Celia's Song

by Lee Maracle

  The man was mean. He subjected Stella and the child to all sorts of indignities. But Stella always got excited when he returned. It wasn’t love or lust or loneliness that propelled her to invite him in. It was more that his face broke the monotony of the ugly landscape of her home, her life, and the future that yawned before her. He always brought groceries and beer. The child took to crying when he came. She was such a noisemaker. Stella couldn’t remember hearing such a racket coming from one of them things. Her mother had had so many. She complained to her mom who gave stupid advice to stop the child from crying. Pack her, her mom said; like I got nothing better to do but pack this thing and feed her, like strength and money falls from the sky or grows on trees, Stella said. Soon she quit saying anything to Martha. The useless man brought food for her, not this child. Feed her what? She tried packing her; put her on her back in a blanket. The child still cried. She was five years old and cried like a baby.

  The man built a hammock on the porch and she put the child in it. That seemed to settle her. He brought food enough for all of them and she fed her and that seemed to work some too. He almost seemed nice in some vague way, but it never quite registered anywhere inside Stella. Martha was frustrated with her daughter. Stella took to bringing the child to Martha’s on weekends. Martha wanted to keep her. She was too small, too obedient, and altogether too quiet, and that place of Stella’s was no place to raise a child. But Martha could not keep her. She was Stella’s after all, and Martha worked.

  Pretty soon the little girl was walking about, naming things as they were, and getting cheekier by the day. “This place needs a good clean,” she would say and Stella would beat her. That intrigued the man. He joined her. Eventually, the child became a source of entertainment for the man. This almost woke the woman up. A crazy kind of fascination was sparked inside as she watched the man diddle the child. The little girl seemed to like the tickle game and the sex with the man afterward was great for Stella. His appetite increased over time. Not satisfied with Stella he made a wife of the child. Stella got jealous. It was the first emotion Stella had felt in a long time. Her jealousy made her meaner.

  Stella tormented the child. She and the man would get drunk, so drunk, and before Stella would pass out she would beat the girl. In their drunken stupor they would sleep, leaving the child out in the cold, whimpering. Soon he began to participate in tormenting the child to see if she would still respond with her little giggles. She didn’t, but he started to like the little whimpers from the girl better than her giggles. Stella would wake up and reach for the beer he always brought, drink herself into a stupor, pass out, and begin drinking again before either of them was fully awake. The process repeated itself.

  He used them for his entertainment, then he left. He was sometimes back soon, sometimes he was back later. While he was gone, Stella’s memories fought to be heard. She took to blanking out — staring off into space, emptying her mind of all thought so the memories sank to the bottom of some well of self-induced stupidity, impotent and unheard. He had been gone for a particularly long time this time — months. The little girl seemed almost happy at her mother’s deprivation. This chilled whatever feeling Stella had left for this child. When the man returned, he was terrible to Stella’s little girl. Even in her blurred state, she knew he was doing terrible things to her. She finally said something about how he was going to kill her and she would have to clean up the mess; he beat her, beat her unconscious.

  Suicide is a permit; a licence to kill that hangs in the air like a stench. This stench covers everything. It calls up the murderous spirit in everyone who sniffs the scent of it.

  He could smell it. He smelled her too. What difference does it make if you murder yourself or someone else? Only fools kill themselves. If you’re going to check out, take someone with you. She watched him burning the life from the child and planned his murder, then her own.

  Memory has its own journey. It possesses a strange insistence. It will not be ignored. Quiet, it freezes the spirit. Alive, it binds us to time, to eternity, in strange ways.

  Stella was fascinated by the slow murderous dance between the man and the child. Some image stubbornly appeared through the fog of her dying mind. She was rolling down the hill and laughing with another girl child. The laughter ended quickly. The old snake appeared and took both girls. There was a dense silence that started in her feet and rolled its way up through her legs, her hips, her belly, her chest, and finally settled in her mind. That’s when the words dropped: “You going to kill her, you keep that up. Don’t expect me to clean up your fuckin’ mess.” That’s when the beating came with that hot poker. That’s all she remembered. Someone woke her up. At first she thought it was her mother, but it wasn’t. Someone else woke her up. Who was it?

  It didn’t matter. She was awake, wide awake. She paced, hunting around the shack for something to put her to sleep. This awake was so strange and unfamiliar, it seemed to hang outside her, in the air, on her skin, then it was in her mouth; at some point she swallowed it. She didn’t like it. Awake she saw things differently; she felt things she did not want to feel. Awake she remembered things in crazy fits and starts; she remembered the hillsides before she was tormented by that old snake. She remembered her mom’s words, “Fucking bitch, what have you done?” She remembered Celia and some other blurs and some crazy kind of unnameable feeling they brought with them.

  Memory forced her to know things.

  She was wrong. She knew she was wrong. She didn’t know if she was mis-wired or something, but she was definitely wrong. This shack, this life, this dirt, this child, this torture, this hunger — it was all wrong. Everything about it was wrong. This blur was wrong. She sat in her filthy chair and slept again, musing on her wrongness.

  Memory moved her to dream.

  Gramma was sitting at the edge of the river, her tiny feet dangling in the swift water, angling her legs out from her knees. Stella sat next to her. She told her gramma her legs looked funny. Gramma did not share the same definition of funny with her granddaughter because she had laughed as though Stella had told a joke when she had meant her legs looked odd. It didn’t matter though, it felt good to be sitting there, feet being pulled by the river’s current, the soft west coast sun kissing her skin and the warmth rolling around in her mind slow and sure. Gramma pointed upward to the top of the mountain at the edge of sky and Stella saw a goat with big horns. That goat crawled up that mountain sweet and easy. Stella wanted to be him for just a moment. He was balanced at the edge of a stone face, fearless about climbing, sure he was going to make it; he skittered toward the top of the mountain.

  “Where is he going?” the child asked, still squinting into the bright sunlight to follow the goat picking its way up the mountain’s face.

  “Home,” her gramma said.

  “Where has he been?”

  “Why, he came down to leave his hair on the thorn bushes, devil’s club, so we could pick it and spin it up.”

  “What’s spin?”

  “That’s when you twist up the fur of the goat so it makes a yarn like wool.” Gramma pointed at her sweater.

  “Do you know how to do that?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Do you use his hair to make wool?”

  “No, not anymore.”

  “How come you don’t go get his hair and spin it?”

  “I spin sheep hair now. We aren’t supposed to spin that goat without dog hair. The white man killed our dogs, but he never told the goat, so the goat still comes on down anyway to leave it behind.”

  “How come we don’t just spin it anyway?”

  “Because it would be wrong, we made a deal and it would be wrong to break it.”

  “Why does he still do it then?”

  “Because he loves us, child, he is like us. When we love we scale mountains for our loved ones. When we don’t love, we wallow in the shit on the valley floor.” With
that, Gramma had laughed long and hard.

  Stella woke up in a sweat. She did not like her dream. She tried to forget it, to bury it, but the damn thing just sat there squarely in the centre of her mind and nagged. She stumbled around, looking for something to help her forget, then remembered she didn’t have anything. She lay down again, tried to sleep, but it wouldn’t come. The sheets on the bed she was lying in smelled of stale beer and sour soap and it bothered her so much it kept her from sleeping. She tried to convince herself she had not been bothered by it before and so she should not let it bother her now, but the smell kept reminding her of her dream. When she thought of the dream, the aroma of the river and the plants edging it sneaked up behind her; they competed with the smell of her bed. Her body started to feel something she did not want it to feel. She got up with a string of curses and tore the sheets off the bed and threw them onto the floor. She lay down on the bare mattress. This didn’t help; the mattress smelled worse than the sheets.

  “Shit.” She grabbed the sheets and looked around the room. Her hands shook. The DTs were coming. “Shit, not now. Not now.” She sank into a rickety chair next to the bed. The floor moved with the hallucinations. Remnants of her filthy past came back to life. Her shoes bounced off her feet and onto the floor by themselves. They did a little jig; the tops looked like faces that were laughing at her. She threw the sheet at them and hollered for her child. Silence. Where was the damn little shit? Stella crawled on the floor toward where she had last seen the child tied up. She finally found her thongs where they lay on the floor and, like the shoes, they grinned at her, teased her. This made her body shake; she was near to convulsions.

  “I’ll kill you when I find you, you little bitch.” She shook so violently she could no longer crawl. Her skin burned, itched, strained to get loose of her shaking flesh. The room continued to move; it swayed stupidly. She swore at it, grabbed objects and threw them at the walls, cursing and shaking by turns. “I need a fucking drink.” That was when the door opened. She saw three men. She lifted up her skirt, spread her legs and whimpered, “Please, a drink.”

  One of them handed her the lip of a bottle. They looked so familiar, but the blur was too thick and she shook so violently she could not get a bead on their faces and so could not determine who they were. Another of the men pulled her to a sitting position while he rearranged her skirt. The bottle pulled away from her mouth with a popping sound, its froth bubbling up as it left her lips. She reached for it. “Not yet, you let that settle a minute first.” She went to lift her skirt. The one on the left said, “No way,” and she thought he wanted it the other way so she flipped herself onto all fours and offered them her backside, holding her skirt around her waist. One of them slapped her behind and told her to sit up right. “You want it rough, hon. I don’t mind. Just give me another drink.” The shaking grew more intense.

  She sat on the floor legs wide open, hair matted and hanging in front of her face, lips drooling, last night’s madness interrupting today, while she waited for the roughness these men had in mind. They gave her another drink. The shakes subsided.

  “Another one,” she whimpered. “Don’t be cruel.” She started to sing some old song the young man did not recognize. The old one told him what it was. Stella felt the familiarity in the tones and the rhythm of the voices, but she couldn’t drag hard enough on her memory to identify them. One of them offered her a hand. She got up on her knees and started to fiddle with his belt buckle saying, “This you want. Give me another drink.” He smacked her hands. She sat back down and whimpered.

  “Get those lamps going?” This was such a foreign request for her usual company. Stella grew afraid. These men did not want anything she offered and they meant to watch her and hold on to their beer. What were they here for? Who were they?

  “This is Ned, Stella.” It came out hard and sharp. It sliced at her stupor cutting away the blurry veil, leaving only the pain of her skin again. The shakes that had almost settled down returned after he finished telling her why he was there. “You are going to sober up, Stella. We are going to watch every painful minute while you do that. Then, when you are good and sober and not shaking, you are going to tell us just exactly what happened to your child.” She looked around. Where was that child? Then she passed out.

  JACOB DOES NOT WANT to watch the child back at the house. He wants to be here when they talk about it with Momma. He asks to come. Now, seeing Stella vibrate in the haunting backlight of the bright lamps that fail to fill the room with light, he isn’t sure he can watch this. This relieves him. He had been afraid he was mean, like the old snake, but now he feels that he was on some other trail. He looks out on the mountain her window faces and sees trails of berries hanging plump and ripe and he wants, for some strange reason, to leave this woman and go pick them. He does not want to watch.

  Jim motions his nephew outside. “Those are our mountains,” he says, pointing. He lights a smoke. They stare at the mountains wordlessly. Jim tells Jacob that he had climbed these mountains and stayed up there in their dark for four days as a teenager. Jacob wants to know why. This surprises Jim, but he tells him. “So I could know what I was about.” He wonders if the other nephew, the one who killed himself, had climbed the same mountains.

  “How come everyone who has ever done anything Indigenous talks in riddles?” Jacob asks. He throws his cigarette to the ground, crushing it out almost at the moment the butt lands. Jim laughs and waits a minute before he answers. “You can only know what our stuff is all about if you do it, that’s why.” He turns to go inside. Jacob tells Jim he doesn’t think he can watch after all. Jim says he would be able to, if he had climbed Cheam Mountain. Jim leaves Jacob sitting on the half-rotted-out stoop, pouting. He rejoins his father inside.

  Ned’s anger is a hot rock rolling relentlessly; it sears everything he thinks about. This is his clanswoman. She has no right to be this way. It outrages him to see what she let happen to her child — his blood, his great-niece. He is determined to will his rage along a path to sober Stella up, exactly as the women in his house instructed him. Every indignant thought diminishes his empathy for Stella and every time he feels a soft feeling for her coming up, he stokes the fire of his rage and sends it flying in the direction of his spirit. This cools his empathy. He is not ready to empathize with her.

  Jim watches his father, making sure he is successful at keeping the woman on the path to sobriety. He is not the conductor of this ceremony, so he can let his sympathy rise. He locks it to his voice. His uncle seethes at Stella when she tries to throw fits, but Jim calms and soothes her when she cries. When she quits crying, she appeals to Jim, who gently tells her that she is talking to the wrong man. Ned is in charge. This sends her into a frenzy, crawling around in half circles for minutes, letting go curse words some of which Jim has never heard. When she settles, she lies down and shakes. If the shaking becomes too severe, Ned will give her another pull on a beer.

  Jacob sits on the stoop, stewing over what he saw or did not see. When he was down at the old shack he had thought he was seeing what was happening and not imagining it. But when he went to tell his uncle and his grandfather, he wasn’t sure. If he’d actually seen it, then was he not as perverse as he had originally feared? If he imagined it, then is he no different than the men who did this? He stares at the skirt edges of their mountains. Cheam is at the end of the valley; her seven peaks jut higher than the rest. The old folks talk about a screaming woman inside the hills. Between what Jim said and Jacob’s curiosity over the screaming woman, he is driven from the stoop and toward the base of the tallest mountain.

  XVI

  STELLA CURSES, SWEARS, WEEPS, crawls, shakes her way to some semblance of sobriety. It takes two and a half days, during which time Jim makes tea, cooks, and cleans what will need to be clean for him to feed her, but not a dish or pot more. There are two boxes of Kraft Dinner. They will do. Jim eats a bite directly out of the pot, offers Stella some. Sh
e takes a bite, heaves it up. Jim cleans it up with ashes from her stove and determines that only tea will work here. The first time he offers the tea Stella takes a good pull, then she spits it out all over him and curses. He takes her hand and gives it a good whack, as if she were a naughty child. This infuriates her. She leaps for his throat. He dodges her. She goes sprawling across the floor.

  Ned picks her up and sits her down.

  “You’re strong enough to want to whale on Jim, then you’re strong enough to tell us what happened to your child.”

  Stella takes a slow look around the room and wonders where her child is. Her mind grabs fogged-up pictures of pokers, a man, her mother trying to strangle her, and some force that keeps grabbing at her ferocious mother and stopping her. The pictures waltz around her mind, disordered and deranged. She cannot seem to sort them. The dream of her grandmother flies at her through the fog and she starts recounting it like some crazy woman.

  “She said the goat loved us. How can a goat love us? She was sitting with me on that rock. We could see that goat. High up on the mountain …”

  Ned looks at Jim, whose head is tilted with his left ear to her.

  “That your gramma sitting on the rock with you?”

  “Yes,” she says slowly. “The water felt so good and my feet were so small. Gramma, she said that mountain goat climbed down and then up because he loved us. She said he was like us. How come I am not like us, Gramma?” Stella sinks into the chair and drifts back into her gramma’s night world.