Through Black Spruce

by Joseph Boyden

  “Gus,” I say.

  “Them, they didn’t seem too happy. Like they were fighting, maybe. Always unhappy looking together, especially in the days before I didn’t see them around no more.” He picks at his teeth. “I never figured out why she gave us the magazines until these two here.” He points at the old women with his lips. “They recognized your sister in the magazines, all painted up and looking like a model.”

  “She was a model.” I’d seen some of the same magazines, I’m sure. Suzanne would mail them up to Mum sometimes.

  “Her boyfriend got in with a bad crowd here. Motorcycle riders. Ugly. I wish I could tell you more, me. But those motorcycle men. Can’t go near them.”

  Painted Tongue stands up and crawls back into the teepee. I put the last of my goose beside me and ask for another sip of Perrier to cut the smoky taste. “What’s his story?” I ask Old Man.

  “Not too different from a lot of Indian kids,” he says. “Parents not fit to raise him for whatever reason, so he’s raised in foster care and a couple of white homes. Ran away to the streets when he was sixteen.”

  When he comes back out, Painted Tongue approaches me shyly. He grasps some glossy pages ripped out of a magazine in his hand. I watch him turn to the fire, as if he’s thinking of tossing them into it, but then he turns back and holds them out to me. I take the pages, goose-grease smeared, and watch him retreat. I look at the ad for soap on the first page, a woman with black hair tied back, splashing water across her face that shimmers in tiny droplets. Is he telling me I have skin problems? Take a look in a mirror sometime, Dumb One. I look at the next page. A woman in a long gown, dipped in a dancing pose by one of those skinny, too-pretty men, the ones who look like they live in that world between boy and girl. Her black hair almost sweeps the ground, a few feet below her thin, curved neck. A light pops in my head. I look at the next picture quick. Suzanne stares out at me from the page, her eyes hiding some secret, some sadness. Her face takes the whole page. Her hair frames it and disappears in long black lines. She looks like I’ve seen her a hundred times, the eyes questioning something, worried, but wide open. The mouth is relaxed, though, so that the worry in her eyes is cut by her lips. I stare into my sister’s eyes. She stares back, and in the flicker of the fire, her lips seem to quiver, like she’s ready to talk. Or cry.

  I try to find out more from the old man, but he doesn’t know or won’t share anything else. When I get the opportunity, I say thanks and walk home. I’m almost up to King Street, considering what I should do now. The idea of a dark bar and a couple of beers are in first place on my very short list. He’s behind me, and pretty good at pretending he’s not, keeping a distance. Quiet night. Not too many people, not too many cars. He assumes I’m going to keep walking north back to my motel, so I turn right down a small, dark street. That will throw him off. I’ll turn around in a couple of blocks and shout, scare the shit out of him. And, of course, he won’t be able to say anything in response.

  I walk slower down this street, blacked-out buildings, the husks of dead factories. No bars down this way. His feet quicken behind me, and I turn, ready to scream at him to leave me alone. But it’s a white guy. He stops, maybe twenty steps away.

  “What the hell?” It comes out as a whine. “You following me?”

  “It’s all right,” he says. “No noise, nobody gets hurt. Come here.”

  “Fuck you.” I feel my belly slip, worried I’m going to pee myself or worse.

  “Come here,” he whispers, holding his hands out, moving toward me.

  “I’ll scream.”

  He laughs, looks around, and shrugs. “Purse.”

  I think of the money in it. I left most of it at the motel. I think of home. I drop it. “That’s it,” he says. “Back away now.”

  I do.

  He walks up and bends to pick up the purse then bolts forward. We hit the ground, and I feel my shoulder crack on the cold pavement. My lungs freeze up with the impact. No air. I can’t breathe. He sits on my chest, looks down at me, and smiles with grey teeth. I try to get a breath in because I’m dying. One hand high above his head curls into a fist. He drives it down, full in my face, on the nose. Lights flash, and something bad pops deep in my face, and I feel a warm wetness. I’m being dragged across what must be stones by my shirt, by my hair. I can’t see anything through the water. Blood? I want to scream out, but the thickness of it fills my mouth when I try to breathe in. He’s going to rip the hair from my head. I reach up to his hands. He slaps my face hard. He drags and drags, and my back, I know by the grind, it’s being cut up by broken glass, by sharp rocks. Grass tickles the side of my face. I begin to choke and cough.

  “Fucking bitch. Wagon-burner bitch.” He grabs my head and lifts it, and I feel the snap of the reverse, the back of my head grinding into the pebbles. Black now. Tingling skull. Stare into the bright light above. Half moon. He’s yanking at my jeans. I want a full moon. Only a half moon. Not bright enough. No one will see me or be able to help me.

  Cool air on my legs. My head. He’s somewhere below me, still tugging my jeans, trying to get them off my feet. The sound of spitting and then he’s running his hand up my leg. Fucker! No! His heavy body moving up mine. He’s going to do it. That. No. I cough. Blood spit in the air, falling gently. Rain.

  My body shivers in the cold. It shakes. I must kick against him. I fight against him. Anything to stop him from what he tries to do.

  Don’t. Stop. You’ve hurt me badly and are about to far more.

  He can’t hold my legs. Nobody can. I am pushing him so he can’t. Angry man, snarling like a dog. Raises his fists to hit me again.

  But then he’s away from me now, yanked from me as if he’s attached to a rope. My head feels cracked, and I worry I am dying. Air crackling around my skull, in my eyes, and I see silver in the half moon and long black hair. Painted Tongue. Silver flashing. Screams against the moon, the moon red now. Screaming and screaming, and it isn’t me screaming. I sink, I sink and rise and my body is numb, Uncle, and I sink.

  11

  SNIFFING AROUND

  You lose some things, so you must try and gain some things, too. Before I ended up here, not long before this place, I attempted two new relationships, me. Don’t tell anyone this, nieces. But one was with a woman, the other with a bear.

  Not long after I had almost shot that bear, Joe brought me by a moose haunch. I cut some meat off for me and then left the rest for the bear out back by my porch. It had come around sniffing, the days before, like it was taunting me for not killing it. I recognized by the size and by the droopy, shrivelled teats that she was a female. She left her tracks in the grass and mud. And so, bored, I left her a meal. It took two days for her to come around again, but I heard her grunt and watched one night as she took the haunch in her broken teeth like it was a dog bone and carried it away. That made me feel good in a strange way. Me, I’ve killed lots of bears. Too many.

  After I ran into Dorothy at Taska’s, I got thinking. I looked up Blueboy in the Moose Factory phone book. Ever a lot of them. And there it was, Blueboy, D. That had to be her. Two weeks of milling about and making excuses before I called. I actually called a few times and hung up quick. And then I did it again, a few drinks in me. I’d just put out for the bear an old ham your mother had dropped by two weeks earlier.

  I’d gotten used to running into her on my early-morning exercise, shouted at her to get, that if anyone else in town saw her wandering around, she’d be dead. That bear was pretty much blind, but still smart. She made sure to hide herself in the bush during the day.

  I left the ham outside, and I called Dorothy and then thought better of it and hung up. I was hoping a few ryes would give me the courage, but that wasn’t enough. I poured another and sat outside to wait and see if at least the bear would come.

  I thought about you two girls, as I often did, on my porch. Your mother’s worry about you was making her old too fast. Me, I don’t think she slept anymore. I saw the dark bags under h
er eyes. She’d turned skinny. Gaunt. Good word for it. Sounds like haunt. Haunted is what she became.

  The ringing phone pulled me out of my chair on the porch. I looked at the ham gift sitting on the ground by the edge of darkness where the porch light could no longer reach. If it was Joe or Gregor, I knew I’d invite them over for a drink.

  “Yello.”

  “Is this Will Bird?”

  Shit. “Uh, yes, yes it is.”

  “This is Dorothy Blueboy. My caller ID shows a bunch of calls from your place, but you never leave a message.”

  Caller ID? What the hell is that? It’s technology conspiring against me. “Oh, hiya, Dorothy.” Long pause. I wanted to lie, say it must be some kid goofing around, but I knew it wouldn’t fly.

  “You there, Will?”

  “Hi. Yes. Sorry, that was me. I think my phone’s messed up. It cuts out on me a lot.” I shook it for emphasis. “Darn thing.”

  “Did you need something?” she asked.

  “No, not that I can think of.”

  Another long pause. “Well, okay. Nice talking to you. You take care, eh?”

  “Nice talking with you as well.” We hung up.

  A smooth operator, me. I fixed another drink and went back outside to mull it all over. The ham still sat lonely on the light’s edge. Tomorrow was another day. I considered turning on the tube to watch one of those crime shows. Those things are nice. Always the same. You always know what you’re going to get. Usually a murder and only a few clues, but detectives, they’re resilient. They won’t let things slide. They always work hard and figure it out and the criminal is brought to justice in the last few minutes. Those Americans got it all figured out. Nice and neat. Perfect.

  Sitting there smoking and thinking the night had gone from a good one to something less, I heard the snuffling of the bear. The big head showed in the light. She lifted her head to me, squinting. She’d be lucky to make it through summer. The bear found the ham, sunk her teeth into it, and took it back into the shadows, but she didn’t go far. I could hear her tearing and swallowing noisily. Me, I knew I shouldn’t be doing this, feeding a wild animal, getting it used to humans and handouts. That usually spells trouble. But this one was different, had lived a long life, and knew something more than the usual bear. I tamped out my cigarette, finished my drink, and listened to her gorge herself. It didn’t take long for the bear to polish the ham off and crunch back into the bush by the side of the road, stumbling and tripping into the darkness.

  Something I’ve never spoken about, nieces. In September of my fifth year, my mother and father walked me to the school for the first time. We lived in Moose Factory then, in a little cabin in the woods on the middle of the island. Your mother was a tiny baby strapped in a tikanagan on my mother’s back. My parents didn’t tell me where we were going. My father carried a hide pack with some of my clothes in it, a photo of my mother and him smiling shyly at the camera tucked inside. My father held my hand, something he rarely did. When I looked up at my mother, I saw tears on her cheeks.

  “Where are we going, Papa?” I asked in Cree. He looked down the road. As we came near it, the big white building grew out of the stretch of trees near the river. I knew what it was. I’d stood in the woods nearby and watched the children, older than me, playing and fighting in the fenced-in yard around it. We’d never spoken of the school, and I thought I was safe from what happened to the other poor kids. My parents were somehow better than other parents. They didn’t need to send me to such a place.

  My mind went as white as that building then, and I thought I was going to throw up. I pulled against my father’s hand so that we could turn around and run if we had to. Some horrendous mistake had been made. “Mona,” is all I could say.

  “No.” My mother made a sound like she was gagging, and my father stopped walking.

  “We have to,” my father said. “You know what will happen if we don’t.” I wasn’t quite sure if he was speaking to my mother or to me.

  “We can leave this place, then,” my mother said. “Go somewhere where they won’t find us.”

  “They will find us. There’s nowhere to go anymore,” my father said. “I am a one-legged old man. We can no longer live in the bush.” He pulled my hand then, squeezed it hard, brought me crying uncontrollably to the gate where a man in black clothes stood waiting with his hands behind him. Just the two of us came to the gate. I looked around for my mother. She’d stayed behind on the path, stood crouched as if her stomach was bad, hugging herself.

  I looked up at my father. His eyes were wet, and he wouldn’t look at me. “Mona, Nootahwe. No, Father.”

  “They will take care of you. And I will visit when I’m allowed.” My father seemed a different person than the one I had known. He leaned to me. “It will not be forever. Only for now.” He hugged me, and I felt his thin back through his rough shirt. His body shivered. I knew he lied.

  “It will be easier for the boy if you leave now,” the man in black said. He was a wemestikushu, white as a pickerel’s belly. His Cree words surprised me. My father didn’t seem to hear him. “It is time,” the man said, taking my arm. I wanted to bite his hand and scratch his eyes out. Then we could leave. “Four months will pass quickly. You’ll see.” The man’s hand tightened on my arm. His nails dug in through my jacket. “Ashtum. Come.”

  My father released me, and I screamed. “Mona! Mona!” The man in black clothes took me then, and I watched my father recede as if through a window smeared with rain, only realizing it was me who was moving away as I was dragged through the school doors.

  My father disappeared from me with such suddenness that it was physically violent. I threw up on the priest’s black pants. He bent as if to comfort me but instead took my face hard into his thin hands and shook me so that my neck muscles felt torn. “You are with God now,” he said, his neck reddening, and his eyes round, “and with me. Christ’s little soldiers are not crybabies.”

  He dragged me by the hair to a room with a sink. He wet a towel in a bucket of water, and he made me kneel and clean his pants until no sign was left on them.

  Your grandfather was a hero in a war, girls. He wasn’t a bad man or a weak man. Maybe he was too old to have a second family, a second wife and your mother and me, so many years after he lost his first. Maybe he was too old to fight anymore, and that’s why he let me be taken away. I’ve thought about this for years and years. All I know is there are no heroes in this world. Not really. Just men and women who become old and tired and lose the strength to fight for what they love any longer.

  I don’t know if either of you two ever found out what Marius did to me next, a few months after he and his friends kicked me to the step of that door. They were out for something but didn’t want to kill me, not yet. They were warning me in the harshest way they could. About what, I didn’t know. A late-night sound of truck tires on the gravel outside my lonely house.

  Quiet laughter and whispers travelling like smoke into my home. I was still up and not able to sleep. I slipped to the kitchen, looked out the window, and saw the dark outline of a big new truck. Marius’s truck. I watched two men climb out, one of them the hulking form of Marius, a bottle clutched in his hand. His friend flicked a lighter, and I watched the flame touch the tip of the rag. They weren’t about to do what it looked like, were they? There are laws against this. They couldn’t.

  Marius’s arm arched back, and the flame’s arc left a trail right to me. The bottle smashed through the window. I turned my head from the splinters. My ears popped with the whoosh. My floor lit with flame. My kitchen began to crackle, and I rolled away from the fire and the stink of burning gasoline. Gasping, I pushed through my door, heard Marius’s friend screaming “Snitches die like witches” as they tore down the road, laughing.

  In my moment of clarity, I grabbed the garden hose from the side of the house and ran back into my kitchen, spraying down the flames. Water hissed and pushed the gasoline fire into corners and under the table, the sm
oke choking me.

  When I was sure I’d put all of it out, I poured a stiff drink and lit a cigarette, then picked up the phone. Nothing else I could do.

  Two young cops I’d not seen before arrived just ahead of a wailing fire truck. Great. The whole town already knew. The cops came in and saw me sitting on my smoking chair by the burnt kitchen table, puffing a cigarette, drinking rye.

  “You fall asleep with a cigarette?” one of them asked as a couple of firefighters rushed in with extinguishers. I shook my head.

  “Come outside and tell us what happened,” the other young cop said, accusation in his voice. The firemen stomped around in their big boots, looking for what they look for.

  I told them what happened, night air cool against the heat of the fire on my cheeks.

  “Marius Netmaker what?” one said.

  “He firebombed my house,” I said, my legs beginning to shake now.

  “That’s a serious accusation,” the other said. “How do you know it was him?”

  “I saw him in the dark. I watched him pull up. I watched his friend light the rag. I watched him throw it.”

  “You can see that good in the dark?”

  I pointed to the moon, half hidden behind a cloud. One of the cops looked to it, then scribbled in his notebook like he might be writing a poem. They looked at each other after a few seconds, then went back inside the house, leaving me standing there alone. I lit another smoke, followed them inside, and poured another drink.

  “How much you had to drink tonight?” one of the cops asked.

  “Oh, lots. You should see how much I can drink.”The cops looked at each other again, and the one with the notebook scribbled. “Once you got enough notes, maybe you can go arrest the fucker,” I said. The cop without the notebook approached me stiff, like he wanted to wrestle me.

  “It isn’t that easy, sir,” he said. “Leave the police work to us. Why don’t you have a seat over there?” He pointed to my kitchen chair. I stayed standing.