Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  He snags the edge of her T-shirt with his teeth and pulls, pushing his lips in against the skin, nuzzling his face into her breasts, and with one arm bracing them both, he gently lowers her to the ground. Before she is completely under him, he stops and looks into her eyes. “This okay?” he asks. “I want this to be okay.”

  Stephanie nods. Her skin feels damp, her heart a yammering tattletale, her limbs as pliable as fresh clay. Was she ever going to resist? Already she can’t remember.

  The activist is up on the dais of St. Cuthbert’s basement auditorium telling those gathered in detail about the injustices they’ve suffered. Las feels disappointed. He abandoned a half-full dinner plate hoping for someone more imposing, heroic. This guy has a beakish face and a braying edge to his voice, not unlike a wheezy farm animal. Las looks around; there are about thirty others in the room, most of them middle-aged like his parents. There are posters on every telephone pole downtown. He expected a room full of hot-headed young men creating a swoon of adrenaline, imminent violence, not oldsters dressed for a mall walk or a Sunday picnic roast. But at least they seem impressed, willing to take the activist seriously, some of them nodding as the guy makes a point. That has to mean something. He’s from the big city, the pub owner, Will Jacobs, told Las when he came in, slapping his shoulder. Las wanted to ask why the citizens’ group wasn’t being organized by an actual Doreville citizen. He says God wants him here, added Will. Oh, Jesus effin’ Christ, Las thought to himself. He’d shot out of the house jonesing for anger, a desire for hard-fisted vengeance that mirrored and justified his own, not a candidate for the priesthood named Kenneth.

  The basement is muggy and nobody has thought to put out chairs. Las recognizes Gordo’s mom hovering off to his left. Not here officially, she says over and over to anyone who approaches her. Just curious. Las nods at her and she looks surprised to see him.

  Kenneth likes to talk. As his speechifying drags on, Las finds it hard to concentrate on all the ideas Kenneth insists should be attached to their outrage as upstanding Doreville citizens. Las already knows what to be mad about: wishy-washy policing, bleeding-heart judges, politicians running scared with their tails between their legs, entitled natives. Some of the people in the room begin to shift from foot to foot as if they have to pee. Las detects the rank ammonia of body odour and scrunches his nose. He leans his chin into his shoulder for a furtive sniff of his armpits. Not him.

  Kenneth stops for a breath. “Now, folks,” he announces, “I am going to outline my ten steps for a citizen counter-insurgency.”

  Las’s ears prick up. He likes the sound of insurgency, even if it’s the counter kind, which he guesses waters down some of the anarchy and fun. All is fair in love and war – isn’t that what the guy is saying in so many words? Kenneth rhymes off the steps so fast that Las is still trying to sort through them ten minutes later, trying to understand which of them actually means fighting back, throwing things, fucking things up a bit, when the crowd organizes itself into sign-making stations.

  “Kenneth thinks signs are a very important aspect of counter-insurgency,” Will Jacobs says as he hands Las a paintbrush, clean bristol board. The mayor has already hightailed it out of there.

  “Bullshit!” Las says. He doesn’t care who hears.

  Kenneth, who has alighted from the dais and is instructing a wannabe counter-insurgent in Bermuda shorts and bright white sneakers to print neatly, stay within the margins, bobs up his head. “Is there a problem?” he asks. Off the stage, he looks even pointier, his voice sounds even more adenoidal.

  Las’s thirst for bravado, for brawling, for something big, becomes an overwhelming thirst for beer, catching him at the throat. “Yeah, there’s a fucking problem. It’s over there, blocking Highway 3, while we’re in here fingerpainting like four-year-olds.”

  Kenneth twists around his head in alarm, raises his arms. “Nobody should be doing their signs with their fingers. Use the brushes, everyone.”

  Las throws up his hands in disgust and storms out of the church basement, knocking over a row of paint pots so that a chorus of cheeps from disgruntled sign-makers follows him into the night. Outside, he unleashes himself on the parked sedans, vans, and utility vehicles belonging to the sheep inside. He elbows car doors, twists hood ornaments and side-view mirrors. “This fuckin’ useless place!” he yells at the empty lot as he wrenches one mirror free, tossing it so it bounces off the hood of a car parked four spots away. He waits for someone to come out of the church, to start yelling, but there is only quiet, but for a low chuckle.

  Las turns to the dark wall of the church. A figure crouches there. He smells the joint before he sees its hot eye.

  “Be careful there, rebel. Don’t want a vandalism charge to stand in the way of that glorious future of yours.”

  Gordo. Las has avoided his friend since he left him moaning in the grass, the morning of the raid. He went home, fell onto his bed, and woke more than twenty-four hours later in a dark room, vaporous with the musk of his unshowered body, gasoline-soaked clothes, and a foggy despair about exactly what happened that night, how far he’d slipped into the murk of unredeemable acts. He has a vague memory of his mother’s thin entreaty from outside his bedroom door calling him to dinner – or was it breakfast? Both? Certainly meals were missed before he finally dragged himself into the shower. But nothing could make him feel clean. He hasn’t been in the pool for nearly a week.

  Now Gordo will be pissed. Some line has been crossed that might trigger a new spree of unpredictability. A church, inside it or out, is an unlikely place for either of them to show up, much less both. Las wonders if the mayor ratted him out to her son. He wonders how long Gordo has been waiting for him.

  “Wanna toke, fuckhole?” The joint is held out to him, a molten bead against the darkening air.

  Las sees he won’t be able to say no. There’s no excuse not to tighten the distance between himself and Gordo, though instinct tells him space is his one advantage. He walks over, slides down the church wall, squats beside the other boy, and accepts the joint nub, its strong fragrance dizzying. He inhales deeply. “Thanks, man,” he says, handing it back. “Good shit.”

  The tops of their fingers touch, and instead of taking the nub from him, Gordo lets the contact linger, like a dare or a challenge. Las pulls away, letting the joint fall to the ground in front of them.

  “That was stupid,” Gordo says calmly. His fingers move, mantis-like, to retrieve it.

  Las unfolds himself to standing to ease the knot in his belly. He’s just about to offer to buy his friend a beer, to get them somewhere with light and people, when he notices Gordo, still squatting, grab something brick-shaped at his side, turn it to vertical. It comes down hard on Las’s bare toes, exposed in his flip-flops. He feels a crunch, a jarring disbelief, a flame of pain. A wildfire of sensation races up his calf. Las crouches over, holds his knees. He pukes.

  Gordo laughs, straightens, takes a long final drag on the joint, and throws it at him. “You think I’d let you get away with being an asshole?” he says. “You went too far, pretty boy. And guess what – I’m an elephant. I never forget.” He saunters away.

  Las crouches. He counts to ten. The pain saws through the flesh and bones of his foot. He counts to sixty. When he hears Gordo’s truck engine slip into gear, he stumbles over to the lit doorway of the church basement. Three toes of his left foot have a deep slash across them, their tanned skin split like fruit, revealing a red-bluish pulp, a whitish gristle. Already they are puffing up, raw as scored sausage. He tries deep breathing to slow his pulse. Will he need surgery? How will it throw his training? And his mother – God, his mother – won’t she just be crazy mad in that way that chews up her face.

  He empties his lungs too fast. The pain overwhelms everything, including the hot wick of shame that’s been burning inside him for days. He feels dangerously alive.

  A few hours before dawn, standing in the tobacco field, Nate watches Stephanie sneak into her house through t
he back entrance. She turns and waves just before jiggling the latch and ever so quietly sliding the patio door wide enough for her to squeeze through. He waves back, and when she disappears, he pulls his hand to his nose, where the smell of her lingers; he feels washed in her, brand new. “I love that girl,” he says, and it sounds just as true aloud as it did in his head. He turns into the tobacco field and walks back to the blockade.

  If there was other love in his life, it never seemed enough. His grandfather, for instance, loved him with a kind of respectful distance, even when he was a little boy. In place of hugs and words of praise, that old man, an ironworker, cradled his rough hands around the stories he told, braiding them like a rope to give to the boy.

  Why do they hire Mohawks? Nate asked when he was a young kid convinced he’d be an ironworker too.

  Because, even up there, we have the earth directly beneath our feet, his grandfather said, pounding his solar plexus. Reminding him how he’d stood atop the railway bridge spanning the St. Lawrence Seaway, between Montreal and the mainland Mohawk territory, to do the final welding. It’s always here, right here in us. All of us. It’s our story; we’re people made from clay.

  The creation story – a sky mother, twin gods born in different ways, and the whole of humanity made from a clump of wet dirt released from a muskrat’s claw – was more complicated every time his grandfather told it, with its coexistence of poison and medicine, night and day, wolf and deer. He didn’t realize until later, long after the old man died, that through all the craziness of Nate’s messed-up parents, juvenile detention, isolation, and boredom, the rope of stories remained. He only had to grab hold of it, use it to pull himself out, to save himself from being submerged.

  Stephanie is another kind of salvation. She touches every part of him – the weird graffiti, the high hoarseness of his laugh, the amateur tattoo on his chest, even the forearms scarred with self-inflicted despair – and seems to love it all. Her attentiveness emboldens the new purpose in his life. He sees ahead of him the smoke trail of the blockade, imagines his people waking up to another day of protest, hugging cups of coffee, burning a smudge of sweetgrass, nodding Shé:kon, and he feels his chest expand. Purpose and love, he says, together they’re pretty potent.

  The rows of tobacco are interrupted by a large oak tree that’s within metres of the road. The rising sun wiggles through its canopy and lands like liquid silver on the small oasis of sandy soil underneath. Nate stops, dazzled. He squints, shakes his head, moves forward. Where the tobacco plants begin again at the outside edge of the oak’s shade, he sees a final glint of silver on the ground that makes him stop, bend, and brush his fingers over the soil, like the young boy he once was, hoping for treasure where there was only the illusion of light.

  Except that everything in his life is different now, so when his fingers catch on an object that’s cool and metallic, he is only half surprised. Pressed between thumb and forefinger, he feels something intricate and delicately made. He waits until his eyes have adjusted to the new light and looks down at his palm to find a single silver earring in the shape of a dream catcher, a hoop with a web, hung with engraved feathers made of silver. Nate smiles and crosses the highway. These earrings are so common they are almost a joke, trinkets that tourists buy at powwows before hurrying off the reserve. Still, he thinks it is a good omen, this object that keeps bad spirits away, and slips it into his pocket like a charm.

  CHAPTER 15

  The hotel room is dappled with men wearing pressed white shirts, holding small black phones, poking the keys of their laptops with soft, clean hands. On the long table in front of them are name cards, glasses of water, microphones, coffee cups – little armies that advance and retreat on the linen desert as the morning progresses. Helen smooths the tablecloth in front of her, tries to steady her mind. It is a bright, busy room decorated for civility and industriousness. She wants to trust, but she can’t help but think the shades of taupe and tawny are a blind for an ambush.

  Years ago, when she returned from the residential school to find her mother enfeebled, she began to hunt for their food in a land mostly ransacked of game. Deer, rabbits, the occasional grouse or pheasant could still be found. Hunting is not about pursuit but anticipation, her mother would croak from her rocking chair on the porch when Helen left. And waiting.

  Now the quarry is truth. Across from her is the federal negotiator, in a wide-shouldered jacket, a prim striped blouse, hair the colour of wet ironstone. Her name is Antonia Taylor, a former minister in a former government and now a consultant with a mouldering law degree. According to the local paper, she bills the government $3,000 a day. Helen wonders what experience she’s had with blockades, with natives, with history. The negotiator keeps raising her eyebrows in exasperation, checking her phone, sighing audibly, and whispering to the white-shirts huddling around her. And she nibbles and nibbles, constantly reaching for the dry little cookies as if she can never be sated.

  Linda Goodleaf, an elder and clan mother, is speaking, and six more wait to have their turn. But the negotiator doesn’t understand this as necessity. She interrupts. “With all due respect, folks, this is an expensive process. And the first order of business is to establish who the federal government recognizes as a fellow negotiator.”

  The clan mother who is speaking stops, and with a wry smile she lets the negotiator demonstrate her lack of respect. A whole lifetime of interruptions has taught her to press her tongue hard against the back of her teeth, to wait.

  Then Linda takes a deep breath and smiles as if she is talking to a younger brother, slowing everything down, making it simple. “Skennen’kó:wa kenh, Miss Taylor? With all due respect, I must remind you that your ancestors borrowed our version of democracy and then abandoned it for something less democratic. Then you told us we must practise your democracy. At the end of a gun. Your government sent police with sharp sticks, with black boots, with bayonets. Just as they did again a week ago. That’s how they deposed our traditional chiefs, took away our traditions. Though my granddad, rakshótha, got in his licks.”

  Laughter teases the throats on Helen’s side of the table. The clicking of the laptops stops. There is a chorus of crinkles: wrappers being peeled off sticks of gum and cellophane being stripped from yet more cookies for the negotiator.

  “An elected government must deal with an elected government,” the negotiator says. Helen knows this tone, its confidence that a rule is as good as a truth. The negotiator clears her throat, wipes some crumbs from her chin, reads something an aide thrusts in front of her, adjusts her glasses, and waits.

  Linda takes a sip of water. “You know, Miss Taylor, we’re not a culture, as you government people like to say. We’re a civilization. We have our own way of governing. We have our own civic codes, institutions. You just keep trying to take them away from us. After the first raid, my grandmother, akshótha, a powerful leader who helped choose the chief, became a woman with no power. Without even a vote.”

  Helen watches the negotiator, waiting to see understanding register on the woman’s powdered implacability, waiting for her to recognize that the elder’s talk, and her listening, is part of the process, part of how they earn each other’s time and respect. The negotiator looks down at her phone and starts to text.

  The clan mother’s voice dips as she finishes her talk. “We kept resisting, returning to our true leaders. The next time, your government sent in the black boots. I was a young girl, mostly well behaved.”

  There is more laughter, followed by whispering across the room, like a wind through dry leaves. Linda removes the pins that keep a tight roll at the back of her head. Long grey hair falls to her shoulders. She reaches behind, grabs a fistful, and yanks it up from the back of her head so her face grimaces. The negotiator startles.

  “This is how they dragged me out of our traditional council meeting when the raiders came again, Miss Taylor. Do you know how painful that is? My scalp bled. For six months I could not brush my hair. I had it cut of
f. These things you don’t forget. That and the feel of a black boot in your ribs from a man who thinks you are lower than a dog.” She drops her hand; a warm, thick banner of grey rolls down between her shoulders. And for a moment Helen sees the elder shape-shift into that young woman – smooth-cheeked, straight-backed, with beautiful hair – who bled. Like Cherisse.

  “This democracy of yours is a funny thing, no? You wanted us to rule ourselves with a government like yours, yet it took you long enough to let us vote in your democracy. Ha, good trick, that! But we were better off without it. We already had our own government, our own democracy. Still do. Nearly four hundred years ago, the Two Row Wampum treaty ensured we’d live side by side with Europeans, parallel lines that didn’t interfere with each other. Then in 1763, your predecessors again proclaimed they’d respect our rights to the land we occupy, and thus, how we live. You have broken that promise. Eh ne’e na’a wen’ne.” The clan mother sits. And she is old again, defiant still.

  Three days earlier, looking down at Cherisse in the hospital bed, Helen thought only, She’s alive. Native women were tossed from cars like fast-food wrappers; their bones were plucked clean by coyotes and vultures; they disappeared with nothing left but poster pictures and the water-drip torture of hope. Before the drive to the hospital, she’d gone to Joe’s trailer to gather some things and found the smoky atomizer in Cherisse’s bedroom. It was a queer object, but Helen recognized its magic. She tucked it into her hand, and later under Cherisse’s hospital pillow, hoping it was as powerful as a witching bone. As long as Cherisse was safe from further damage, Helen wanted her to stay in the hospital, so she, an old woman, could coax the demon of truth out of the darkness with a bowl of blood and a hunter’s patience.

  Shayna’s head and heart are splintering. A baby on the way. A niece in the hospital. A blockade that’s packed the negotiating room with too many men: government aides, Chief White and his cronies, Clarence in designer eyeglasses, the unreadable Elijah Barton sitting with two Warriors, thick-necked and bulging in their dress shirts. And among them a woman with sleek hair and manicured nails doing a man’s bidding: Antonia Taylor.