Indian Horse

by Richard Wagamese

  “Game over,” I said. They never bothered me again.

  42

  When I came out, I brought the intensity of the bush camp out with me. I was seventeen. I was still a boy. But this mistreatment made me hard. When I took to the ice with the Moose, the anger funnelled out of me, and my game became a whirling, slashing attack. It didn’t matter who we played. I played as hard against the white town teams as I did against reserve teams. There was no lively banter on the bench. Instead, I glared at the ice until they opened the gate to release me. I still had grace, the flowing speed, but my eyes were feral beneath my helmet. I blazed up the ice with locomotive force, and when anybody hit me, I hit back. When they slashed me I slashed back harder, breaking my stick against shin pads and shoulder pads. When they dropped the gloves with me I punched and pummelled until I had to be torn off by my teammates. There was no joy in the game now, no vision. There was only me in hot pursuit of the next slam, bash and crunch. I poured out a blackness that constantly refuelled itself. The game was me alone with a roaring in my gut and in my ears. I heard nothing else. When the other members of the Moose stopped talking to me, I knew that I was beyond them, the tournament teams and the game, forever.

  43

  I left Manitouwadge the year I turned eighteen. I’d saved enough of my wages to buy an older-model pickup truck that was outfitted with a steel box to carry the tools I’d assembled. There was no plan. I was just leaving. I was a working man. Work was everywhere. The highway led west to the prairies, the mountains and the Pacific coast, and I had never seen any of them. But it wasn’t a yearning for new geography that drove me—it was my tiredness of the old. The bush had ceased to be a haven. A vacant feeling sat where the beginnings of my history had once been. That part of myself was a tale long dead, one that held nothing for me. So I was heading out to create whatever history I could with muscle and will and no constraints. I was leaving the bush and the North behind. I didn’t think I needed them anymore. The echoes of those I’d travelled with slid into the trees I was leaving behind.

  The Kellys took my departure with worry, though they didn’t try to stop me.

  “It will be tough, Saul,” Fred Kelly said. “A working life is made easier by a home. People. Noise. Distraction. They fill you when you’re tired and depleted.”

  “Feels like I’ve had enough noise and people for a while,” I said.

  “That Toronto business was hard,” he said. I’d never told anyone about the ordeal of the bush camp.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you can let it go. You can stay here, work, get a life under your feet.”

  “I’ve had a life.” It came out blunt, hard, and I could see that it hurt him.

  “I know,” he whispered.

  Virgil was characteristically blunt. “Feels like you’re fuckin’ running.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I’m just moving on. Time for a change.”

  He levelled a long look at me. “We’re supposed to be teammates. Wingers. You. Me. Nobody wins alone, Saul.”

  “I’m used to alone.”

  “You’re used to thinking you’re alone. Big difference.”

  “I’m not disappearing,” I said.

  He shook his head sadly. “Seems to me you already did.”

  44

  I stood in the kitchen and looked out to where the boards of the backyard rink sat in the pale spring sun. There wasn’t a way that I could think of to tell them how the rage felt against my ribs, how it tasted at the back of my throat. I had to leave before I collapsed under the weight of it.

  I took one last walk through the house, trying to memorize the degrees of light in each room and the sound my footsteps made on the floorboards, the feel of the jamb of the front door against my palms. Then I walked out to my truck and was gone by the time I started the engine.

  Medicine Hat. Fort Chipewyan. Wabasca. Skookumchuck. Tagish Lake. I worked in all those places and more. The resonance of those names haunting me with memories. I followed the rumours of work that tumbled from the lips of the men I met and became migratory, a wandering nomad with my eyes on distant hills. I covered long charcoal stretches of highway, the undulating yellow line like a river bearing me somewhere beyond all recollection. Or that’s what I hoped. I would drive unthinkingly. Music was my constant companion. I loved it for its ability to fill space, to occupy the empty passenger side of the cab of the truck, and the rooms I rented in two-bit motels in the mill towns, mining towns and work camps where I landed. I learned about it with the help of books, and once I discovered Dvorak’s cello concerto, I turned to it again and again through my travels to suspend the desperation clutching at my gut. Work and music sustained me for a long time. I could vanish into them and surface at my choosing. I preferred being alone to inquisitive company. I became a carpenter, roofer, miner, lumberjack, highway paver, railroad labourer, dishwasher, hide scraper, ranch hand, tree planter, demolition worker, steel foundry yardman and dock worker. I did not offer to be a buddy to my fellow workers. I did not become chatty. I did not move beyond the safety of the wordless barrier I erected between myself and other people. The rage was still there. It sat square in my chest whenever I heard “Chief,” “Tonto,” “Geronimo,” “dumb Injun” or the hundred other labels men applied to me. But I never reacted. I wouldn’t risk the explosion I knew would follow. The feel of Jorgenson’s throat in my hands. The blackness inside me. Instead, I threw myself harder into the discipline of labour, losing myself in the grunt work I favoured.

  A part of me missed the banter of the bench and the dressing room, though; the brash gutter talk and the teasing. So I began eating lunch and supper in beverage rooms and taverns where working men slung jibes back and forth, engaging in verbal arm wrestles that bristled with energy. I would sit and listen. Drink it all in and grin at the wit, the laconic retorts, the garrulous drunken voices rambling on about everything that concerned a man. I’m not sure when I began to drink myself. I only know that when I did the roaring in my belly calmed. In alcohol I found an antidote to exile. I moved out of the background to become a joker, a clown, a raconteur who spun stories about madcap travels and events. None of them had actually happened to me, but I had read enough to make these tales come to life, to be believable and engaging. Amid the slaps and pokes and guffaws that greeted them, I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are. I became drunk with that. Addicted. My new escape sustained me for awhile. Whenever the stories and the invented histories started to unravel, I’d move on to a new crowd in a new tavern, a new place where the Indian in me was forgotten in the face of the ribald, hilarious fictions I spun. Finally, though, the drink had me snared. I spoke less and drank more, and I became the Indian again; drunken and drooling and reeling, a caricature everyone sought to avoid.

  Now I had a different reason for needing to be away. So I drifted. When I could find work I was mostly a high-functioning drunk, keeping just enough in hand to get me through the day, and then sinking into the drink alone when the day was over. I’d pass out listening to music or with a book cradled in my lap. I’d wake up in the early hours, switch off the light, take another few swallows and fall back asleep. You can live for years like that. You experiment to find out how much you need to swallow to get you past a certain chunk of hours, how much you need to walk steadily, without your hands shaking. I was an alchemist, mixing solutions I packed in my lunch kit to assuage the strychnine feel of rot in my guts. It was a dim world. Things glimmered, never shone.

  45

  I don’t know what brought me back to northern Ontario in 1978. I don’t remember deciding to head there. I don’t recall thinking of it. I just wound up near Redditt where my brother had found my family before we set out for Gods Lake.

  I arrived on a rainy day without much money in my pocke
t. After I’d settled at a small motel, I made the rounds of mills and lumberyards, the railroad and a few construction companies. I managed to get onto a crew breaking up rock at a quarry and put in a good couple of weeks. But after that there was no work to be found. I was tired of my life, really tired, and I lost my ability to hold things together. Before long I was too broke to get out of town and too wasted to care. I hung around the draft joints cadging drinks and hoping for a break. I was at a table in the corner of a workingman’s bar, almost passed out, when someone shook my shoulder.

  “You need to wake up there, fella.”

  I looked up and I expected to see the waiter or a cop, but the man was older, white, dressed in coveralls, a John Deere hat and work boots.

  “Why?” I slurred at him.

  “I don’t drink with sleepers,” he said.

  “Why the hell would you want to drink with me?”

  “Ojibways are the best storytellers I know. Got a story or two in you, I imagine. Don’t ya?”

  “Maybe. If you’re buying.”

  “I’ll buy. You just sit up and look proud.”

  “Sitting up I can manage.”

  “All of us got pride. You just need to remember you have it. Your people? A real proud people. Been my pleasure to know a lot of them.”

  “That why you sat here? Because you’re proud of who I am?”

  “Proud of your people. Seems like enough to start a conversation, anyway. Sift is my name. Ervin Sift,” he said and stuck out a hand.

  I shook his hand limply, though I managed to grab the draft beers the waiter dropped firmly enough. Sift let me be, and I was grateful for the lack of talk.

  “Eat?” he said after another round of drinks.

  “I could, yeah.”

  He ordered us steaks with mashed potatoes and beans. When the food arrived, he folded his hands right there in the bar and offered a prayer. Embarrassed, I cast a look around to see if anyone was watching.

  He lifted his head, folded his napkin in his lap. “Soon’s we’re done this we’ll head on home.” All I could do was stare at him.

  Over the next three days he nursed me through a killer hangover. I’d come to and he’d be at my bedside with a wet cloth to wipe my brow or a cup of soup he’d hold while I sipped it. He talked to me when I got scared, calmed me down. When I was over the worst, he helped me walk out to the porch for fresh air. All through it, he never asked a question.

  Erv Sift was a farmer with a good-sized acreage where he managed a dozen head of cattle, a few sheep, chickens and an old burro left over from when he’d had horses. He ran a wood-cutting operation to augment his income. His last woodman had walked off unexpectedly, and he needed someone to take over. I drove his extra pickup truck around and cut firewood from deadfall, from slash piles the forestry guys had left behind, or from trees other landowners needed cleared from their property. Sometimes I winched dead trees out of the bush. I hauled everything to Erv’s woodlot, made sure the piles were arranged according to the kind of wood and the amount of time they’d been seasoned. It was easy work. I knew my way around timber, and I got to work alone. I delivered firewood to homes all over the area. It didn’t pay any screaming hell, but it was good, honest work, and I felt that I owed it to him. He gave me a room in the farmhouse. He was a widower. His wife had died a decade before, and he lived alone. They hadn’t had any children.

  Erv didn’t drink much and he was a good hand at the stove. He never charged me for my meals. There was nowhere to spend my money, so soon I had a bank account for the first time in a long time. I fell into the routine we’d set up, and there was a degree of comfort in it. But there was a restlessness in me, something that wouldn’t settle.

  46

  We’d play cards late into the night listening to the radio, and if I didn’t feel like talking he never pushed me to it. Instead, I always felt like he could see into me and understood that there were territories in me that I never travelled. He was content to see me recover and get my feet under me again.

  “Saul,” he said. “You ever pine for anything other than this? Ever have dreams of family, your own home, things like that?”

  “No time for dreams,” I said. “I had some once. They didn’t pan out. I don’t have them anymore.”

  He looked squarely at me and I held the look. Then he nodded and let it go. That was the first real conversation we ever had. For the most part he let me work and let me be. We were friends. There were always more silences between us than words but we understood each other’s need for privacy. I knew he missed his wife. He wore it like clothes. He told me some of it. How they’d been together almost thirty years. How he’d drive his father’s tractor twenty miles just to park on the hill overlooking her house on the chance that he might see her. How he met her at a country dance and she knew who he was. Had seen him on the hill. A faraway look would fall over him and he’d light his pipe and sit back in his chair and smoke and I knew to let him be.

  Erv Sift was an angel. I have no doubt of that. He understood that I bore old wounds and didn’t push me to disclose them. He only offered me security, friendship and the first home I’d had in a long time. But there were times when I would get up suddenly and feel the need to walk, to be away. It billowed in me like a cloud. He wouldn’t say anything and neither would I. I would walk beyond the boundary of his fields and into the bush. Most times I would just wander. Sometimes I would find a tree or a rock and sit there and look out over the land and let the silence enter me. For a while the effect of the land was enough to keep me grounded. But there were always things swimming around in me that I could neither hold on to long enough to comprehend or learn to live with. It was like the change in the air that comes before a storm. You feel the energy build but there’s nothing you can do to stop it. That’s what it was like for me.

  When those times came I couldn’t talk. There was no language for it. I suppose when you can’t understand something yourself it’s impossible to let anybody else in even if you’re motivated to. I wasn’t. The bleakness and me were old companions by then, and the only thing I knew how to do about it was to drink.

  At first it was only a few furtive sips while I worked. Then it became longer periods of walking out alone and coming back when I knew Erv was asleep. Then it became a morning gulp or two. And then the roof caved in.

  I sat out on the tailgate of the truck with the saws and the axes around me. I’d stopped to pick up a crock in town before heading out to where I was cutting a good sized deadfall of fir trees. The sun was out. The day sparkled. But I felt dead inside. There was no reason for it. Everything was on the rails and it was looking as though I could stay with Erv for as long as I wanted. The work was good. I had money. I had a friend. In the end, that was what busted it. As I sat there drinking I thought about how much I actually owed Erv, how much I owed him the truth about me, of where I’d been, what I’d done, the whole shebang. There was a part of me that really wanted to do that. There was a part of me that desperately wanted to close the gap I felt between myself and people. But there was a bigger part that I could never understand. It was the part of me that sought separation. It was the part of me that simmered quietly with a rage I hadn’t ever lost, and a part of me that knew if the top ever came off of that, then I would be truly alone. Finally. Forever. That was the part that always won.

  So I drank. I finished off that crock and threw the tools and gear into the box and drove back to Erv’s place. He was gone. He was out making arrangements for a few head of cattle from another farmer thirty miles away. I put the tools away. Then I walked into the house and gathered my belongings. I stood in the emptiness of another kitchen in another house in another life that only meant to offer me shelter. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t run the risk of someone knowing me, because I couldn’t take the risk of knowing myself. I understood that then, as fully as I ever understo
od anything. I didn’t know why it was that way with me. I only knew it was. I only knew that I would run and that I would always continue running because I’d learned by then that it was far easier to leave if you never truly arrived in the first place. So I drained the one bottle of wine Erv had under the kitchen sink, and when the buzz had me hard I scribbled a note telling him where he could pick up the truck, and I drove away. Again. I was on a Greyhound bound for Winnipeg within an hour, with another bottle in my coat and the taste of another dried-up dream in my throat.

  47

  It’s funny how bartenders always tell you to drink up. When you’re lost to it like I was, you always drink down. Down beyond accepted everyday things like a home, a job, a family, a neighbourhood. You drink down beyond thinking, beyond emotion. Beyond hope. You drink down because after all the roads you’ve travelled, that’s the only direction you know by heart. You drink down to where you can’t hear voices anymore, can’t see faces, can’t touch anything, can’t feel. You drink down to the place that only diehard drunkards know; the world at the bottom of the well where you huddle in darkness, haunted forever by the knowledge of light. I was at the bottom of that well for a long time. Coming back up to daylight hurt like a son of a bitch.

  The first thing you have to realize is that what you need to survive is killing you. That’s the tough part. There’s relief after a few big, hard swallows. Everything gets endurable. You can actually convince yourself that things are going to be okay even though you know in your gut that they’re not likely to. So you fess up and try to stop. Stubborn bastards like I was at the end come to believe that we know enough about the weaning to be able to handle it ourselves. We cut down. We measure. We time our shots. It never works. We’re always just as drunk as we always were because the only way to really stop is to stop. That’s how I wound up in the hospital. The seizures hit me and I collapsed on a sidewalk in Winnipeg. They had to strap me down because the withdrawal terrors got real bad. I saw things I can’t even begin to describe and I was reduced to an incoherent babble and thrashing about. After five days of enough medication, I calmed down. I held down my first solid food after seven days. I sat up in my bed after eight.