by John Smelcer
“Shit, kid. Get the hell away from me with that damn thing!” his father yelled, his angry words slurred.
Simon knew his father was drunk, and he knew, too, that the man was unaware of how badly he was cut or of the volume of blood he was spilling. He handed the soaked shirt to his father, who had managed to stand up—wobbly from the fall, from all the beer he had consumed, and from the loss of blood.
“I said get away from me, you little shit!” he yelled as he smacked Simon across his head, knocking him to the porch floor.
As Simon lay in a warm pool of his father’s blood, the man went inside the house and beat his mother for having had the porch built in the first place.
He beat her all the time, usually for nothing.
Less than nothing.
Once, his mother tried to take the key out of the truck’s ignition when his father, so drunk he could barely stand, was about to drive into town to buy more beer. She reached in through the open window for the key, but before she knew what was happening, he rolled up the window with her arm still inside. She was still stuck that way when he shifted into gear and drove down the gravel road, dragging his screaming and flailing wife alongside. Simon ran after her to help, but the truck and his mother soon disappeared around a distant curve, and he stood alone for a long time crying as the sun went down.
Hours passed before his mother stumbled back to the house.
Days went by before his father returned.
A year after his father fell on the steps of the porch, he died in a crash. He was drunk when his old truck jumped from the winding highway and plummeted two hundred feet into a lake far below, sinking into its sparkling depths like a smooth, flat skipping stone. Simon remembered the funeral several days later and how everyone had said how good a husband and father the man had been.
“He was such a good man,” someone told him, as they both stood on the far side of the room, eating platefuls of boiled beaver and porcupine with greasy frybread.
Ever since that day, Simon thought of funerals as a place where people gather to eat and lie about the dead. That’s the way life goes in general, he thought. That was all he ever knew about funerals and family. Families fight and throw things at one another until they eventually die or break apart. Family means a bunch of people living in a crowded house who hate one other, but can’t live no place else.
A Quiet Recess of Winter
The scrawny sled dogs outside were standing on their little, flat-roofed dog houses barking at a dark figure of a tall man shuffling up the snowy trail to the cabin door. When he was close, they stopped barking and went back inside their straw-packed homes and curled upon themselves.
A hard knock announced the man’s arrival.
Mary Yazzie opened the door and invited the visitor inside before quickly closing the heavy door to keep as much heat from escaping the small log house. It was January and the temperature had hung around thirty below all month. The river out front was almost entirely frozen except for a few open stretches clearly visible beneath a million stars and the light of a bright moon. It was hard when winter stayed so long, hard for people and harder still for the animals that lived on the indifferent land.
Sometimes Mary felt sorry for the moose and caribou which had no dens in which to outlast winter.
While most months had names in their language like, “Time when the salmon come” for June or “Time when leaves fall” for September, winter months were simply numbered as if surviving the season was a countdown to when the sun would again rise above the mountains to thaw the land and its many rivers and lakes. Spring in the northland was more a place of rebirth than any place else in the world. The difference between summer and winter was sharp as the contrast between life and death.
“Take your coat off,” Mary said as she fetched a chipped tea cup from the cupboard. “Go stand by the stove and warm up.”
The man did not speak but hung his coat on a nail on the wall above the hissing and popping wood stove busily turning spruce into heat. The Indian had trouble standing straight while he rubbed his hands together and looked about the one room cabin. There was a bed along one wall and green-painted metal bunk beds against the other. The wood stove squatted to the right of the front door below a small framed window covered thick with ice. An infant was sleeping in a small cradle on the floor near the stove. To the left of the door was a small round table where two young boys sat playing cards and eating frybread. Two oil lamps, one on the table and another mounted on a wall, illuminated the room with flickering light and shadows.
“How you boys been?” the man asked.
“Fine,” replied Philip and Charlie without looking up from their game.
The boys didn’t like the man who came by every week since their father had died. His name was Hardy Bigjim, and he lived in the village downriver. He usually brought the boys candy or soda. Once, he even bought them each a new single-blade pocket knife.
“Sit down and have some hot tea,” Mary said, motioning with one hand towards the bed on which she and the baby slept. The bed was covered with different colored Potlatch blankets. The one on top was solid red except for a broad white stripe at either end. She needed so many blankets because the fire almost always died in the middle of the night before she or one of the boys awoke in the morning to stoke it.
The springs squeaked as the man sat down.
“Here,” Mary said, handing him the cup. “Drink this.”
Hardy took the cup without looking up. He tried to take a drink but his hands were shaking so that he spilled the hot tea on his leg. He jumped up and the cup fell to the floor breaking into pieces of porcelain.
“Damn it, Mary!” he yelled. “Now look what you made me do,” he said, while rubbing his hand over the wet spot on his pants.
The mother of three knelt down to pick up the sharp fragments of her favorite cup. When she stood up the man was standing over her staring at her long black hair and her beautiful dark eyes and brown skin.
His own eyes were glassy and distant. They reminded her of the way a moose’s eyes glazed over lifeless only moments after death. She had shot a small moose in the fall and her loaded rifle still leaned in the corner behind the table where the boys sat watching the man.
Hardy sat down and again the bed springs creaked under his weight.
“Got anything to drink?” he asked, forgetting that Mary never had any liquor in her house.
He wet his lips and turned to the boys.
“Why don’t you boys go play outside for awhile?” he asked in a tone that really wasn’t a question at all.
“It’s freezin’ outside!” said Charlie, looking out the window at the thermometer hanging on a nearby spruce tree.
Charlie was a year-and-a-half older than Philip who was ten. Both were skinny and had hair much shorter than Hardy’s waist-long ponytail.
“Why don’t you go catch me some rabbits for supper?” the Indian asked, this time in a firmer voice.
It was clear to the boys that the man meant for them to leave him and their mother alone for a while. But it was too cold to go outside, even for a while. In this temperature, a hot cup of water would crackle when tossed into the freezing air. Besides, it was dark outside and it was a clear night which meant that the temperature would surely slip even further.
Outside the cabin nothing moved. Only the occasional faraway hoot of an owl broke the silence of the silvery night.
The boys turned their attention back to their card game, ignoring the drunken man’s request.
“Go on now!” Hardy exclaimed louder than before without even looking at them. “Get the hell out of here!”
Mary knew it was too late and too cold for that. Besides, she didn’t want anything from this man anyhow. He wasn’t so bad when he was sober, but he only came to visit her when he had been drinking hard at the bar nearly two miles downriver. Lots of men drank,
but few turned downright mean the way he did.
When the boys didn’t move, the man sat quietly for a few minutes staring at the clean swept plank floor. As she forced another piece of wood into the stove and turned down the damper, Mary thought that perhaps the man had forgotten why he had come in the first place.
After a couple more minutes, Mary brought him a piece of frybread from the table. When she handed it to him he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her down onto the bed with him.
“Come on, Mary,” Hardy said. “You know you haven’t had it in six months.”
Mary struggled to get up.
The boys stopped playing cards and Charlie jumped up from his chair.
“Leave her alone!” he screamed. “You hear me? Leave her be!”
But the drunken Indian didn’t listen. Instead, he pinned the smaller woman under his weight and started kissing all over her face and neck. Mary struggled to free herself, and she turned her head from side to side to avoid his slobbery lips and the smell of too much alcohol on his breath.
Just then a log in the stove popped loudly like a gun and momentarily startled the Indian.
But a moment later, Hardy was kneeling over the woman pinning her arms back behind her head with one hand. With his other hand, he grabbed at the front of her shirt and ripped it back sharply, exposing her breasts.
Mary struggled hard and screamed.
Then The Indian smacked her across the right side of her face with the back of his hand.
The baby woke up and started to cry.
“Get out of here, boys!” the mother screamed to her sons. “Go get your uncle!” she yelled again, while Hardy tried to loosen his pants zipper with his one free hand.
But the boys didn’t leave. Instead, Charlie jumped on the man’s back and pulled his hair and bit his right ear until blood trickled down on to the blankets. All the while his mother kept screaming at him to run away.
“Get out of here, Charlie!” she screamed. “Run!”
But it was too late. Hardy was more than a foot taller than the boy, and he outweighed him by a good hundred pounds. He rolled off the bed throwing the eleven year old from his back on to the floor. Then he picked him up across his shoulder and carried him right out the front door and tossed him off the bank into a still open part of the river. Then, without even waiting to see if the boy was alive, he went back into the cabin, slammed the door shut, and locked it.
Mary was standing by the bed holding her blouse together with one hand and wiping hair from her eyes with the other.
“Get out of here!” she screamed. “Get the hell out of here, Hardy.”
She was trembling and her voice was labored.
The baby was crying louder and Mary went towards it, but the man grabbed her and shoved her back on to the bed and jumped on her again.
Philip grabbed the boiling cast iron tea kettle from the stove and poured it down Hardy’s back. The man roared in pain and when he jumped up the boy hit him across the back of his head with the pot as hard as he could. The tall Indian fell to the floor.
Mary grabbed her son by the shoulders.
“Get out of here, Philip!” she said, her voice full of terror.
The young boy saw that the fear in her eyes was more than before. But she didn’t fear her own safety as much as she did for her son.
“He’s gonna kill you,” she said. “Run!”
But before he could act, Hardy was on his knees and shaking his head. His ponytail had fallen loose and now his long hair brushed the floor like a black mop.
“Hide, Philip,” his mother whispered.
“There’s no time. Hide.”
The ten year old quickly rolled under the bottom bunk and grabbed the metal springs above. Hardy took hold of one of the boy’s legs and tried to yank him from beneath the bed, but Philip’s grip was strong and the Indian only managed to pull the heavy bunk bed a foot from the wall.
Just then a loud sound rang sharply through the small cabin. It was much louder than the noise of the popping spruce. Hardy released the boy’s leg and turned to see Mary holding her rifle aimed at his chest. She was breathing hard and her long hair fell across her face again.
She backed up towards the door with the barrel still aimed at the man.
“Philip,” she said, “come over here. Now!”
The Indian looked down at the small boy sticking his head out from beneath the bottom bed.
Mary worked the rifle bolt to feed another bullet into the chamber. It was something she had done many times in her life among the wilderness. She had learned to shoot from her uncle when she was no older than Philip.
“If you touch him, I’ll kill you,” she calmly told the man, feeling more in control now with the familiar heaviness of the weapon in her hands.
When her son was safely beside her, the mother told him to open the door for Charlie who had been knocking on the door and screaming for the last several minutes.
The older brother came inside. He was soaking wet and shivering so bad that he could not speak. With both arms wrapped tightly across his chest and trembling so much he could barely move, he shuffled over to his mother.
“Now get out of here, Hardy,” Mary demanded, still holding the rifle level with the man’s chest.
When he started towards them, the mother and her sons moved to the left side of the cabin near the wall behind the kitchen table to put as much distance as possible between them in the small room.
Hardy pulled his heavy coat from the nail and put it on without zipping the front. The baby was still crying, and Mary couldn’t wait for the man to leave so she could comfort and quiet it. Before she knew what was happening, the man with blood still dripping from his right ear lifted the infant from its make-shift cradle and held it against his chest.
“You gonna shoot your own baby, Mary?” he asked, the crying baby wriggling in his hands.
“You put my sister down right now!” Philip yelled from beside his horrified mother.
The Indian said nothing but walked towards the still open door holding the child before him as assurance the woman would not shoot him.
Mary took a step closer and aimed the sights at the man’s head, but he raised the crying infant to match her movements and the mother backed away and pleaded with the Indian.
“Please, Hardy,” she begged in a soft voice barely audible across the room. “Put my baby down.”
But he didn’t listen and he wouldn’t until he was far from the cabin and the woman with the rifle.
As he backed outside into the extreme chill of winter, the dogs again came out from their small houses filled with straw to investigate. Seeing only familiar faces and no food, they returned again to curl up on the warm spot they had made with their own body.
Mary kept pleading with the man to give her the child. When it became clear that he might harm her baby, Mary aimed low and fired the rifle at the Indian’s tea stained leg. But nothing happened. No sharp report rang out in the small house. There was only the sound of the release of the firing pin.
Click.
There was no second bullet. She had forgotten to reload the gun.
Mary dropped the rifle and tried to pull her child from the man, but he hit her hard on the side of the head and knocked her unconscious. Philip and Charlie took her by the arms and dragged her inside the cabin near the roaring and crackling wood stove.
By the time they looked out the door again, Hardy and their baby sister were gone. Philip placed a blanket over his mother and wrapped another one around his shivering brother sitting at the table. He closed and locked the door and stared out the ice-covered window for a long time saying nothing, occasionally wiping away tears running down his smooth cheeks.
Hardy Bigjim walked through the frozen night along the trail which ran alongside the wide river. His coat was still open and he
wore no hat or gloves. The baby, still crying in his arms, was wearing only a cloth diaper for protection. It was almost two miles to the village, and the Indian knew that it would be at least half an hour or longer before he’d walk into the stale warmth of the bar.
The full moon was high overhead, and stars filled the clear sky above green-and-reddish-tinged northern lights racing across a sharp edge of horizon. It was so bright that he could see distant mountains and steaming patches of open water. The only sound in the forest as he walked was that of his boots crunching on the packed snow and the cries of the infant which caused his head to ache even more than it had before he arrived at the cabin.
For almost two miles, the man walked the thin trail through the frozen forest which meandered down to the edge of the river, now mostly buried beneath wind-packed drifts of snow. His hands were frozen from holding the baby, which had stopped crying, and his ears hurt, especially the one the boy had bitten. Coming around a long bend, he could see the beckoning lights of the village’s only bar up ahead. He would be there in minutes. He could almost hear the old juke box playing and taste cigarettes and whiskey.
Hardy licked his lips and paused for a moment at the edge of a steep bank wondering what he should do with the child? He couldn’t take it into the bar. What would he say? How would he explain? Below him, through the darkness, he could hear the frigid waters lapping against the edge of the bank, whispering to him.
It was settled then.
He held the child out above the icy river and let her fall.
The Lake
“Let’s go get some water,” said the man with a coarse salt-and-pepper beard, grabbing his parka from a hook on the wall behind the wood stove.
“Can’t we do it tomorrow morning when it’s light outside?” replied the son, looking up from the book he was reading and then looking out the frosted window. “It’s pitch black out there.”
“No. Let’s do it now. Grab your coat.”
Josey marked the page he was reading and scooted his chair out from beneath the table. He placed the book, a collection of stories by Jack London, on top of a well-used edition of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.