by Krista Foss
Shayna leaving the barricade for a late-afternoon visit to the council offices presents all sorts of interesting possibilities. He has nothing to lose by hanging around for a bit.
Chief Jonah White may have convinced other folks that his ability to break even running a Stop ’n’ Go is tantamount to business acumen, that his adeptness at retelling a joke or funny story is the same as negotiating moxie, but Shayna has little patience for men like him. Her people believed in the traditional council – the one where women such as her grandmother were enfranchised and powerful – and resisted the federally imposed idea of governance, its trickle-down of undeserved payoffs and goodies accruing to opportunists such as White and his cronies. Still, she is nervous. As a point of honour, she has rarely ventured into the new band council building since its cost overruns became a heated controversy. The automatic door’s pneumatic whoosh, the lobby’s bright, antiseptic gleam unnerves her. From behind a polished marble barricade, a receptionist’s head bobs up.
“Can I help you?” She eyes Shayna’s grime-stained jeans.
“My name is Shayna Fallingbrook. The chief asked to see me.”
“Oh.” The girl drags a polished red fingernail along her computer screen and then taps the keyboard. She throws a clipboard on the counter.
“Conference room 22B. First right, then left, then left, then right. Can’t miss it. Please sign in, and don’t forget to initial when you leave. They’re waiting for you.”
“They?” Shayna says, and scratches her name on the sheet.
The girl shrugs and offers a conciliatory smile. “Yup. Looks like you’re a popular gal.”
Shayna slips into the closest washroom and fumbles for the cellphone in her purse, only to find it uncharged. She scrubs her hands, rinses her face, runs her fingers through her hair. The bottom of her pant cuff has a weird blue stain and a crust of dirt. The last two buttons of her shirt are missing. “Shit!” she says. Helen would counsel her to stay cool, stay strong. Even if it is an ambush, she’d say, what have you got worth stealing?
The conference room’s shades are drawn and it smells of new carpet. As her eyes adjust to the low light, Shayna makes out the silhouettes of four figures, all large-shouldered, facing her from one side of an immense round conference table.
“Come in, come in,” says Chief White, and he draws himself up out of his seat, holding out his hand. “We have coffee, tea.”
Shayna sits opposite the men so the table obscures her pant leg, the scruffy half of her shirt. She puts her palms out flat, places the dead phone beside them to suggest a time limit, looks up. The first set of eyes she meets are those of her ex-husband.
Clarence is smiling at her. “Hello, Shay,” he says, and it is the voice she remembers, the voice of a man who never yelled but who expressed his belligerence with greasy fingerprints on the remote, the noises he made eating an orange, the always empty gas tank.
“We asked Clarence to join this meeting because he’s got some expertise, you know, on the legal stuff regarding land.”
Shayna nods her head slowly. She met Clarence at law school. He was a Mohawk from Big River, his father a sometimes friend of Rick’s. She was the better student. She got multiple offers after passing her bar examinations; he got one. But it was Clarence who thrived among the city towers, the press of people in the subways, the traffic that drowned birdsong and breezes. She walked out of her office tower one day, late for a lunch appointment, saw her passing reflection with her expensive leather boots and tight skirt, clutching a mobile phone, looking as if she’d mow down anyone who delayed her, and suddenly she couldn’t reconcile her reflection with the women who’d come before her, or the woman she wanted to become.
“Sooo,” says Chief White, “we wanted to talk to you about this barricade business. Perhaps you could fill us in on your strategy.”
Shayna takes a long breath. “I’m a little confused about how this concerns you at all. Hasn’t the band council formally distanced itself from the barricade?”
“Well, that situation is … you know, fluid,” says the chief. He folds and unfolds his hands, then his eyes dart to Clarence.
“Shayna, the thing is, at this point you really need a focused message,” Clarence begins. She’s irritated by his tone, the effort he is taking to explain things to her. “When you’re dealing with the media,” he continues, clearing his throat for emphasis, “and especially the government.”
Chief White nods eagerly, as if Clarence’s words were edged in gold leaf.
“We have a message: the land doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us,” she says. “And we filed claims and considerations and followed the rules and somehow that didn’t work. So now we are being a bit more, y’know, proactive, as they say.”
“Yeah, but …” Clarence says, and she remembers that but. He said it exactly the same way every time she muttered about more and more blonde baby mamas showing up on the reserve pushing strollers with blue-eyed natives, hanging dream catchers in their bedroom windows, sporting Turtle Island tattoos. But we’re all hybrids, Shay, he’d say.
If everybody is native, no one is native, she’d spit back, and surely that must be the plan. First missionaries and churches, then residential schools. And now legislation that defines a race by giving it no definition worth having. Hand out the funds and rights. Water down the cultural and blood ties. Keep everybody just poor enough. It’s the politest genocide on the planet. This was the kind of stuff she’d offer for every but he supplied. Finally he’d wonder aloud if she were paranoid. Shay’d call him a sheep. Baa, siksik, baa.
“But you need to be precise, Shayna.” And what she hears is an old exasperation, his implying that she’s given to fuzzy theories and overreaction. “For instance, you should have a figure in mind.”
“A figure?”
“For compensation. Surely you’ve reviewed the title history on this property,” he says. “You’ll have to argue that the band was improperly compensated for the land, rather than trying to prove it was taken from them in a series of complicated boondoggles. The evidentiary through-line is so much clearer.”
Shayna gives a little laugh, shakes her head. Farmers are selling their acreages and new houses are rising up from graded mud flats. Her people – his people too – are being surrounded by Walmarts and Japanese maples, Montessori schools and discarded Frappuccino cups. Meanwhile their treaty claims cram banker’s boxes, gather dust in the offices of lawyers and overpaid consultants. The reserve population is growing, the land base shrinking. And what does the band council do? Burns sweetgrass for every visiting politician. Hires show-me-the-money Mohawks such as Clarence who say evidentiary and – always – easier.
“So, let me guess. The band council has a figure in mind. And you’re offering to distribute this compensation.”
The chief shifts uncomfortably, whispers to the two men on either side of him.
“Shay, you have to be realistic,” Clarence says. It hurts her to smile. “Elected council has a good track record with the right people in government. You and your troop have no credibility. The feds’ negotiators will run circles around you.”
A funny way to exact revenge, she thinks, but effective. Perhaps she has it coming. In the last six months of their marriage, Clarence would push her off him at night, saying, Stop! She would grope at him with her fingertips, with her tongue, her teeth. Nothing registered – not the salt of his sweat, the tang of his ear, not the stubble of his chin, the soft flesh of his ass. She’d begin to scratch, scratch, scratch at him as if she were trapped in a box of his flesh. He’d pin her to the bedsheets. Stop! When he moved into Pete-Pete’s old room, she’d slip into the house’s dark hush to destroy something he loved, ripping each page of the first book his mother had bought him, running a nail across the ridges of his mint-condition Hank Williams seventy-eight. She mined a talent for hurting him. And every time he came back to her, wearing long sleeves and pants to hide what she’d inflicted upon him, she only wanted to
do something worse.
“We want the land, not compensation. The land itself,” she says finally. “The tiniest fraction of what was originally promised to our people.”
Chief White’s shoulders drop.
A long, disapproving phssst comes out of Clarence’s mouth. “You’re not serious,” he says. “You can’t be serious, Shay. You’re going to argue the original treaty? That will take forever. Forever. They will tie you up in discovery so long you’ll run out of money before you see the inside of a courtroom. That plays right into their hands. It’s idiocy – criminally stupid.”
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that last word,” she says. She’s halfway out of her seat.
Clarence shakes his head.
After all these years she still can’t tell if he is angry or truly surprised. Our kid is going to preschool in the Legion? he asked when she announced that Pete-Pete would learn the Mohawk language before he mastered English. She had to clear away beer bottles and ashtrays in the morning, wash the tables with baking soda and vinegar, open the doors to fresh air before the elders showed up.
Konkwehon:we, Pete-Pete said one day, pointing to his chest, looking up at his parents. His smile used every part of his face. Yes, baby, real people. You are one of the real people, Shayna whispered. Her chest rattled. Her eyes watered. After that, nothing but her child could sate her hunger, ever really fill her up. Clarence knew it.
She pushes back her chair. Her ex-husband will suffer for that unkind word; she needn’t draw more attention to it. Still, she can’t muster the grace for shaking their hands. She leaves wordlessly.
Outside the council offices, Shayna is marshalling her resolve to walk back to the barricade when a voice from a parked truck stops her. “Can I offer you a ride?”
She starts. Elijah Barton is hanging out the window of his red pickup. There are more reasons to be wary of this man than to trust him, Shayna thinks. But she is tired and the distance she has to walk daunting. She climbs in.
Inside, the truck gleams with newness. Shayna sinks back. He will ask her what she is doing here, and she hasn’t the energy to lie. Perhaps Clarence better understands the nature of the compromises required when being strategic, when making alliances, she thinks. But she’s smart enough to recognize everything that a man like Elijah can lend to their cause. For now, that feels smart enough.
CHAPTER 10
When her father, Vilja, died – his body jaundiced, thin as a stewpot chicken – Ella started to run. It was the winter she was in grade ten. The high school track and field stars were the high-cheeked children of landowners and tobacco farmers, realtors and bank managers. Her father had picked tobacco in the summer, cleaned toilets in the winter. Accents clung like gristle to his and her mother’s English, and the air in their rented house was oiled with cooking and nicotine. Tryouts were in April. She tied on the North Star runners her mother had fished from the discount bin on her twice-yearly bus trip to the Pemcoe Zeller’s and told herself, I will make that team. The December air was chafing, the roads polished with new ice. Damp and salt loosened her shoes’ leather stripes, which flapped as she ran.
The echo of her father’s deep voice, his singing, followed her through the wintry monochrome. There are things I cannot be and others I can, he told her once, and she wondered then if he were making excuses for the drafty house, the fact that he was not the popular musician he’d been in Budapest. When he was gone, the words took a different shape. Surely he was telling her to focus on what was possible. So she ran.
Every day she returned from school, did the dishes left by her mother, thawed a portion of venison left over from her father’s hunting trips or a package of beef kidney bought on sale from the IGA, checked her parents’ darkened bedroom to whisper, Édesanya? and listened for a soft murmur of Édesem from her mother’s lumpen grief. Then she layered her clothes and tied on the North Stars, stiff from sitting by the radiator. Her toes were angered by chilblains and her legs protested with shin splints, but she grew stronger and faster. And as she did, she imagined her lungs being scrubbed of her father’s endless cigarettes, whose smoke still hung in the curtains, clung to the threadbare settee, and permeated the synthetic down of her winter jacket.
By the time she was in grade eleven, Ella was a regional 1,500- and 5,000-metre champion. But in the district competition that year, her first, she choked. She’d never been on an overnight excursion outside Doreville, had never seen a university campus, never connected running to a future, an escape. You’re holding back, Ella, her coach said. You have more doggedness, more potential than anyone I’ve ever seen. But it’s as if when it really means something, you don’t know how to turn on your win switch.
Her coach bought her new shoes. He slid the box across his desk towards her without a word. Shame bled warmth into her cheeks. Next year, he said, you will win the district. These will help. She took them. They were part of the either/or dilemma he presented her with. She couldn’t leave this place, couldn’t do better than her parents, without finding her win switch. There were six weeks left of grade eleven when she began to run trails along the banks of the Smoke River, jumping over logs, landing in brackish puddles, letting the sumac switches flagellate her, all the while repeating in her head, Turn on your win switch. After a month, her forearms and calves were striated with bramble scratches, her feet blistered from the ungiving new shoes. She felt no nearer to understanding what the coach wanted from her when she stumbled over a large rock and yanked an ankle ligament.
Cross-train, said her coach when she hobbled through his door. Go work out with the swim team until the end of the school year. They haven’t competed yet, so they’re hungry. It’ll be good for you while your ankle heals.
In the spring of that year, an Olympic-size swimming pool had been added to Pemcoe Secondary. Derek dePonde, who supplied curing kilns to every big tobacco grower in the region, made a donation that got his picture in the local paper and his name on the beet-coloured brick. The bronze letters were a foot high: DEREK DEPONDE POOL. Everyone referred to it as da pond at first. After the elementary school kids started busing across town to take swimming lessons, it became the DDPee.
The pool change rooms still had the smell of new paint. Ella was issued a standard one-piece racer-back red Speedo that clashed with her hair, flattened her breasts like a gymnast’s, and pinched her uncomfortably at the inner thighs. The other swimmers were broad-shouldered girls with big voices who shook their legs and slapped water over their bellies like playful seals.
There was a nervous ferocity to the way the girls torpedoed down the fifty-metre lanes, slicing up the two million litres of water. Ella struggled to keep up in the outside lane, pulling herself out of the pool at the end of practice. Spent, she sat on the tiled edge, her head down, her shoulders slack, her legs dangling in the water.
In the half-hour between the end of girls’ swim team practice and the beginning of the boys’, when the pool was deserted, Ella would linger in the water, waiting for the terminally boisterous girls to vacate the change room. She dreaded that one of the nicer ones would try to start a conversation with her. You’re doing so well! How is your ankle healing? She wanted to be alone with the shower’s inexhaustible water pressure, its perpetual heat. She didn’t want new friends she could never invite back to her smelly home.
One day she was on her back in the water, her legs kicking aimlessly, when she heard a splash and felt a surge that pushed her sideways. Surprised, Ella let go of the flutter board under her head and stopped kicking. For a moment she was entirely submerged and looking at a long, tanned figure parting the water as if it were soft butter.
She made her way to the ladder and turned. The swimmer had already pushed off from the opposite end of the pool and was rocketing back towards her – a goggled head, a gleaming set of arms vectoring outwards with a fringe of water unravelling behind. Mr. Ellis, one of the history teachers, appeared at the end of pool with a whistle around his neck. Stercyx! Stercyx! Save somet
hing for practice.
As Coulson Stercyx pulled himself to standing at the pool edge, rinsed out his goggles, and bowed his torso in a luxurious stretch, Ella recognized a force both big enough and graceful enough for all the pool’s newness, its upstart ambitions. That’s what the win switch looked like – she knew it. It was a thing to behold. She never shook off that first impression of him.
Ella glances out the window at her back gate and the meadow beyond it and feels the cramp in the small of her back relax. She is wearing a fresh cotton blouse, slim-fit black jeans, new open-toed sandals with a saucy wedge. Under her arm she has tucked a fresh copy of Tobacco Diversification Strategy: New Challenges and Opportunities for Interlake Farmers.
“Where you off to?” Mitch asks as she applies melon lipstick in the hallway mirror and fluffs her hair.
Thirty days into the barricade and her husband is like a dented boat; formerly purposeful and energized, he lists towards being hangdog and needy. Ella has overheard him trying to move things forward. His voice resonates through the office doors. If it is loud and exhorting, tinged with desperation, she knows he is talking to lawyers or politicians. Do something. Get the cops to raid. A softer voice, on the verge of wheedling, means he is assuring skittish creditors and presold unit holders. Hang on. It’ll blow over. The properties will go up in value.