Indian Horse

by Richard Wagamese

  I’d never walked the shore of the lake completely. But I did so that day, and every step closer to our old family campsite transported me further back. The angst in my belly disappeared. My thoughts cleared. I walked in a peace I could not recall having experienced before. I reached out to touch the broad span of ferns, the trunks of trees, leaves, grasses. A part of me remembered each sensation. The smell in the air was rich and earthy, with a wisp of swamp and bog. Dying things and living things together. The air was filled with birdsong. I broke through the trees fifty yards from the foot of the cliff. As I knelt on the stone beach, gazing up at the cliff, the clouds at its upper edge moved as though it was a living being, breathing. I closed my eyes, close to weeping, and I heard my name whispered. I opened my eyes to see a flotilla of canoes gliding toward the shore.

  Benjamin. My grandmother, with my Grandfather Solomon. My mother and father. Strangers I took to be ancient members of my family. Wind-tanned, leathery faces, deeply creased and lined. My people. And there was Shabogeesick himself, paddling solo in a birch bark canoe that looked ancient and brittle but rode the water like a wisp. He raised the flat of his paddle in salute, then beached his canoe and stepped ashore. He stood a pace away from me, studying me intently.

  “You have come far,” he said finally.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “The journey you make is good.”

  “What am I to learn here?”

  He swept his arm to take in the lake, the shore and the cliff behind us. “You’ve come to learn to carry this place within you. This place of beginnings and endings.”

  I looked up to see an eagle circling the rim of the cliff. Shabogeesick laid a hand on my shoulder, and we were suddenly on the top of the cliff. He put a hide pouch in my right hand and a broad eagle feather fan in my left. Shabogeesick gazed at me kindly. I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them he was gone.

  I stood on the edge of the cliff with my pouch and eagle feather fan and my family stood around the fire in the trees looking up at me. Soft singing, low like a prayer, came from the boats below. I took a pinch of the tobacco from the pouch and held it up to the evening star. As I did, the sky eased into purples and blues and indigos. The singing from below rose higher and the great northern lights emerged to dance beneath the unblinking eye of the moon. I cried in great heaving gasps. I let myself mourn. Allowed every ounce of sorrow and desperation, loneliness and regret to eke out of me. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Then I heard my name.

  “Saul.”

  The moon hung in the sky like the face of a drum. As I watched, it became the shining face of a rink, where Indian boys in cast-off skates laughed in the thrill of the game, the smallest among them zooming in and out on outsized skates. I offered tobacco to the lake where everything started and everything ended, to the cliff that had made this the place of my people, and I offered my thanks aloud in an Ojibway prayer.

  52

  I went back to the New Dawn Centre. I hadn’t planned on it. I hadn’t planned on anything. The only thing I had known for certain was that I had to backtrack, to revisit vital places from my early life, if I was ever going to understand how to live in the present. Call it intuition, I suppose. But I needed to go to the school just as I needed to return to Gods Lake. So I went back to talk. I went back to learn to share the truth I had discovered locked deep inside me. I went back because I wanted to learn how to live with it without drinking. I went back because I needed a solid start on a new road and I knew it would be hard. Sometimes ghosts linger. They hover in the furthest corners, and when you least expect it they lurch out, bearing everything they brought to you when they were alive. I didn’t want to be haunted. I’d lived that way for far too long as it was. So I put in the winter there. I worked closely with Moses and I learned how to lift the lid off my life and inspect what was contained. It was hard work. It terrified me a lot of times, but I made the journey, and when I felt strong, confident, secure with my feelings and my new set of skills, I returned to knock on a door that I hadn’t knocked on in a long, long time. It was just after the first thaw.

  When Fred Kelly opened it, his face cracked into a wide grin. He’d aged well. His hair was silver and he’d gained a bit of weight. “Look who’s here,” he said. He held the door open and I walked in.

  The house looked the same as when I’d left it. It was orderly and neat, with light pouring in through the windows, and filled with the smell of baking. I wondered how people could live with things set in place, fixed, their places determined by the power of the recollection they contained, the memories they held. It was what made a home, I believed; the things we keep, the sum of us. Fred excused himself and went upstairs, and I found a seat on the living room couch. When he came back, Martha was with him. They stood in the doorway with their arms around each other, looking at me without speaking. I stood up. None of us knew what to say.

  “We should sit down,” Martha said finally.

  They took chairs opposite the couch. I sat on the very edge of it, my forearms on my knees and my hands clasped together. I tapped my toes nervously on the carpet. Martha stared at me, her eyes shiny with tears, balling the corner of her apron up in her fist. Fred reached over and put a hand over hers.

  “Thought I’d know what to say once I got here,” I said. “Turns out I don’t.”

  Fred shrugged. “People put way too much stock in words. Sometimes it’s better to just sit. Kinda get used to each other again.”

  “I never put stock enough in talk, really. But I’m learning how these days. More than I did before, at least,” I said. “There are things I found out that I never told anyone.”

  “About the school,” Fred said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “We know, Saul. We always knew,” Martha said quietly. “Not specifically. But we were there too.”

  “They taught us to hide from ourselves,” Fred said. “It took forever for me to learn how to face my own truth. I ran from it for years and years.”

  “It’s hard,” I said.

  “The hardest,” he said.

  “Were you...?” I asked, the words dwindling off into space. I looked at him and he kept his head down, clasping his hands together.

  Then he looked at me placidly and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Many times.”

  I felt tears building and I pinched my lips together and gazed out the window. “Cost me a lot,” I said.

  “It costs everything,” Fred said. “It bankrupts us in every way. The lucky ones rebuild. There’s a lot of those kids who never got that chance.”

  “I went back there,” I said.

  “I still do.”

  “Even now?”

  “Every year. Just to lay tobacco down and try to find forgiveness.”

  “Did you find it?”

  He took a drink and set his cup down slowly. “It’s a long road,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I can, you know? I don’t know if I even want to.”

  “It’s part of it,” Martha said. “It took me a long, long time, and even now I don’t know if I’ve truly done it. More like I just live my life here, and it heals me. Time. Distance. Not thinking about it.”

  “Did they rape everyone?” I asked.

  There was a long silence. In the distance I could hear the sounds of the mill and a train. I waited and they both looked at the floor.

  “It doesn’t have to be sexual to be rape, Saul,” Martha said.

  “When they invade your spirit, it’s rape too,” Fred said.

  I nodded. “That’s how I felt. Invaded.”

  “And now?” Fred asked.

  “Now I’m just tired of the way I’ve been living. I want something new built on something old. I wanted to come back. This is the only place I felt like something was possible for me. Don’t know what I want to do.
Just want to work on the idea of what’s possible.” I wrung my hands together and looked at them.

  Fred reached over and took Martha’s hand. They smiled at each other. “We hoped you would, some day,” she said. “We all wanted to go out and find you, but we knew we couldn’t. We knew you’d have to find your own way. The hardest part was that we knew how hard your road would be—but we had to let you go.”

  “They scooped out our insides, Saul. We’re not responsible for that. We’re not responsible for what happened to us. None of us are.” Fred said. “But our healing—that’s up to us. That’s what saved me. Knowing it was my game.”

  “Could be a long game,” I said.

  “So what if it is?” he said. “Just keep your stick on the ice and your feet moving. Time will take care of itself.”

  “I know how to do that,” I said.

  “I know you do,” he said.

  53

  Virgil was a supervisor at the mine. He was married and had three boys. The days of the far-flung reserve tournaments had long gone, and there were Native teams in town leagues and amateur leagues across the North. As more Indian hockey players made the National Hockey League, it had become easier for Native kids to get on established teams. The reserve tournaments had evolved into huge annual tournaments in places like Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury and Timmins. Those tourneys featured up to twenty-four teams, and the skill level was so impressive that big-league scouts were no longer oddities in the stands. The Moose had all grown up, married or moved away, and what remained of them was called the Manitouwadge Miners now. They played in a Senior B circuit and had yet to come close to a championship. But they were good. Fred filled me in on everything as we ate the lunch Martha prepared for us.

  “You’re only thirty-three, Saul,” he said. “They could use you on the Miners.”

  “I haven’t played since I left here. Haven’t been on skates since then either.”

  “Talent like yours doesn’t go away.”

  While we ate I told them about Father Leboutilier. I told them about how the game was the means of my emotional and mental survival. I told them how I could lose myself in it and how when I found I couldn’t any longer, the joy I’d found and the elaborate cover it offered me both disappeared. They listened and nodded, and when I had finished we sat in a well of silence.

  “So I think what I want to do is coach,” I said finally. “Kids. Native kids. I want to bring them the joy I found; the speed, the grace, the strength and the beauty of the game. I want to give that back.”

  Martha smiled. “Virgil’s looking for a coach. The mine sponsors a bantam team. Virgil’s been trying to coach them, but it’s hard to make time, with shift work and all.”

  “They’re practicing tonight, if you want to have a look,” Fred said.

  “End of the season, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Two more games. Still, you should take a look at the squad.”

  “Where?”

  “Town built a big expensive arena a few years ago. You can’t miss it. It’s got a white roof you can see from most anywhere. I can drive you over.”

  “Think I’ll walk. Be good to see the old town again.”

  “She ain’t changed much. A few bigger stores, more people. But she’s always been a mill and mining town and she’ll never get away from that.”

  “Sounds perfect to me,” I said.

  54

  He was leaning on the boards, directing the players with a hockey stick. I could hear him shouting orders as soon as I stepped away from the concourse and began walking down the steps. His back was to me. It was a broad back. I took a seat fifteen rows up and watched him as he worked. He was like his father. He let them play the game, and he only whistled them to a stop when he had something specific to point out. They listened. They looked at him with their mouths open, down on one knee and breathing like stallions at the gate. He spoke in a low tone that I couldn’t hear, but I remembered how the voice would sound, deep, rumbling, serious. When he’d made his point, they scrambled to their feet and took their positions and he blew the whistle and sent them into the high-speed whirl of the game.

  They were fast. They had a lot more polish and they were a lot more acrobatic than kids had been when I was their age. They’d been well coached. Virgil ran them through a fast skating and passing drill that sent them up and down the ice in waves of three at a time. I could hear the excitement in their voices. After five minutes or so, he let them run through it on their own and they raced through the drill a half dozen times before he blew the whistle and called them to the bench. I moved a few rows closer so I could hear him.

  “Full scrimmage now,” he said. “But I want you coming out of your ends fast so there’s no chance for the defense to bottleneck the neutral zone. Use your speed. Cut through the open ice and make yourself a strong target. I want those passes crisp and I want those rushes to end in a wrist shot from no further than fifteen feet out. No slappers, no dekes for now. Just set up the shot. Ready? Go!”

  He skated to centre and dropped the puck and then drifted backwards to the boards and leaned on his elbows. The team was relentless. They flew up and down the ice smoothly, efficiently, and each rush was capped with a strong wrist shot. They skated a full ten minutes before I inched up behind him.

  “Fifteen’s a natural centre,” I said. “He sees the ice too well to waste him on the wing.”

  He turned his head slightly and arched an eyebrow when he saw me. “He’s a sawed-off little runt. The big boys’ll take away his ice.”

  “Not if he uses that speed.”

  “Everyone’s the same speed when they’re flat on their back.”

  “Same size too,” I said.

  “Well, you’d know. Your whole career was spent on your back.”

  “You obviously missed the half when I was face down.”

  “Didn’t. Just too sensitive to your feelings to want to mention it,” Virgil said. “When did you get back?”

  “Long enough for lunch and a talk with your folks.”

  “You look good.”

  “You wanna kiss me now or later?”

  He snorted. “Think I’d as soon kiss the north end of a southbound moose.”

  “I was a Moose once.”

  He spun on his skates and leaned on the boards to look at me. He was stern when he spoke. “That seems like a long fuckin’ time ago right now. I wanted to punch your lights out for leaving.”

  “Still want to do that?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Depends on what you have to say for yourself. You want to get a beer and talk it out?”

  “I don’t drink. Not anymore. Used to. Didn’t really work for me.”

  He nodded. “All right. I’m gonna get these guys into the dressing room and talk a little strategy. Why don’t you wait for me outside? Ten minutes, tops.”

  “Okay,” I said. I watched him bring the practice to a close and when he followed the players off the ice and into the walkway under the stands, he looked at me.

  “Don’t disappear again,” he said.

  “I won’t. I’m there. Ten minutes, tops.”

  55

  We settled for sitting in the stands while the rink man cleaned the ice. There was a long silence and I struggled to find words to break it. Virgil sat with his hands cupped in front of his face, staring straight ahead. I understood then how hard years are to get a hold of, how elusive the life in them can be to capture and retell. I understood then too that time does not heal all wounds. I wanted to say it all in one brilliantly executed sentence, encompass all of it in a succinct, effortless rush. But I couldn’t. I was at a loss where to begin. In the end, he did it for me.

  “You’re one of those kids, aren’t you? One of the ones the schools fucked up. My dad told me some of what he went throug
h. When they said they wanted to bring you out of there, I guess I kinda knew why, even then. Knew it wasn’t all about the game.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “Not for a long time. Not until just this past year.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Don’t think he had anything to do with it, really.”

  He turned in his seat. “I know. I’m sorry. Crap choice of words.”

  He stared down at the ice while I told him about Father Leboutilier. I told him about my family and how I’d come to be at St. Jerome’s. I told him about the rage that built in me that I had never understood and how it corroded everything, even the game. I told him about the road, the jobs, the towns, and then I told him about the booze.

  “The ultimate device,” I said. “It lets you go on breathing but not really living. It lets you move but not remember. It lets you do but not feel. I don’t know why I fell into it so easily, why I lost myself so deep. I just thought I was crazy. But turns out I was just hurt, lonely, guilty, ashamed—and mostly just really, really sad.”

  “Did you want to hunt that fucker down? Make him feel some of the same pain?” Virgil asked. He still couldn’t turn away from looking at the ice.

  “At first, yeah. Then, the more we got into it at the centre the more I realized it was more than just him. I’d be hunting a long time if I lashed out at everyone. In the end, I learned the only one I could take care of was me.”

  He turned to me finally. His cheeks were slick with tears. “Five minutes alone in a room with each of them. That’s what I’d wish for. For what they did to my dad, my mother, my grandparents, you. The fuckers.”

  “I know. It still hurts. It will for a long time. But I know that now. I know that and I have ways to deal with it. Better ways than running, abandoning people, fighting, drinking.”

  “Yeah? And what are those better ways?” He leaned back now and shunted so that he could half-face me.

  “Come back here, for one thing. I always felt most like home here. Get a job. Work. There’s a lot of healing to be had by picking up a lunch pail. Then I thought maybe I’d shop around for a team to coach.