Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

  The rap sounds better in Danielle’s lush Georgia accent. Mum’s accent slanted, harsh as the wind off the Bay of Fundy, mournful as the name of the place she came from. Port Lorne, Port Lorne, a seagull’s cry of a name. In Mum’s accent the love of God never sounded particularly comforting.

  “I know I’m forgiven but ... I’ve been feeling so bad, Meg. I did so much bad shit. I sold drugs. I sold my own body.” She starts to cry again. “I feel so dirty.”

  “You’re living a different life now. But it’s hard to forgive ourselves, eh?”

  She wipes her eyes, blows her nose again. “I’ll know I’m a Canadian when I say that.”

  “What? Oh, ‘eh’?”

  I’m just about to ask, ‘Where were you born?’ when her eyes well up. She reaches for a fresh tissue.

  “I sure do cry a lot here.”

  “It’s good. It’s healing. You’re doing really well, Danielle.”

  “Thank you, Meg. I feel so safe with you. I think maybe I might take a nap.”

  Heather looks up from the stack of folders on the desk. “All quiet on the western front?”

  “Danielle wanted to talk. Shame about the shit she did.”

  “Peddling her bod, right? I never got to that, did you?”

  “Nope. Screwed around a lot but I never made any money at it.” I pause. “Do you know how she ended up here? She grew up in Georgia.”

  Heather shakes her head. “No doubt there’s a story. There always is.” She reaches for the phone. “Suppertime, it’s suppertime.”

  “All Saints’ Day,” Doug says when he comes back with his tray. “Day of the very dead.” He’s gazing down mournfully at the frayed brownish grey slices of what might once have been beef.

  “You grew up Catholic?” Heather asks, forkful of mashed potato on its way to her mouth.

  “Just outside St. Albert. Saint City. What about you?”

  “Catholic school all the way.”

  “You?” Doug asks me.

  “My mother was in the ‘Assembly of the Word of God’. Fundamentalist Protestant bigots. I went for a few years. My father”—I shrug—“he worships the mountains, I think, or maybe everything.”

  “I’m with him there.” He smiles at me.

  “So Doug,” Heather says, “you grew up in St. Albert?”

  “And a good little Catholic boy was I. Altar boy, all that. Even thought I might have a calling.” He glances my way. “To the priest-hood. My mother’s dearest wish. But then I turned fourteen.”

  “And?”

  “And I heard the devil’s music. Janis Joplin singing Me and Bobbie McGee. Wind got under my feathers. 1970, I hit the road. I was seventeen years old. No one could teach me anything. Everything my parents were or cared about, I wanted different. They worked hard, saved their money, fit in. Never talked about where they came from.”

  Heather looks a question.

  “Both sides of my family are Métis, going way back. But they raised me white. So what did I do? Grew my hair, stuck a feather in my headband. Hitch-hiked west.

  “Got as far as Winlaw, BC. A happening place back then. Draft dodgers and deserters coming in from the U.S. They built some wild and wonderful buildings. I helped out. After a while I went the other way, down to New Mexico. The groups down there, they were well organized. The communes worked together, smuggling men across the border.” He shrugs. “So many people, those days, were trying to live a different life.” He looks down at his plate. “We had a saying, ‘If it’s white, it ain’t right.’ White flour, white sugar, white men.” He looks up, shakes his head. “Sorry. I’m like some old geezer going on about the old days.”

  “Careful,” Heather says. “I lived through those times too. Except I watched the goings-on on television. Make love not war. Precious little love but we were certainly making babies. Not like my mother though. I was one of nine.”

  “How many do you have?” Doug asks.

  The front door beeps.

  “Four,” Heather says.

  Chatting and cheerful, the first wave returns, slung with plastic carrier bags.

  Doug carries the trays back to the kitchen while Heather and I check through sneakers and tissues, CDs and cigarettes and Halloween candy.

  “Who’s down for ceremony?” Heather asks, two hours later.

  I glance at the board. “You are.”

  “Oh.” She laughs. “That’s why I write everything down.”

  “Think I’ll walk the perimeter.”

  “Doug went to do that half an hour ago. He’s probably hanging out with the smokers.”

  “Is everyone back?”

  “Everyone except Mr. Chatty. Nobody high or drunk or beat up. If he makes it back sober too, it’ll be a record.”

  “I don’t usually work Sundays. Is it really that bad?”

  “I’m exaggerating. But only a bit.” She pulls out the basket of sarongs. “Hey, did you check out Warren and Shannon? They came back together.”

  Scorpion face and James’ cousin. “Rehab romance?”

  “Tanya noticed he was hanging around her.”

  “Should we put something in about it?” I nod at the computer screen.

  “What’s the policy these days? Used to be they’d kick people out.”

  “I think we’re just supposed to tip off the counsellors so they can have a little chat with the clients.”

  “On the joys of the Detox Delight. Hell of a pool to pick your next partner from. Last time Warren was in—which was before your time, I think—he refused to take off his BC correctional outfit. Red pyjamas with little blue letters on the chest. Figured he was going right back there. Which he did.”

  “Didn’t he arrive high this time?”

  “Yeah. They bent the rules, let him detox here. That family, they could have a rehab all of their own.”

  “How’s Theresa doing, do you know?”

  “I saw her at a meeting Thursday.”

  “That’s good.”

  There’s a growing buzz of voices outside the office. The reek of cologne and perfume is stronger than usual. Off to one side of the throng, Danielle and her room-mate, Julie, are deep in conversation.

  The new chief and smudge person go into the chamber and, after a murmur of prayer, smoke seeps from the blanketed doorway.

  Doug comes around the dome, a clutch of table tennis paddles in hand.

  “Joey got you playing again?” Heather asks.

  He smiles. “Geoff back?”

  “Not yet.”

  He glances at the clock. Five past nine.

  “Did you have a chance to talk to him about the little tray incident?”

  He shakes his head. “I will, if ...”

  The front door beeps. Geoff stalks in. He’s wearing brand new black high tops. Blue star in a white circle on the ankles. Shiny white toes. He sets his bag on the counter.

  “How are you doing?” Heather asks.

  He shrugs.

  “That good,” Heather says.

  He ignores her.

  Doug says, “I’d like to talk for a few minutes after ceremony. Are you up for that?”

  Geoff watches Heather check the bag then nods and walks off.

  Heather blows out her cheeks. “Maybe I’ve been here too long. They’re beginning to annoy me.”

  I don’t know what to say. Neither does Doug, apparently. After a moment he says, “Emmett’s the elder these days, isn’t he?”

  Heather nods.

  “It might be good if he came and gave his two spirit talk. Have you heard it?”

  He’s looking at me as well as Heather. I shake my head. Meg no-spirit is more like it these days.

  Out front glasses are piled on the ledge surrounding the desk. Clients stand in line, blinking, myopic and vulnerable. Heather wraps a fuchsia sarong around herself as the blanket is drawn aside.

  “Going in?” I ask Doug.

  “Nah.” Lines fan out from the corners of his eyes.

  “Do you keep ho
rses?” I ask when everyone is in the dome except for two women on their moon.

  “One, plus a neighbour’s.” He glances down. “Baling twine?”

  I nod.

  “Better than the other possible give-aways. Did you grow up on a ranch?”

  “Sort of. What about you?”

  “Farm,” he says. “Good vegetable land. Some wheat. They leased out a bit of grazing.”

  “People don’t talk much about that distinction but my father says there were major tensions, early on, between the farmers and the ranchers.”

  Doug nods. “Running a cattle ranch was an acceptable occupation for the younger sons of the English aristocracy. Versus growing vegetables. That put dirt under your fingernails. English didn’t know how to work these soils anyway. It was the Ukrainians who knew what they were looking at.”

  “Chernozem,” I say, enjoying the flick of surprise in his eyes. “Same as the plains in the Ukraine. Breadbasket of Europe. One of my father’s favourite topics.”

  “My father too. That and the different strains of wheat.”

  “Marquis and Red Fife.”

  “Club, White Drop.”

  “Golden Russian. Hard Red Calcutta.”

  Doug’s smile makes his whole face a relief map of gullies and rises, ridges, banks, sloughs. “You might be the only person I’ve met who can name more kinds of wheat than me.”

  “I’d love to bake with them, the old varieties. You can’t even get Red Fife around here”

  “The wheat that opened up the West.”

  “Because it ripened reliably here. Until then people starved if winter came early.”

  “White people,” Doug says softly.

  My face flames. “Sorry.”

  From inside the dome comes the cadence of voices reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  “What do you think I am?” The question is out of my mouth before I’ve thought it through.

  He studies me, shakes his head. “A lot like me, probably. Genetically, I’m your basic Alberta mutt. Cree, Scots, English, French, Ukrainian, maybe German, Anishnaabe. But you can’t really tell by looks. My brother you’d have said was pure Cree. He got all kinds of shit in school that I didn’t get. Mom’s sister, same thing. She says their parents favoured Mom because of that, but then she’s mad about everything.”

  Hai hai sounds from inside the dome. The blanket is pulled back. Clients start filing out.

  “How was the labneh, by the way?”

  “Delicious,” I say as Geoffrey appears. Doug catches his eye.

  Heather and I handle meds and phone calls. It’s almost midnight when Doug reappears. He looks sombre.

  “How did it go?” Heather asks. “Mr. Chatty tell you his life story?”

  “Poor bastard,” Doug says. “Good thing he had booze.”

  “Saved his arse until it started killing him?” Her voice is gentle, though.

  “Why do people hate?” Doug asks. He sounds young, on the verge of tears, his face crumpled.

  Neither of us says anything. After a moment he shrugs. “At least he’s here. He came pretty close to not coming back today but”—Doug’s face changes and his voice rises a little—“I’m damned if I’m going to let a bunch of ignorant, badly-dressed little punks drive me to drink.”

  WEEK THREE

  Chapter Twenty Three

  “HEY, YOU’RE ON again.” Danielle puts down her book. “C’mon in.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Good. Little weird. Being here.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Have a seat.” She waves her hand at the other bed. “Julie won’t mind. She’s real nice.”

  “Being here’s a little weird?”

  Danielle shrugs. Her hands are pudgy little girl hands. “I guess I didn’t know Canada would be so different. The way people kid each other, even. Let alone the hockey thing. And the whole pointing with your lips bit which is Native, right? Like it’s rude to point with your finger.”

  “How did you end up here? You started to tell me.”

  “You were so nice, that first day. I was nervous, you know? But I could tell you were kind. A good person. Crazy it was only six days ago.”

  “Six days is a long time when you’re first getting sober.”

  “Oh, I had ninety days before I got here. Got sober in jail. I told you I was in jail, right? In St. Louis, Missouri. One day I had to go see the governor of the jail. She told me I had no right to be in the U.S. Because my parents never did the citizenship thing. Naturalized. They weren’t naturalized Americans. And I wasn’t born there. So when I got out of jail they were going to deport me.”

  “You were born in Canada?”

  “Yeah. She told me I could go to Austria or I could come to Canada. I spent my whole life in America. I couldn’t believe it, that they were saying I couldn’t live there. Like it had to be some crazy mistake. I got a Legal Aid lawyer who knew jack shit about immigration.” She shrugs. “There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. I said the Serenity Prayer about a hundred and fifty times a day, read my Bible, went to the A.A. meeting. Tried to trust I’d be taken care of. God wouldn’t have carried me this far to drop me in the shit. Excuse my language.

  “The day I got out of jail two officers met me at the gate. They put me and my stuff in a van, drove me to the middle of the Peace Bridge, told me to get out. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t know a soul. I never even heard of Ontario.”

  Her voice is quiet. I look at her and the strange big love comes over me. It makes your heart swell and crack. There isn’t anything to say but you hope they can feel it. “They told me, ‘Don’t come back.’ There I was, me and my suitcase.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I knew my birth name.” She nods. “Laboucan. What I go by now. And I knew the name of the reservation where I was born. My folks told me that. It was near the Rocky Mountains. I panhandled some money, got the phone numbers of a couple of Laboucans on the Fire-stick Reserve. Called up the first number. Woman answered, Judy. Turned out she was my aunt. She told me to hang tight. Next day she wired me the bus fare.”

  I’m trying not to stare at her.

  “Suppertime. It’s suppertime.” Heather’s voice crackles out of the loudspeaker in the corridor.

  Danielle stands up. “I’m hungry all the time these days. I must have gained five pounds. Are you coming?”

  “Sure. Yes. But I’d better stop in the office.”

  I watch her walk down the hallway in front of me. We really don’t look alike. Except from the side. But Firestick?

  “Go ahead,” I say to Heather and Tanya. “I’ll watch the desk.” As soon as they’ve gone I pull out the bottom drawer of the big filing cabinet. Laboucan, Danielle. There’s hardly anything in the file but the aunt is down as the next of kin. Judy Laboucan. With a phone number. I put the file back just as Heather reappears, tray in hand.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  I DIDN’T EVEN check my messages last night. Slept in this morning. There’s a hang-up call from Dad. 8:43 pm.

  Mum did the talking on the phone. What there was of it. God forbid she’d run up a long distance charge.

  No one answers. He could be out for his walk.

  It’s not like him to have called. Dad with his cane, humped back, stick thin legs inching across the floor.

  I wrote the brothers’ number on the cover of the phone book.

  “Hello, this is Meg.”

  “Ah, Meg. Victor here. What can we do for you?”

  “Um, I was just checking on Dad. I ... He called last night.”

  “You want to talk to him? He and Manfred just went out to the truck. They’re going to the doctor’s. A routine appointment. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Oh. Oh well, thanks. I don’t need to talk to him. Just wanted to make sure he’s all right.”

  “Of course. We’ll see you next time you visit, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  I stand, phone in h
and, looking blankly out of the kitchen window. Six feet away is my neighbour’s back door. It opens and she steps out. Quickly I turn away. Janet Somebody. McDonald. More than I know about Dad’s doctor. He always flatly refused to see one.

  The brothers must know who he goes to. I should have that information. I’ve been leaning on them too much. They’re willing and I let them. But what if they decide to move on? I did consider moving to the farm after Mum died. But the church ladies enjoyed fussing over Dad. Betty, especially. And things weren’t over with Bill. He certainly wasn’t going to move to the sticks. So when Dad said two brothers wanted to put a trailer on the land in return for doing work around the place and they’d be happy to do his shopping for him, it sounded like an answer. A breathing space anyway. Then he said they wanted to build up the vegetable garden. They’d give him a share of whatever they harvested.

  ‘Grow-op,’ Bill said.

  Clearwater County’s not exactly B.C., climate-wise, but I did begin to wonder if it was too good to be true. Only, when I met them, they were so straightforward about their situation. And their plan made sense. Manfred had worked for CN for thirty years. They’d got a little money from selling their parents’ ranch. ‘On the interest from that and the pension we can live simply,’ he looked at me with earnest brown eyes.

  ‘If we buy a place, no more interest. Then we have to work,’ Victor said.

  ‘Not that we’re afraid of work.’

  ‘We like to work. At what we want.’

  ‘To grow good food. Tend the land.’

  ‘We’ll give your father half.’