angles her hands in front of her and explains that one building goes like this and the other one opens up over the train tracks and the roof opens and the walls lift and it’s a performing arts centre. “The cultural shed. The Hudson Yards. It’s going to be beautiful. It’s a big job. Right down on the Hudson River in Manhattan. And Kyle is working on this thing they call the beehive. The plans for it just came out last week. It’s going to be amazing. The centrepiece.”
On 9/11, when the World Trade Center came down, my brother Kyle was on the front lines of the rescue and recovery efforts. He was in the first wave of responders to jump into the wreckage looking for survivors and removing remains from what was left of the towers that my uncle Walter and five hundred other Mohawks had built in the sky over Manhattan. Walter had worked ten years on that project, and with great pride had raised the antenna. Kyle walked through Ground Zero, climbing over mountains of twisted iron and steel. The world was on fire, unpredictable, dangerous. He and two hundred Mohawks moved those mountains so the firefighters could get underneath and do their job. Kyle was pulling some wreckage away and came upon a giant piece of steel that he thought was a rocket. It was Uncle Walter’s antenna.
When Kyle finally got a break, he went home to Kahnawake. He washed and cleansed himself with tobacco water because parts of all those people who died there were inside his system. He said that the ritual was part of his responsibility to the people who had died there. Those lost souls are carried on by the Mohawk ironworkers.
Most ironworkers who have given up the game and got themselves into the new/old profitable cigarette business still say they miss “the job.” They don’t miss the travelling but they miss the work. Go ahead and ask one of them, “Do you miss the ironwork?”
The answer comes back a quick, simple and matter-of-fact, “Yup.”
There’s constant talk around my sister’s kitchen about the old days, crimes, characters and misconducts. Sharp minds, spinning wheels, rapid-fire humour, counterpoints, turning corners and bending the truth. The conversation is fantastic. You can drift out of the talk and come back in at any time and still get an earful of action. Small-town chatter. Community talk, everyone knows everybody, this person is related to that person and my cousin and this one and distant relatives and outcasts and arguments back and forth about facts and figures that have packed up, left town and disappeared into the mist over the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
As I walk around the reserve, I come face to face with some of the old-timers who lived and fought through the summer of 1990. It’s not easy to get them to share their secrets from the woods and the front lines. Many used to be in Canadian Army Reserve, and some were Vietnam vets. They didn’t want to see anyone die and pitied some of those young kids that the army had put in the front lines. For the town of Oka it was all over a goddamn golf course. For the Mohawks it was about plowing over graves and digging up the bones of their ancestors. For the Mohawks, it was about survival. That was the whole Oka Crisis. That’s what started it. And the moaning and tears brought on a river of anger, and the anger would bring the SQ (the Quebec provincial police) and the Canadian army and a hatred that had been hidden in plain sight.
The first causality on July 11, 1990, was my nephew Logan, my sister Lynn’s little boy. He was riding his bike with no shoes, and Lynn kept yelling out across her front lawn, “Logan, put your bloody shoes on right now!” No sooner had the words left her mouth than Logan’s toe slipped through the sprocket and right through the chain. He screamed and looked at his foot and saw that his toe was hanging by a thread of skin.
Lynn ran out and wrapped his foot in a towel. Bloo
d soaked though the towel so fast that she wanted to panic, but she kept her cool. There was no time to call an ambulance, so Lynn’s husband, Kenny, put Logan in their car and drove him to the fire station, where they put him in their ambulance and took him to the children’s hospital. Three hours later Logan’s toe was stitched back on, and Kenny and Logan were in a taxi leaving the hospital.
But the taxi would not go anywhere near the reserve. That day, after weeks of playing cat and mouse with the Mohawk warriors, the army had stationed troops right where the smoke stores were, arming them with shields, batons and rifles. The warriors had cut two-by-fours, lined up and attacked the soldiers, chasing them until they reached the end of the reserve. French mobs had gathered and fires were burning and tempers were ready to burst the Saint Lawrence Seaway wide open. So the taxi left Logan and Kenny at the Mercier Bridge.
The bridge was blocked by the angry French mob. Logan was terrified. He was just three years old, and was so scared that he clung on to his father’s neck. Five police officers surrounded the boy and his father, refusing to let the two take the walkway on the Mercier Bridge back home. Kenny moved to step around them, but they blocked his way. Kenny got mad—he was big and tough and didn’t give a shit what happened to him. But Logan hung on to his father’s neck for dear life. Kenny came to his senses, put his anger aside and turned back.
When he looked towards the river, he saw somebody from the town silently signalling to Kenny like “Get in…Get in the boat.” They were trying to get people back home and away from the bridge and had seen Kenny and Logan blocked by the mob.