White Whale

by Rose Christo

"Back in Glina," Fox said, "the priest used to tell us it's a sin. I figure priests are usually right about these things."

  I didn't know where Glina was. I stashed away the word for later use.

  "But, you know," Fox said. "So what? There's nothing God can do to me he hasn't already done. I mean it, Orca. I mean it with all my heart. Will God send me to Hell because I want to be with you? I've already been to Hell. I figure it's not so scary the second time around."

  * * * * *

  Rabbit came home from school and I lifted him in my arms; I held him tight. He squeezed me as hard as he could, which wasn't very hard at all. I put him down and he zeroed in on our new house guest the way a killer whale zeroes in on a shark. Rabbit liked meeting new people. He liked it a little too much. I'd forgotten to warn Fox.

  "Who are you?" Rabbit asked.

  Fox started. "Uh," he said.

  "Daddy's friend," I said. I tousled Rabbit's hair. "He's a soldier."

  "So am I," Rabbit told Fox. "I'm a soldier."

  "You are?" Fox asked. I got the feeling he didn't know how to behave around children.

  "I don't fight anymore because the war's over." Rabbit changed his tune. "Can you tie my shoe?"

  "I can try," Fox said softly.

  Fox bent down on the braided sweetgrass carpet and tied the strings on Rabbit's moccasin. Rabbit didn't want to hold still. The moment Fox was finished Rabbit bounded over to the radio. Too bad he couldn't reach the dial.

  "Homework," I scolded.

  "But I don't want to," Rabbit said.

  "Too bad."

  "Miss Theresa says the school's closing. If the school closes then I can go fishing with you."

  My stomach twisted into knots. I told myself it wouldn't happen. I told myself they weren't taking my boy.

  Fox straightened up and looked at me. One look and I could tell he was concerned. He was always concerned. I didn't know why we'd named him Fox back in AIT. Mother Hen suited him better.

  Rabbit did his homework at the kitchen table and I boiled riceroot on the wood stove. The Anglican boarding schools kept coming into my head. Kill the Indian, Save the Man. That was their motto. That had been their motto since the 1800s.

  I hadn't even gone to one of those schools and I was pathologically afraid to put on Cree clothes. I'd tried to wear a ribbon shirt once, for my mother's funeral four years ago. I couldn't do it. I physically couldn't do it. Halfway through dressing my hands had locked up and my throat had locked up and my skin had gone cold. I wound up tearing apart the crushed velvet with my bare fingers, the sound of Dad's knuckles ringing in my ears.

  Fox touched the small of my back. I flinched. I hadn't heard him get up from the table. He rubbed the base of my spine and I relaxed. I leaned back against his hand.

  "Are you coming to the Give-Away Dance?" Rabbit yelled at Fox.

  "Indoor voice," I said.

  "Are you coming to the Give-Away Dance?" Rabbit whispered loudly.

  Fox let go of me. I could hear his smile when he responded. "If that's okay."

  "Do you snore?" Rabbit asked. "You can't snore. That's not good."

  "What?" Fox said, laughing through his bewilderment.

  "Don't try to keep up," I said. I ground thyme into the riceroot. "He lives on a different planet from the rest of us."

  "Which one?" Fox asked.

  "They haven't found it yet," I said.

  Rabbit picked up his math book and made airplane sounds. I'd never been more proud in my entire life.

  * * * * *

  The Give-Away Dance started on the Sugow River. The men danced the Crow Hop in light and springing jumps. The women danced the Ribbon Dance, long ribbons streaming and twisting over their heads. I gave a gift of peppermint tea to an old woman, Lady's Mantle to a wood cutter, pemmican and whale oil to an unwed mother. The father of one of Rabbit's classmates gave Rabbit a buffalo bone toy. I made sure Rabbit gave angelica root to Fawn and boneset to Mrs. Kabocha.

  The snow on the ground shook when the drummers struck their birchbark drums. A girl with curly hair played the cornstalk fiddle in accompaniment. Fox looked around like he didn't know what to do. I cleared a patch of frost on the riverbank and sat down.

  The lichens were blue and silver and hearth red. They rolled together and down into the cold, clear river, a carpet of arcane blossoms. I watched the hard white ice floes drift down the bubbling riverbend, past the spinning watermills, out into the tranquil gray sea.

  Fox sat down next to me, his elbows on his knees. His hair looked thick and tawny and winter spice brown. My hair was growing back. It reached my shoulders already, a wiry black cloud.

  "I think I know why the US shoved you people out here," Fox said. "They were probably hoping the cold would kill you off."

  "We've been traveling up to the Arctic for a long time," I said. "If they wanted to kill us, they should have sent us to the desert."

  The sun sank behind the river. The Northern Lights appeared beneath the stars in smoky wisps of water blue and emerald green. Fox stared at them for a long while. The snowy owls called out to the spirits, hidden behind the distant glaciers. Someone brought out a big bowl and filled it with whale oil, seal oil. They threw in lumps of lemming fur for kindling and lit a giant fire. The children gathered around to hear the elders' winter stories. Miss Theresa tied her capote shut, rubbing her mittened hands together.

  "Ayas was the daughter of a medicine man," Miss Theresa began. "A very wicked medicine man. He killed his first wife with a poison posset and married a new girl, an Inuit girl, Pretty Blossom."

  "I'm gonna marry Lisette," Rabbit told me, climbing on my knees.

  "Ayas tried to warn Pretty Blossom," Miss Theresa went on. "But what could she have done? It wasn't long before her father grew paranoid. With a few herbs and a magic spell the medicine man banished Ayas north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun sleeps for half the year. No human can survive it. Not even a warrior girl, a strong Cree girl..."

  I'd heard this story so many times before, I guess I wasn't all that interested. Rabbit squirmed on my lap. Fox listened raptly, his elbows on his knees, his folded hands under his chin. Watching Fox was better than listening to the story. I wondered how long ago it was he'd heard a story from his elders. I didn't know anything about Cigani traditions. I wanted to ask him; but I didn't want to make him uncomfortable.

  "Ayas met Grandmother Fox in a den below the ice caps," Miss Theresa went on. "It was Grandmother Fox who showed Ayas how to shed her human skin. A human can't survive the cold north; but an animal can."

  I stroked the back of Rabbit's head until he fell asleep against my shoulder. His whistling little snores ruffled the silk strings on his ribbon shirt. His buffalo bone toy fell on my lap and I pocketed it for safekeeping. Maybe next year he'd get to hear the whole story through.

  * * * * *

  Fox walked at my side when I carried Rabbit home. He tucked his hands in his pockets, another of his nervous habits. I wondered if his fingers were twitching where I couldn't see.

  I laid Rabbit on one of the down beds and he rolled away from me, fast asleep. I lit a candle on the cabinet in case he woke up. I went back outside the house and Fox was sitting on the snowy ground by the frozen bore tide, a tiny yellow wintersweet wrapped around his fingers. The moon glittered off the red sea glass under the untouched ice.

  "What are those?" Fox asked me.

  He tilted his head back. I followed his gaze to the Northern Lights. They were brighter than ever tonight, rippling, flitting between the stars, shocking blue and sea green.

  "Those are your ancestors," I told him, sitting down.

  "What?" He looked at me.

  I stuck my fingers in my mouth. I whistled. The Northern Lights crawled closer. They'll do that if you whistle at them. I don't know why.

  "How did you do that?" Fox asked, his voice dry.

  "I told you," I said. "They're our ancestors."

  Suddenly Fox looked very afraid. Suddenly I knew he didn't
want to face his ancestors. What I didn't know was why.

  "Are you cold?" I asked him.

  "It's alright," he said. "Good for thinking."

  "About what?" I asked.

  The moon, the Northern Lights only captured one side of his face. One half of his face was lit up, blue and white and green. The other half was bathed in shadow. It made for an unsettling contrast, a prestezza profile.

  "I think I'll go inside," Fox decided.

  I told myself it wasn't right to feel annoyed. If he didn't want to talk, he didn't have to talk. He stood up, his hands in his pockets, and looked out at the bore tide. Far off on the inlet the clear gray ice ran together with the ocean, loud and rushing and white with snow.

  We went inside the house, into the kitchen, and I locked up for the night. I wet my finger and put out the oil candles. When all but one of the candles had been extinguished Fox took off his corduroy coat. He draped it across the back of a chair. I saw the frenzied red scratch marks running up his arms.

  Before he could say good night to me I took the paring knife out of the drawer. I grabbed his wrist and he swallowed a sound of surprise.

  Cutting Fox's nails the second time around left me feeling uneasy. I didn't understand it. I trimmed his nails until they were short and even. I rubbed my fingers against them and they didn't scratch me. That should have been enough. I put the paring knife down on the kitchen table. I probably would have left it there. But then I caught Fox doing something I'd seen him do countless times before. He tugged his shirt sleeve down over his elbow.

  I grabbed his wrist again. I held it steady in my hand. I pushed his sleeve over his elbow, up to his shoulder.

  The scratches above Fox's elbow were deeper than the ones below it. They were accompanied with gashes that looked uncomfortably like teeth marks. It was the crook of his elbow that was the bloodiest, the skin peeling off, all welted and congealed and purple-red. Between the cuts I saw an old black tattoo.

  It wasn't a picture. It wasn't a word. It wasn't even one of those military tattoos you sometimes see the jarheads get, something cheeky like a barcode, or an anchor. It was a number. 0169484.

  I rolled Fox's sleeve down over his elbow. My fingers felt like needles, stiff and stinging and useless.

  "You shouldn't have done that," Fox said quietly.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  He sat down on a sealskin chair. I sat on the chair on the other side of the table. I watched the flame swimming in the whale oil dish.

  I didn't look at him, but I saw it when he dropped his head in his hands.

  "Where are you from?" I asked him.

  "Croatia," he said.

  I'd seen a lot of things worth throwing up over. I'd never felt like throwing up the way I did now.

  He lifted his head and rubbed his wrists. Maybe he wanted to scratch those, too. I didn't think so. I knew why he scratched himself now. I knew what it was he was trying to scratch away.

  "How did you escape?" I asked.

  "Stole meat," Fox said. "Wrapped it around my hands. Climbed the barbed wire wall. Threw the meat to the dogs and ran."

  I thought of the starved bodies we'd pulled out of Buchenwald, and I thought: That was him. That was my friend.

  "I'm so tired," Fox said.

  He didn't move. He didn't get up and go to bed.

  A silence stretched between us. The owls hooted softly outside.

  "Which camp?" I asked Fox.

  "Jasenovac," he said. "Outside Zagreb."

  "How long were you there?"

  "Four months. I was nineteen."

  "The SS?"

  "The Ustasha," Fox said. "They rounded us up and marched us out to the church in Glina. They fed us communion and slit our throats. When they ran out of communion they sent the rest of us to the death camps." His fingers drummed against the table. "Dug a big pit and threw all the children in it. Buried them alive."

  I was so angry, I couldn't think straight. I was so sick, I told myself I might be dreaming. I knew I wasn't. I only wished I was.

  "This isn't new," Fox said. "This happens everywhere. It's our curse. It's the Gypsy curse."

  "You don't believe that."

  "I do. Do you know where Cigani really come from?"

  I shook my head.

  "Egypt," Fox said. "That's what my mother told me. She told me we were the ones who hid the infant Christ when King Herod wanted him dead. The Roman magistrate found out and exiled us as punishment. We've been wandering ever since."

  I didn't know who King Herod was. I didn't ask. I was afraid if I interrupted Fox might come to his senses and close up on me.

  "So we went to live in India," Fox said. "And that was good, for a while. But then Mahmud of Ghazni came and pushed us out." Fox sat picking at his shorn nails. "We lived in Romania after that. The Romanians enslaved us. Forced us to mine metal and diamonds. We ran away. Ran to Britain where we were enslaved all over again. The British sold us to slave owners in Norway, in Newfoundland. In America."

  I lifted my head. He smiled grimly at my surprise. "Wasn't just the colored folks working the plantations."

  "I didn't know." I'd never known.

  Fox shook his head, like he was trying to shake away his ancestors. "We ran away, over and over again," he said. "Our whole history is nothing but running away. We made it to Bohemia once. They thought it would be funny to cut our ears off. I still don't know what that was about. Denmark was probably the worst. Right up until the turn of the century they held annual Gypsy hunts. It was a game to them. Can you imagine that? That the law says you're the same as a duck, or a deer? That there are hunters shooting at you with rifles, stuffing your head and mounting it on a mantelpiece?"

  "I can," I said.

  Fox hadn't expected that. I could see it in the way he drew off.

  I looked at him. "Where do you think the word Redskin comes from? King George used to pay colonists fifty pounds if they brought him Indian scalps. It was the fastest way to get rich in those days."

  It was how we'd learned to scalp back. We weren't thinking straight. We didn't realize fighting fire with fire only makes a bigger fire.

  Fox breathed slowly. I wondered if I should get out the sweetgrass. I wondered if I should teach him how to smudge and purge.

  "I dream about Jasenovac," Fox told me. "Is that strange? After all we've done--all the disgusting things you and I have done as soldiers--I go to sleep at night and I'm nineteen again. I can hear the women screaming while the Ustasha rape them. I can hear the old men crying from hunger. I can hear my father calling my name--"

  "What is your name?" I asked him.

  "Jona," he said. "My name is Jona."

  "Jona," I said. It tasted right on my tongue.

  "I can still hear them singing," Jona said. "Those songs we sang while we wasted away. The song my sister sang before they slit her throat. The song my little brothers sang before they were buried alive. Oyde parudyan man pe'l lovende. Oyde parudyan man pe'l daimantsu. Oyde parudyan man pe'l love Amerikachi. Chiro bezax te avel. You traded me for riches. You traded me for diamonds. You traded me for American money. God is counting your sins."

  "You still believe in God," I said. I knew he did. I didn't know how he could. I didn't know how he wasn't dead.

  "Christ is coming back someday," Jona said. "I know that. I swear I do. And when he comes back he's going to exonerate the Cigani. He's going to save us. We've loved him since he was a little baby. We've protected him when he was at his weakest. He knows that. He won't turn his back on us. He won't."

  I didn't want to say it; but it sounded as if he already had.

  * * * * *

  It was late when Jona went to bed. I put out the last of the candles on the kitchen counter. I gripped the edges of the counter and tried to think.

  America got involved in the war for all the wrong reasons. We didn't care enough about the Gypsies to go and stop Croatia from exterminating them. Instead we'd murdered 250,000 civilians after they'd alre
ady surrendered. We'd liberated Buchenwald; but I think if we could have won Germany without freeing the Jews, we might have left the Jews to rot.

  America was my father. I didn't like the evil person my father had turned into. And in the way that's true of all children I loved him anyway. I still loved him. I still thought there was a way to redeem him.

  I remembered my father lighting a fire outside our house, tossing my mother's blood-stained ribbon clothes on top of the black kindling. I remembered his expressionless face when he told me we weren't Indians anymore; we had to be civilized now.

  If being civilized meant being like my father, I didn't want to be civilized. I wanted to be a savage. Savages don't pay you fifty pounds for skinning a live child. Savages don't pave parking lots out of whole entire cities because they want to play with their new toys. Savages don't enslave your race for centuries, then free you, then decide you can't even use the same toilet as them.

  Savages don't throw you in prison because the person you love has balls between his legs.

  My hands went loose around the edge of the counter. My chest went tight. I worded and reworded that last thought. Every way I worded it it came out sounding the same.

  The wind pushed and creaked against the birchbark walls. I wasn't worried. The only wood stronger than birchbark is willow.

  I went into the bedroom. The candle on the cabinet waned low. I added a fistful of sweetgrass to the tallow. Rabbit slept curled up on his bed by the closet door. Jona's bed was the one by the window. His back was turned to me, moonlight and starlight sifting through his brown hair.

  He stirred when I lay on the bed beside his. I knew he was awake. He had this certain way of breathing when he was asleep, slow and rhythmic, like a sad sigh.

  I reached between the down mattresses. I took Jona's wrist in my hand. I felt his pulse speed up against my heel.

  "I've already been to Hell," Jona told me.

  He slid his wrist free from my hand. He turned over and faced me. His eyes were as pale as candlelight. If I kissed them I wondered whether they would set my lips on fire.

  I tried to imagine what it felt like to lose your whole family in a single sweep. To live without them for four years, and then--just when you think you're safe--get plunged back into the war that took their lives. I tried to imagine the sheer loneliness.