Lisette and I lost our mother in our late teens. Your grandmother, Annie and Suzanne, she was old school. Your grandfather wouldn’t have it any other way. My mother came from up the coast near Peawanuck, was the daughter of some of the last old hunters there who’d fought the Hudson’s Bay Company’s encroachment and only traded with them in times of need. My mother’s people made news back in the 1940s, just after the Second World War, for refusing to send my mother and her eight sisters and brothers to residential school in Fort Albany. When the RCMP tried to get involved, my grandparents took the children to their camp up the coast, not far from Hudson Bay, and protected them with their hunting rifles. They were some of the last to do that.
The government gave up on them, showed their weakness, and my mother and her brothers and sisters grew up never knowing the wemestikushu language, their ways, their schools. Lucky her.
I grew up wishing my father had done the same for me. Although I never said it out loud to him, the tension was there. We both knew his failure. All the fighting in his life as a young man until it was dried up when the time to fight over me came. And my anger at him caused a fissure in our relationship, a broken line in the trust. The people responsible, they knew this same breaking happened in every family whose children they took. They did it on purpose. They were bent on crushing the old ways in order to sow the new. And if that meant parents and children who no longer really believed one another, so be it. Generation after generation. But my father and me, we knew something between us that we couldn’t quite see had been damaged, sure as you might not see an animal nearby but know it’s close by the tracks.
I thought of my mother late that night, after leaving Dorothy, as I followed the moon’s path back home across the Moose River. My mother, maybe she was in that moon’s light. I didn’t know anymore, but when I was younger, I used to imagine that she was. I’d talk to the moon some nights, and I knew my mother listened. I haven’t done that in a long time, me.
The tide rose high as it would go during my visit to Dorothy and was waning now. I took the longer way around, heading north and east before turning south on the river to avoid the sandbar, a dark hump in the water. I headed toward the twinkling lights of Moosonee, let them guide me to the safety of my stretch of river.
Once I’d tied my boat off at my little dock I walked cautiously up the bank, looking for signs of unwanted visitors. Marius made me this way. Marius made me a careful hunter again.
My back door screen on the porch was open. I didn’t leave it this way, but it might have been Joe or Gregor coming by for a drink.
I stood in the shadows and watched and listened. If someone was waiting to jump me, he’d have heard my outboard and know I was here. I slipped the long way around my house, to the brush on one side, stepping slow and silent through it, peering in my windows. I stood a long time at the front corner of my house, listening, looking for parked vehicles down the road. I walked across it and approached again along the far side of my place. Something crouched on the flat ground just beyond the shadows of my porch light. I moved up closer. I saw a canvas tarp and the movement of a body beneath it. Antoine.
Before I woke him, I headed to the kitchen and took the half case of beer from the fridge. I walked outside and sat beside the old man wrapped in his canvas tarp. I didn’t say anything, just pulled a beer from the case and popped it open with the edge of my lighter. I took a long drink. “Now that tastes good,” I said, smacking my lips, watching old Antoine roll over under the tarp and his head appearing, grey hair sticking up from it, a smile on his face.
Old Antoine doesn’t speak English. At least not anything that isn’t a swear word. He smiled at me, a couple more teeth missing since the last time I saw him. I took another swig and pretended not to notice him there. He wouldn’t take a beer till I offered him one. I finished mine and reached for another, popped it open, and handed it to him. He sat up and took it, and drained it empty. I opened two more, and we sat quiet and looked up at the sky together. Our custom.
Antoine, my half-brother, my father’s first son, still travelled down from near Peawanuck and showed up at my door like this once or twice a year. You’ve met him before, Annie and Suzanne. He is the one who lives in the old way, comes out of the bush rarely, only when the need for company forces him to. He’s the one who rarely speaks, really only does when a case of beer like this one is in his presence and he has his drink.
But when he drinks, he drinks. A case, two cases, three cases over the course of a few days, and then he’s gone again. I guess he does this to clear the pipes, to fill himself up with something before he disappears.
We sat quietly for a long time, drinking our beer. Finally he said, “Cold. Good,” in Cree. I didn’t know how he made it the two hundred miles of bush from Peawanuck. He’d walked it plenty of times, hunting and gathering as he went, but was too old to do this anymore.
“What brings you here, Brother?” I asked.
He finished his beer and waited for another. “To see you, Brother.”
“How did you get here?”
He took a long drink before answering. “I’ve learned to fly like a bird, me. I’ve become magic in my old age.” We both laughed.
“One day I will be magic, too,” I said.
When the beer was gone, I offered him a bed in my house, but I knew he wouldn’t take it. Him, he sleeps outside under his canvas tarp. I warned him about my bear, asked him not to shoot it. Old Antoine didn’t blink when I said this, just took it all in stride.
As I headed inside, I asked him again not to shoot my bear. I knew I didn’t need to ask again, wasn’t sure why I did. He slipped his head back under his tarp without answering. I didn’t worry for him. Where he comes from he sleeps among polar bears.
As always, I awoke early the next morning, but instead of jogging, Antoine joined me for a walk. I didn’t bring my rifle. No need to with old Antoine by my side. So good to have company. I wanted to be Antoine when I grew old.
He saw the bear first, on her ridge, lifting her head to us in greeting with her nostrils opening wide to our scent. “Wachay, Sister,” he said to her. “You are Will’s new friend. My brother has gone crazy.” He smiled his almost toothless smile, and we kept walking, then turned back a couple miles down the road to sit and drink tea.
My next days I spent with Antoine in this way, walking up and down the road, walking to the liquor store for a case of beer, drinking it in the sunshine as we ignored the blackflies. We didn’t speak much, just absorbed each other’s company. But one afternoon, Antoine finally spoke. “Trouble for you,” he said. “I felt it way up there.” He pointed north. “I came to see you.”
I told him about Marius, about his actions.
“One of you must go,” Antoine said. “It should be him.” I didn’t want to believe what he meant.
He was gone the next morning when I woke up. I pulled on my old boots and walked around my property, looking for him. His canvas tarp was gone. The small fire he kept going at night sat cold. The only sign he had been here at all was that cold firepit.
The sun came up over the trees, and I decided to go for a jog. No rifle. A few people would be up and down the road at this time of the morning, and I didn’t want them calling the cops on me. Anyways, it was easier going without the thump of the gun on my back. I moved slow but steady, nieces, thinking about Antoine and then about my mother and father. I come from good people. No bear. Too late in the day. She had sense, even if she was mostly blind. Tonight I’d leave her a good treat, I figured. She hadn’t come around since Antoine came visiting. She knew a new human scent could only mean danger.
I remember my back tensing when I heard tires coming up on the road behind me. The car approached fast. I could hear the gravel pinging off its underbelly. It was nearly at me now and I moved as close to the ditch as I could without falling into it. The car zoomed by, leaving plenty of room between us. Just another old war pony on the dump road.
I got back onto
the road. I was breathing hard and realized it had been from holding my breath. Does the fear ever go away?
At the healing lodge now, I was surprised at how the time had flown by today, how it wasn’t the usual crawl, the usual plod of boot step followed by boot step slapping the dust. I made my turn and headed back toward my home, tried to find that same place where time didn’t crawl. I wondered what the days, the months, would bring. I passed the dump and looked for my bear, knowing she would be deeper in the bush. But I looked anyways, my breath coming fast but even, the usual pains in my knees and side not too bad.
Car tires again, the same ping of gravel, same noise of engine. I forced myself not to panic, not to step off the road to the side of the ditch. I could tell by the sound that it was the same car, returning back to town from a run to the dump. Marius drove a fancy new pickup now, wouldn’t be caught dead in a rustbucket like this one. The car drove just as quick, and I could hear it giving me a wide berth on the road, tires crunching gravel. It’s all right. The car was about to pass.
But it suddenly cut much closer to me, and as the passenger side flashed by in sunlight, I felt the explosion of pain through my left leg. The cracking of wood made the sky spin above me. I crashed onto the ground beside the ditch. I lay in the dirt when I stopped rolling and tried to sit up, tried to look down at my body. My left leg wouldn’t move, and I couldn’t feel it. It bent weirdly out by the knee. You bastard. I saw the broken end of a baseball bat beside me. I saw a long splinter of it in my leg. I tried to sit up to see if the car was coming back, who might be in it. I screamed when my leg torqued with the movement. Oh you bastard, Marius.
14
FROZEN SUZANNE
Why, when I dream of Suzanne, do I dream of her frozen? Maybe it’s that this cold snap refuses to let up. They say drowning is one of the most panicked ways to go until you finally allow yourself to take that first lungful of water. But freezing to death must be like drowning in slow motion, the burn of ice air on skin like roasting until you go numb. Suzanne and I have been cold plenty of times before together. Snowshoeing, snowmobiling, waiting for the moose that never wants to appear. Always the thawing-out by the fire the most painful of all. And still, my dreams of my sister are of her pretty face frozen. Like by a camera. Her sad eyes, the mouth set and saying nothing. It’s Suzanne’s eyes that tell her story. They are the eyes of our family.
On my journey I kept photos of her folded neatly in my purse, the sharp creases cutting lines across her face and body. I’m not sure why I carried them. What was I going to do, stop people on the streets of Montreal and Toronto and New York, ask them, Have you seen this model?
I take Gordon out fishing for trout at a creek near Uncle Will’s house. The last couple of days we’ve spent with my mum, and I feel stuck. Nothing to do, and no one I want to see. I’m going back to the camp today. At least there I can keep myself busy with chores and checking my traplines.
I’ve augured a few holes through the thick ice, and we use fishing line tied to thin spruce sticks for rods, a piece of bacon on the small hooks lowered a few feet below the ice. The trout here won’t be big, barely pan-size if we’re lucky. I’m here just for something to do so I don’t go crazy. The constant scooping away of ice that begins to immediately freeze up our holes, the jigging of the bait, keeping wood on a small fire nearby in the snow, the repetitiveness of it is pleasant.
I’m explaining to Gordon that the nibble of the trout won’t be much at all, just a slight tugging, when I see the tip of his branch begin to bob. “Just a slight tug up, Gordon, that’s it, now bring it in.” He pulls the line out of the hole and holds a trout no longer than his hand. He smiles broadly.
“Is this the first fish you’ve ever caught?” I ask.
He nods.
“Amazing,” I say. “Up until today, I was hanging out with possibly the only Indian in Canada who’s never caught a fish.”
I want to throw it back, but Gordon seems too proud of it. I throw it on the snow beside the snowmobile. “We’ll cook it up tonight for dinner,” I say.
By the time we prepare to head home, we have a small mound of trout frozen solid in the snow.
I first met Violet in Montreal. She was one of the names Suzanne’s agent had scribbled down. When I got up the nerve to call her, she freaked out, told me to meet her at a club that night. I’d left the envelope of money the agent had given me lying on my bed. I’d still not counted it yet. It felt wrong, like it was a payoff to leave him alone. Now I realize that is just what it was. What the hell, I thought. I’ll go out and meet one of Suzanne’s friends tonight.
When I get off the phone with this Violet person—Violet? What kind of name is that?—Gordon begins pacing like a hungry sled dog in its pen. He glances at the envelope, then paces back to the window, where he slips open the drape an inch and peers out before turning back and stalking across the room. I’ve got a nutball on my hands. He’s not used to being in a room anymore.
“Gonna shower,” I say to him on my way to the bathroom.“I’m going out.” He stops his pacing and stares at me, his eyes startled as an owl’s. “If you want, you can come.” He won’t. I’m safe in my being polite.
Tonight, I will meet a woman who knows my sister, and if she knows nothing, I will call the airport tomorrow and fly back home. I’ve got enough money to do such a thing. The more I’ve tried to spend it all lately—on this hotel room, on two bus tickets to this city—the more I seem to acquire.
I’m almost giddy, climbing into the shower with my razor and a cheap bar of hotel soap. I will go home and go back to my camp with the summer to prepare for the goose hunt.
Water running, my body soaped up, the thought comes to me that maybe he’s just grabbed the envelope and run. I grab for a towel, but then drop my arms. If he has done this, fine. I admit to myself that the envelope can’t be good. I force myself to luxuriate under the hot water, scrub and shave my legs and pits and shampoo and rinse. When the shower is turned off, I am lost in the steam.
I don’t have shit to wear, so I pick the black skirt and a white T-shirt that used to be snug on me not long ago, pull them on in the small, hot bathroom.
When I come out, Gordon sits on the floor, staring. I sit on the chair in front of the mirror and try to decide how to paint my face tonight. My devil eye stares back at me from the mirror. There’s no fixing it with makeup. But I can do something about the green around my eyes.
My black boots look ragged. Maybe no one will be looking in a club. I slip my sunglasses on and stand up, try and get a glimpse of the full package. I’m definitely thinner. I’ve not looked like this since I was a teen. Wish I had a wine cooler or a beer to steady my nerves.
I see Gordon staring up at me in the mirror. “I’m going out,” I say to my reflection. He looks down at the floor. The envelope on the bed sits silent. “You can come with me if you want.” He looks up again. Shit. “You gotta take a shower, though, man. Shower with your clothes on, okay?” He looks back down.
When the shower stops running, he emerges from the bathroom. He’s shirtless and stands there in wet blue jeans. Oh my. His thin upper torso is not so thin at all. His arms are ropy muscles, his chest and stomach, too. A few bad homemade tattoos stand out blue on his arms. “You go to some kind of gym on the streets I’m not aware of?” I try not to stare. His long black hair hangs down in wet strands, and he holds his dirty grey T-shirt in his hands. He looks at it, as if confused. “You can borrow one of mine,” I say, digging through my knapsack and throwing him a white shirt. It’s a girl’s button-down, but if he rolls up the sleeves, no one will notice.
He doesn’t put the shirt on, just holds it.
I finish my primping and see that Gordon’s calmed his pacing down. He sits on the floor nearby, still shirtless, staring to the curtained window. “You going to brush your hair at least?” I ask. “Maybe try that shirt on?”
He doesn’t move. I stand and touch his shoulder. He jumps. I think this guy has some issues.
“Want me to braid your hair for you?”
He looks up and smiles like a boy. I pull my chair behind him, pick up my comb, and start at the ends. His neck goes a little slack as I untangle the knots. A neat part and I weave his long black hair into a tight braid. Gorgeous hair. Nicer than my own. I tie it with one of my elastics.
“That is so fucking butch!” the thin girl screams over the DJ once I’ve taken off my sunglasses. “You are one tough bitch!” I’d remembered to take out a handful of bills from the envelope before Gordon and I had left, seeing they were twenties and that there were many of them. I’d then stuffed the envelope under the mattress. But when I got to the door of the club and said the thin girl’s name, Violet, the doorman waved me and Gordon in no charge, but not after staring Gordon up and down for a long while.
Inside, I don’t know where my protector has gone. I’ve lost him in the noise and people and lights by the bar. I slipped him a couple of twenties on the way here. He’s a survivor. And me, I went straight to the bar to drink a double vodka and tonic before meeting this Violet by the table she told me to meet her at below the DJ booth.
Now I sit with her and a few of her friends, all of them thin and tall and pretty plain looking. I lean into them to try and hear their words over the thump of music.
“Are you one of those ultimate fighters?” Violet shouts. “Suzanne told me you were a tough one, that you kill bears or something up where you live.”
I try to laugh, shake my head, and take a long pull from another drink. It tastes good. “No. I got attacked and had my head smashed in by some prick in Toronto.”
Violet just laughs as if I’ve told her I got hurt while shopping. She and the others get up when a new song starts and glide to the centre of the dance floor, begin to weave and move their arms above their heads. They’re quickly swallowed up. Screw them. This is ridiculous. I down the rest of my drink and stand up. I’ll find Gordon and get the hell out of here. Maybe Violet will meet me for a coffee tomorrow where I can ask her a few questions and actually hear her.
Through Black Spruce Page 12