by Rose Christo
"That old guy still cleaning his dentures?" I asked.
"Uh," Jona said, with a forward glance. "Yeah."
I kissed him. I put my head on his lap. He put his hands in my hair and it was as good as a long night's sleep. I held him tight around his waist, my cheek against his stomach. I'd never been good with words. I wished I could borrow at least half of his words. If I held him tight enough maybe he'd understand. Maybe he'd understand that he was an anchor, a harness. Maybe he'd understand he was the best surprise in the world, the kind that creeps up on you when you're looking the other way and snatches you to safety when you didn't even know you were about to fall.
* * * * *
When we got to Saskatchewan it was already evening. My cousin Bee lived in a village called Akootoowa. With a name like that, you know you're in Cree territory.
"Where are we going?" Jona asked.
The road was iced over. I walked alongside it in the thick, thawing snow. Jona stumbled after me, shivering.
The windows were lit on the smooth clapboard houses, the sun fading in the red sky. At a crossroads the Nootka trees grew together in impressive overgrowth, the frosted pine branches drooping and weeping all over the harsh ground. Jona and I took the crossroads east. A single petrol station interrupted the miles of untouched snow. Jona stared at it. Buses and trucks didn't run through Akootoowa, so planting a petrol station out here was kind of like building a fishery in the middle of the desert.
"Are you cold?" Jona asked me.
"No," I said.
The clapboard houses came back. The sky dimmed to the color of embers. I found what I was looking for: a lone saltbox house behind a frozen water pump. The paneled walls were unpainted and gray but lit with outdoor lights, a lantern on either side of the door, a lantern in every window. The roof sloped backward and away, so that there were two stories in the front of the house and only one story in the back. I could hear a dog barking long before we pushed open the front gate. The barking grew louder when we stepped across the salted walkway. Jona started freaking out.
"Don't tell me you're afraid of dogs," I said dubiously.
"You're joking, right? A dog bit my ankle when I was three."
"I didn't see a scar."
"You didn't look closely."
"I looked close enough."
The front door swung open before I could knock. My cousin Bee had her hair all piled to one side, thick and loosely braided.
"Oh, gross," she said. "It's you."
"Hi," I said.
She stepped back and let us in. Her yappy little dog circled Jona's ankles. Jona froze up.
"Go away, Big Boy," Bee said easily.
Big Boy dropped his tail and scampered to the back of the house.
"What are you doing here?" Bee asked, tucking her hair behind her ear.
"They took my son," I said.
"What?" Bee said quickly.
I could hear the radio buzzing brightly in the sitting room. I could hear it when the radio died down.
"He's in a school in Manitoba," I said.
"Why Manitoba?"
Before I could answer my cousin her husband came out of the sitting room. He was a burly guy, white, with a thin brown mustache. I'd never really liked him but he was good at looking out for Bee. That much I could appreciate.
"Orca?" Lucien said, surprised. "You look sick."
"You do look sick," Bee said. She tried to feel my forehead. I held her hand away.
"They took my kid," I repeated. "He's in a boarding school in Manitoba."
Lucien looked quickly at Bee.
"I'm so confused," Bee said distantly. "Do you want soup? Rubaboo?"
"No," I said. I dropped Bee's hand. "Thanks."
"Who are you?" Lucien asked, glancing at Jona.
"Uh," Jona stammered.
"He was in the Third Army with me," I said.
"Are you going to do something crazy?" Bee asked me.
"Not sure," I said.
Bee nodded approvingly. "I'll make you a room," she said.
She went to the back of the house. Pain shot through my arm and I rubbed it. I was tired, suddenly, in a way I'd seldom felt before. I didn't know what to do.
"Do you know a place called Norway House?" I asked Lucien.
He stared at me. "I've never heard of it."
The kids came out of the sitting room. Alex had hair like brown sugar. Janine was two years older and she made sure you knew it. She stood tall, she stood square-shouldered; she pushed her brother aside.
"Dad!" Alex complained.
"Where's Rabbit?" Janine asked me.
"Everybody in the sitting room. Go, go!" Lucien said, and clapped once for emphasis.
In the sitting room a blue throw rug decorated the hardwood floor. A little white radio buzzed quietly next to the glazed window. Over the mantel hung a locked rifle, a couple of grainy photographs, one of the kids' old ribbon shirts. Inconnu stared dizzily back at me from a wooden picture frame.
Bee came into the sitting room with tea. Only Alex wanted any. Janine sat on the rocking chair and Lucien took the armchair. Jona and I sat on the sofa on either side of Bee.
"They're starting the boarding schools again?" Bee asked.
"Why would they send your boy to a Canadian school?" Lucien asked calmly.
"Because it doesn't matter to them," I said. "We're not American and we're not Canadian. We're Indian. That means we're not anything."
Janine bit her lip. Alex looked from one adult face to the next. I wondered when his parents were going to send him out of the room. Maybe they weren't. If you're Indian you have to learn sooner or later what you're really worth.
"Do we have to go to boarding school, too?" Janine asked.
"Don't worry," Lucien said cheerfully. "You're staying here with me. Someone has to help me skin the beavers."
"Mother, I'm hungry," Alex said.
"Put your tea down and go eat some rubaboo," Bee said.
Alex got up and shuffled out of the room. Janine's rocking chair creaked when she pushed off the floor with her heels.
Lucien turned toward us. "Have you heard about the Rosenbergs?"
"Who?" Jona asked.
"It just came out today. One of them was an American soldier--Julius Rosenberg?"
"Army Signal Corps?" I asked.
Lucien nodded slowly. "He and his wife were taken into custody."
"Even his wife?" Jona asked, incredulous.
"What for?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter," Lucien said. "McCarthy's going to trump something up against them. He's hunting down military personnel like a fowler in open season. If you ask me, somebody saw something and he's making sure it doesn't get out."
"We thought of you, and we worried," Bee said. She added, crossly, "Ever think of getting a telegraph out on that island of yours?"
"It was your island, too," I said.
"Don't remind me," Bee said sweetly.
"Is it any coincidence that the Rosenbergs are Jews?" Jona asked.
Lucien looked at him. "What do you mean?"
Jona only looked at me. Only he and I knew about von Bolschwing in the CIA.
"Why are you still in the room?" Bee asked suddenly, turning on Janine. "You naughty little brat!"
"Mother, I'm twelve," Janine said, her chin up. "I'm practically your age. I can hear."
"I ate the rubaboo," Alex said, milling back into the room. "Are you an Indian?" he asked Jona.
"No," Jona said, with a fleeting smile.
Big Boy scurried into the sitting room, nails clacking on the hardwood. Jona cringed. I could tell this was going to be a long night.
* * * * *
"So how's my bonehead brother doing?" Bee asked cheerfully.
We were in the little kitchen in the west of the house. The kids were in the sitting room showing Jona a Cree hand game. Lucien had taken the dog out for a walk.
I wrapped my hands around a strong cup of yaupon tea. The linoleum floor was scra
tched with deep etches, years' worth of chairs scraping back and forth across the tiles. Snowflakes sailed quietly past the window at our side. The radiator rattled with warmth.
"Orca?" Bee said, when I forgot to answer her.
"Thank you for having us," I said.
She gave me a soft look of surprise. "Of course. Is there something you're not telling me?"
I looked at my fingers, long and strong and brown, like my dad's. I wanted to be a good dad.
"I might be sick," I told Bee.
Without hesitation, she said, "There's no might about it. Your eyes look yellow."
"They do?"
Bee’s chair scraped back but she didn't get up. "Do you want to smudge? I'll do it with you."
"I need chaparral," I said.
"Too far north. You're not going to find any here..."
"Remember Grandpa's peyote songs?" I asked.
Bee smiled. "Oshiyalalo iyana he ne yo wa," she sang.
Peyote songs are healing songs. They have to be. They're named after the plant that grows in some of the harshest climates on earth. Scorching droughts, rainshadows, porous limestone--peyote grows in all of them.
I thought of a woman with her face half burned off, her back sticky with poison. I thought of a man skinnier than a child, lighter than an infant, wasting away in a nook on the wall. I thought of stinking, steaming Hiroshima, black as death, not a drop of water in sight. Could peyote grow there? That's what I wondered. Because peyote doesn't need water to grow. Peyote doesn't need sunlight. If sweetgrass was the world's first plant then peyote is going to be its last. This planet will be razed and bleeding and screaming in agony, and peyote will grow through the cracks in its face.
"America is killing me," I said.
America had taken my father. America had taken my boy. America had taken the clothes off of my mother's body, the songs out of my mother's mouth. America had taken Jim Lukaszewicz and Eddie Slovik and I had the feeling I might be next.
"Oh, I know," Bee said soothingly. She reached out and wrapped her hands around mine. "America is killing all of us, dear. That's why I live in Canada."
* * * * *
The guest room was at the back of the house. The paneled ceiling slanted down to a double casement window with a hand crank. There was only one bed. Bee hadn't bothered putting extra blankets on the floor, the pretense of a makeshift second mattress. Bee was five years older than me; she'd had five more years to observe me. Sometimes I thought she knew me better than I did.
Jona looked out the window at the velvety black sky. Out here the Northern Lights were diluted and thin. They streamed across the snowy ground in vertical pillars, blue and gray and violet and green.
"We'll get him," Jona told me. "We'll get your son. We're not so far now."
He set the leather bag on the floor. I sat on the bed. The quilts were heavy and plaid and made me think of my mother with her sewing awls. I don't know why. The only patterns my mother ever knitted were pendleton.
Jona got out a sweetgrass candle and lit it. He didn't need to. The ceiling lights were already lit.
"You have to pray three times," Jona said, when I asked him. "Three times heals a sickness. I don't mess with this stuff. Cigani women know what they're talking about."
"I feel fine," I lied. "Just sit down."
Uncertain, Jona put the candle on the windowsill. He sat beside me on the bed.
"Why does your cousin live in Canada?" Jona asked.
"Bigger Cree community," I said.
"But she didn't want to stay with you and her brother?"
"Home makes us who we are," I said. "There's a reason some people leave and some people stay behind."
Jona grew up itinerant. If home made us who we were, and Jona never had one, maybe Jona didn't know who he was. I knew who he was. It was weird to think that I knew him and he didn't. I wondered if maybe none of us knew ourselves as well as we thought we did. Everything you look at in life, you're seeing it through this lens. It's a lens colored by your experiences, your biases, your beliefs. The trick is that you don't ever get to take that lens off. Not even when you're looking in the mirror.
"So McCarthy's going after soldiers..."
Jona's musing brought me back to present. "If it's not about the atom bombs," I said, "it's about von Bolschwing."
"Why can't it be both?"
He had a point.
"I don't know, Orca," Jona said. He sounded as tired as I felt. "If only we'd stayed out of the damn war."
"We were drafted."
"I mean the US. I'm afraid. I'm afraid America won't be here in a couple more years."
"This country's been here thousands of years," I said. "It had a different name, but it was here. It has a history most people won't ever know about. The newcomers will never know who Star Child and Majikiwis were. They'll never know who first walked the Wolves' Road or where to find the Summer Bird's Path. They'll never know who invented the kiskipocikek and why it was so scandalous at the time. They'll never know about the great battle with the kacitowask, the Tule Eaters' War, the Triple Alliance, the Iron Confederacy. They'll never know when Cahokia happened, or who built it, or who held the Medicine Mountain convention and why. The real history of this land is not for the invaders to know. They'll be gone someday. When the money runs out only the people who love this land will stay behind. The US won't last forever. America will. It always has. So don't be afraid. This land will kill you, this land will hate you, but this land will always be here for you."
"You think the land hates you?" Jona asked.
I kicked my shoes off. "I know it does. Not everyone's cut out to be a parent."
* * * * *
I didn't really sleep that night. I tried to, but I couldn't. I watched Jona instead. I held his wrists while he tried to scratch himself. He settled down, his head beside mine, his thick hair on the pillow. I touched his hair. I didn't want to wake him but I couldn't keep my hands off him. The candlelight, the snowflakes outside the window reflected on his face, cool and shadowy and flickering. I wanted to kiss them off his cheeks, to pull him close and bask in him, to love him, to love away his fears. Love was my only real talent. I had two people I loved and I loved them so deeply, so desperately, it was almost all I could think about from one moment to the next.
Jona woke around dawn and kissed me, long before he was even lucid. I tucked it away as a kind of undeserved gift. He got out of bed and searched blearily for his shoes. I was already dressed but my hair was rumpled; my face felt stale. We took turns washing in the wash room off to the side.
"Should I pray? No, no... I don't know," Jona murmured.
Bee caught up with us when we were leaving, gave us rubaboo for the road. I didn't want any. I thanked her for the millionth time. Alex asked if he could come with us and Janine gave me the most grown up look she could muster. I kissed Janine’s head. Jona and I went outside and Lucien caught up with us before we could open the front gates.
"There's an Aboriginal Affairs building in Winnipeg," Lucien told me. "I don't know where Norway House is, but they will."
"Thank you," I said.
"You get your kid," he told me. "Let them know he's not for sale. Do you want a handgun?"
"What?" Jona sputtered.
"A rifle?" Lucien asked. "I've got plenty."
"I'll take one," I said.
"Orca," Jona said.
"I don't know what they're going to do," I told Jona. "I don't know how hard they're going to fight me. I'm a soldier. I'm allowed to fight back."
"Do you want a handgun?" Lucien asked Jona, pleasant as could be.
Jona wavered. "Alright," he relented.
We left with revolvers and rubaboo, Alex running after us, Janine waving after us. The snow was thin and runny underfoot, morning heat trickling through the cold sky.
"Have you been to Winnipeg before?" Jona asked anxiously.
"No," I said.
The gravel road was slicked with ice. It made for a weird cont
rast.
"I'll figure it out," I said.
Jona hoisted the leather bag over his shoulder. I could hear the handguns knocking together inside. I was glad I'd emptied the cylinders.
"You're not alone, you know," Jona said. "Don't forget that."
I looked back at him with a smile. Behind him the rising sun lit his body in a tawny afterglow. His hair made me think of honey candy.
Honey was my favorite.
* * * * *
The only train available to Manitoba was a freighter. The yardmaster didn't want to let us on. He hemmed and hawed about it until Jona convinced him we were on our way to Parliament with a telegram for the prime minister, real urgent, only our auto had spiraled off the road.
"And that's called a bujo," Jona told me, grimacing. We climbed on board the freight car. "And may I never do it again."
The freight doors slapped shut, plasticky and green. They banged open again when the train began to move. Crates and metal drums were nailed to the floor and we held onto them, so we didn't fly out onto the tracks. I coughed when snow and country grit rolled into the freight car and sawdust rose off the slippery floor. The overhead lights trembled and blinked.
"Where you from?" another stowaway yelled at us.
"We're draft dodgers," yelled the stowaway's friend.
Jona tried to tell them the war was over. The screeching of wheels on metal train tracks drowned out his voice.
The freighter rocketed along at high speed and my teeth rattled in my mouth. I held onto the leather sack. I was afraid it would burst open and the whale oil would spill all over and catch something flammable. Every time the train met one of the checkpoints it slammed to a halt and stood still for five minutes. The stench of heat and steel reminded me of the battlefield.
"Any of you boys know how to play Whiskey Before Breakfast?" an old fellow asked.
"Shut up!" one of the belated draft dodgers hissed.
We had to hide behind the cargo, all six of us, when the road foreman rolled the doors open, sighing, scribbling on his clipboard. Almost as soon as he'd arrived he clacked the doors shut again and disappeared. If he was supposed to be counting wares I thought he was doing a shoddy job of it. I guess when your entire day consists of staring at boxes you want to get it over with pretty fast.