Blue Bear Woman

by Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau

  He walks toward me with a slight limp, kisses me on both cheeks and offers up his usual too-strong coffee. “You stayin’ for awhile?” he asks.

  Right then and there, I decide to stop over for a few days. Try to recoup some sleep after nights drenched with nightmares. Maybe my old bed will work miracles. Papa is happy, “Perfect, I got us some great beans for supper. I’ll call the others, maybe they’ll c’mon over, too!”

  Wonderful idea! My family clan has always done my heart good. Following our father’s example, jokes shared around a big table are a surrogate for words of tenderness and affection. A gesture or look tells it all with a certainty embedded beneath our feet in the pre-Cambrian rock.

  As I wait for the family, I stretch my legs on the old path that used to lead to Pointe-Aux-Verts, the dog at my heels. He loves chasing squirrels and trapping them on the end of a branch. Then he barks to attract my attention as though he’s just hunted down a bear. His favourite game. His instinct helps him detect any real danger. On a hike one day, we came upon two cubs on the trail. I knew the mother couldn’t be far off. Thanks to his sense of smell, so did Mouski. He stood at attention in front of me, not making a sound, his lips pulled back, his fangs ready to sink into flesh. He forced me to backtrack in silence. I walked quickly followed by the dog. Once he felt I was out of danger’s way, he charged at the intruders, howling like the damned.

  On another hike, I spotted the antlers of a lone stag in the distance. I wanted to draw nearer to admire the male from up close. I grabbed Mouski’s collar, “Shh! Don’t move!” He obeyed. I could feel his impatience shivering across the skin under his fur. Submissive, he kept quiet. He looked up, waiting for the best moment to take off. We were facing into the wind and I ordered him to stay. He crouched by my side and seemed to be admiring the creature as I did. I let him go once the stag noticed our presence and turned its haughty head in our direction. In one leap, it disappeared into the bushes, a silent Mouski racing behind.

  My dog came to me through my friend Jean a few years before I met Daniel. Jean’s neighbours couldn’t stand to see the animal’s unhappiness at the end of a leash. I liked Mouski, three years old, from the outset, his short nose under golden-white fur speckled with rust. His expressive eyes, ringed with black as if with kohl, examined me, curious and attentive. Unsure of my abilities as a dog owner, I kept him inside for a few days, using a leash for any outings. I won him over with a lot of patting and dog biscuits. We roamed over the hectares of my land next to my father’s at the time; without realizing it, I taught Mouski the extent of his territory. After a week, I unbuckled his leash for our walk. What a champ! Jean came by to see how the two of us were getting on. Recognizing the car, Mouski ran ahead of it, overcome with joy. Before he left, Jean did a bit of an experiment. He opened the back door to his car, his usual signal for Mouski to hop in for a drive. Mouski walked over to Jean, rubbed up against his calves and returned to crouch in the grass at my feet. From then on, the two of us were in it together for life. He replaced my spaniel Lucky; losing him in childhood had made me think I could never grow attached to a dog again.

  The memory plunges me back into grief. Will I ever be able to give myself over to love again after Daniel’s ephemeral passage through my life? We’d only had such a few short years together.… I’m so tired of death crying victory each and every time as it runs off with those I love. One day soon, my father too will leave us. Then I’ll become the eldest, no uncles or aunts left, all gone. They were our “bulwark against infinity” as Mylène put it so well, recounting a dream in which her grandfather died.

  Mouski’s wet muzzle nestles by my ear. He licks my chin and cheeks damp with tears. “Thank you, my friend.” I say, “Let’s go back to the others now. Food!” The magic word. He twirls in the air and races ahead of me down the path toward my father’s house.

  25

  MY FATHER

  SEPTEMBER 2004

  PAPA MAKES EGGS for breakfast; mine are perfect, accompanied with slices of tomato and bacon and beans from yesterday’s meal. He has me rehash the circumstances around Daniel’s death. A stupid accident. The autopsy revealed only one wound, to the head. The trucker was innocent, as were the careless ATV drivers. Could Daniel’s habit of never tying his laces have been the cause of his death? As he backed up, did he trip over a shoelace? Maybe. Half-deaf in one ear, he mustn’t have been able to judge the vehicles’ exact distance from him. Behind him, the ditch was deep and steep.

  During our exchange, my father forces me to speak, to dredge up words lodged in my throat. The affection I glimpse in his eyes, recently operated on for cataracts, moves me. I confess, “Papa, I think the accident was my fault.”

  Again, I cry.

  “Whadda you mean?” His stunned look makes me smile through my tears. I tell him about calling out just before the incident and about my husband’s slight hearing problem. He says nothing for a while. He takes time to reflect, standing looking out the window, coffee cup in hand.

  “In Belgium’s trenches, I was with my buddy Savoie from New Brunswick. He had that Acadian accent, ya’ know, in French.… We had loads of fun together. We were sent to spy on a barn we were pretty sure had Germans hidden inside. Bein’ scouts, our mission was to spot ’em and force ’em to show themselves. My buddy was a tad absentminded. At one point, I leaned over to dig through my bag lookin’ for a biscuit. I heard a shot and Savoie dropped onto me, a hole in the side of his head … his blood on me. Dead! He’d taken off his helmet, maybe to give his head a scratch seein’s how we didn’t wash often. Who knows? And he forgot to keep his head down. Seein’s how he was blond as could be, they saw him right away.”

  After a brief silence, he adds, “See, m’girl, for the longest time I asked myself if I hadn’t looked for that damn biscuit, would he still be alive today.… Then with time and all the stuff I saw in that war, I figgered out it wasn’t my fault. It was just meant to be.”

  I excuse myself and run for the door to spare him the volcano erupting inside, freeing me of the black mass that has been imprisoned there for weeks. Hidden behind his toolshed, I cry till I can cry no more, with Mouski whining at my feet. A sweet peace radiating heat floods my body and heart.

  I go back to my father, who’s finishing up the morning dishes. He places a hand on my shoulder, first wiping it on a tea towel, and asks, “Feelin’ better now?”

  Ignoring our mutual reserve, I hug him, my arms around his neck. “Papa, yes, I feel better. Thank you. Thank you so much!”

  He clears his throat. “Ah! That damn Savoie! What a character! I was some mad at those Germans. But now I knew they were in the barn, a small building, more like a cowshed really. I figgered there weren’t that many of ’em so I tried my luck. I put my buddy’s helmet on the end of his rifle in case they might’ve thought they missed.… Then slow, real slow, I crawled through the hay the farmers had left standin’ ’coz of the war. I detoured way round to the back of the shed. Not much movin’ round there. I got close enough to stand up ’gainst the wall and look behind the barn. Get a load of this, one of ’em was standin’ there, his back to me, pissing behind a door five, six feet away, real close! I laid my rifle on the ground and pulled out my knife; two strides in and the German soldier was done for, his throat slit! I didn’t take no chances, threw my two grenades inside before I made my way in. There was just one other fella layin’ next to a l’il window facin’ me and Savoie’s position. He wasn’t a pretty sight! I dunno which of ’em took out my buddy, I’ll never know. But at least that day my infantry unit could advance a few more miles into occupied territory. Go figger, they always sent me out scoutin’ alone to spot Germans after that.…”

  I ask if he’d been a scout from the first. He gets a faraway look in his eye, he’s back in his soldier’s life. “Uh-huh, I volunteered for it straight off. The guys said I walked like an Indian up to no good. Not a sound!” He laughs remembering.

 
My father’s horror stories are part and parcel of our life. He couldn’t forget. So he talked. Maman told me when he got back from Europe in 1946, he drank so much he’d have waking dreams. She said he was bewitched. He suffered from delirium tremens. A young nurse managed to free him of his visions by plying him with chicken broth. When he left the army, he bought hunting rifles, traps, a tent, and a canoe, and travelled by train to La Reine in Abitibi. He returned to his poaching trails on the Ontario side and, for the most part, in Algonquin territory. He lived like a hermit for a few years, seeking peace in the vast forests of northwestern Quebec. Tracked by an RCMP officer who just wouldn’t give up, he boarded another train to Senneterre. There he met Samuel Wescutie, the Algonquin married to the woman who would become my grandmother Louisa. Sam was getting old and looking for a hunting and trapping partner on his territory. Maman and her son Jimmy lived with her grandmother in Waswanipi.

  Whenever Papa tried to describe to us how grim his life had been, he’d exclaim, “I came into the world on a Friday the thirteenth by the Calamity River, then my mother went and died two weeks later.” Despite his jesting tone, he was scarred by the truth. Born in La Sarre during the Spanish influenza, he was raised in Champlain by his maternal grandmother and his aunt Madeleine. For the longest time, he kept it a secret that his father went mad after his wife’s passing and lived in an asylum until his death. I was eight when I learned that I had a grandfather.

  The next morning as I lay in a deep sleep, my sister Élizabeth’s voice merged with my dream. She’s the queen of our father’s heart, his lastborn. True to his desire to give his children names from England’s royal family, Papa did, however, concede in the face of my adolescent protests at the arrival of Margaret, Édouard, and Élizabeth, to make André and Édouard’s names more French. Albert-Maikan inherited Queen Victoria’s spouse’s name, a man Papa held in the greatest esteem. André-Makwa was born the same year as Prince Andrew and so bore his name. Margaret was changed to Margot in memory of a blonde German girl who fell for Papa in Berlin. Papa’s hopeless anglophilia dates back to his marriage to Maman. People in the village didn’t take well to the union of a white man and a “savage” and we were often the targets of racism. Among other instances, Papa was refused a grant offered back then to those interested in acquiring land for farming. The land agent reproached him for not attending mass on Sundays. Papa developed a virulent antipathy toward the Catholic Church and Maurice Duplessis’ politics. We were the living proof of his resistance.

  From the kitchen, Élizabeth exclaims, “What? Still in bed? It’s noon!” Then the hum of my father’s voice, likely telling her about my grief and fatigue. My sister lowers her pitch. Hearing the time, I get up grumbling and pull my wool sweater over top of my pyjamas. As soon as I step out of the bedroom, Lizbeth falls into my arms, “Here she is, my sister, I’m so happy to see you! How are you? I brought us lunch. But maybe it’s breakfast you’re wantin’? You sure look pooped!”

  She bursts into laughter. A laugh that brightens up this rainy day. She couldn’t be here for bacon and beans the other night, and now she takes up all the space with her youth and vitality. I give a snort and slip into the shower while Papa makes some fresh coffee. I hear him say, “Wait and see, I’ll make her a cuppa that’ll wake her up good!” Again my sister’s laugh. I smile as I turn to the warm water’s caress.

  Two dreams return, here I go dreaming again! The first, rather muddled, is about Daniel minus the painful fact of the flat-bed truck. The second brings me back to my coming journey. In it, I’m on the road to James Bay again with Uncle George’s ashes. When I empty the urn’s contents into Rupert River’s waters, my uncle materializes saying, “Don’t forget your mission!”

  Lizbeth serves us her famous Italian pasta dish. She makes everything from scratch, never buys ready-to-serve food, winning the esteem of our food-loving father, who reheats in the microwave the dishes she brings him. My calm restored, I tell them about the Cree shaman Mistenapeo and my upcoming meeting with Kanatewet in Mistissini.

  “Both mitawiou,” says my father. “So you’ve got the gift and aren’t just a dreamer?”

  I wonder if he’s making fun of me. But, gazing out at the trees dripping rain behind the kitchen window, he seems to hesitate then, remembering an anecdote, discloses an essential part of his origins that we his children knew nothing of.

  In response to Élizabeth, who asks why he’s kept it secret, he says, “I didn’t figger it was important for you lot!”

  “But Papa,” I say, “ that means you’re Métis and your mother, too! What nation was your grandmother from?”

  Born in Michigan and adopted into a family from Champlain, he thinks she might have been Ojibwe or Mohawk. My sister, whose skin is brown and hair and eyes black, interrupts, “It also means we’re more red than white! Now I see why you’re attracted to Indian women!”

  She laughs, her lips open wide over white teeth. For the past few weeks, Papa has been seeing an English-speaking Algonquin woman who’s eighty-five and lives in the seniors’ home. “You been hidin’ anything else?” she asks.

  Papa chuckles. His grandmother Marie-Louise used plants to heal the sick. “When the doctor didn’t work out, people’d come to see my grandmother. They say she was a real good healer, the funniest part is she was quite the Catholic. In turn, my grandfather Élie Gouin healed horses. He was s’posed to hand his gift down to me, but I was still too young when he died. Ah … but he sure spent a lot of time rockin’ me!”

  “Is he the one who sang all the old songs from France you used to sing to me? Les sabots de Marjolaine, Le joli mois de mai, L’âne à Marianne?” He smiles.

  I remind him of the time I was a child shaking with a bad fever, lying under a big duckdown quilt. He was sitting by my side. All of a sudden, I found myself on the ceiling, watching him two metres below me. Afraid and trembling, Maman stood in the doorway. Papa put his head in his hands and started to cry. I re-entered my body. Bone-tired. But with the fever broken, I opened my eyes to see my father.

  “Your love and sorrow healed me, Papa, they might even have resuscitated me! And you say you don’t have a healer’s gift? You’re the one who transferred your gift to me!”

  Papa doesn’t know where to look. Mouski barks. Now that the rain has stopped, we hurry outside to see what he’s barking at. Édouard’s and Margot’s cars are advancing down the long drive to the house. I forgot today is a holiday.

  26

  POINTE-AUX-VENTS

  SEPTEMBER 2004

  ON THIS SUNDAY MORNING, I push my father’s canoe into the water. Sitting in the middle, as good as can be, Mouski scratches his ear. Forty years have passed since the last time the extended family camped at Pointe-Aux-Vents. I tell Papa I’m off for a pilgrimage as I stuff a sandwich and apple into my backpack. And make sure not to forget the dog biscuits. The points of land that advance into the river belong to a logging company now. I paddle slowly, breathing in the tranquil sunny morning. Mouski shatters the silence barking at crows riding the gentle breeze. My thoughts unfurl like waves. Single again, worse yet widowed. What a horrible word. What will I do with our house? Of course, we had a circle of friends, but they were mostly Daniel’s. A nomad by nature, I can’t see myself putting down roots in a village far from my family who, I’ve realized today, I miss a great deal.

  We arrive at the second point where the Wescuties tented. Their mother, a second cousin of Maman’s, married her father-in-law Samuel’s brother, a gentle, quiet Algonquin man. Later that autumn, they made their way up the Nottaway River toward Shabogama Lake as far as the mouth of the Magiscane River where they set up camp for the winter. Sturgeons come to spawn there in the spring. My parents would dip their wide-mesh nets into the river to capture the monstrous fish.

  We’re drawing close to the spot where our log cabin stood. The area is overrun by trees. Big rocks crop up from under the water’s surface and I wonder
whether my parents had trouble landing. A memory returns: Papa built a dock next to a spring we used for our fresh water. I discover a grassy cove where I wedge the canoe. My boots sink into the mud, and I grab at alder branches to free myself. Mouski disappears up a rocky slope, sand cascading under his paws.

  The raspberry bushes prick my hands. I hadn’t remembered it being this steep. I’m surprised by how narrow our point is. I remembered an expanse it never had.… I trip on the metal vestiges of a mattress. On the shrivelled end of a jack pine’s branches, a rusty, hole-ridden pail hangs. I poke my toe into the ground between the grasses and the raspberry brambles to locate the foundation’s remains. Nothing. The earth seems to have swallowed our entire home. The dried-out treetop on the huge birch that Jimmy and I used to climb is evidence of its life drawing to a close. I head for the path down by the rocks where Maman used to rinse her laundry, and by the boulder that Philou knocked himself out on after slipping on a bar of soap. Maman plunged his head underwater to bring him to! My eyes turn to the opposite bank where the Lamarches’ sawmill used to stand, now long gone. In front of me lies the water on which my father looked to be dancing on floating logs under my mother’s loving gaze.… My emotions gallop unchecked like horses delivered from their stalls. It’s time to head to Pointe-Aux-Vents.

  Since Mouski vanished the minute we arrived, I climb into the canoe alone, assuming he’ll find me by following my scent. As I paddle past Maman’s rock, Mouski races down the slope. He barks, desperate, thinking he’s been abandoned. I use my voice to reassure him. He runs beside the bank wading through water, not taking his eyes off me. His role as my protector is not looking good. I land on a tiny sandy beach by the bedraggled birch trees whose leafy branches used to keep us hidden from those we spied on across the way. The same place where Angélique breathed her last and Daisy gathered mussels. Tree roots hem in the stones that lay scattered across the beach back then. The climb is tough. I have to push away birch and aspen branches that crowd the space where our Cree cousins’ and Algonquin friends’ tents used to stand. Retracing my steps, I walk along the shore on the west side of the point toward the fine sand slope we used to slide down on our buttocks. I’d return home, the seat of my pants all golden, my stomach weak from so much laughter and shrieks of joy. My memories bring a smile to my lips.