Indian Horse

by Richard Wagamese

  “Skate?” I asked. “Like that, you mean?”

  He stared straight ahead.

  38

  I made the team as a rookie, and I had a new weapon in my arsenal now. Trust. I trusted that these elite players would go to the right place, make the right moves, put themselves exactly where they needed to be. My passes were the solder that welded our attacks together. I loved the thrill of knowing that I’d sent someone into open ice, left them a gap in the defense, a lane that led to the mouth of the goal and that blinking red light. I scored when I could, but my passing game became electric. I made the Marlboros as a centre. A playmaker. A skater.

  If hockey had been the only arena in which I was tested, I would have won in a rout. But it wasn’t. I was still the Indian kid from northern Ontario. During a press interview following the announcement that I had made the team, I mentioned learning the game in broken-down boots with horse turds for hockey pucks. That made me even more of an oddity. No matter what I did, I remained the outsider. My teammates never called me Chief, but they didn’t use my name either. They never called me anything but “thirteen.”

  “Thirteen don’t talk much.”

  “I heard they’re like that.”

  Or, “Thirteen never smiles.”

  “None of them do.”

  They took my passes, though. They let me fry that ice with my speed and hurtle forward with the puck. They allowed me to carry the game sometimes, waiting until I flipped the rubber to them. But they came out of a system that culled elite kids from the pack and made them special. They’d grown up with hockey moms and dads driving them to practice through sleepy morning streets, coaches they’d known for years pushing them to excel, fans expecting big results from their gifted kids. These guys weren’t mean. They weren’t vicious. They were just indifferent, and that hurt a whole lot more. I’d leave the shelter of the game and walk the streets of the city in something close to desolation. I lived only for the whistle that started the game.

  Every team we faced that season was cut from the same cloth as the Marlies. The players were fast, precise, unrelenting and creative. They were warriors. They played at such a tempo that all I had to do was close my eyes on the bench and the vision settled over me right away. I was a whirlwind in those first games, and nobody could miss that. But the press would not let me be. When I hit someone, it wasn’t just a bodycheck; I was counting coup. When I made a dash down the ice and brought the crowd to their feet, I was on a raid. If I inadvertently high-sticked someone during a tussle in the corner, I was taking scalps. When I did not react to getting a penalty, I was the stoic Indian. One reporter described how I looked flying across the opposition blue line with the puck on my stick: I was as bright-eyed as a painted warrior bearing down on a wagon train. This explosively fast, ordered game I was learning to play had set me on fire. I wanted to rise to new heights, be one of the glittering few. But they wouldn’t let me be just a hockey player. I always had to be the Indian.

  The fans picked up on it. During one game they broke into a ridiculous war chant whenever I stepped onto the ice. At another, the announcer played a sound clip from a cheap western over the PA. When I scored, the ice was littered with plastic Indian dolls, and once someone threw horse turds on the ice in front of our bench. A cartoon in one of the papers showed me in a hockey helmet festooned with eagle feathers, holding a war lance instead of a hockey stick. The caption read, “Welcome the new Marlboro man.”

  Soon, players on other teams were following suit. I was taunted endlessly. They called me Indian Whores, Horse Piss, Stolen Pony. Elbows and knees were constantly flying at me. I couldn’t play a shift that didn’t include some kind of cheap shot, threat or curse. And when I refused to retaliate, my teammates started leaving a space around me on the bench. I sat alone in that territory of emptiness, eight inches on either side of me announcing to everyone that I was different, that I was not welcome even among my own. Finally, it changed the game for me. If they wanted me to be a savage, that’s what I would give them.

  I began to skate with the deliberate intention of shoving my skill up the noses of those who belittled me, made me feel ashamed of my skin. One night against the London Knights I made a no-look backhand pass through the legs of one player over the outstretched stick of another, right onto the stick of our right-winger. He scored on a clear-cut breakaway. As we were skating back to our bench the Knights centre slashed me behind the knees and I fell to the ice. There was no whistle. The crowd howled. My teammates even laughed. He was seated on the Knights bench by then and I skated over lazily. They all looked at me and made faces. I flipped my right glove off at the last second and drove my fist right into this face. I fought three of them before they hauled me off the ice. That was the end of any semblance of joy in the game for me. I became a fighter. If an opposing player directed any kind of remark toward me, I dropped the gloves and started swinging. Any questionable hit was sufficient excuse for a tilt, and my bodychecks were hard, vicious and vindictive. I was bitter. I wanted the game to lift me up. To make the world disappear as it always had. But as a Marlboro, I could never shake being the Indian. So I became a puck hog. Instead of making passes to my open teammates, I skated and whirled until I could make the shot myself. One night, after an end-to-end rush that resulted in a goal on a nifty change of direction at the goal mouth, I dropped to one knee at the other team’s blue line and mimed taking a shot at the net with a bow and arrow. It infuriated the crowd. The other team sent their biggest, toughest player after me on the next shift, and the fight that followed was titanic. I drew a game misconduct penalty and marched to the dressing room, bloodied but filled with a roaring pride.

  “We didn’t bring you here for this, Saul,” the Marlies coach said to me in his office after the game. “We brought you here to be a player. Not some cheap goon.”

  “Hey, I’m just giving them what they want,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The crowd, the team. Don’t you read the papers? I’m the Rampaging Redskin.”

  “That was an unfortunate bit of cheap writing. I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’m better suited to a tomahawk than a hockey stick.”

  “You and I both know that’s not true.”

  “I’m the Indian. That’s all they see.”

  He started to bench me for long stretches in games. When I hit the ice I was effective. I scored twenty-three points in nine games. But the taunting from the stands continued, and I fumed and smoldered and racked up one hundred and twenty minutes in the penalty box. I caused the Marlies to play short-handed a lot of the time, and we lost seven of those games. Finally, they benched me completely. After one night of sitting in the stands, I packed my bag and got on a bus back to Manitouwadge.

  39

  There was a girl I remember from St. Jerome’s. Her name was Rebecca Wolf and she arrived there with her younger sister. They were beautiful. When I saw them for the first time they were getting out of the car that had brought them to the school. I was raking grass, but I stopped what I was doing to watch them. Rebecca saw me looking and gave me a little smile.

  Rebecca’s skin was clear and brown, and her eyes shone. She was tall for her age and slender, not gawky like other girls her age. I’d see her in chapel or walking through the hallways. I’d try to get her to notice me, but she almost never did.

  Rebecca’s sister, Katherine, was small and timid. She was scared of the nuns, but when she tried to run to her older sister for comfort, they strapped her and locked her in a broom closet for hours at a time. Then they started putting her in the Iron Sister.

  The last time they brought Katherine up from the basement, she was broken. She began to wet her bed at night, and the nuns beat her for that. They would haul her into the aisle and strap her. When Rebecca tried to protect her sister she earned a trip to the basement herself.
And while she was down there, Katherine died. No one knew what happened. She went to bed and the other girls found her dead in the morning.

  They didn’t bring Rebecca up from the Iron Sister for four days. When they told her she just looked at the faces of the nuns and didn’t react. Then she turned slowly, walked to the front entrance of the school, and stood at the top of the stairs and screamed. She tore at her hair and face. No one moved to help her, for fear of retaliation from the nuns. But her wailing and sobbing cut all of us kids to the quick.

  I was in the barn alone the next evening, practicing my shooting on the linoleum. I was so intent on the mechanics of my wrist shot that I missed the first few notes. But those that followed made me raise my head and listen. A voice shimmered through the evening air, and I walked to the door of the barn to see where it came from. Rebecca was standing in the rough grass of the Indian yard, her palms raised to the sky, and she was singing in Ojibway. It was a mourning song. I could tell that from the feel of the syllables. Her agony was so pure, I felt my heart ripped out of me. I stood crying in that doorway, offering what prayers I could for the spirit of her sister.

  I never saw the knife. Not until the song was over. She knelt on the fresh-turned earth of her sister’s grave and slipped the knife from her coat and plunged the knife into her belly. As I ran to her, a whole crowd of kids burst from the school. She was dead when we got there, blood everywhere. We stood in a circle gazing down at her. No one said a word. No one could. But when someone began to sing the song Rebecca had sung we all joined in, the outlaw Ojibway rising into the air. When the song was over, we filed back into the school, past the nuns and the priests who’d gathered at the bottom of the stairs. None of us looked at them.

  40

  It was late at night when I got back to Manitouwadge. I walked from the bus to the Kelly house, knocked on the door and then waited on the steps with my bag at my feet. After a minute I heard footsteps. The door opened and closed, and Virgil sat down beside me in the dark. He lit a smoke. We sat there staring at the lights of the mill.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “It was for shit,” I said.

  “Read about you. The Rampaging Redskin.”

  “That and more,” I said. “Lots more.”

  He snapped the butt away with one finger, and we watched it spin through the night and land in a rut in the road. “You ripped it up, though, didn’t you?” he asked finally. “Twenty two points in nine games.”

  “Twenty three,” I said.

  “Jesus, Saul. That’s a season for most guys.”

  “So were the penalty minutes.”

  “You had to fight back. Shit, I know that. Glad you finally learned, actually.”

  “You got a spot for me on the Moose?”

  “Hell, yeah. But what about the NHL? With stats like that over a full season in Major Junior, you’d be a lock to be drafted.”

  “I just want to play the game, Virg. I can’t do it with all that bullshit getting in the way.”

  He nodded. “So, what are you gonna do now?”

  “Go to work, I guess.”

  “Mines or mill. That’s all you got to pick from around here.”

  “I know. It’s good enough for you.”

  “You were born for more, Saul.”

  “Says you.”

  We sat in the dark, and there were no more words. The silence was enough. Finally, he reached out to clap me on the back. After he went in I stayed out there a while looking up at the stars. When the chill got to be too much, I picked up my bag and walked into the house to sleep.

  41

  Fred Kelly got me on a forestry crew as a deadfall bucker that fall, and I became a working man. When trees fell down or when the wind knocked them over I took a chainsaw and cut them into lengths that the log skidders could haul to the trucks. It was hard, heavy work, but there was something in the strain that I liked. I took to picking up eight-foot lengths of log and bearing them out of the tangle on my shoulders. I became known as a hard worker, industrious, and after a few weeks the company shipped me off to their logging camp on the shores of Nagagami Lake.

  It took a float plane to get us in, and I watched the great green carpet of the land roll out below my face pressed to the window. When we landed I could feel it all around me, like the press of a living thing. The view from the bunkhouse was stark and beautiful. Any fear I’d carried about my first venture into the bush as a logger vanished. I’d stand on the rocks in the dim hours before any of the others had woken and feel it enter me like light. I’d close my eyes and feel it. The land was a presence. It had eyes, and I was being scrutinized. But I never felt out of place. Late in the evenings I’d walk into the trees, stride through the bush until I was wrapped in it, cocooned. The stars that pinwheeled above spun a thousand light years away. Time, mystery, departure and union were there all at once. I wondered if this was what it meant to be Indian, Ojibway. A ritual. A ceremony, ancient and simple and personal. If I could have borne it with me into the day-to-day life of the camp, things might have been different.

  But they weren’t. These were northern men, Finns, Swedes, Germans, Quebecois and Russians. They were lumberjacks. They were as efficient with the giant two-handed rip saws, axes and horse teams as they were with chainsaws and tractors. They were steeped in the tradition of it. They were huge, brawny men who bellowed and roared and skipped back and forth between languages over the course of a conversation, so I never knew where the gist of it was leading. Drinkers. Hard and deliberate. They spent their evenings in the loquacious flow of liquor, smoking and playing cards. Brawls erupted quickly and ended the same way. Then they’d return to their game, the blood of them cut with the next fresh deal, fists clutching cards like a throat.

  They didn’t know what to make of me. There hadn’t been an Indian in their midst before. So I never joined them in their evening distractions. When I came back in from the bush I’d huddle in my bunk and read. When they started calling me “Chief” and “Tonto,” “Geronimo” or “wagon burner,” I’d heard it so often before that I didn’t offer a reaction. That bothered them. I suppose they took my silence for high-mindedness, the books in my hands as a rebuff. They began to take my measure in the only way they knew how.

  They’d push me hard in the woods and wait to see if I could keep up. I always could. When they pressed hard with their saws and axes through the trunks of great trees I did the same and I carried heavy lengths of sawn timber through the bush without a complaint. They tried to find a weakness in me, but I was determined that they would not. So they made it personal. They saw to it that I drew the assignment to clean the outhouses. I dumped lime and swept and batted at the flies that congregated in swarming masses. I washed dishes. I mopped the kitchen floor, carted garbage and shovelled up the mess bears and raccoons left scattered about the small gravel pit the camp used as a landfill. I oiled and greased tractors, hosed down trucks and skidders and washed down the bunkhouse each day before my shift started. The more they tried to exhaust me, the harder I worked. I did all of it without saying a word. Then I’d lie in my bunk and read by flashlight after they tumbled into bed and be awake and in motion by the time they rose.

  They took to more insulting name-calling and swearing at me. Even when they took to pushing me and tripping me and swiping at me when I passed, I’d just level a blank look at the offender and keep on with the work.

  Only on the land did I find calm. There I could relax. I could rest. I could sit looking out across the wide expanse of lake forever. But the time always came to turn back to the bunkhouse. I’d squint hard at the lighted windows of the camp and I’d draw into myself. I’d haul in a lungful of air, hold it, compact all my dark energy until it sat in my gut like a black marble, cold and glassy and hard. Then I’d walk back into their midst and they’d stop their game and challenge me. I’d walk to my bunk and
lie down and read long into the night.

  Then one night a big Swede named Jorgenson called to me, gestured crudely toward me. I stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then I rolled off the bunk and walked slowly to the table where he sat playing cards. As they laughed, I planted my feet wide. Jorgenson stood up and swung a meaty fist at my face. I blocked his punch with my forearm and reached out with my other hand and latched onto his throat. I squeezed. Hard. I walked forward slowly with the man’s throat in my hand, wordlessly, lifting and pushing and squeezing at the same time. The big Swede clutched and grabbed and swatted at me, but the pressure of my grip was so great he weakened and dropped to his knees, red-faced and gasping with his eyes bugging out. As I let him drop to the floor I punched him in the head with everything I had, and he crumpled onto the floorboards. I turned to face the rest of them. I was frigid blackness inside, like water under a berg. I wanted another one to stand, wanted another one to swing at me, invite me to erupt. But they stayed seated, and nobody spoke as I walked slowly over to the table and picked up Jorgenson’s discarded hand of cards. I studied the cards, then smirked and tossed the hand back on the table.