Birdie

by Tracey Lindberg

  She had been dreaming about that tree every day. Well, not every day. Sometimes she could not sleep because of that drum group that practised near the shelter. They pounded day and night and Bernice found that the music was soothing, but hard to get out of her head. Also, she kept dreaming about that fat little chef and was worried she had a crush on him that she did not know about. But, she dreamed of that tree so often she thought of him as family.

  She had to go. The cousin loaded up Bernice’s scant luggage and was polite enough to roll down the windows a bit without mentioning the street smell that her big cousin carried with her, regardless of the shower and Bernice’s fastidiousness. Driving out of the city and heading north on the highway they listened to music that Bernice had not heard for years. Merle Haggard, the Carter Family, Patsy Cline. The cousin tried to get Bernice to listen to some newer tunes, but when Bernice did not respond, she put the Georgie Jones CD back in the player.

  They drove and listened, stopping for gas at Swan Hills and passing the road map of her childhood. When they got to Grande Prairie, Bernice noticed that it had really grown. On the highway into town there was a Tim Hortons and a Sawridge hotel where the roller rink used to be. Other than that, the hustle of the town sounded and smelled the same. The cousin chattered and ooohed and aaaahed over the changed city, but Bernice knew better. It was the same people, or their children, in the bars, the same hunger just a ways out of town, and the same noiseless sky at night when you turned to head west from Grande Prairie.

  Day turned to night as they edged their way out to their community. Being extra-diligent for deer and moose, they slowed down and felt each bump in the roads. From Gibsons, Bernice looks around and she sees twenty-four-year-old Bernice clutching the armrest and soothes her. Cooooo cooooo cooooo.

  When they got to the house, the cousin dropping her and waiting for her to get in, Bernice held her breath. She did not know whether to knock or to just go inside. Freda took that choice out of her hands, pulling the door open and grabbing a hold of her cousin.

  “Bernice! I knew you would come! You came for the talent show, right?” Freda was all glitter and short this, sheer that.

  “Hello, Freddy,” Bernice said shyly.

  “Come in, come in, it’s gonna snow soon.” Freda grabbed the poster tube, the Aer Lingus bag and the garbage bag (which made tinny whines and glassy tinks as she swung it over her shoulder).

  Bernice scanned the living room carefully, like a hunter, noted that the gun case was open, there were many bottles on tables and near the door, and that beyond the living room the kitchen looked a mess.

  “Tell me, tell me, cuz …” – she looked Bernice over and noted her clothes were rumpled and that her hands looked chapped – “… whattya been up to?”

  Bernice sat herself carefully on the couch. Birdie watches her from her perch at Lola’s and sees the way her body transformed from woman to child in that instant.

  “Where is. Everyone?” Bernice felt breathless and her heart felt like it was winding up only to release itself and beat even faster.

  Something slid across Freda’s face, from her eyes to her mouth, something that might have felt like knowledge. “They had sweat and then everyone went to the hall to get it ready for the show. Oh!” she said, animated again. “The uncles went to town for some beer. They won’t be back for hours.

  “Let me get you something to … get you some tea, Bernice,” she said. Bernice said that would be nice and looked around the place she had called home. Got up and locked the door before sitting down and exhaling.

  Bird Bernice looked out the window. A single snowflake had fallen.

  It started with a snowflake, Bernice comes to realize. Sure, it likely started in someone else’s lifetime, but the beginning of the end started with a stupid snowflake. While Freda made tea, she went to her old room to look for something clean to wear for the talent show. She found a sweater that Kohkom Rose had given her with Scotty dogs on the front. It was too small, and the small metal chain that had been drawn from the white dog to the black one had long since stretched, broken, fallen off and been lost. The sweater was part of her old comfort outfit. The bottom was a super-sized pair of old blue jeans.

  They were worn through in the knees and were torn and flapped at the ankles. She used to like pulling the sweater over her knees and securing it underneath her feet when she sat on the chair by the front window. Back when the outfit was supposed to give her comfort, she would read a book until it got dark or someone came home. Then, ordinarily, she would go to her room, push her dresser in front of the door and read until she was falling asleep or had to pee.

  She remembered that after her Christmas pageant, peeing became a major hassle. She tried to make sure that she didn’t drink anything after five o’clock but sometimes, if she was pretending to be a normal kid or if she forgot she was under siege, she would drink something and have to move the dresser, flee to the bathroom, and then listen at the door for pure silence before padding down the hall to her room. Once there, she would push the dresser back into place, sit down and try to regulate her breathing.

  On the day of the beginning of the end, Bird Bernice watches the big Cree woman and her tiny cousin as they sat and drank tea. She sees that sheBernice was visibly relieved because everyone had money and, she assumed, was partying, hungover or passed out. She didn’t care, as long as they weren’t home, where her uncles spent the night. Freda’s words flitted and fluttered through the room and let her know that Maggie was staying with Auntie Val, whose diabetes had kept her in her bed in the city for a few days now.

  It was just starting to get dark, she remembers. She had unpacked her poster tube and she and Freda were looking at that picture of Jesse and reminiscing just before they started supper. Shots broke the late-afternoon silence. People who had not been paid were hunting seriously to beat the snowfall. She and Freda teased each other back and forth. Freda teased Bernice about how long her hair was becoming and Bernice teased her about her latest Phil (this time, it was Little Joe Mayville, a long-time neighbour and admirer). The hamburgers were almost ready when Freda exclaimed, “Snow, Bernice, I saw a piece of snow!”

  “What? Can’t be, there hasn’t even been frost yet!” And then, with dread, “Oh Freda, we have to close the sweat.”

  “Can’t it wait until uncles come home?” Freda asked.

  She looked at her, in the way Kohkom Rose looked at her when she was asking too many questions.

  “Okay, okay, let’s just see if there’s …”

  “No, don’t unlock …” Too late. Uncle Larry was just walking in at that moment and caught the door as Freda opened it.

  She and uncle stared at each other. She knew that look. And. Then. He looked drunkenly at Freda. Bernice felt ill. She knew that look, too. The one before the one he just gave her. Freda looked nervously back and forth between them. She had her own look. Birdie remembers it. That look she had when Bernice got heck for having her skinny cousin’s cigarettes. The look said, “Not me, not me, not me.”

  “Get out, Freda.”

  “Awww, Bernice, I just wanna …”

  “Now.” She realized she was almost yelling. “Get your coat and run to the gas station.”

  Uncle staggered to block Freda but she was small and not paralyzed by the fear to which Bernice had grown accustomed. She had her shoes on before he could reach her; Freda grabbed her coat and ran to the side door.

  “Bernice …” She stood ten feet away from the house, and looked at her cousin with wide eyes.

  “Go Freda. Go.” She pushed roughly past uncle and closed and locked the door.

  Her birdself watches. And. Waits.

  Get away from me, dirty old man. She thought she said it, but it was hard to know. Everything, in her mind, was happening at 7/8ths speed. Sort of like when you just slowed down a record a bit by lightly weighting it with your finger. It made sense, it just wasn’t quite regular.

  Not again. Never again. She was not sure
if she said that, but she does know that she said this, “You want to be sure about this.”

  Through clenched teeth and with similar fists.

  The tremor that had been visiting her for months now, almost like a chatter from the cold, was conspicuously absent. She also knew that her movements seemed steady, although that may have been in comparison with the uncle’s movements. He seemed jerky and agitated, and she would like to say that he was not there, that she could not see him, but she could. He was in there somewhere, behind the smell of whiskey and the reek of cigarettes, peeking from behind something that shared a shadow with fear. Maybe it was birdher’s eyes but it seemed that, for once, she could Now see him/bravadohim, perhaps even saw him Then, as he really was. He said something about liking a fighter and, repulsed as she was, she almost laughed. Instead, it sounded like a choke or a wheeze from deep within her. Of course he liked a fighter. But he loved passivity more. He thrived in her silence. She thought, in a flash, she needed to be silent tonight.

  One last time.

  “Where you goin’, my girl?” uncle says to Freda, minutes gone. It is the dearness of the phrase, the sick understanding of what the my means. The resemblance between uncle and Freda clear, only in that instant. Freda’s paternity. The link. Between Freda and the family. This. This as much as his wheeze, “C’mere little Bernice. C’mere you sweet thing. Did you miss your old uncle?” Changes her.

  For a long time, since it started, she pretended that her uncle was not an uncle when he did this, that he shape-shifted and became something less than uncle and more than animal. She had also assumed that when he shifted, his vision was blurred and she was no longer Bernice, just a body. Now she knew, as she saw him behind his eyes and heard her name, that he was just uncle. Not a wolf. Not a man. And he was bad.

  She remembered, in that glint of his eye, him playing fiddle and devilishly jigging around all of the women in the room at dances and gatherings. Sitting for hours at the kitchen table, telling stories and laughing, black hank of hair twisted over his eye like Elvis. And later. Other dances. Walking like a child getting off of the tilt-a-whirl. Other tables. Slamming fists and shouting. His mean mouth and menace aimed at Maggie with seemingly no impetus. The distance her mother and the aunties created between uncle and the girls. Uncle and themselves. And now all she saw was a lecherous old man, still muscular and quick, for he was now in his fifties, heading towards her with a mixture of malice and something that her mind processed as desire.

  Bernice had watched enough TV to know that it was possible for someone to “snap.” When one’s mind snapped, it was thought to signal the beginning – of a new consciousness, of a new behaviour, of a new personality. Watching NYPD Blue and Law and Order had taught her that. When it happened to her, however, snapping was the sign of the end. Like the closing of a book, if you will, her ability to numb herself to what the uncle did was closed. No longer able to harden herself, to forgive him this trespass, to will herself to forget every day after, her eyes were wide open. Her nerve endings were alive and her muscles were taut.

  Watching herself from her Bird’s-eye view in Gibsons her body is similarly ready for attack.

  Snap. Snap. Snap (like the fingers in West Side Story when the rival gangs meet). He walked towards her, unsteadily, but not unsure.

  Snap. Snap. Snap (like twigs being walked on late in the fall). She saw his left arm rise towards her head and his right arm move towards her chest.

  Snap. Snap. Snap (she sidestepped him and he lurched forward, running into the living room wall by the door). She flew across the room, airborne and graceful. She heard the air in his chest release and imagined his anxiousness rising in him like a helium-filled balloon.

  Snap. Snap. Snap (she grabbed for something, caught air, which birdshe notices magically became the uncle’s work boot). He placed his hands on the wall and slid down to his knees.

  Snap. Snap. Snap (hands raised effortlessly with the leather footwear, a coloured rainbow arcs as she swung the steel-toed boot through the air). She stopped at the last instant, aware that he was not moving and was continuing his slide to the floor.

  Snap. Snap. Snap (neurons flashed and hissed and sent the message to her arm from her brain). Heart attack. Uncle has had a heart attack.

  There was no relief, only revulsion, at the realization that this excitement had overwhelmed him. She wanted him to look up at her and plead with teary eyes for help, forgiveness, silence. But he is only gasping when a particularly horrible screamwheeze was leaving his lungs. “Save me, Birdie.”

  BirdBernice pays particular attention. She has never seen this, never remembered this before. She is rapt under her comforter.

  Snap. Snap. Snap (old matches on an old matchbook striking ineffectually). “Creator, give me a sign,” she had prayed. The uncle stared at her. They lit. She threw the matches, picked up her stuff (in the picture, Jesse is looking at her with foreboding, heavy-lidded) and walked slowly to the door.

  “Save yourself,” she said.

  She is not sure how long she stood there, watching. She struggled with the poster tube, pictures and her makeshift luggage. Put on her coat and walked outside. Birdshe wills her to turn around, to see what she forgot. She does, slowly. The match must have taken immediately as the curtains were already on fire by the window where he fell down. She walked away. She must have stood there for some time, for when she looked down she saw that her hands were blistered. Could feel her feet burning. Wonders absently how long she stood there. Walked. To the hill and the old tree. It had no life in it.

  She remembers.

  acimowin

  The Storyteller guffawed

  That Wolf!

  Never did learn his lesson

  He wanted the taste of owl in his

  mouth

  Every time he saw her

  The wolf ran around

  her, sniffing and leering, wondering

  what she looked like without skin on

  She looked at his crazy eyes and wondered

  about the strength of her beak.

  10

  SHE WRITES HER OWN STORY

  omekinawew: one who shares food

  pawatamowin

  There is noise below her, and she is afraid she will wake while in the air. She looks down and sees a raven, an eagle and an old mangy crow eating KFC.

  AUNTIE VAL

  VALENE STARTS CRYING AND CANNOT STOP; only sleep calms her. When she wakes up, the frozen face and clenched hands of her niece behind her in the night, the papers are gone and Bernice lies, dressed and groomed, and seemingly asleep in her freshly made bed.

  There is something written on one single paper on the table and it seems to be in Val’s own handwriting:

  Pasakoskow*

  Amiskowiyâs†

  Maskekewapoy‡

  And. She isn’t sure, but she thinks one of her cigarettes is missing.

  Bernice lies in the bed. In wait? In the quiet. Every so often, Val tells her a story, sings her a song or holds her hand as she prays. Birdie’s hands are soft from the lard and butter and they feel remarkably strong for a womangirl who has been wasting in her bed for weeks. She has held these hands since Bernice was an infant, staring at her, puckered and red-faced, her tiny cleft palate gleaming like the inside of an oyster shell. She was always a big kid. She was a big baby. She and Maggie used to open their eyes wide at each other over little Birdie’s big head. Part in wonder that such a big child had come from such a tiny woman. Part in complicit acceptance of some unspoken and silent deal they made never to talk about those hard months before the birth. Births.

  * Sticky spruce gum.

  † Beaver meat.

  ‡ Medicine water or medicine tea.

  She realizes that underneath all of that flesh, all of that Bernice, all of that protective armour, Bernice exists as a tiny replica of Maggie. Val finds this disconcerting as the kee kuh wee sis to her littlebig girl. Bernice no longer looks like her.

  Valene Mee
toos has always been the big woman in the room. In her twenties and thirties she came into that. Raised by a good woman and a good man, she came to expect greatness from herself and was quite seldom let down. When she turned forty and discovered she had “the goddamned diabetes” she became more aware of her diet. She also began to look around and see the potential for the sickness around her. Always close to Bernice and her other nieces and nephews, she began to notice that the girls were hiding. With some it was in the wide open – big heels, makeup and tight pants – but with Bernice it was different. Maybe she noticed more because Bernice looked just like her, but larger, but Bernice was hiding more in books and food than Val was comfortable with. In her tiny little hutch, like a big caged rabbit, Bernice would stock all manner of food and literature.

  That place was a firetrap anyhow, Valene thinks.

  When her brother died, and later still when her sister left, Valene mourned as if they were saints because that was the only way she was going to be able to forgive herself when her time came. She would mourn Bernice the same way if something should happen. “Something should happen” would be starvation or dehydration, she imagines.

  When Bernice was little, when Bernice was young, she could write and tell such stories. You could not shut her up. When Val would visit, she would sit on the tiny bed under the stairs and listen to her niece, really her daughter from another mother, tell stories of princesses, crazy dogs and travels that were full and rich in their detail. Val would bring all of her new boyfriends to meet her fantastic niece as soon as she thought they might be around for more than a month. Unfailingly, the newly ex-boyfriends would end up as badmen or monsters in the next instalment of Bernice’s tales.