I had just about finished when the door opened and Mary emerged. She had that enormous white fur coat on and came floating down the steps. Trying not to fall, she walked over towards her car.
“Oh thank you. I hoped you’d be finished by now. Am I supposed to tip you or anything like that?” Not knowing if she was kidding, I shook my head.
“Okay, well thank you again. Bye.”
“You’re leaving? Already? You just got here a couple of hours ago! They had all sorts of things planned for you.”
“I know, and I hated to disappoint them, but I do have other appointments to keep. I hope they won’t be too distraught.”
I plunged my shovel into the snow and leaned against the Saab. I was trying to figure her out. “You gave them a special Christmas. I think they wanted to share that with you.”
“Well, sometimes you can’t always get what you want.” I remembered thinking that on the phone.
“Mary … ”
“Please, call me Janice.”
“Janice, why did you come out here?”
“Curiosity. I had to know. I had to see. So now I know and I’ve seen what I wanted to see.”
I followed her eyes as they wandered over the house. They went from the half-hidden outhouse out back to the dirt driveway to the leaning wooden house. I decided to push the issue. “When do you think you’ll be back?”
Her eyes finally ended up at the two uneven figures standing quietly in the window. “Oh, someday, I suppose.” There was that same tone of wistfulness and sadness I recognized, but no hope. She opened her car door and got in. She looked at me, and I looked at her.
“Merry Christmas,” was all she said.
With obvious care, she backed her car up and drove away. My last image of Janice was her personalized license plate. “WIRTH” disappearing in the distance.
I turned around to face the house and noticed the two images in the window had disappeared. I admit it, I was half tempted to call it a day, to just go home and drink as much egg nog as I possibly could. There are many things in this world that make me uncomfortable. What had happened in that house was one of them. I threw the shovel in the snowbank and looked longingly across the frozen bay to my house.
Instead, I bent and picked up that big old spruce Christmas tree. Gripping it tightly, I knew it would be a bitch getting it up those slippery steps.
Heat Lightning
Off in the distance, across the calm blue lake, I could see the heat lightning flash, making the large, fluffy clouds glow and shimmer like a scene from a Steven Spielberg movie. My friend Jamie’s house stood on the eastern end of the lake, so from the shore you could always see the dark and heavy storms rolling in over the dark blue water.
Luckily this kind of lightning had nothing to do with the violent thunderstorms you usually see during the summer—these were just nature’s way of letting off electrical stress. You couldn’t even hear the thunder. You could just see the lightning illuminate the clouds from the interior like a flashlight under a blanket. And there was never any rain, just the promise of it.
Had it been a real storm coming, no doubt Jamie would have had us working double time. He can be kind of serious when the mood strikes him. As it was, we were quite busy sharing a beer as we watched nature’s fireworks, sitting atop the pile of lumber lying between the house and the lake. The renovations to his mother’s house could wait a few minutes more. Rome wasn’t built in a day and we weren’t in any mood to defy the cliché.
Jamie was half Ojibway, half Mohawk. Guess that makes him an Oji-hawk, I suppose. An odd mixture for the likes of this community. With this being a strictly Ojibway village and us being hereditary enemies with the Mohawks not more than just a few centuries ago, this might have caused some problems, if not just a whole lot of teasing. But this is Otter Lake and being an Oji-hawk was the least of Jamie’s problems.
I drained my beer. “How long will this take? The whole thing I mean? Some of us start college next week, you know.”
Jamie shrugged, his brown eyes never leaving the lightning. He had that look of a great weight behind his eyes that he sometimes gets when things aren’t going well. “It will take as long as it takes. Hopefully not longer than Friday. Plenty of time for you to go off and chase white girls. One of these days you might actually catch one and get lucky.”
“You forget. With Mohawks, it’s luck. With Ojibways it’s skill.”
Jamie smiled. I was the only one who teased him about his unusual bloodline and just that alone. I think he liked and appreciated me for it. Unlike a lot of the locals, I never commented on his home life or his mother, or made the rude remarks that got him into so many fights as a kid, and also occasionally as an adult. I think that’s probably why he asked me to help renovate his mother’s house. That and the fact he needed my pickup for all the lumber.
He stood and stretched, the rip in his plaid shirt showing his untanned side. I placed the empty beer in the twelve pack and joined him in an equally luxurious stretch.
“Well then, Sailor … ” Jamie’s called me that ever since he saw a twenty-year-old photograph of me wearing an idiotic sailor’s hat my mother had found in a rummage sale and forced me to wear. As I said, teasing can be quite unmerciful on reserves. “Let’s get back to work. There’s a wall over there with our names on it.”
He was referring to his mother’s bedroom wall which looked out over the lake. Practically the whole side of the room had been removed to put in a large picture window with a sliding glass door. Next on the list was to put a deck on the outside of that door, but I had my fingers and other parts of my body crossed in hope that that was going to wait until next year. Jamie loved his mother, but not that much.
We picked up pretty well where we left off fifteen minutes earlier, struggling to fit the new frame for the doorway into place. The picture window was already fixed in position, just waiting for the glass door to complete the framing. But the door was being difficult. It was an old house and it had settled in some pretty peculiar ways, as old houses often do, and I got the feeling it didn’t like the cosmetic surgery we were performing.
“Come on Sailor, force it!” was the only encouragement I got from Jamie. Being equally adept with a grunt I answered, “I am, but it won’t go. Like you and school.”
He smiled again, this time through the sweat. He didn’t have many friends on the reserve, especially since he had moved to Peterborough several years ago to get away from this house. At least there, the less people knew, the better. And often, they didn’t care.
He shifted his position to the inside of the house, trying to use his weight to pull the door frame into place. He tugged at it a few times, his back hitting a large oak chest of drawers. All the glass paraphernalia on its top clinked together like bottles in a liquor cabinet.
Giving me a frustrated look, Jamie leaned against the dresser and yelled through the open door to the rest of the house.
“Hey Mom, we gotta move this dresser or we’ll knock something over. Is that okay?”
There was a rustling from the kitchen before Jamie’s mother, Patricia, or Patty as we called her, appeared. She looked a lot like Jamie but obviously older and a bit heavier. She didn’t have Jamie’s hard look, but then again he didn’t have her dreamy quality either. A pity, since both could have no doubt used a bit of each other’s attributes. So as it stood, basic appearances and blood were about the only thing those two seemed to have in common.
She smiled her Patricia smile when she saw me. “Oh hi Andrew, don’t let him work you too hard. His father does that all the time to his own friends.” Despite the heat of the day, I felt a chill go down my spine when she said things like that. She turned to Jamie. “You can move it, but be careful. Kathryn will take a fit if anything happens to her dresser.” Her mind definitely stated, she turned and called out to the kitchen, “Kathryn, hurry up. We’ll be late.”
If I could read minds, I would probably have felt Jamie wondering how long an oak dre
sser could float in the middle of the lake. Maybe Kathryn with it. But it was a question that would remain unanswered as Kathryn appeared in the doorway, and with this, an almost tangible change in the atmosphere of the room. And not a pleasant one, either.
Kathryn was a smart-looking white lady in her forties, a close friend of Patricia’s. A more politically correct and accurate term might be partner, or bus’gim, an Ojibway term meaning girlfriend/boyfriend, and, unfortunately an even more realistic term would be Jamie’s sworn enemy. Patricia and Kathryn lived together in that little house on the shore of that big lake, and that was the reason Jamie lived in town.
Jamie’s Mohawk blood came from his father, Galen, who many years ago had lived and loved in this small house with Patricia. According to my mother, theirs was a passionate relationship, and they acted like newlyweds for over four years. But Galen had other passions that were equally important to him.
Two years after Jamie was born, Galen joined the American army, following a long family tradition, to go off and fight in Vietnam. I was surprised to learn that quite a number of Native people, even in Canada, had joined the American armed forces during that violent time, and Galen evidently felt the call too. I guess the Canadian Army just didn’t have the mighty warrior ring to it that the Marines did.
After your standard tearful goodbye to his wife and young son, the kind you only see in Oliver Stone movies, Galen went overseas in ’71. He was five months short of ending his tour of duty when the telegram came. On some sort of recon mission, Galen and his platoon came under heavy enemy fire. Only a handful made it back to camp. Galen wasn’t one of them. The strange thing was that nobody actually saw him being shot, caught or anything. He had just disappeared into the jungle. His body was never found, so, as was the procedure, he was listed as missing in action.
Once, in an uncharacteristically pensive moment, Jamie had confessed to me the guilt he felt because he doesn’t remember his father. There wasn’t a tangible memory to grieve with sorrow, or remember with happiness. Nothing. He had just turned three when his mother went into mourning and never came out. All he can recollect of that dark time was the non-stop crying that went on for months and spending a lot of time in his room, alone. He does, however, remember suddenly appearing at his maternal grandparents’ house for several months during what later turned out to be Patricia’s breakdown.
Then, one sunny summer day, Jamie does recall his mother appearing in his grandmother’s living room. He remembers this strange woman who looked somewhat familiar picking him up. Then, after a short car ride, he found himself in a new place that again, looked slightly familiar.
Apparently Patricia had been released from the hospital and was supposedly fit to face the world. But as most of the reserve wondered, how fit is fit?
Patricia had seemed okay, throwing herself into the raising of her son. She’d gotten her smile back and her laugh, and gave off the air that nothing had changed. That was the first hint that something was a little off. She kept referring to Jamie as “Galen’s legacy” and “how she had to look after him until Galen was found, or made his way out of the jungle, or was released, or whatever.”
Since he was only MIA, he was surely alive somewhere, and she settled in to wait. Someday he would come home. However long that took.
That was over twenty years ago and her talk is still peppered with statements and certainties about Galen; Galen this and Galen that, always in the present tense like he was catching the bus home at the end of the week with his arms full of Chinese food or something. Most of us who are close to the family have gotten used to it, but if you take the time to actually think about it like I do, it’ll give you the willies for sure.
For a number of years after Galen disappeared, a few of her friends and family tried to get Patricia dating again, maybe get her mind back into the real world and help her get on with life. But they had about as much success as the Americans did in finding Galen.
“I can’t go out with anybody!” she’d laugh, shaking her head in amazement. “I’m married, remember?” Then she’d thrust up her ring finger to remind everybody with the physical evidence. My aunt once told me she was always tempted to quote the line from the wedding vows that went “till death do you part” to Patricia, but then thought she might jinx Galen’s return. Deep down inside, most of the village hoped they were wrong and Patricia was right. So, as it was, Patricia was bound and determined not to have anything to do romantically with members of the opposite sex.
“It wouldn’t be right. Just imagine what Galen would say when he gets back.”
Instead, still feeling the need for non-family companionship, she joined some women’s organization in Peterborough after seeing something on 60 Minutes about MIA wives banding together. But seeing how MIA wives were about as numerous in Peterborough as Vietnamese, she had to make do with various other women’s groups.
That’s where she met Kathryn, who ran one of the groups.
By this time Jamie was older. He was about ten or so when he first met Kathryn. Patricia had invited her to the reserve for dinner and Jamie remembers them staying up all night talking. Patricia was rolling out all the Galen stories she knew and Kathryn politely listened to them all.
About six months later, Kathryn moved in, in every sense of the word. Nobody is really quite sure how it all happened, and with Otter Lake being as homophobic as any small town community, not too many people really went out of their way to find out all the dirty details. They were more than content to gossip around what little information they had. Needless to say, friends and family were shocked and scandalized, and again questioned Patricia’s state of mind.
But I don’t think it was insanity at work. More like loneliness. Existing in an environment of your own creation can be a solitary reality. Kathryn must have been attracted to Patricia’s … sweetness, is the only word I can come up with. Living in her own world of hope and unshakable belief had left a residual effect of some sort on most people. She is the sweetest, nicest, most giving person I have come across in my travels. Had she been twenty years younger, not Jamie’s mother, and in the right state of mind, I might have been tempted myself.
As for what brought Patricia to Kathryn in particular, who can say? Perhaps she needed Kathryn’s strength and leadership to lean on. Or could it be as simple as companionship? Seven years of being by yourself, with no close fellowship, either emotional or physical, is hard on anyone. And maybe this way she felt she wouldn’t be cheating on Galen. Whatever the reason, they were still together all these years later.
And that’s where Jamie’s problems really began. Reserve life for anybody out of the ordinary is difficult enough. But for kids with … different … mothers, it can be hell. Jamie’s middle name is Richard, which in turn is usually changed to Dick, but in Jamie’s case, he was called Dyke.
Now this can make a kid go two ways: he can shrink into himself and live the life of a put upon wimp, or he can get tough and take on the world. The second is exactly what Jamie did. Repeatedly. Sometimes violently.
I’ve known Jamie all the thirteen years he’s been fighting people with enough poor judgement to tease him openly, defending his mother’s honour, and quietly hating Kathryn.
“She’s using her. She preys on Mom.” He could never bring himself to say Kathryn’s name but he always had words to say about how Kathryn was some sort of Butch manipulating his dysfunctional mother.
At age sixteen he left home, moved in again with his grandparents for a couple years, then got his own place in town.
Regardless of his feelings towards Kathryn, Jamie would still come home and do things for his mother, but he would always try and arrange it for when Kathryn wasn’t around. And to her credit, Kathryn went out of her way to arrange these encounters, especially around Galen’s birthday and the unmentioned D-Day (Disappearance Day).
But not today. That’s why we were fighting with a support beam in a large hole in the bedroom wall.
Kathryn
’s short salt-and-pepper hair was still damp as she put her coat on with one hand and tried to dry it with the other. She too smiled when she saw me. I was one of the few locals who came to visit.
“Hey Andrew, still looking as cute as ever. You still a heart breaker?”
I should never have answered the phone last Sunday from the desperate but persuasive Jamie. He’s a better carpenter than I am but, unfortunately, I was the one who owned the truck to pick up the lumber. Being mobile can have its disadvantages.
“I’m a little old to be cute,” I responded.
“With a face like that, you’re never too old, eh Patty?” Patricia nodded with a smile. Kathryn gently patted my face in an almost motherly fashion. Jamie’s eyes never left Kathryn, who had, over the years, learned to ignore his scathing glare. He shoved the large dresser to the side with a violent thrust of his hip. The dresser and floor shrieked in protest. The little bottles of perfumes sitting atop it tinkled and jingled with the force of the movement.
“Jamie! I said be gentle with it. Your father would be ashamed!” I could never figure out if Patricia was oblivious to the less than sublime relationship of the two people closest to her or whether she chose to merely ignore it. In all the time I’ve know them, she has never acknowledged the cold war that raged within the confines of that house.
“Sorry, Mom,” was all Jamie would say to her. “Come on, Sailor, give me a hand. We wouldn’t want to damage this fine work of art.” Embarrassed, I looked at Kathryn. She shrugged back, the retaliation of somebody used to a thousand small insults, and who couldn’t be bothered.
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