by Lee Maracle
They dance in that house. They dance day and night. The sticks clack against hollow logs and the benches all day and night for four days running and then Jacob sings. After that comes Jim. But that one, the clubbed one, that one can’t get the rhythm, can’t seem to stop complaining; his voice won’t come. The men keep him dancing. During one of the trips, when the three women bring food for the helpers and the villagers, Stacey thinks she might have seen Jacob taunting the clubbed one. The clubbed one looks so dry and so tired, she thinks; she steals a glance at Steve to see if he looks concerned. He is singing along with the rest of the people, engrossed in tapping his stick on the log. His eyes appear to be on the clubbed one, but no concern registers on his face. He must be all right, Stacey mutters to herself. Steve is a doctor; he will know when enough is enough.
Amos’s feet touch the ground, each time his step is lighter than the one before, until he feels like he could fly, like he could dance forever. As he dances, the horror stories his body collected float in his belly and leave his body through his song. He sees them floating in front of him and he tries to make some sense of them. The first story to leave is of the flashlight coming into the dorms when he was away at that school; the lay brother carrying it, sidling up to his cot, taking his hand, leading him down that dark hallway to the basement, the basement where the lay brother tore at his childhood sex. Amos wretches, then his step lightens as this old memory exits his body; it lightens his heart too. The hunger of never having enough to eat leaves next. His little skinny body that never seemed to grow relaxes. The bullying by the older boys leaves too, and then the stories of his bullying smaller boys and the mask of joy their whimpering brought leaves along with the shame he feels.
His feet tap out the rhythm of the exiting stories, the song comes and he feels like he can feel his grandma entering that house as his voice belts out the song. He is sweating — years of toxic memories sweating out through his pores, years of alcohol, putrefied by never having given his poor body a break. He reeks of the deep toxicity of the memory of hate, of hurt. He dances faster and harder. Finally, here she is, his grandma; behind her are hundreds of people, some old, some young; they are floating in the rafters of the house. He raises his face to his long-gone family and determines to dance himself into their arms, to dance his way to the other side. He begs them to take him home, away from his toxic insane life and he dances some more. Redemption comes as his ancestors reach for his dancing body. His spirit struggles to extricate itself from the living world.
Round about midnight silence falls. It drops like a lead weight. Momma wipes her hands and holds one up to stop the women from saying anything. She motions them to follow her; she picks her way with grace across little stones between the house and the kitchen, trying not to disturb their sleep. The moon is up, round and full. Celia wants to tell the other two that she can see the moon smiling, but some little voice whispers, “Not now. Not yet.” She tosses her head and keeps walking. They arrive about the time Steve pronounces the clubbed one dead. It breaks the spell of death coming from the longhouse.
One of the Christians shrieks. Maybe it is Esther, no one sees who screamed. In any case, Esther is the one who runs to fetch the chief. He comes. By the time he arrives, the whole house is singing again. Everyone seems to recognize this one now. “He was the one. The one who lived with that Stella woman down near the old snake’s? Stella looks particularly pretty tonight, doesn’t she? Odd, isn’t it?” They look at the man lying dead on the floor and shrug; a small clutch of young men stand about, chatting while the chief looks at him. They take him out of the smokehouse and over to the chief’s house. He dials 911.
The baby is born at the moment Amos dies. The nurse who announces it to the girl is in awe. “Wendy,” the nurse says to the baby’s mother. “She is the most beautiful child I have ever seen.” Wendy babbles thank you to the doctor, the anaesthetist, the nurse, and to Jimmy who gave her this beautiful girl. She weeps and laughs with joy as the nurse hands her her daughter.
XXIV
THE SERGEANT AT THE RCMP station has a bad feeling about this. One of the cops has heard a story about something like this happening before. “It was back in the thirties. An old woman and her four sons sang outside a little station in some isolated village in the interior. The cops inside died that night. Coroner couldn’t figure out what killed them. Witchcraft.” He lays down the letter opener he’d been toying with. “It took seven years, but they hung them boys. Had to try them in secret. Some old woman claiming she was their grandma kept singing outside the courthouse, so they moved the venue to a larger town without telling anyone where the trial was being held.” The old cop is sure this is the work of the same kind of sorceress.
He sits behind his desk, staring at the case file. All this sorcery is legal; “culture,” everyone calls it. But he knows better. They will have to dig for a charge now. Someone has to pay. This was murder. They set the ears in the village that belong to them to listening, but their informants kept saying they never heard anything. Truth is no one wanted to mess with the old man or the smokehouse — they might get clubbed too. A year passes.
ANOTHER ONE DIES. “ISN’T that the friend of the one that used to be with that Stella woman?” the sergeant asks his men. The one who told the story of the sorceress nods. The village is being ripped in two now. The Christians dig in. The smokehouse people took to preaching about culture, about law and song and belief. The Christians took to bellowing about Satan and his work. The ones in between, the fragile and the meek, just took to drinking. Everyone ignored the serpent, who continued to crawl about swallowing this one and that, dividing the fractured village into more parts.
Witchcraft, mumbo jumbo, voodoo, cultism were being whispered throughout the town. White town was terrified at the power that house seemed to have. The RCMP kept up a dialogue with the judge. Someone had to be charged. But who and with what? It took some time before they could conjure up the right wording, but they finally settled on a charge of criminal negligence causing death. This implicated Steve, who was the only doctor present. Stacey worried about it, but held her tongue; she prayed that the racism inherent in the charge would be thorough. She prayed the RCMP would be satisfied with the incarceration of a few dancers. Steve did not hear the rumours flying about the village. He didn’t understand why the RCMP were questioning each of those who had been to the dance. None of the dancers told the RCMP Steve was there; not even the Christian villagers felt compelled to say Steve was there. They had a doctor who lived in their village. They weren’t about to give him up. Steve had no idea what the RCMP were up to. He knew enough to maintain his allegiance to the ceremony.
Shortly after the charge was laid against the old man and the head dancers, Steve drove into the RCMP parking lot.
“Sonofabitch,” the old RCMP sergeant muttered after Steve left. “That crazy Doc Williams is going to testify on behalf of the long house.” His desk sergeant urged him to dig up some anthropology evidence against the longhouse.
The deaths of the two men had been good for the village, Celia believes. It signified the birth of their beautiful smokehouse and its feasting ways, as well as the end of their sickness. Momma’s step lightened and the lines on her face fell away. She looked like she was a young woman always getting ready to go somewhere. Babies were named in that smokehouse, marriages happened in there. How could anyone think this was wrong?
STACEY’S SCHOOL OPENED ON the day they came for Ned, Jacob, Jim, and the old man. The old man said if they intended to lock him up, he was leaving. The cops took his belt and searched for something the old man might use to kill himself. The old man just smiled and said goodbye as they loaded him into the car. He was dead on arrival. Just before he went, he turned to Jim and Jacob and grabbed hold of one of each of their legs and smiled. The old man was out of his cuffs.
The town came alive with the fear of sorcery and witchcraft. No one said it, but it could be heard
in the hushed terror of the tone used when they said “criminal negligence causing death.” This dancing and singing stuff was a way to kill people. “Bad medicine” was being whispered everywhere through the village and the town. “That hall, that one, is where they killed those boys,” they warned their children. The prosecutor swore Dr. Williams in and Steve became the defence’s expert witness. He testified on the medical value of the dance. It sobered people up, healed them in a way Western medicine could not. The clubbing was symbolic, the dancers could stop anytime, no one was forced to dance. They all went through the same rigours. They were assigned caretakers. There was no proof of any negligence of any sort. “Just the opposite,” the judge said, “the dance seems to help more than it hurts. It was clear, however, that these two men were in no shape for the rigours of the dance. The head men and the dancers had no way of knowing that. I am dismissing the charges, contingent upon insisting that all initiates be given a physical prior to initiation into the longhouse.”
Steve’s practice dwindled as the town people stopped seeing him. He represented a betrayal they could not name. He reduced his hours to part-time, but eventually his patients returned, assured that he had testified as a white professional and not as someone who believed in sorcery. The talk inside the family changed in that smokehouse. The women from the healing circle joined the longhouse and Momma heard stories she never wanted to hear. Terrible things happened to her granddaughters and her grandsons. Judy and Rena seemed to be good at getting these stories out in the open, getting the girls and boys past their nightmare existence.
Momma has been swimming in a pool of negligence that began to fill up in the time of the epidemic. Each swab of a patient was followed by a “What’s the use, it is never going to end.” Once she said it out loud, while trying to save Ella. “Be careful what you pray for,” old Ella had managed to say before a coughing fit wracked her thin, frail body. This apathy, this red-boned, stone-hard defeat settled in, despite the warning. It raked her soul. When the raking scraped away her laughter, her enthusiasm, and her appreciation for her life such as it was, she took to talking to Dominic at night while Ned slept well. The death of Amos seems to have lightened her load and enlivened her sense of caring. Her fussiness returned. Her laughter filled the house. She teased her daughters into hope and thinking of the future. Ned’s footsteps altered. He shuffled after that bout of flu. He spent more time listening to the talk of children, but it tired him some to wake up remembering the stories the next day.
The laughter of his wife brings back his old enthusiasm. He picks up the old language, listens to the old man giving him instructions about the longhouse and by some miracle he remembers just about everything the old man told him. Laughter sings out in the valley and the pall of fatigue lifts. Youth stay in school, play with computers, and song fills the winter air.
JACOB HAD SPENT EVERY spare moment with that old man from Boston Bar. Stacey knows he is slipping away on her. She supported the longhouse reconstruction with a fairly big dose of doubt, and now she watches as her son becomes more and more devoted to “our ways,” as he calls them. She wonders what is to become of him. To her surprise, he enrolls in college. How does all this longhouse stuff fit into his desire to be Western educated? Her husband seems to have an explanation for it. “I’m a doctor, we are persuaded that nothing outside of science exists, but belief is not about science, provability, logic, or reasonability. It is belief. Jacob believes in the longhouse, others are Christian — you just may be an agnostic.” Stacey knows it’s the best she’ll get, so she lets it go.
One night, Momma told the old man from Boston Bar that she did not want Ned to beat her to the other side. “I’m just not built the way Stacey and Celia are, I can’t find peace without a man.”
“Okay,” he said.
THE YOUNG WOMAN NAMES her child Celia, after Jimmy’s mom. Every other weekend, she brings Celia to see her gramma. She had liked the sound of Celia’s name whenever Jimmy spoke of her. “When can I meet her?” she’d asked one night.
“My momma is next to impossible to know,” he answered flatly. “She is barely there, Wendy.” He hesitated. “Celia sees things, she wanders about lost in her own world most of the time.”
Celia was watching her five-year-old grandchild the day Momma got sick.
Ned tended her as he would a child. She got no better. Finally, Steve said it was time. She was hospitalized. They took her to the hospital, even though the women all knew it would do no good. Momma acquiesced; she knew there were just a few feet left to her run at this world. When the smokehouse closed for the winter, Steve announced that Momma’s life was coming to her end, those who knew and loved her had but a few days to make their peace with her.
Two at a time they went. Jacob and Jim were the last to visit. She visited with them and gave them the last bit of love and light left inside her. She smiled when she said that odd thing to Jacob, Jim recounted later to his sister Celia as he smoked with her on the porch. “I know what you did to Amos, Jacob.” Momma paused. Jacob flushed. She took as deep a breath as she could and said, “Good for you, son.” She closed her eyelids so slow it hurt to watch.
Celia went inside to peel potatoes for the feast that would follow the funeral after Jim told her about Momma’s last moments. Her grandchild was outside digging up her garden with a wooden spoon. Every now and then Celia looked up to enjoy the sight of her. She didn’t want to think about what Jim had just told her. She wanted to send her mother off in grand style, participate in the raising of her granddaughter and look far into the future, determined to re-quilt her life with the odd bits of scrap cloth left over from the past that Momma had stitched to their new context. The longhouse had grounded her and the old man had taught her how to deal with her peculiar visions. She would miss Momma, but she was happier than she had ever been; she didn’t want to disturb this deep underlying joy inside her. Jim had threatened to disturb what little peace there was to be had in this life. He could be such a pain in the ass, she thought, nodding with every stroke of the paring knife. The peels fell away; the sweet dirt scent from the skin rose with each stroke and made her want to plant some in the spring. Half a dozen potatoes sat in the pot of cold water when Celia suddenly saw what Jacob had done. “I’ll bet she smiled.”
“At what?” Stacey asked. Celia was sorry that she had spoken out loud; now she had to recount the story. Stacey thought they should tell someone.
“Who?” Celia asked, the peels falling flatly into the garbage bin. She stooped to pull them out. “If I save these, maybe some of them will germinate. If they don’t, they’ll still be good compost.”
“Celia. What are you talking about? I said, ‘We have to tell someone.’ We can’t just let this sit, squatted inside the fold of family, a dirty little secret.”
“Tell them what?” She bagged the peelings and set them aside. “My garden, I am going to plant a garden.”
“Stay focused, Celia. What Jacob did. You sound as though this is okay.”
“Nothing just now is okay, Stacey. Not the old dirt roads, the old snake violating our children, the war he fought uselessly, the epidemic that slaughtered our opportunity to just be, the vote we traded for houses, the residential schools, and not the silence we are drowning in, giving our children to foreigners because we haven’t got the wherewithal to care, not even for one more minute. What’s okay? The school you could not teach at, Momma dying before her time, my son killing himself before he aged enough to know that this too shall pass, me burning his history before I realized how much I needed those pictures to remind me I had a son? What exactly is okay, Stacey? Just exactly what about our life is okay?”
“But this …” Stacey couldn’t finish. Some part of her knew that Celia was right — nothing was okay, but maybe it would be.
“Stacey. We have no idea what Jacob did, if he did anything. We have a simple line from Momma, nothing more. In any case, this is no
t about Jacob, it is about you focusing on this small moment because it is manageable and everything else is not. Suicide, early death, fatigue, all our defeats, and the epidemics are all part of the same crazy journey and they are too big, too horrific for us to deal with. None of us had any choice in travelling on this road and none of it could ever be managed by us. This thing, this small moment of Jacob’s, is a sliver of terror in a long list of terrors. It’s small enough to handle, and so you pick it up and suggest that we punish him for it, and really it is just one small stone in a road full of jagged rocks. We have to do something about all this, but spreading rumours about Jacob or making him pay for this journey isn’t it.”
“I don’t have a clue who you are, or what you’re about, Celia.” Stacey crossed her arms and stared out the window.
Outside, men were raking the stones and preparing for the asphalt truck behind them. The road was going to be paved. No more dust. No more cars with busted springs and no more scrabbling up the mountain scraping up bits of roots, herbs or berries, hoping they would last the winter. The vice was off. Some crazy elastic band had snapped. The whip from the rubber had lashed them all. They were scarred. Half the village ran amok, blind with pain; the other half struggled to rebuild their lives and their sense of themselves without really seeing the journey that had carried them here to this moment of truth about Jacob and the old snake.
Jim was out there in the yard with his too many children putting up a swing set he’d purchased at Kmart. His eldest daughters were each holding up the upside down Vs that formed each side of the swing, while Jim set the horizontal beam that would join the Vs together. He was the one who had told Celia the story about Momma and Jacob. It sat there with him for the thirty seconds it took him to part with it and then he just let it go, and now Celia was peeling potatoes humming that Christian song Momma loved, “Amazing Grace.” Ned was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, smoking a cigarette and smiling at the little one he had on his lap, not bothering to help his son.