Virgil had never been on a train and his dream, mundane as it might seem to others, was to book himself a ride when he got older. Those trains reminded him that there were places to go, beyond the Reserve. The next train was due by in about six minutes, though the exact time was always a rough estimate, with VIA Rail’s record. The engineer had seen him sitting there so often, it had become his habit to blow the train’s horn as he went by. It was a loud noise, one that Virgil had become used to and enjoyed. It was an acknowledgment of his existence by somebody other than his family. At least some things in this world could be counted on.
Virgil often came here instead of the classroom. He knew that his skipping school upset his mother, and perhaps somewhere down the line he would pay for it, but right now, he didn’t care. Maybe he should be more like Dakota. She went to school religiously and took to each subject like a kitten to a ball of string. But school was almost out for summer anyway, weakening his educational resolve.
Today had been a long and sad day and he was glad to get away. The tree branches grabbed at his black jeans and black shirt—perfect funeral attire—but he ignored them. He knew the large lime stone rock that sat three metres to the left of the train tracks was just up ahead. There he could ponder the mysteries of the universe, or think about absolutely nothing. Both were equally enjoyable. He emerged just west of the rock, where the bush was the thinnest, and walked along the railroad ties. He didn’t know why he was feeling so solitary these days. He’d heard people say stuff about his turning into a typical moody teenager. Great, now he was becoming a cliché.
His flat-topped rock was surrounded by a small field of sweetgrass. That’s how he’d found it. His grandmother had taken him out one day when he was small to teach him how to pick sweet grass, and she’d told him this was the best spot. Maggie had come with them once, but usually only Lillian bothered to gather, dry and braid the wild grass. “I used to do this with my grandparents,” she’d often tell the bored Virgil. Though he found the smell pleasant, he had never tried to pick it himself. He knew it was one of the four sacred herbs, the others being cedar, sage and, the most important, tobacco. Soon, though, it had become too difficult for Lillian to make the tiring journey through the woods, and it was left to the boy. Only now he came for the train, not the sweetgrass.
Sitting on his rock was the blond stranger, watching him approach, as if he was waiting for him. Virgil stopped on the railroad tracks, unsure what to do. The motorcyclist leisurely lay back on the boulder, and yawned as the boy approached. Virgil could hear the creaking of the man’s leather garments.
“Hey, what’s up, little man?”
It was a casual greeting for such a startling encounter. Virgil didn’t think anybody knew about his precious rock. He didn’t know how to respond. Instead he just stood there, in the middle of the tracks.
“Beautiful spot, don’t you think? It’s a wonder they haven’t put condominiums up yet.” The motorcyclist stretched out on the rock as if it were a bed. He seemed quite at home, staring up at the blue sky spotted with wispy clouds. “Have fun at the funeral?”
At first Virgil didn’t respond, but then he thought about the man’s question. “That’s stupid. Nobody has fun at a funeral.”
“My mistake.”
The stranger looked at the boy. “You know, that may not be the safest place to stand. You might want to move off to the side. I know every man walks his own path, but sometimes a little advice from a stranger can save your life.”
A little embarrassed, Virgil moved to the shoulder of dark gravel opposite the black-clad man.
“Here, I made you something.” The man held out a perfectly braided length of sweetgrass. “I haven’t made one of these in years. Just smell that. Now that’s Anishnawbe.”
Virgil didn’t move. He did, however, notice the pile of freshly picked sweetgrass drying on the rock beside the stranger.
“They do speak English here, don’t they?”
Virgil swallowed hard before answering. “Yeah. Who the hell are you?”
This seemed to amuse the man on the rock. “Oh my, now there’s a direct question. Geez, where to begin. Who the hell am I? Well, I guess I could start with a name. That’s always a good beginning. You can call me… John.” John put the sweetgrass braid down on a corner of the rock.
“John…?”
The man looked up. “I suppose now you will want a last name too. As if one name isn’t good enough. I remember when all you needed was one good name to get you through life. But not anymore. Okay then, my name is John… Tanner. John Tanner. Yep, that’s me. Happy?”
John Tanner. Such an innocuous name for such an unusual individual.
“And as is the custom, I assume at some point you will tell me your name?”
Virgil hesitated. He and every kid in North America had been warned through school and the mass media not to tell strangers too much about themselves. But this was no ordinary stranger.
“Virgil Second.”
“Is that like Henry the Eighth?” The man laughed at his own joke.
Virgil scowled. He’d heard that joke, or a variation on it, too many times in his life. “What are you doing here?” he asked instead.
“Why do you want to know?” said the man, suddenly engrossed in braiding another strand of sweetgrass.
“You were at my grandmother’s.”
“That I was. So were you,” the man replied, intricately weaving the three strands together. They represented the mind, body and spirit, and how strong these elements could be when properly balanced.
Off in the distance, the train could be heard, its lonesome horn announcing its approach.
“The great iron horse approaches,” said the man, in his best Hollywood Indian voice. “Boy, I remember when I first saw one of those things, just about scared the shit out of me.”
Again, Virgil didn’t know what to say. The man seemed to concentrate for a second before letting out the mournful sound of a train whistle. It sounded… like an actual train whistle, the kind he’d heard hundreds of times.
“Did you like that?” asked the man.
Then he took a deep breath and let loose the plaintive cry of a wolf revealing its heart to the moon. It was startling in its authenticity.
“How can you do that?” asked the astonished boy.
“Can I help it if I’m multilingual?”
Next, the call of a loon came from the White man’s mouth. It was note perfect.
“A little something I picked up on my travels. Maybe I’ll teach you sometime. That woman at your grandmother’s house, and with you at the graveyard, I take it that was your mother?”
The new braid finished, the man reached down and retied the blue bandana around his ankle.
“Why?”
“She’s pretty.”
This puzzled Virgil. His mom pretty? Moms weren’t supposed to be pretty. Especially to strangers in black leather. Especially to a stranger he’d seen kissing his grandmother. A stranger who had been sitting out here in the middle of the woods braiding sweetgrass and waiting for him, it seemed. The boy was growing increasingly uncomfortable.
“What do you want?”
The man sat up on the rock, giving Virgil his full attention. “Me?”
Virgil nodded.
“Well, that’s a tough one. Admittedly that took me a while to figure out, especially after your grandmother died. You see, I haven’t had much to do lately. A little of this and that. More that than this. Years ago I fell victim to what’s called T & A, you may be familiar with it. They are the two greatest enemies of a person’s self-esteem. Tedium and alienation. That put me out of the loop for a long time. You see, I knew your grandmother way, way, way before you were born.” The White man’s blue eyes danced. “That was the last time I felt good. I want that feeling again. I’m hoping it runs in the family, if you know what I mean.”
Virgil did not know what he meant. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I thought
maybe you could help. Or at least, stay out of my way.”
If Virgil was puzzled before, he was really puzzled now.
“Me? Why would you want me to stay out of your way? And how am I supposed to help you?”
“I’m glad you asked, because I did promise your grandmother I would let you know what I was up to. She was quite fond of you, you know. You should have come to say goodbye to her. Like I did.”
The young boy’s heart tightened with disgust.
“Still, a promise is a promise. I made your grandmother two promises, and both involve you.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“What… what… did you promise her?” If there was such a thing as a weirdness indicator, Virgil was sure the needle was dangerously into the red.
The man slid off the rock and stood up. “Well, you see, there are some things that have to be done. I haven’t done this kind of stuff in a while, but I want…”
The rest of what the man had to say was drowned out by the roar of the train. The ground shook beneath their feet. The wind buffeted them. And the noise of the engine, the passenger cars on the metal tracks and the blowing horn overpowered all other sounds. The man’s mouth continued to move.
Just as suddenly, the train was gone, and the motorcyclist finally finished what he was saying. “… and so you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution, young man. So there. The choice is yours. Otherwise, tikwamshin!” With that, he gave the boy a polite bow. “I’m glad we got that out of the way. I feel better, don’t you?”
“But…” said Virgil, having no idea what the man was talking about.
“Sorry, I don’t do Q and A’s. Anyway, time to be going. And, Virgil, if I were you, I wouldn’t hang around out here by yourself too much. Never know what freaks and desperate types you might run into.” Brushing the twigs and dried grass from his pants, John Tanner disappeared into the woods.
Virgil, still overcome with surprise, simply watched him go. What had he said? Tik… something? What did that mean?
Lying on the flat rock were seven braided strands of sweetgrass.
EIGHT
Chief Maggie Second was so tired she was afraid she’d drive off the road. Two days had passed since the funeral, and she’d been forced to jump right back into the thick of band affairs. She was just driving back from meeting with the MP for the municipality. The local county authorities continued to be upset over all the confusion in Otter Lake regarding the land acquisitions. Local non-Native residents had gotten wind of the purchase and were concerned that the Native people were trying to buy back all the land the non-Natives’ ancestors went to so much trouble to appropriate. Native people with additional land—that could not be a good thing. And there was good money to be made in using the land for cottages. After five hundred years of European settlement, all they had to show for it were cottages lining every lakefront, complete with noisy Jet Skis.
The whole land deal was almost complete, but there were still i’s to dot and t’s to cross. To create extra roadblocks, the local municipality was demanding more studies to find out if Otter Lake had the capability to administer and properly use the additional land. Things like water resource reports and road access issues, among others. A set of high-tension power lines ran over one small section. What would happen if they went down and had to be repaired? Who had jurisdiction?
The previous owners, three families whose total property had comprised the three hundred acres, had not been grilled so severely. In fact, one family, the Fifes, who lived primarily in Toronto and had never actually set foot on the land (it had been left to them in a will) had sold it without a second thought. None of their portion was lakefront, and it was only a couple of dozen acres, so not worth getting hot and bothered over. The Goodman family had a cottage on Otter Lake, one that had been in the family for generations. It looked like a sixty-year-old cottage; the Goodman family were not known for their maintenance capabilities. They purchased another, more modern cottage on a nearby lake with the profits from the sale. The third participant in the sale, Michael Bain, lived adjacent to the land. He was a local farmer who occasionally used the area as a woodlot. Being a third-generation NDP supporter, he felt it was his civic duty to help Canada’s Indigenous people assert themselves culturally, spiritually and, of course, financially. So he eagerly sought to participate in their geographical expansion onto their once rightful land, while making a tidy sum.
Maggie found it odd that such a peaceful chunk of land could be causing such an uproar. Just yesterday she’d spent an hour on the property, lying on the hood of her Chrysler, listening. That was all. Just listening to the sounds of the deep forest. She heard birds and insects. Saw a porcupine. Four raccoons passed by, remarkably close, intent on where they were going. This was what her life had come to, hiding in the woods. Her mother had never wanted her to become chief. Lillian had felt that Maggie, of all her children, hadn’t yet found her place in the universe. Even weird Wayne was doing his own thing. Lillian’s peculiar blend of Christianity and traditional beliefs had eventually made her happy. “But you,” she had said to Maggie. “You’re too much like I was. You need something you’re not expecting. Babysitting twelve hundred people is not it.”
Still, Maggie felt she was a good chief. This was now her second term, and other than the chaos of this particular land issue, she felt confident she wasn’t letting the people down. Land… no issue affected Native peoples and non-Native peoples so strongly and yet so differently. On the one hand, White people thought land was there to be owned and utilized. Something needed to be done with it. Otherwise it was wasted. This was even in the Bible, where God gave man dominion over Nature. Native people, on the other hand, saw themselves as being part of Nature. It was a big huge intertwining web. You could no more own the land under your feet than you could the sky over your head, though it was no secret White people were already working on that too.
But colonization had a nasty tendency to work its way into the DNA, the beliefs and philosophies and the very ways of life of the people being colonized. Nowadays, some of the people on Maggie’s Reserve, other than having a good tan, were indistinguishable from White people.
Lillian, however, had been what could be called an old-fashioned Indian, and she had taught her family respect for this land. Maggie had thought of that as she lay on her car, thinking about her departed mother, her rebellious but lovable son and the rest of her family. Maggie could have stayed on that hood all day contentedly pondering life, but damn her work ethic! There was still a lot to deal with.
Today, once again, she was driving alongside the controversial land. Maggie was growing to like this side road. It was thick with trees and, depending on the season, interlaced with snowmobile and ATV trails. Personally, she wished it could remain the way it was, semi-wild. It would remind them all of the way the land used to be, its simplicity.
Blasting from her speakers and keeping her company was music from Maggie’s well-worn Nirvana tape.
Maggie was deep in thought when it happened. A sudden noise made her jump, and her car swerved to the left. Reacting quickly, she applied pressure to the brake, forcing the car over to the right shoulder and gradually bringing it to a stop, all the while grumbling under her breath. When the Chrysler had come to a stop she stepped out and investigated the trouble.
“Son of a bitch!” As she suspected, it was a flat tire. Her first one in almost fifteen years. And of course it had to be out in the middle of nowhere. Though technically she was only a ten-minute drive from her house, she was in one of the desolate patches of wilderness still to be found in Otter Lake. Maggie knew from experience that she had about as good a chance of finding cell phone reception out here as she had of finding affordable underwear that didn’t ride up. Luckily, Maggie had a spare tire in the back. She sighed. As a woman of the new millennium, she was confident she could do anything her brothers could do, and probably better, short of writing her name in the snow, but that
didn’t mean she had to enjoy it.
Deep in the trunk, under a stained blanket, boxes of files and an old shoe, she managed to find the tire, which felt suspiciously low on air itself. But having no alternative, she hauled it out and began the laborious task of hooking up the jack, and then pumping it until the left side of the car was elevated. She was fiddling with the nuts when she heard the distinctive sound of a motorcycle approaching.
She could tell it was the stranger riding the machine everybody was talking about, evidently still roaring up and down the Reserve roads. She hadn’t seen him since the funeral. And here he was, approaching at about sixty kilometres an hour. Maggie wasn’t unduly nervous, but she was a lone woman, on a deserted road, with a flat tire. Though she would have denied it, her hand tightened around the tire iron.
The bike slowed to a stop in front of her car. When the stranger took off his helmet, she could see that he was much handsomer than he had appeared across the graveyard. And his eyes were the most perfect shade of blue she’d ever seen. Wrapped around his wrist was a blue bandana.
Sitting astride his machine, he glanced at the tire iron in her hand. “Flat tire?” he said with a smile. “Need some help?”
Motorcycles & Sweetgrass Page 7