Speak to Me in Indian

by David Gidmark

  And for the white hunters who are hunting moose in La Vérendrye, the Indians are mounting loud speakers on top of their pick-ups and they are going to follow the hunters around during the day and at night when they are sleeping, and they’re going to play ‘O Canada.’”

  “Do you think they will be successful?” Shane asked.

  “If they keep it up, I suppose. It depends on how the government reacts.” Theresa got up to serve more moose meat. “Ki kitci minopidan monz wiias? You like moose meat very much. We have to speak more often in Indian.”

  Shane took a piece of bannock and dipped it in the sauce from the moose meat. He allowed the juice to soak up in the bread before putting it in his mouth and savouring it. “Yes, we need to speak Indian more often and, yes, I like moose meat. Which reminds me, I’ve got to figure out how I can hunt moose in the Laurentians. We can’t keep sponging off our relatives and friends for moose meat.”

  “They’ll make you get a licence,” Theresa said.

  “Yes,” he said, annoyed. “The only place they’ll let an Indian hunt without a licence is on a reserve or in La Vérendrye near Barrière Lake or Grand Lake Victoria, and then they want to keep them off the highway so the white people don’t see them and complain to the game wardens. If we start hunting north of Montreal, why don’t we make a test case of it? Indians shouldn’t have to get a licence anywhere, even if they do live off reserves.”

  “I agree. But we have to have some legal people behind us.”

  “We know some people in Ottawa and Montreal who could help,” Theresa pointed out.

  “I’ll call them,” Shane said.

  Theresa picked up the dishes on the table and put them in the sink. She poured them both another cup of tea. Then she looked at him, smiled, and said shyly and sweetly, “Shane?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s in the box?”

  When Shane had arrived some time before, he had brought with him a small cardboard box. The top was folded closed, and there was a small blanket folded up and placed over the top of the box. He had placed it carefully on the living room sofa.

  “What makes you think there is something in the box?”

  “You’re teasing me!” she laughed. “If it was food or something, you would have put it on the counter in the kitchen.”

  Shane said nonchalantly, “Oh, I’m not really the kind to tease.”

  “Don’t tease me!” she insisted, smiling, and barely able to control her excitement at what it might be.

  Shane got up and walked over to the box, picked it up, walked back and placed it in front of Theresa on the table.

  Theresa smiled in anticipation as she removed the folded blanket and undid the box flaps.

  There in the bottom of the box was a tiny black kitten with big yellow eyes who, just at that moment, after having been silent for more than an hour, gave out a faintly perceptible “meow.”

  “I thought you might like some company around the apartment,” Shane said, happy at watching how Theresa took to the little kitten. The kitten was cupped in her hands and she had the little creature up near her face and was speaking soothingly to it. All at once, the kitten began energetically licking Theresa’s face, which in turn delighted Theresa all the more. She placed the kitten on the table, and went to the refrigerator for some milk. Shane couldn’t help but look at Theresa. Even when she reached in to get the milk, she was smiling at the thought of her new-found friend. Shane smiled as well. He was happy to be able to give so little to a young woman who appreciated it so much — the woman he loved.

  “What are you going to name it?” Shane asked.

  “Is it a male or a female?” Theresa inquired.

  “Female.”

  “Let me see,” Theresa said. “I think I’ll call her Annie.”

  The smile went quickly from Shane’s face and he turned away. “Annie” was the name of the daughter that she had been forced to give up.

  Chapter Twelve

  I

  How Annie moved, when and what she ate, how she reacted, were important to Theresa. When Annie hopped and jumped for a crumpled paper ball, Theresa experienced great delight. The symbiosis between the two became very real. Shane saw in Theresa a strong nurturing impulse towards everything in the animal world. When Annie hopped at the paper balls, Theresa shrieked and giggled, and that brought joy to him.

  “Annie is good company,” Theresa said, a few days later, “but I’m going to get some more company.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Shane.

  “Don’t be silly!” Theresa giggled.

  “What’s her name then?”

  “It’s Delores’s niece from Barrière Lake. Her name is Victoria, but I only met her once. She got in bad, bad trouble up there.”

  “She’s pregnant?”

  Theresa answered him in a tone that suggested that her answer ought to suffice, and that the girl’s privacy ought to be respected. “No. Worse.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Nineteen,” Theresa answered. “Delores says that she has to get out of Barrière Lake, and that she has to work. So I told her she could stay here, and that I would try to find her a job.”

  Victoria arrived by bus from Barrière Lake a few days later. Shane and Theresa picked her up at Terminus Voyageur. She was tall, pretty, with high cheekbones and long, lustrous hair and narrow, tranquil eyes. She reminded Shane, all in all, of a younger Theresa, though there was a great difference. Victoria seemed to have experienced some kind of shock — Shane could think of no other word.

  Victoria went to the ladies’ room at the bus station.

  “She’s been through something rough,” Shane observed.

  “Should we have a coffee before we go home?” Theresa said, as a reminder that Victoria’s business was Victoria’s business.

  II

  At the meal later in Theresa’s apartment, Shane asked, “Would you like some more meat?”

  Victoria simply shook her head “no” without saying anything.

  Theresa brought some more meat and potatoes to the table and served Shane without trying to engage Victoria in conversation.

  Shane avoided trying to speak to Victoria; it seemed to him that she was more likely to talk to Theresa than she was to him.

  In the ensuing days, Victoria occasionally was talkative with Theresa, but only in Algonquin. In English, she remained excessively taciturn. She washed her hair frequently and constantly combed it. Then Shane visited Theresa. Victoria washed the dishes, or in other ways cleaned up around the place, seeming, he thought, to rely on such activity to supplant conversation. She often went into the bedroom when he came to visit.

  Once at the dinner table, after having eaten a little, Victoria kept her gaze down. At first Shane thought it was an effort to avoid eye contact with them — and this seemed a rather excessive amount of shyness after having been in the apartment for more than two weeks — but then he saw that her almond eyes were lowered because she was looking at the kitten, Annie, who was sitting in her lap.

  III

  They were once again heading north along the Autoroute des Laurentides, this time with Jim and Victoria along. Jim was sitting in the cab with Shane. Victoria and Theresa were sitting in the box of the truck. Theresa seemed to enjoy the wind blowing her hair around and watching the Laurentians whiz by. Victoria, on the other hand, was uncommunicative, even to Theresa.

  “We should be able to get plenty of yellow birch for both of us,” Shane said to Jim. “Then you can make snowshoes all you want. The place we went last time has a fair number of good trees.”

  “I haven’t even finished a pair yet,” Jim pointed out.

  “It’s not all that easy the first time,” Shane admitted. “The lacing is especially difficult the first time, even if someone is showing you. You really have to learn to lace the toe, foot, and heel on your own. Someone can ‘walk’ you through it but to really learn it you have to do the job on your own. It takes me about an hour to la
ce one snowshoe now. When I was attempting my first snowshoe all by myself, it took me ten hours to lace the first one.”

  They rode along, with Theresa not trying to talk to Victoria and, in the cab, Shane and Jim talking about various things.

  Jim said to Shane: “I noticed that Victoria doesn’t say much.”

  “No,” Shane agreed, “she had a pretty rough time of some sort at Barrière Lake.”

  “What was it?”

  “I didn’t really try to find out.”

  “Does she ever say anything?” Jim asked.

  “Once in a while, in Theresa’s apartment, but I don’t try to push her to talk. I sometimes have to ask her something three or four times to get an answer.”

  “Too bad she’s so down,” Jim said, “She’s a pretty girl.”

  “That’s why I thought going out to Saint-Donat would be good for her. It would get her in the bush with just the four of us and maybe she would relax and feel better.”

  “If she can’t warm up to Theresa, she can’t warm up to anyone,” Jim observed.

  “That’s what I think.”

  IV

  Shane pulled up and parked in the bush on the side road where they had earlier harvested the yellow birch for his snowshoe frames.

  “The leaves are almost out on the trees now; they were bare when we were here a couple of weeks ago,” Shane said. “When the leaves come out, the mosquitoes come out.”

  Shane and Jim got the chainsaw from the back of the truck, along with the wooden wedges and the wooden mallet. They walked in the bush until they found a suitable yellow birch. Jim mastered the splitting technique quite easily.

  While the men were trimming and selecting the best material from the birch, Theresa and Victoria gathered wood for a fire. Though Victoria spoke almost not at all, she did not have to be told to collect firewood, nor what kind of wood it should be.

  The fire ready, Theresa cut up a large piece of moose meat into small chunks and then fried the chunks in a very large frying pan. Victoria helped pass the food around but did not speak.

  When the meal was done and the yellow birch was loaded in the back of the truck, they all went back to Montreal.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I

  “Delores says that there is an old man from Barrière Lake in Montreal General Hospital.”

  “Do you know him?” Shane asked.

  “No. His name is Thomas Ratt. I don’t know him; but I know people in the same family.”

  They drove down to Montreal General Hospital. They had asked Victoria if she wanted to come along, for she would know the man, and she had said “yes,” but almost inaudibly.

  The receptionist had sent them up to Thomas Ratt’s room. The old man was lying there with his eyes closed. Surrounding him were three old women and an Indian man in his thirties, who had apparently been their driver for the two hundred fifty or so miles from Barrière Lake.

  The old women were all short, in their late seventies, though one seemed to be in her eighties. They wore paisley kerchiefs on their heads and long dresses of gingham and plaid that extended down to their ankles. All three wore moccasins on their feet.

  Theresa knew none of the Indians there, though Victoria knew them all. Nevertheless, she did not speak to them. Finally, Theresa moved over to the middle-aged man and spoke to him in Indian.

  “I’m Theresa Wawati.”

  The man nodded his head.

  “How is Thomas?”

  “He’s going to die,” the man said.

  “What kind of sickness does he have?”

  “Diabetes.”

  As they spoke in low voices, Shane understood very little of the Algonquin that they were speaking.

  “He’s awake?” Theresa asked.

  “He’s blind,” the man said.

  “Are these women his sisters?”

  “The old one is. The others are his cousins.”

  The old women stood near the bed. From time to time, one or the other went close to Thomas and put her hand on him for a while. His old sister went up to him and said a few words in Algonquin so quietly that Theresa did not understand. Thomas only made some sort of a low sound. Victoria said nothing to anyone. Shane only stood quietly and regarded the scene.

  Theresa, standing back and looking at Thomas, noticed the aroma of smoke-tanned moose hide in the room. His sister, wanting to dress up to visit her dying brother, had put on her best pair of moccasins, a new pair of smoke-tanned ones that still retained the rich, sweet smell of the punk cedar. The aroma of the Indian-tanned hide took Theresa away from the dying Indian’s room in Montreal General Hospital, in the great white man’s city, and transported her back — long ago and far away — to the bush near Ottawa Lake when she was a child.

  It reminded her of her grandmother’s deathbed in the little one-room log cabin that her father had made in the bush. There had been the aroma of smoke-tanned hide there. But the aroma also served to remind her of her entire Indian childhood — picking blueberries in vast reaches of the forest when the understory was nearly blue with the fruit; going out in a canoe to help her parents raise a net full of whitefish, walleye, and northern pike, then helping her mother clean them; the excitement that reigned over the camp when her father returned with a moose, and her mother would quickly skin the animal, butcher it and even get from the head such edibles as the nose, tongue, brain and eyes. And it reminded Theresa of helping her mother scrape the hide and then tan it and smoke it. And there was the hanging cradle, made of ropes and a blanket that her father fashioned for the baby. Her mother would push the little hammock back and forth and rock the baby to sleep while she sang quietly. The olfactory sensation of the smoke-tanned moccasins worn by the old woman brought back many memories of times she hadn’t thought about for years.

  “Too bad he has to die here,” Theresa said quietly to Shane.

  Shane said nothing but only looked at the poor old man and the old women who had come to see him. But he felt that Thomas was at peace.

  The three of them left the room and walked down the corridor. “When I die,” said Shane, looking ahead of them down the corridor, “I want people like that around me.”

  II

  One day the telephone rang. Shane had come home from university and was starting to work on his snowshoes. It was Theresa.

  “Victoria’s got a job!”

  “Good!” said Shane. “Where?”

  “She was real lucky. It’s only about three blocks from here. She won’t feel so alone if it’s near the apartment.”

  “What’s she doing?” Shane asked.

  “She’s working for a husband and wife who are both university professors. They’ve got a little two-year-old girl, and Victoria’s going to keep house and take care of the girl.”

  “Sounds good,” said Shane, “maybe it will help her come out of her shell.”

  “She says it’s a nice big house, and the little girl is easy to take care of. The mother and father teach anthropology, and they like Indians,” Theresa said.

  A few days later the telephone rang in Shane’s apartment. It was Theresa. “Are you working on your snowshoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Victoria gave up her job.”

  “Why?”

  “I told her to quit.”

  “You told her to quit?” Shane asked.

  “The man and woman teachers had different schedules. The man didn’t have classes all day. He thought Victoria would make a good girlfriend.”

  III

  “You look nervous,” Shane observed a few days later as they walked through Old Montreal.

  Theresa didn’t say anything immediately, but rather smiled a bit apprehensively. It was raining and Shane was trying to shield her from getting wet. But the rain seemed to keep the other pedestrians indoors and allowed them to be alone on their favourite walk in the large city. Theresa hugged him as if to say that the rain did not matter to her, only being with him did.

  “Now what are
you so nervous about?” he asked.

  “The law school entrance test.”

  “Well, if you’ve studied for it…”

  “There’s only so much you can study for it,” she said, “that’s the problem.”

  “You’ll do all right,” Shane said, as he hugged her.

  And Theresa thought that if she did not do well, she had something to fall back on — Shane’s love for her.

  Theresa had been the only Indian in the law school entrance-test room. There were few women, no blacks, and not many Anglophones. She retained her apprehension all through the test, though she did not find it as difficult as she had feared.

  Nor did her nervousness abate, in the days that followed, while she waited for the results.

  “I just had a strange telephone call,” Theresa phoned Shane one day. “It came from the office of the dean of the law school.”

  “Maybe this means that you passed.”

  “It’s strange because he wants to see me.”

  “Is that the way it’s usually done?” asked Shane.

  “No. The results are sent through the mail.” Which in turn made Theresa all the more apprehensive. “Maybe they want to give me the booby prize.” And she laughed heartily over the telephone despite her nervousness.

  IV

  The office of Pierre-Georges de Gaspé, dean of the Faculté de Droit of the Université de Montréal, was on the top floor of the law school. The corner office overlooked the central area of the very large university campus.

  Theresa entered the receptionist’s area in the very august-looking office. The courteous receptionist rang Dean de Gaspé and then ushered Theresa into the man’s office.

  The office looked like a law library with hundreds of legal volumes of various sorts, and in several languages, on shelves that went around three walls of the office. The dean was sitting in a very large, leather-upholstered chair behind a grand desk. He rose when Theresa entered.