We stood in silence for a few minutes, weapons still pointed at our prisoners. We waited for Clarence or Bullet to tell us what came next, if we were taking them back with us or leaving them here or … I didn’t really want to think about any other alternative.
“Derrick, Tree, Zheegwon, keep an eye on our guests.” Clarence spoke up. He called them guests, so that was a good sign. And he was using our real names out loud, too. The knot of anxiety between my shoulders slackened. “Rose, French, Bullet, a word please.”
We walked away from the firepit, over behind the tents, Clarence peering into each one as we passed looking for missed bodies or weapons. We stood in a tight circle. I could tell by her face Bullet was annoyed with our gentle-handedness.
“What do we need to talk about? What we’ll serve them for a bedtime snack?”
Clarence waved off her sarcasm. “The shirtless one, one of the two pale men? He’s Cree.”
“Are you certain? It’s not all that difficult for a Recruiter to learn one of our languages. He could have just started speaking it when he heard you use it first.” Bullet was sharp.
Clarence sighed, kicking a rock by his foot. “I know, that’s on me. But I am certain. He’s speaking an old Cree I don’t even fully know. He’s way more fluent than me or anyone else I’ve met. And walked his lineage back.”
“And what about the others? There’s only one Native in the bunch, besides this Cree in disguise.” Bullet was still skeptical.
“They’re allies, real allies. They put their lives on the line. It’s not just talk. You heard them,” Clarence insisted. “There may be …”
“Wait,” Rose cut him off. “Is he as fluent as Minerva was?” I saw right away where she was headed, so I stated the obvious.
“But he’s not old. I mean, not Elder kind of old.”
“Why does he have to be old?” She was excited now. I could see it flashing in her dark eyes like the clouds of fireflies that made summer nights frantic with light. “The key doesn’t have to be old, the language already is.”
We stood there for a minute. The wrinkles in Bullet’s forehead smoothed out like a sheet pulled tight.
“Clarence?” I said. “I need to ask him something. Then we’ll know.”
He nodded. I walked back to the fire, grabbing a red-checkered shirt from a low branch by the last tent. The twins were standing over the nurses and the Nish, their guns pointed towards the ground. Derrick was watching the two men. He kept his rifle trained on the small space between their heads. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed, letting him know I had this.
I threw the shirt to the man Clarence had spoken to. He nodded gratitude and pulled it on, buttoning the front over his damp skin.
“How do you dream?”
He looked up, and it wasn’t so hard to see his nation there. It was there in his light eyes, the way they angled down and avoided roundness just slightly. It was in the right corners of his high cheeks and the smooth flatness of his lips. It was there in the question he posed back with just the movement of his eyebrows.
“I mean, what does it sound like?”
“Come again?
I sighed. I hoped he wasn’t in a mood to stall. “What language do you dream in?”
He smiled, and his lips parted to show rows of bright teeth. I already knew what he was going to say.
“Nehiyawok, big man.”
I watched the word leave his mouth, felt it fall over my face through the cotton damp with breath and mud. It raised the skin on my arms to bumps.
“I dream in Cree.”
I looked back over to the small council and nodded, smiling.
“Pack ’em up,” Clarence called out.
We were getting close now, passing the log once more. I slowed down, hoping to walk with Rose the remainder of the trip. Instead I ended up beside the Cree. He smiled, so I tried to make small talk, now that we were able to tuck our aggressive bravado away. Even Bullet had softened, smiling at the back of the line while the nurses laughed and teased each other.
“So, how long have you been in the bush?”
“Oh, years. Too long.”
“Were you always with these people?”
“I’ve been with Talia and Helene, the nurses, since the beginning. They’re the ones who helped me get out of the school. I was brought in to their hospital for blood work to determine my eligibility. And, well, here we are.” He put air quotes around eligibility.
“What do you mean, eligibility?”
He pushed air out his nose and smiled full of bitterness. “To make sure my blood wasn’t too mixed. Can’t catch a break for being a half-breed, any way you look at it.”
I stayed silent. My family didn’t really have those problems. No one mistook us for anything other than what we were. I wondered if we were lucky or not. My family, my stolen family.
“How did you stay alive in there?” My voice betrayed the small sliver of hope sliding under my skin. “I heard it’s pretty grim.”
“I had somewhere I needed to be.” He pushed back the hair from his forehead. “Someone I needed to be with …”
And that’s when I saw it, the dark lines curving from his middle knuckle, rounding the ridges of vein, settling just under the cuff of his plaid sleeve. A tattoo of a buffalo on the back of his hand.
“Isaac?”
His eyes grew wide. He dropped his hair so that it swung back into his face, and his feet slowed.
“How do you know my name?”
That bundle I carried in my chest, the one that inflated when I heard about our triumphs, the one that ached with our losses, the same place where my love for Rose nested and the painful memories were enshrined and mourned: from there came the push, and I set off running.
“French! Hey, what’s the matter?” Tree yelled after me.
I couldn’t answer. I had to get to Miig now.
The moon was hoisted to the center of the sky as I ran, a big stage spotlight among the smaller bulbs of stars. It illuminated the green expanse between trees and the rocky outcroppings that marked the start of our camp. The grass here was waist high with clusters of sleepy blooms nodding their heavy heads in the blue light. I ran into the clearing, pulled my breath in to yell. It burned all the way down my throat into my belly.
“Miigwans!”
A crow, startled by my small commotion, alighted from a branch to the right, cawing his displeasure, a staccato of anxiety stitching the night a darker blue.
A short silence was followed by the quick shuffle of feet and the bouncing strobe of flashlights in hands. A small group came into view from the denser pines by the rock. I bent in two, hands on knees, gasping for the air to call Miig to me, to us.
“Miigwans!”
The group spoke low amongst themselves, and there was movement. I raised a hand to block out the glare and saw Miig pushing through the bodies to the front of the group. “French?”
I laughed out the next ragged breath. I didn’t know I was crying until I closed my eyes and the water dropped onto my cheeks, hitting the backs of my hands.
He took a step towards me, then stopped and shone his flashlight into the trees. There was crashing behind me as the others caught up. I turned my head, still bent over to catch my breath, expecting Derrick or quick Bullet. But it was him. It was Isaac at the head of the party.
He slowed to a walk now, the welcoming party and newcomers falling in behind. He slowed all his movements, as if focusing his eyes and reconciling what they saw took motion from his muscles. I heard a sound like an echo turned inside out, and then Miig, who had been standing still, trying to see, to understand, under the blue smoke of moonlight, finally took a step forward.
“Miigwans? Is that you?” Isaac’s words jumped up his throat like heartbeats, each bookended with a pause then settling in the grass like blood coagulating.
We couldn’t move for it. I couldn’t breathe.
Miig opened his mouth. The movement unhinged his legs and he fell to his knees, knocking down the grass like so much chaff. He held his hands out, palms turning upwards in a slow ballet of bone, marrow intact after all this time, under the crowded sky, against the broken ground.
“Isaac?”
I heard it in his voice as Miigwans began to weep. I watched it in the steps that pulled Isaac, the man who dreamed in Cree, home to his love. The love who’d carried him against the rib and breath and hurt of his chest as ceremony in a glass vial. And I understood that as long as there are dreamers left, there will never be want for a dream. And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all.
Anything.
Everything.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I sincerely want to thank the arts councils who continue to support the literary arts: the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Without their support I wouldn’t have been able to take the time to finish this book.
My gratitude to Wenzdae Brewster for taking the cover image and to Michael Snake for being the cover model. It means so much to have such amazing Indigenous youth be a part of this project, chi miigwetch!
I am indebted to the Banff Centre of the Arts for its solitude and landscapes, to my traditional territory of the Georgian Bay for its family and magic, and to the Ontario powwow trail for its laughter and the understanding that we are community even in transit.
I need to thank the Aunties and Uncles who provide knowledge and guidance with such generosity. Among them, Janine Manning, June Taylor, Stephanie Pangowish, Josh Smoke, and so many others.
There are moments when excellence and enthusiasm align and the very best of the best are accessible. I have been lucky enough to encounter 3 such individuals on this project: my editor Barry Jowett, Cormorant visionary Marc Côté, and the ever-powerful Lee Maracle. I am in awe of your skill, your diligence and the belief you had in both me and this book.
To my husband Shaun, and my children Jacyob, Wenzdae and Lydea, thank you for giving me space, time and the support necessary to write. I appreciate your sacrifice and know that I missed you every time I shut the office door to dream this dream. I love you beyond words, and I have a lot of them.
I have so much gratitude for my parents who allowed me to chase the words all through my life until they could be corralled into books. And for making sure that every year, without fail and no matter how much it might inconvenience or stretch our means, I went back home to our community to spend summers with my grandmother, her sisters and a thousand cousins. Because you had the foresight to raise me with our stories and within our territory, I was able to chase these words into this particular book more than any other. This is the best gift I have ever been given.
For my brother Jay and my cousin Chris. Thanks for being halfbreeds with me — running around the Bay, playing euchre with our Mere, pushing through the bad shit together because we knew we came from royalty; jigging in the dirt, fishing off the borrowed dock, returning bottles for popsicles, making soup out of bones kind of royalty.
And finally, as always, for my Mere, Edna Dusome, who kept the stories, raised the babies, shouldered the weight, and laughed all the way to the end.
The Marrow Thieves Page 20