by Alix Hawley
He limps outside to look. I stay in the doorway, watching her walk slowly up the slope. She is in middle life, with some white in the plaits that hang below her headscarf, and heavy lines beneath her eyes. Her forehead is set in an arrow-shaped frown, like the mark some babies have when they are born. When she sees all of us looking, she gives a short nod, and says:
—How do.
Daniel has stopped dead, staring. She stares back, her skirts jingling slightly in the breeze. She covers her mouth, and her severe face shifts. She points at his bandaged hand and says:
—Sheltowee. Always hurt.
Her English is quiet. He says very low:
—I know you. Pimmepessy.
—Ah!
They clutch at one another, weeping and smiling, babbling nonsense and soft words.
I go indoors. I slice a cake and bread and butter, and fetch cups for coffee and rum. I do not know what to offer. But I take all of it outside and leave it on the porch. They are still holding each other in the yard, even with Daniel’s poor hand, talking and pointing and laughing at how old they are.
* * *
When it is night, and Daniel has not yet come back inside, Jemima comes to me where I am knitting in bed. The woman would not stay, she says.
—Well then.
She sits on the bed and tells me it was Daniel’s Shawnee sister, who lived with him in the Indian town years ago when he was taken. She was only a little girl then, but she remembered him, and had heard of him over the years, like everyone else. He had played games with her and another sister in their bark house, he had taught them some English.
I drop a stitch, and I say:
—Well.
Jemima jabs me with her elbow:
—I know you want to ask him things, Ma.
—No, I do not.
—Well I will tell you anyhow. His Indian father and mother are dead, and the younger sister lives somewhere else up the Ohio and has dozens of children. And his wife—
—Jemima, do not—
—His wife is somewhere else too, the woman did not know where. Gone in a raid with her little girl when everything was going to pieces. She could not think of her name, but she remembered the girl. Said she was good with an arrow, got turkeys every time she tried. Clever, like Daddy.
—He was not her daddy.
Jemima takes a pull on the pipe she has taken up using. I quiet myself. I do not know how much she knows. I say:
—Why you must smoke that thing, sweet, I do not know.
—Because I like it.
She kisses me and goes down to her children. And now I am ready to tell what she told me, the last thing—
When Daniel went again and again to Israel’s grave, and other times when he went off, he was calling up ghosts, which did not come. He had sent them away for too long, he did not listen to them well enough, and none of them came anymore. He could not explain himself to them now, and he was sorry for that. So he said to Jemima those nights at the station when he wept and wept outside. What would it take to make them come back? Blood? Food? Air? The right words, the right song? He had no answer. He had thought they were powerful, but they are helpless. More helpless than we are.
So he thought.
When I am gone, Daniel, I will come back—
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My brilliant editor, Anne Collins, the team at Penguin Random House Canada, and copy editor Tilman Lewis. My indefatigable agent, Denise Bukowski, and her staff.
Novelist friends Corinna Chong and Adam Lewis Schroeder for reading the draft, and Mary Ellen Holland for unfailing enthusiasm. Many other friends and readers for thoughts, questions, and interest.
Okanagan College and University of British Columbia Okanagan. The Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, CBC Books, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
My family: Peter, Jocelyn, José, Carolyn, Dan, Laura, Jon, Marcela. And to Mike, Theo, and Kate, who have shared me with the Boones for a while now, much gratitude and love.
ALIX HAWLEY studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University, the University of East Anglia, and the University of British Columbia. She published a story collection, The Old Familiar, which was longlisted for the ReLit award, with Thistledown Press in 2008. Several of her stories have won accolades from the CBC, and in 2017 “Witching” won the CBC Short Story Prize. Her first novel, All True Not a Lie in It, was published by Knopf Canada as its New Face of Fiction pick for 2015, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the BC Book Prize for Fiction.