Fearless Warriors

by Drew Hayden Taylor

  “I can explain … ” she started.

  “I’m waiting,” was Jamie’s only response.

  Kathryn paced the kitchen as Jamie watched her and I watched him. She stopped in front of the big window overlooking the driveway.

  “I know you’ve always hated me.”

  His voice barked. “The telegram! Why did you hide it? Why didn’t you tell me or my mother. You buried my father without telling us.”

  “I did it for your mother!”

  “I knew you’d say something like that. Don’t try and con me with all this heart-gushing over Mom. If you cared for her one little bit, if her life meant anything to you, you would have told her. You of all people know how hung up on Dad she is. This might have freed her.”

  Kathryn was silent for a moment, the words sinking in. “From him, or from me?”

  Jamie stood up and rounded the table. “You know very well what I mean. This was just to make sure she wouldn’t leave you. If she knew Dad was dead, really dead, she could go back to living a normal life.”

  “And just what the hell do you consider a normal life?”

  “Do I have to spell it out?”

  “Please.”

  Their eyes locked as I sat silently in my little chair at the side of the table. The storm was building.

  “The truth is you didn’t want Mom to get on with her life so you hid this telegram and buried him yourself to keep her with you. Didn’t you? Admit it!” Instead of anger, there was amazement, almost surprise on Kathryn’s face.

  “After all this time, you still think I’m just playing head games with your mother? That’s the only reason I’m here?”

  Jamie turned away, the spaghetti falling from his shoulders. “Oh, yeah, sorry, you’re a great saint who should be congratulated for making my mother a social outcast.”

  “Jamie, you know your mother, you should know how this would affect her. She so believes in Galen’s return that nothing else has any meaning for her. Take that away … take away her faith, her reason for going on, and you might as well kill her.”

  “You’re grasping at straws, Kathryn. This might make her stronger.”

  “No, it won’t. If Galen dies, she dies. Think about it, Jamie. She’s not very strong, never was. He’s all she’s ever talked about since the day I met her. He is alive to her, just like you and I are. I’ve know for thirteen years that if he walked in that door right now, right this minute, I wouldn’t be a flicker of memory in your mother’s eyes. I’d be a distant second to him. But I’ve accepted that and life goes on.”

  Kathryn leaned wearily against the sink, the strength going out of her voice. “Believe it or not, Jamie, I think I know your father as well as you do, probably better in fact. You only knew him for two years when you were a baby. I’ve had thirteen years of stories and legends to know him. It’s like I’ve been living with both your parents instead of just your mother all these years.

  “Do you know what it’s like to lie in bed and comfort somebody you love and cherish as she cries on the anniversary of her husband’s disappearance? Or to spend endless hours listening to the woman you care most about in the world talk incessantly about how she fell in love with the father of her child. It’s not easy! You should try loving someone whose whole heart and soul belongs to somebody else. You can’t fight a memory, or confront a dream. That’s what I had to live with all these years. And yet, on top of it all, your mother is everything to me. I would sacrifice anything for that woman.”

  Jamie was silent.

  “I made sure your father was buried properly in a veteran’s cemetery, full honours, out of respect for your mother. Everything was taken care of. If you want, you can tell her the truth, but you should know that I didn’t hide the truth out of selfishness. I did it to save your mother.” Kathryn was drained, emotionally and physically. A huge cross had lifted off her shoulders and now she was fearful of what the immediate future might bring. “Jamie, let her live her life in hope. I’m sure there’s a thousand psychiatrists out there who would disagree, but screw them. It’s worked for her for the last twenty years. She’s happy and the passing time means nothing to her. Let her, and Galen, be.”

  Trying to avoid eye contact with either of them, I started counting spaghetti noodles splattered across the table. I had gotten into my second dozen when Jamie broke the silence with a logical question.

  “There’s something I don’t understand here. What do you get out of all this? If all my Mom’s talk about my father hurts you, why put up with it?”

  Kathryn fairly shouted her answer back at Jamie. “Because I need her! She’s everything to me. Can’t you see, I’ve invested my life in Patricia. I was there when she needed a friend, it’s my turn now. It’s my turn to need her.”

  “Why do you need her?” Jamie said.

  “I belong here. We belong together. This is my home now and I want to—”

  “It’s not your home. It’s mine, and Mom’s. You don’t belong here.”

  Kathryn grabbed Jamie’s coat, pleading. “Jamie, I love your mother. If you tell her about the telegram, she’ll never forgive me. I can’t stand to lose another one, to be alone again … ”

  “My mother isn’t ‘another one.’ She’s my mother and this is my father.” He shrugged her loose and turned to leave the kitchen.

  Kathryn cried, “Where are you going?!”

  “To have a talk with my mother,” was all he said.

  Pushing him aside she sprinted for the hallway. “Don’t! Please don’t!”

  She disappeared down through the kitchen doorway with Jamie not far behind, his booming voice chasing after her: “Get away from that door!”

  Then, from the kitchen, I heard a rustling and banging, then a door slamming. Voices rising and falling, in anger and fear, were pouring out of that room.

  I could smell the garlic bread from the oven beginning to burn. I fished it out, and then on reflection took an unburned slice and left the house. Once outside I drank in the taste of both the bread and that beautiful sunset disappearing over the islands at the far end of the lake. The heat lightning had disappeared and it was time for me to go home.

  Behind me, I heard the shattering of glass—probably the window we had put in yesterday.

  The Man Who Didn’t Exist

  Technically, Jimmy Pine doesn’t exist. That’s a hard trick to pull off when you’re six feet, two inches, and tip at least 230 on the scales. But still, there’s no record of his birth, life or existence on file anywhere in this country.

  Within the confines of the Otter Lake Reserve, Jimmy is as well known as a friendly dog, and just as amiable. But when you cross the borders of the reserve and venture into Lakefield or Peterborough, the federal, provincial and municipal governments regard him as a persona non grata, an invisible man, which suits his family just fine.

  I know all this because I’m his cousin, though you couldn’t prove it legally. Jimmy Pine is one of our village’s biggest secrets.

  Years and years ago, so long back that people don’t like to remember that far, Jimmy’s mother, a wonderful woman named Greta Pine lost two children. Not to disease or death—that would have been easier to accept than the reality of what happened. Greta Pine lost her children to the institutions of the greater civilization which called itself Canada.

  Greta’s first born, a chubby little boy she and her husband Karl named Moses, was appropriated into the Residential School system, as was the custom at the time. At the tender age of eight, Moses disappeared. Moses was one of the thousands of Native children who went into the bureaucratic/religious laundry that took an entire generation of Native children through the wash, rinse and spin cycle and then hung them out to dry. Many, including Moses, fell from the clothesline.

  Greta’s next child, a beautiful little girl christened Dawn, was scooped up within four months of her birth by the Children’s Aid Society. A difficult childbirth had rendered Greta unable to care for Dawn for several months. Taking this as
evidence of an unfit environment, it wasn’t long until the government-issued car that many Native parents learned to fear appeared in Karl’s driveway, then left, bearing a new passenger.

  The Powers That Be were notoriously tight-lipped about the journey and destination of the children under their jurisdiction. So, like her brother before her, Dawn soon faded from the world of Otter Lake, though never from her parents’ hearts and memories.

  That left Jimmy, the third and final child, born in 1965, though again, nobody can prove it. According to Greta’s midwife, Jimmy was born covered with a caul, a thin membrane left over from the placenta.

  It is said by the Elders that when a child is born surrounded by a caul, it is a sign of good things to come. The child has been singled out by the Creator and is destined for great achievements. Of course that’s what they used to say, but since most babies have been born in a hospital or health clinic for the last fifty or sixty years, there hasn’t been much of an interest in understanding the significance of cauls, especially since the medical establishment takes a more pragmatic view of them.

  So, keeping with tradition, Greta kept the caul, carefully wrapped and preserved in a lace handkerchief, stored in a small tin box once used for tobacco. Jimmy once pointed it out to me when we were kids. It stood on the dresser in the far corner of his parents’ bedroom. We were both too scared to open it; it was enough just to see the box.

  Jimmy confided in me, as only kids do, that his mother had told him he was destined to do something wonderful and great for his people. And that once he had fulfilled his destiny, he was to take the caul and bury it under the biggest, most beautiful pine tree he could find, returning it to the earth from whence all people had sprung.

  On reflection, that was a hell of a responsibility to live up to for a kid who didn’t exist.

  According to family legend, Jimmy’s prophetic birth and the two lost children drove Greta and Karl to their fateful decision. Determined to keep Jimmy at all costs, the Pines conspired to keep the birth of Jimmy a total and complete secret.

  Under normal conditions this would have been a difficult, even an impossible task, but as has often been said before, Otter Lake is seldom in a normal situation. The village is a community with relatives and extended family in all levels of the bureaucracy of the reserve.

  The plight of Greta and Karl was no secret to the rest of the village. Many on the reserve had lost children, brothers, sisters, to both the CAS, and Residential Schools, and the other institutions of the superior nation, so there was little prompting needed to enlist help.

  When Jimmy was little, his parents kept his hair long and uncut. Up until the age of about seven or eight, he could have as easily passed for a little girl as for a little boy. When he went in for his medical check-ups, either to an unaware white nurse on the reserve or an overworked doctor in the city, Greta and Karl made sure they had the birth certificates of their two older children handy, just in case.

  Jimmy’s aunt, the first Native teacher on the reserve, doctored a few papers and forms to slip Jimmy into the class. After grade four, all the other kids were bussed off the reserve to a school in Lakefield. Not Jimmy. His aunt, on Greta’s request, took over private tutoring and he received as good a high school education as any person who actually existed.

  The reserve’s back roads were where Jimmy learned to drive, unseen by the Ontario Provincial Police or the Mounties. Later, when the reserve got one of its own cops, a Native Special Constable, he was Jimmy’s older cousin Tim.

  Luckily, because of the extended family to which Jimmy belongs, he was never at a loss for ID when he really needed it. For instance, he bought everything he needed in Peterborough, making sure it was tax exempt with his cousin Terry’s status card.

  One time, though, he came close to being caught. It was at Charley’s, a bar in Peterborough, where he and I and a group of friends were hanging out, listening to a typically mediocre country rock band, where he saw her.

  Marnie Benojee was her name. And, as luck would have it, she was one of the few people on the reserve who Jimmy wasn’t directly related to—at least not within the last handful of generations. Sleek, still thin, with long black hair that swayed with the barely rhythmic beat of the band, she was sitting three tables to the right of the non-existent Jimmy.

  Jimmy had long had a crush on her, or rather her smile, if you listen to his version of the story. Over the years he had watched her go through a handful of relationships, one short marriage and the birth of a baby girl, Zoe. Marnie knew Jimmy’s name and had often talked with him at Pow Wows and other social gatherings. But that was the extent of their affiliation.

  But that night she sat barely fifteen feet away. And beside her, holding her hand, was Roger Ames. Unfortunately, Marnie had miserable taste in men, and Roger lived up to the standard of his predecessors. Roger was one of those white guys everybody knew by reputation but didn’t want to know personally. No doubt he was in Charley’s because he had been kicked out of practically every other bar in the city (except maybe for the one gay bar in town and there was little chance he’d be seen dead or alive in that establishment).

  I remember that a really bad version of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” was being attempted by the band. With a wild yell of delight Roger jumped up, half dragging Marnie through a dozen crowded tables to the dance floor.

  Jimmy’s eyes never left them as they started to dance. Who knows why people fall in love with people they barely know. All I know is that I was sitting right beside the poster boy.

  The fourteen or so beers Roger had downed hadn’t helped his coordination. He was banging off people like a pinball in the hands of an expert. Marnie tried to keep up and keep him up, but it was a losing battle. Finally, he bumped into this other guy once too often. Words were said, then more words, quickly getting louder, eventually drowning out the beat of the band.

  It wasn’t long before the other guy went sailing across a table crowded with beer bottles. His friend stepped in and, well, there went the evening. Bodies were thrown, punches tossed, glass and wood shattering everywhere.

  I wanted to dodge for the door, both for my safety and Jimmy’s, since I knew the police were probably being called at that very moment. But I spotted Jimmy making his way to the dance floor, using his height and weight to cut a path through the chaos. He wasn’t an especially violent person, so this didn’t make sense. Then I saw his destination.

  At the far corner of the dance floor, Marnie was trapped. Her back was to a railing while the mayhem in front of her kept her cornered.

  Like a bulldozer, Jimmy cleared a passage to her, leaned over the railing and lifted her from the dance floor and over the railing like she was a basketball. At first she was startled, then she saw it was Jimmy. I could see him mouth the words “come on” and throw a protective arm around her.

  Unfortunately, Roger saw this too. Roger climbed his way up the railing and flung himself onto Jimmy’s back. Roger was the smaller of the two, but he had the advantage of surprise and position. He started flailing away at Jimmy, who finally threw him off with a stout elbow to Roger’s midsection.

  It was then that doors were thrown open and the police arrived, just as I’d predicted.

  The party ended with Marnie and most of the other women from the bar being let loose while the majority of the guys were hauled down to the police station. Riding in the police van, we started the complicated matter of preserving Jimmy’s invisible status. Over the years, his unique station had become a thing of honour for the community and it was an ongoing joke and a matter of pride that everyone tried to sustain at any cost.

  In handcuffs, Paul Gunn, another cousin, managed to slip Jimmy his wallet full of ID. We were all pretty sure that we would be fined and released, but that they wouldn’t clue into the fact that Paul Gunn was actually six years younger than the person carrying his ID, a noticeable six years. Other than that, the two looked pretty much the same, close enough that a cop proc
essing a half dozen Native people wouldn’t look all that closely.

  Evidently, we were wrong. The cop at the front desk, a short, fuzzy-type guy, had us all lined up with our ID in hand, waiting to be examined. He went from one to the next to the next, like a bee with a badge. He took the driver’s license Paul had slipped Jimmy and looked long into the picture.

  The six of us, not including Roger, who was being processed elsewhere to prevent an embarrassing repeat of the bar incident in police headquarters, held our collective breath. Luckily nobody noticed six Indians not breathing.

  The cop looked up into Jimmy’s face, a good five inch difference.

  “You look shorter in this picture.”

  Jimmy leaned over to peek at the picture on the licence. “I’d been ill.”

  Taking his cue, Paul nudged me with his elbow, pushing me into a desk overflowing with paper, knocking over an expensive, if well-used, typewriter. It hit the floor and shattered into several good pieces, as did the silence and my dreams of having a future.

  Almost immediately, short and fuzzy slapped the driver’s licence back into Jimmy’s hand and made his way towards me.

  “Hey! What did you just do?!”

  Typically, Paul nodded me a “job well done, cuz,” smile.

  “It was an accident.”

  I don’t think he believed me.

  Four hours later we were released. I now owed the government my fine as well as the inflated price of what they called a practically new, state of the art typewriter.

  Ironically, Paul also received a larger fine for not carrying proper ID. I claimed he was my brother, and since most of us had the same last name, it wasn’t difficult to convince the men in blue. As we left the station, Jimmy tossed Paul back his wallet.

  “Thanks.”

  “It was worth it, to get the last laugh.”

  As we walked to our cars at four in the morning, we all had that last laugh, poorer, but safe again.