by Donna Milner
“Wait!” The single mechanical sounding word, stops Julie in her tracks. Her hand drops from the door knob. Turning slowly to face Virgil she immediately recognizes the device he has taken from the drawer and pressed to his throat. She can see from his expression, the weariness about his eyes, that, like her father, he is loath to use the Electrolarynx. Yet the fact that he is willing to do so, is a testament to the urgency of whatever it is that has forced him to do so.
He removes the photograph that she was asking about from the wall and walks over to hand it to her. Accepting it warily, she studies the faces of the older couple, and the young woman with a baby on her hip. Her eyes dart back up to Virgil, just as he presses the voice box to his throat and his words crack the hollow silence.
“The boy needs you.”
And recognition of the smiling dimple-faced toddler dawns on her.
41
Virgil’s story
Virgil Blue is the Keeper of the Grandfather Rocks. An honour passed down from his uncle.
Yesterday, after his failed attempt to avoid today’s sweat lodge ceremony, Virgil brought the stones to his old friend on the banks of the Chilco River. Old Alphonse glanced up from the firepit he was tending when the pickup truck, tires crunching on gravel, came to a slow stop in the dying light of the day.
After the sacred stones were unloaded the two men sat before the orange glow of the growing fire, their lips unmoving as they spoke in a long forgotten language that needed no voice.
You come too late, my friend. I cannot heal you.
I come on behalf of the boy, to ask you to help me guide him on his vision quest.
I will take the journey with him.
I promised his mother I would be at his side.
It is not safe for you.
It is less so for the boy.
At any other time, preparing for a sweat, delivering the Grandfather Rocks, fire-tested and free from evil spirits within, would have been a time of celebration. A time to look inward, a time to heal. But Virgil fears his young cousin is too weakened by grief for this vision quest. Yet he knows the boy is determined, and he will attempt it on his own if Virgil refuses to guide him.
This morning the sun has not yet risen. Stars still shine between the clouds scudding across a moonless sky as he and the boy arrive on the riverbank. The sweat lodge is ready. Its willow frame is covered with a mixture of ragged-edged animal hides and colourful blankets. Barely taller than the five-foot-high domed structure, Old Alphonse works outside. A deerskin jacket hanging loose from his thin shoulders, he pushes a blunt-nose shovel into the firepit. With a strength that belies his years, he retrieves a large stone from the hot coals, turns slowly and then crouching low carries the searing hot rock through the flapped opening into the lodge.
He reappears from the darkened interior, and Virgil helps him transfer more stones inside. Then all three of them take armloads of wood from the pile next to the firepit and stack them on top of the remaining stones, filling the hole to its rock-rimmed edges. While they work tiny snowflakes appear, only to melt among the sparks lifting from the fire.
When they are finished, the old man stands before the boy. He searches his face. Their breath crystallizes on the air between them. Then, in a voice low and unhurried, Old Alphonse asks if the boy has fasted, if he has kept his body free from alcohol and caffeine for this ceremony. The youth answers with a nod, at the same time holding up his offering of a pouch of tobacco. A sinewy hand accepts, and the pouch disappears into a jacket pocket.
Virgil offers no tobacco, the expected custom. He knows too well the harm years of it have done to his own body. Instead, cradled across his palms, he holds up a polished walking stick. The staff, which he has made from a single mountain ash root, straightened and strengthened in water baths, is as long as his old friend is tall.
Both Elders remain motionless, their faces betraying nothing. Glistening specks of snow become fat flakes that drift aimlessly between them as they hold each other’s gaze. In the river below, ice- blue glacier water washes over a thousand centuries of sculpted stones. Finally Old Alphonse accepts the walking stick. Placing it on a tarp laid out on the ground, he begins to undress.
Following his lead, Virgil and Levi remove their own clothing. Once they are stripped down, the old man, wearing nothing more than a breechcloth, pushes his silver-grey braids onto his back and leans over the fire. He holds a twisted bundle of twigs into the embers at the edge of the firepit until it begins to smoke. Circling the boy first and then Virgil, he passes the smouldering sage up, down, and around their naked torsos, while a sing-song chant rises from deep in his throat. Virgil repeats the ritual for him. Before entering the lodge, they each drink from the buckets of water placed outside the low opening.
As they crawl inside, sage and cedar boughs crunch beneath their hands and knees, filling the sweltering air inside the lodge with the heavy Chilcotin scent.
Darkness engulfs the trio the moment Old Alphonse pulls down the flap to seal off the opening. Virgil’s eyes slowly adjust to light. Before long the red glow from the central stone pit reveals the outline of the old man on the other side. Sitting cross-legged he tosses crushed leaves into the pit, and then with a circular motion of his hands urges the rising smoke to his face and inhales deeply. Virgil and, beside him, the boy, do the same. Water is sprinkled across the hot stones and embers. The steam hisses up, finding its way into Virgil’s lungs. Beads of sweat gather on his scalp and forehead. They run down his face and drip from his chin. More and more billowing steam rises; condensation drips from the willow frame above, the hot droplets landing on bare skin. Virgil feels the dirt beneath the sage and cedar turning to mud. The heat-thick air grows increasingly heavy; it presses down on every inch of his body, it scorches his throat, his lungs. His chin drops down onto his chest. After a while he raises his head to check on the boy. Levi, his skin slick with moisture, his long hair plastered against his skull, stares trance-like into the swirling space before him. Satisfied with the even rising and falling of his young cousin’s chest, Virgil turns his attention back to the stone pit. Taking a handful of leaves he spreads them across the hot rocks and burning embers. He inhales deeply as the leaves crackle and hiss in the searing heat. His body begins to rock back and forth in rhythm with Old Alphonse’s humming chant while he searches the renewed surge of smoke and steam rising in the darkness. Within the dancing grey and orange shadows Virgil imagines he sees the faces of his mother, his father and brothers, smiling, beckoning. He wants to let go, to be with them, but theirs are not the visions he seeks this day. One by one the ghostly images dissolve, fading back into the churning smoke, until in the depths of the thick haze the form of a crow takes shape. The bird wings its way up, its black feathers and ebony head growing and changing as it rises into the massive head and shoulders of a black bear. Beneath eyelids as heavy as lead, Virgil watches the apparition drift toward Levi, the bear’s head now morphing into the smiling face of a young girl. As if he too is seeing the same vision, the boy’s arms slowly rise, he reaches up, and from his barely moving lips comes the whispered name, “Darla.”
42
I don’t need Mr Emerson to tell me that it’s not really my face that Levi sees rising before him, only the memory of me. Still, I try to reach him with my thoughts. While his hallucination grows, I repeat over and over that I’m okay. That he needs to stop this, now.
If only Mom had listened to Mr Blue.
Yesterday, he tried to convince her to meet with Levi, to join him in a healing circle. If she had only agreed, then this sweat, this vision quest of Levi’s, would not have been necessary today. But Mom stopped hearing Mr Blue the moment she understood that the woman in the photograph was his cousin, and that the child on her hip, was her son, Levi.
She fled from the cabin before he had a chance to convince her to meet with Levi, to participate in a healing circle. I wish she hadn’t. I wish she knew the truth about the accident. She needs to forgive Levi, not
only for his sake, but for hers, for Dad’s, and for mine. If only Levi could tell her that it was my fault, not his. If only he could tell her the whole truth, about the beer can, the rose, and why I took off my seatbelt.
But of course Levi won’t tell her any of that. That’s just not his way. He’s too proud to offer excuses and too honourable to shift blame. He only wants to give her the message he heard me tell him that night. His ‘intentions are pure,’ as my Gram used to say, but his method is flawed.
Mr Blue has agreed to accompany Levi on this sweat because he believes Levi is trying to find peace, to find healing, in his ‘vision quest.’ He doesn’t realize that what Levi is really trying to find is me on this day, this anniversary of my death. His true intention is to keep the promise he made to Mom that night, to take me home safely. He believes that if he can leave his physical body and find me in the spirit world, that he can help me pass through to my home on the other side.
I don’t know why he believes that. Mr Emerson says it’s an ancestral memory embedded deep in his subconscious, a memory that he’s decided to trust. He’s not saying whether Levi’s right or wrong, only that it’s not safe. I’m with him. I’m afraid that if Levi goes on too long with this, he really might find a way to join me in this in-between place. And if he does, he may not be able to leave. And it’s just not his time; Levi still has things left to do on earth. The Elders were right when they told him he had an obligation to the youth of his people, who look up to him. He’s lost sight of that.
Mr Blue fears for Levi, too. He keeps watch on him through visions dancing up in the darkness. I concentrate on trying to tell them both that it’s time to end this. Maybe in their altered state they’ll hear me. But then, intentionally, or unintentionally, Mr Blue puts a stop to it himself. His eyes roll back, and he slumps over onto the ground, his cheek slamming against the wet cedar boughs.
43
The bear slowly takes form, growing larger in the rising mist.
I’m dreaming, Julie tells herself. It’s just a dream. I can wake up anytime. Yet she remains frozen in some ethereal netherworld, unable to turn away from the looming image, its head lifting from hunchbacked shoulders, jaws opening, exposing menacing teeth. Then from the depths of its cavernous throat, a crow flies up.
The bird wings higher and higher, until it is nothing more than a black dot in the sky. Wanting to follow it, she remembers what she’s always known: I can fly. She feels herself become weightless as she lifts from the ground, easily, so easily. All she had to do is remember. Trees, fields, forests grow smaller beneath her, as she rises, until without warning the sound of distant banging shatters the moment. “Julie? Julie?”
She tries to ignore the intruding voice and rise once again on imaginary wings. But Ian’s voice is insistent.
The dream disintegrates and her eyes snap open. Disoriented, she slowly focuses on the frosted overhead light in centre of her bedroom ceiling.
“Julie?” Ian calls from the other side of the door. “Are you awake?”
Sitting upright in bed she shakes away the reluctance to let go of slumber, and calls out quietly, “I’m up.”
“Phone call for you. It’s Jessie.”
Fully awake now, her dream nothing more than a fragile memory dissolving in the morning light, she pushes the hair out of her eyes. Jessie calling so early?
She throws the blankets back to swing out of bed, feeling the cold fear that an unexpected phone call brings. Striding across the room, every possible disaster races through her mind: Jessie’s girls? Her husband? Their mother?
The bedroom door opens before she can reach it, to reveal Ian holding the telephone out to her.
He waits in the doorway, as she takes it. “Jess?” she breathes into the receiver. “Is everything all right?”
“Sure,” Jessie’s cheerful voice answers. “I just wondered why you hadn’t called back yesterday. That’s all.”
“Sorry, I completely forgot.”
“That’s okay. Hey, were you still sleeping?”
Julie glances down at her watch. Ten fifteen. Not early after all. “No. Well... yeah... I slept in, I guess.”
She mouths It’s okay to Ian, who turns away and heads downstairs, but not before she catches where his attention was focused. She looks down at herself, at the wrinkled cashmere sweater, the blue jeans, the clothes she had so carefully chosen to wear over to Virgil’s, yesterday.
Virgil’s? Oh God! She can’t think about that right now.
She closes the bedroom door with a soft click. “I’m just having a tough time right now, Jess,” she says quietly into the phone.
“Of course. I had the feeling that you might like to talk today, that’s all.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be fine.” She won’t tell her how. She won’t tell her about yesterday’s bottles of wine emptied in an afternoon and evening that she can’t remember ending. She does remember answering Jess’s email though, promising to call her later, as well as the many telephone calls from their mother, which, not trusting her own slurred responses, Julie had not bothered to answer.
“Mom left a number of messages on my answering machine,” she says searching through the shirts hanging in the closet with one hand while she holds the phone to her ear with the other. The topic of their mother was always a good subject changer. “I haven’t called her back yet either. She okay?”
“Same old, same old. Well except right now she’s all atwitter about the photographs you emailed. They really made an impression on her, especially the last one of the cowboy.”
Virgil? Had she sent that image to her mother?
“She’s talking about going back up to your place. Her exact words were, ‘Maybe spend some time getting to know that handsome old cowboy.’ Can you imagine? Mom flirting with a ranch hand?”
“Oh, God,” Julie says, pulling a plaid shirt from its hanger and heading back into the bedroom.
“I thought I should warn you,” Jessie says. “She’s actually considering flying up for Christmas.”
Julie stops in her tracks. “Hah! Well, that’s not going to happen. Tell her we’re going away. That we won’t be here for Christmas.”
“Well actually, Jules, that’s something I wanted to talk to you about myself. I was wondering if maybe... well it’s just an idea, but what do you think about us all coming to spend Christmas week with you this year?”
Her words catch Julie off guard. “Oh, I uh... No, you wouldn’t want to drive up here then. It’ll be miserably cold. Snow. Who knows what the road would be like...?”
“Barry’s used to winter conditions. He grew up in Revelstoke, remember.”
“What about the girls? That wouldn’t be fair to take Emily and Amanda away from their home at Christmas,” she says dropping the shirt onto the chair by the bed.
“It would be an adventure for them.”
“I, uh I don’t know...”
“They miss you, Jules.”
Julie slumps down on the end of the bed. “I’ll have to talk to Ian. I’m not sure...”
“Just think about it, okay?”
She arrives downstairs to find no sign of Ian, or the dog. The only sound in the empty house is the hum of the fireplace fan in the living room, and the distant drone of a tractor motor outside. In the kitchen, the wine bottles, which she had sought refuge in yesterday, are nowhere to be seen. Did Ian get rid of the, what—two—three— empties? Or had she? She has no idea, no memory of cleaning up or going to bed last night. What she does remember all too clearly is fleeing from Virgil’s cabin yesterday morning, stunned by his request.
How could he have asked her to meet with Levi Johnny? By the time she reached home she was seething with the knowledge of how completely foolish she had been. The crow pendant, the dreamcatcher, the photograph of Levi as a toddler with his mother, it was all in plain sight. Virgil had done nothing to hide his connection to Levi. But still, he should have told them. They had the right to know that the man who they had both com
e to trust—more than they did each other these days—was related to the boy who was responsible for Darla’s death.
It slowly dawned on Julie that Virgil had befriended her for no other reason than to find redemption for his cousin’s son. She had washed down her growing anger with a glass of Pinot Noir. Perfect for betrayal. For surely Virgil had betrayed her, and Ian.
Later yesterday afternoon, she had heard his truck motor. Had he seen her standing there in the mudroom window watching him drive his pickup past the house, moving so painfully slowly, as if reluctant to leave, as if waiting for her to call him back, before disappearing around the corner of the hill?
Now, she wishes she had. She wishes she had demanded an explanation. Maybe she should have let him finish his little speech in his cabin. Not that she would have considered going with him to meet with Levi, or agreed to join them in some ‘healing’ ceremony she doesn’t believe in. No, only so she could have demanded to know how he could have deceived them all this time. And then it strikes her. Does Ian know? Has Ian known all along?
The screeching of engine gears draws her back to reality. From the den window she watches the tractor come to a jerking stop out in the pasture, then Ian climbing down from the idling machine. With only the dog accompanying him he walks back to the flat-bed behind the tractor and tosses bales to the waiting herd. No Virgil to help with the feeding this morning?
Curious, she goes into the living room and looks out the window. Not a trickle of smoke rises to the sky in the treetops above the cabin.
By the time Ian returns to the house, bringing Pup and the smell of hay and manure into the kitchen with him, Julie has decided not to confront him about Virgil. If he already knows, then it is one more betrayal for her to chew on. If he doesn’t, what good would it do to tell him? How would she even go about telling him how she found out? No, she will just have to swallow her resentment, go back to ignoring the man’s presence. It’s a hollow decision, leaving her with nothing more than an empty feeling as she watches Ian warm his hands on the sides of the coffee pot.