From the Ashes

by Jesse Thistle

  57 YEARS OF LOVE

  ON OCTOBER 14, 2015, I graduated from York University.

  As I stood waiting to collect my degree, I smiled at Lucie and her mother, who were sitting in the audience, then patted my left breast pocket, which held my grandmother’s picture. I swear the picture glowed over my heart as my name was called, I walked across the convocation stage, shook the chancellor’s hand, and accepted my degree.

  I’m sure my grandmother was there with me, cheering me on, proud that I had found my way, and that I’d kept the promise I’d made to her.

  Grandma never did get to see me sober, or out of trouble with the law. Nor did she ever meet my wonderful wife, Lucie.

  Lucie now wears my grandmother’s engagement ring, a surprise gift from Aunt Sherry after I told her over dinner one night at her house that I wanted to marry Lucie but mentioned that I couldn’t afford a ring on a student budget.

  “You can have the most precious ring of all,” Aunt Sherry said to me. She got up, went past Uncle John, got her jewel case, and pulled out a dusty box. The two of them were just beaming.

  “It’s your grandmother’s wedding ring—fifty-seven years of love on there—she’d want Lucie to have it, I’m sure.”

  I like to think Aunt Sherry was right, and that Grandma sent Lucie to take care of me—she’s the only woman strong enough to watch over Grandma’s wayward, rebellious grandson.

  WHEN WALKING IS A PRAYER

  MY RIGHT FOOT STILL HURTS over a decade after “the accident.” I guess it always will.

  Every morning when I place my foot on the ground, a shock of electricity shoots up my leg into my brain like a bolt of lightning striking a rusty country weather vane. That first step is always the most torturous, and the jolt of pain it produces hijacks my cerebral cortex as I try to gain my balance. I hobble toward the bathroom with my hands braced on the apartment walls, my cat, Poppy, slithering between my legs. Sometimes, when I can’t face the pain, I simply hop on my left leg, leaving my right leg dangling behind me.

  Bone grinding on wire: that is my morning cup of coffee, that is what wakes me up every day, and that is what reminds me that the fall from my brother’s apartment window was real—and that I’m lucky to be alive.

  The pain also keeps me sober. It reminds me what it was like years ago when addiction and homelessness almost did me in. For that, and those harsh reminders, I am thankful.

  The psychological pain, however, is sometimes almost too much to bear.

  I have nightmares in which my leg is amputated just below the knee and I’m begging for change on Rideau Street and no one hears me. I dream that a colony of maggots is eating the gangrenous flesh around the incision and my toes are nothing but exposed bone. I dream that I’m scraping the skin off my dying foot like I would scrape soft candle wax off a glass table.

  When these nightmares visit me, I feel like I’m drowning in some uncharted region of the icy North Atlantic. I feel helpless and utterly alone—just like I did when I was homeless. Just as I’m about to give up and lose consciousness, I come fully awake, gasping for breath, sweat soaked, and frightened. I am frantic. I cast aside the blankets to catch a glimpse of my foot to see if it’s healthy, to see if it’s still attached to my shin and knee, to see if all my toes are still there.

  Without fail, my foot is always there, waiting for me; toes wiggling and fleshy, assuring me that we’ve made it, and that the leviathan can never drown us as long as we’re together.

  Lucie always knows when I’ve had one of my nightmares. Her method of comfort is always the same: she smiles and tells me it’s okay, then she shifts across to my side of the bed, pulls me close, and squeezes me until I fall asleep. When I am lost at sea and drowning, her arms rescue me.

  She’s also there in the morning when I step down on my foot to receive my morning jolt; however, she’s not so understanding then—she almost always shoos me out of the room so she can catch those precious last five minutes of sleep. But when the pain in my foot is too much to bear after a hard day of work, Lucie is there to offer me an arm.

  I often wonder how I came to run with my foot the way it is (the doctors told me I’d likely never walk on my own again without medical aid). The truth is, I don’t know, but what I do know is that my mangled foot and the pain it brings changed everything. It almost destroyed me, but somehow I survived; it forced me to do something unthinkable to save my life, it forced me to challenge and push myself when I was utterly defeated; it taught me to trust my body, myself, and my wife; and it forces me every day to remember what happened when I gave up and blamed the world for my problems and expected something for nothing.

  In these ways, the pain in my foot has been a blessing, and I value each and every step I take. Every step is a gift, every one is sacred, and each, in its own little way, is a prayer for me.

  EPILOGUE

  I’M HERE IN OTTAWA PRESENTING at a conference on homelessness organized by the Federal Homeless Partnership Strategy, which oversees millions of dollars for emergency homeless services across the country.

  My panel is on enumerating homeless people in census surveys called point-in-time counts. I’m also presenting a talk on a preliminary draft of the Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada—I’ve been working on it at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, where I sit as the Resident Scholar on Indigenous Homelessness. But Jesse Donaldson, my boss and co-worker, is my co-presenter, and, truthfully, she carries our presentation—I fumble my words and have trouble reading, just like always.

  People have started listening to me lately, though. Apparently, I’ve become an expert on homelessness and Métis history, and I won the top two doctoral scholarships in the country a month before—the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholarship and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship—and I also won the Governor General’s Silver Medal for graduating with one of the highest grade point averages in the country—the first student, Indigenous or not, in York University’s sixty-year history to do so.

  The attention is a bit overwhelming—I just do my work like Grandpa taught me, listen to Lucie’s advice, and remember the things Olive told me about being a good human. But people at conferences such as this listen now, instead of batting my hand away. I belong somewhere, finally—in academia, of all places.

  People say and know my name now, they remember me when I introduce myself. I’m not just a blur to them. I’m no longer a blur to myself.

  After the conference, I’m supposed to go out to dinner with some colleagues, but I pass up on the free meal. Instead, I decide to go for a walk, down Bank Street, along Rideau, past Parliament Hill and the Freedom Tower. I gaze over at the Centennial Flame, where I used to scoop piles of change, its flame of justice forever flickering over crests of our country’s provinces and territories. I look for my RCMP friend, but he’s not there.

  LUCIE THISTLE

  Taken the day I gave a lecture at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

  Downtown Ottawa has changed quite a bit since I was here last. There’s massive construction, but the Zesty Market on Dalhousie and Rideau is still there, as ghetto as ever. So are the multitudes of shawarma joints that stay open late to feed the hordes of drunk people that spill out onto the block after two a.m. when the bars close. The windows on the one I burgled have long since been repaired.

  As I walk up Dalhousie toward the Novotel hotel across from the Mission shelter, I find myself taking off my numerous silver rings and placing them in my pocket. I do the same with my shiny aviator watch and the bracelet Lucie got me for Christmas a few years back. I’m afraid my jewellery might betray me to the local homeless people and make me a prime target for robbery—I would’ve robbed me back in the day. I also try to hide the rectangular impression of my iPhone in my pocket, but the blasted thing is just too damned big to conceal.

  If they rob me, I think, I’m suing Apple for making such a humongous and unconcealable phone.

  The homeless men who g
lare at me from out of the Mission’s front entrance on Waller Street, however, don’t make much of me—they aren’t like I was. They aren’t interested in me or my huge iPhone. They simply stand and survey the city landscape, glancing at me like I’m some awkward shrub rudely growing out of the sidewalk.

  I stand there, the human shrub, trying to find the courage to uproot myself and walk over to see if I know anybody. But my legs won’t take me. I just stare in the direction of the Mission and rustle around, wishing I could say hello, but can’t.

  This place isn’t my home anymore, I think. Maybe it never was.

  After a moment or two I head toward the beer store next to the walkway that leads to the nearby Salvation Army.

  As usual, the dealers are in the alley slinging dope to the homeless clientele of the ByWard Market. One is thick and muscular, too thick and muscular to be a long-time regular—just out of jail perhaps, or maybe just a few months shy of drug-induced emaciation. On either side he’s flanked by two beautiful but pockmarked working girls.

  As I emerge from the alley, the dealer’s eyes dart upon me and he jams his hand in his underwear, hiding his dope in the crack of his ass. As he does this, I see him mouth “cop” to his associates. They in turn whistle to other street sentinels. A chorus of whistles echoes into the distance and the dealers and their drugs vaporize into thin air.

  They think I’m a cop? I laugh to myself. I guess I am a burly boy just like those donut-eating mofos.

  It’s true. The flesh on my bones in these parts means I’m either that or a lost pedestrian. But even softened by years of luxury and stability, I can still read the street like an open book. I can still see plain as day where the zombies live, where the vampires shift in dark corners, where they sell bones and batwings to the undead, the broken-hearted, and the lost.

  As before, I long to go up to the homeless people in front of the Sally Ann, but my legs won’t take me. I just stand and watch them from afar smoking their crack and cigarettes, and drinking the beers I assume they must have stolen only moments earlier from the liquor store. It’s all so familiar. A man in a wheelchair rolls past me and breaks my trance, reminding me that I have no business watching the homeless consume themselves in this hopeless realm. I gather myself and walk toward the McDonald’s. There I spot a guy I knew, but he walks right past me to ask the crowd of people behind me for change.

  “Hey,” I ask him when he’s finished. “Do you remember me?”

  “No . . .”

  I can tell he’s trying to place me. “I stayed at the Mission many years ago—”

  He interrupts before I can finish. “Yeah, I remember someone like you. But he was really skinny, and you’re fat!”

  “That I am,” I say and laugh at his honesty. “Life has been good to me these last few years. I’m sober, have a home, a wife, a cat. And you?”

  “Oh, you know, same old. I stay on the second floor of the Sheps now. My mind doesn’t work so well anymore—they feed me, keep me sorted with clean clothes and bug juice.”

  I know he means psychotropic medication. I can tell the physical damage the drugs have done to him over the years from the way he can no longer keep himself from fidgeting. His shoes are held together with duct tape and his pants stained with the grime of his thousand-year wanderings in the Ottawa desert. His bloodshot eyes shift about aimlessly, but they still carry the intelligence I remember.

  “You used to be my friend, Omar,” I say as I shake his hand. “You used to watch my back, give me tokes when I got sick, and we used to joke around and drink beers. Remember?”

  “No. Sorry.” His eyes break from mine. “I don’t remember that. I just remember your face. Nothing comes easy anymore. Sorry, friend.”

  “No worries. Rest easy, old buddy.”

  Before he leaves I ask him to take care of himself. He promises he will, but that he needs some change to make it through the night. I give him what I can, then we part ways.

  As I sit in my hotel room later, I don’t regret missing my dinner meeting with my colleagues. I explored homelessness in a way that would escape them. They could only talk and write about it; I took a walk a stone’s throw from my hotel room where I’d lived it.

  And I’d said goodbye.

  MY SOUL IS STILL HOMELESS

  sometimes

  in between slumber and consciousness

  i sleepwalk.

  my mind not yet aware

  i shuffle out the front door

  the crisp open air and night sky still call me.

  at night

  in between slumber and consciousness

  i sleepwalk.

  my soul not yet aware

  that my wanderings are over

  and I have a home.

  MISSING PERSON

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? Investigators from 22 Division Criminal Investigation Bureau in the Region of Peel, Ontario, are trying to find a missing man, Cyril Thistle , and need your help.

  Cyril Thistle, who was born April 3, 1954, disappeared in 1981 in the Region of Peel when he was twenty-six years old. He was last seen by members of his family, and his children have been searching for him for years but have not had any success.

  The police note that, “At this time all investigative leads have been exhausted and assistance is being requested from the public.”

  If you have any information on the whereabouts of Cyril Thistle, please call investigators at the 22 Division Criminal Investigation Bureau at (905) 453-2121, ext. 2233. You can also leave information anonymously by calling Peel Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477), or by visiting peelcrimestoppers.ca.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I begin by thanking my wife, Lucie. As always, you are my world, my everything—words fail me when I think how grateful I am to you. Liba, my mother-in-law, you’re the best mom-in-law I could ask for, the great teacher of truth in my life. Thank you for letting me make sandwiches out of the bramborák. The Suriano family, you likewise love and have given Lucie and me a home; I feel like your son in many ways. Carolyn, you’re my great mentor and changed my world in every good way imaginable—I’m infinitely grateful to you. To Thistle and Morrissette family members who shared stories in the crafting of this book—Mom, Dave, Sherry, Jerry, Josh, and Ralph—marcee. Randy and everyone at CASS, you made the academy my home—cheers. Janine, the strongest Kwe I know, along with cousin Cherie: you helped me find my writing legs way back when—thank you. Auntie Maria, you walked me through such beautiful fields of reconnection and are a major factor in all I do. Aunties Nancy and Janet, thank you for the “auntie plan” with Tessa. Tessa, I know I was scared, but you got me to start speaking for the first time in my life, and without you my stories just wouldn’t have been told. Nancy, you’ve always been there, along with Pat, back when the world literally had collapsed on me. The Hockley Crew, Bud Boys, and girls down east, you forged my soul and I think of you often. My Harvest House family and Jenepher, marcee for saving me when I was just an angry wolf. Randolph and Russian Andre—thanks for employing me over the years; sorry you had to fire me fifty times. Stephen and Allyson and the COH—thank you for believing in me. My last two probation officers—Marta especially—I’m grateful for your light. Jesse Winter, your story changed everything and caught the attention of Adria and Nita at Simon & Schuster—thank you all for seeing value in me. And lastly, I want to thank Laurie, my Jedi master editor who taught me good writing, was patient and kind, and helped me cobble together my life into this memoir—your words and teachings also live upon these pages. Thank you.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  My memories are memories from my point of view. I have tried my best to remember and relay my life in a meaningful way. But because of my youth and, later, my addictions, I see what happened to me like fragments of light, flickers of a flame, shadows on a wall. And trauma distorts perspectives. I think my mind blocks out a lot, bends time, folds that trauma in on itself so that I can function today.

  Much of what I rec
all is accurate, but my years clouded by drugs and alcohol have left me, at times, an unreliable narrator, so I employed court, probation, and school records in an attempt to help reconstruct the past; and many people who knew me during those turbulent times have helped me fill in the gaps—family and friends, police officers who dealt with me, social workers at rehab centres, shelter workers, probation officers.

  Some of the names in the book are real; others aren’t.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LUCIE THISTLE

  JESSE THISTLE is Métis-Cree, from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is an assistant professor in Métis Studies at York University in Toronto. He won a Governor General’s Academic Medal in 2016 and is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholar and a Vanier Scholar. He lives in Toronto. Visit jessethistle.com and follow him on Twitter at @michifman.

  SimonandSchuster.ca

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jesse-Thistle

  @SimonSchusterCA

  Simon & Schuster Canada

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  166 King Street East, Suite 300

  Toronto, Ontario M5A 1J3

  www.SimonandSchuster.ca

  Copyright © 2019 by Jesse Thistle

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Canada Subsidiary Rights Department, 166 King Street East, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5A 1J3.

  This Simon & Schuster Canada edition August 2019