Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

  “Eleven or twelve.”

  “He was a Cree man born on the Firestick reserve in ...”

  “October, 1936.”

  “Who died about five or six years ago. What did he do for a living?”

  “He was a trucker. Before that he worked at the Luscar mine.”

  “When?”

  ”When it first opened.”

  “In 1969. You know where that is?” Doug asks. His voice is different.

  “On the way to the Cardinal Divide. Where we went every summer, growing up.”

  “When was the last time you were there?”

  “Five years ago.”

  “Did you ever go to the general store in Cadomin?”

  “Every time we went.” I feel like I’m being grilled. “What are you getting at?”

  “Hubert’s got photographs of just about everybody who lived or worked in the area.”

  “On the walls.” I remember Mum and Dad and me reading bits of newspaper clippings, waiting for our sandwiches.

  “He’s still going strong. Well, maybe not strong but his memory is good. He can put a name to every face.”

  “You think ...?”

  Doug shrugs. “Want to take a ride up there sometime soon?”

  “Yes.” I look at him. “What’s your connection to the Divide?”

  “More coffee?”

  “Let’s take our walk. I’ll make coffee at my place after, if you don’t mind. I’ve got bread rising.”

  Chapter Sixty Three

  WE’RE DOWN BELOW the Capillano, out of the wind. Traffic rumbles overhead. The stand of willows tugs at me. “I think I dreamed about this place last night. This is where my father cut off his hair. Her hair. Where she became he.”

  “This exact place?”

  “In the dream.” He waits but words are far away.

  “A birthplace,” he murmurs, hands stuffed in the pockets of his canvas jacket. “And a death place, I suppose.”

  We walk on toward the other bridge. Strangeness washes over me. I’m moving slowly, Doug matching his pace to mine. To my right I see a familiar gnawed stump. “Beavers live in that lodge.” My voice feels rusty but it sounds okay.

  Doug’s eyes scan the river then settle on the dome of the lodge where it bulges out from the bank. He stands there in his jeans and his soft paw boots, dun coloured hair hiding most of his face, just looking. Somehow he’s familiar. I don’t know much about his life but I know him. He’s quiet and strong and he’s not afraid. He’s not afraid of losing himself.

  “They’re making a comeback,” he says. We start walking again. “After being trapped almost to extinction. By my people, among others. You ever thought what the fur trade meant to the animals? Before, people took pretty much what they needed, a few extra to trade. Then the Europeans came. It was like some monster on the far side of the ocean opened its maw.”

  He shivers. I’m cold too.

  When I lift the lid off the cast iron casserole, the blast of heat makes me look away. The moment the dough touches the hot metal it puffs up. I slip the lid back on.

  “Smells good already.” Doug leans back on the chesterfield, stretching his legs and feet out. Thick blue wool socks meticulously darned in brown on one toe.

  “Wonders of technology. I set the oven to come on half an hour ago. Here’s more of the same.” I point the remote at the gas fireplace. Blue flame flickers around the fake logs. “So are you going to tell me your story?”

  “You wouldn’t rather tell me what you meant when you said you weren’t sure if you were having a spiritual experience or a nervous breakdown?”

  “You have a frighteningly good memory. Later. I want your basic What it was like, what happened, what it’s like now.”

  “Okay. I was born in the Royal Alex, grew up where I live now. My folks were good people but anxious, controlling. Turns out both of my grandfathers were alcoholics. My parents went the other direction. With an extra layer of shame. The drunk Indian thing. They turned their backs on their heritage. My mother didn’t have an easy time having babies. There were five years and two miscarriages between me and my brother. After he was born they took out her womb. So there we were, Douglas and Bernard and a whole lot of expectations. In a way they were like the cliché of immigrant parents, willing to sacrifice so their children could make it in the new country. We were about to be a disappointment, both of us. Not at first. We were good little Catholics. But I never felt like I fit in. First time I drank a couple of beers I felt good. Comfortable in my own skin. This is what normal feels like, I thought. You’ve heard that a thousand times.”

  I nod. It’s in almost every AA story I ever heard. Though I figure if you’re gay it has some extra punch.

  “I didn’t care for school. Seemed like everybody wanted to tell me what to do and who to be, but the times, they were a-changin’. I told you that bit, me and Bobby McGee hitching out of town. I spent seven years in the U.S. I did come back to see my folks a couple of times, say hi to my brother who was going through his own rebellion. Only in his case he looked far more Native than anyone else in the family so he was getting that shit too.” Doug looks at the clock on the mantle but he’s not really looking at it. He hunches his shoulders then relaxes them. “I was young and selfish. Full of all sorts of ideals but the more I drank and got high the more it was all about me. Right from the start I could drink men twice my size under the table. Though I was always susceptible to drugs. Didn’t care for downers, loved hallucinogens, came to lean on weed as much as booze.

  “I had a few relationships but mostly I prided myself on being a free spirit which meant if you got anywhere close to anything vulnerable in me, I was gone. In a VW bus with a cracked head. Travelled all over the Southwest, commune to commune. The Tokin’ Red Man. A legend in my own mind.”

  I smile but it’s a joke I’ve heard before. Somehow I’m not getting much of a feel for who Doug was.

  “That’s how it went for most of the time I was in the U.S.” His eyes stray to the clock. “I told you about the draft dodgers and the deserters. I got pretty involved, finding new identities for people. I travelled around, looking for the places with separate birth and death registries. Even cut my hair. Got all duded up. I liked being undercover. I felt important.” He shrugs. “I don’t mean it was all an ego trip. I believed in the peace movement. And I wanted to connect to my roots. I read Black Elk, I talked to elders on the reserves. Did a Sun Dance, sweat lodges. Even sniffed around the edge of A.I.M. but they scared me. I was raised to be a middle-class white boy, you know? The real activists, the people who made stuff happen, they didn’t have a lot of time for me.” He shrugs. “They were right. By the end it was all about getting high.”

  There’s something he’s not saying. About being gay? A long, charred log he’s carrying, cradled to his chest. It’s almost more than he can carry. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s always seemed so steady. Except that time with Geoffrey. And after the two spirit talk.

  “What time do you have to head out?” he asks.

  “Soon as I take the bread out.”

  “I’d better be on my way.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are going to tell me the rest of the story?”

  “On the way to Cadomin?” His eyes crinkle and he looks like himself again.

  WEEK SIX

  Chapter Sixty Four

  THY WILL BE done on earth, as it is in heaven.

  Hai hai drowns out Amen.

  Laura’s rounding up the flock, driving them out the door. Where they scatter, grazing on cigarettes, chatting and laughing. Her eyes flick about. She’d rather they were closer together.

  The bus pulls up. Laura boards first.

  Danielle sidles up to me. “Can I sit with you?”

  “Sure. Why don’t you grab the front seat? I’ll join you in a minute.”

  “Thanks for bringing them,” Vince says. “I pray for them, every one of them.”
His battered Marlon Brando face breaks into a smile. “And it’s always good to see you, Meg. Don’t be a stranger.”

  I do the roll call then drop into the seat next to Danielle. There are the usual catcalls when we pass the Beverly Motel. She stares down at her knees.

  “What’s up?”

  She shakes her head but then she says, “I wish I could cut her out. Cut her out of me.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who ...” She lifts her chin at the motel.

  “Oh.”

  “Not my baby.” She turns frightened brown eyes on me. “It’s me. I’m ...” She shrugs, tears filling her eyes.

  “She’s you, Danielle, but she’s only part of you, a part that was scared and didn’t know what to do.”

  “No, Meg.” Her eyes are suddenly fierce. “A part of me that likes nice clothes and expensive food more than virtue, more than decency. That likes money more than God.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on yourself?”

  “If I ever forget to feel ashamed, I’ll be right back out there, peddling my ass.”

  “Danielle, come on, we all make mistakes. That’s what the 8th and 9th Steps are all about. Making amends to the people we hurt. Including ourselves.”

  Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven is playing. The driver hasn’t turned the volume down yet though the bus is quiet now, all but the back seat. I hear Laura’s bark of a laugh. Twisting in my seat I see there’s only Deborah in the seat behind us and she’s snoring.

  “As a matter of fact,” I say, “I need to make an amends to you myself.”

  Danielle turns to look at me, puzzled.

  “I took your aunt’s phone number from the information in your folder.”

  She looks confused. “I told you I needed to get permission from her.”

  “I’d already taken the number and called her when I asked you for it. I was trying to cover my ass.”

  “Oh.”

  “But that’s not all. When she asked where I got her number, I told her you gave it to me.”

  “Oh boy. Guess she was pleased.”

  “Probably not but I have set the record straight with her.”

  “You’ve been talking to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s how come she wanted to talk to you the night I ... the night that I slipped. Why did you want to talk to her?”

  The eagerness in her voice makes my chest ache.

  “To see if I might have come from Firestick originally. She agreed to ask around then the other day she invited me to meet your uncle Roger.”

  “That prick.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, he tried to grope me in the john about two weeks after I got to the reserve.”

  “Ah, well, I didn’t exactly warm to him myself. But it was useful to meet him. He says years before you were born, your father was married to a woman called Lisa. They had a daughter named Theresa who would be my age.”

  “Theresa,” Danielle says. “Theresa.”

  “Judy thought you might have a photograph of her.”

  She shakes her head. “I never heard tell of my father being married before. Didn’t sound like he was the marrying kind. He was a bad alcoholic, that’s what I heard. His car broke down one night just before Christmas a few years back. They found him a couple days later three, four miles away in the middle of a field under a pump jack, frozen stiff as a stick of firewood.” She shrugs. “I hope your mother was better than mine. Lisa. Lisa what?”

  “I don’t know if she is my mother.”

  “We’d be half-sisters, right? We’d have the same last name.”

  “Danielle, this is a long shot. I don’t have much to go on. But I’ll try to find out.”

  She looks at me, earnest brown eyes, tear-stained freckles. “I forgive you, Meg. My sister. I hope. Thank you for telling me about the number.”

  Chapter Sixty Five

  “THEY’RE LIKE HENS pecking up the old sun. I’ve always liked pump jacks. I know I shouldn’t but ...”

  “They’re human scale,” Doug says, “plus they look like something a clever engineer in ancient Egypt might have come up with. And they do have that chicken rhythm.”

  “Sort of stately and funny. Walking and bobbing their heads at the same time.” I gaze out at the wide November fields, flat as far as you can see. I’m so used to driving this road myself, it’s pleasant to be a passenger, Doug’s big knuckled hands resting on the wheel.

  I glance over at him. “Danielle told me that her father froze to death under a pump jack, in the middle of a field.”

  “Car broke down and he started walking?”

  “Drunk, most likely.”

  “Did you tell her about Judy?”

  “On the bus coming back from the Beverly meeting. She was very forgiving.”

  A truck is barrelling toward us, double trailer stacked high with logs. Doug pulls over tight to the shoulder. The truck blasts pasts, tires on the centre line.

  “Arsehole,” I say.

  Doug just shakes his head. “Go on.”

  “Judy, Danielle’s mother’s sister, is on a mission to clean up the reserve. She wants Danielle to help. She’s a force of nature, Judy. Her health is horrible. She can hardly breathe but her will is powerful. It’s like a wind blowing you where she wants you to go.”

  “Her will or her mission?”

  “Are they different?”

  “Could be.”

  I wait.

  “Sometimes people are tapped on the shoulder, given a job. Mostly they don’t want the job. Often they try to get out of it. But somewhere inside they know they have to do it, whatever it is, so they do, but it’s not their will. It’s not about them.”

  I’m about to ask if he has a job like that when he says, “Does Judy have her sights set on you too, to save the reserve?”

  “If I turn out to be from there.”

  “Assuming Danielle’s father was status, you would be too.”

  “If I could prove he was my father.”

  “Easy enough with Danielle’s DNA to compare to.”

  “Oh.”

  “How do you feel about being a Laboucan from Firestick?”

  He hasn’t pushed me like this before. I don’t like it. “It’s nothing I would choose,” I say after a moment.

  Doug glances at me. When I don’t say anything else, he nods. “I guess that’s how my parents felt. They had a choice and they chose to pass.” He stares at the road ahead. His hands are tense. At last he says, “My brother couldn’t pass. I could have but I didn’t. Not because I was brave. It was a time when, in certain quarters, it was cool to be an Indian. I explored the identity a bit, exploited it in a way.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, people wanted to see me as this naturally spiritual, in tune with Mother Earth guy. As long as it included free drugs and booze, I was happy to fulfill their fantasies.” He shrugs.

  “And now?”

  “Environmental issues really get me. Especially being back in Alberta.”

  “Where it’s definitely not cool,” I say.

  “Maybe it is in my blood, to feel that bond with the earth. I don’t know. For a while I was obsessed. Like it was the End of Days and why didn’t everybody else get it? Then I talked about it to the girls’ other grandmother. The one I was telling you about the other day.”

  “The tree?”

  “Millie is her name. She looked at me, this tiny old Cree lady—she’s about four foot ten—she said, ‘We’ve had our apocalypse. Now we’re just trying to do what we can.’”

  Doug glances at me.

  “That gave me goose bumps,” I say.

  He nods. “‘We’ve had our apocalypse.’ She has the kind of eyes, they’ve seen everything. She doesn’t waste energy judging. Things are what they are.”

  “My father’s like that too.”

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  My spasm of unease is wiped away as w
e crest the slight rise. Mountains stretch across the whole horizon.

  Doug pulls over.

  It’s clear enough today to see range upon range, a rough ocean of rock, crests gleaming in the sun. To the north, a band of violet cloud. After a while I say, “My father cried the first time he saw the Rockies. She saw them. She and her friend Dorothy in a boxy old van, taking Christianity to the settlers’ children.”

  “When was that?”

  “1921.”

  “Tail end of the apocalypse.” After a moment Doug says, “Shall we get back on the road?” And I say, “I need to pee,” at the same time.

  There’s a stand of scrappy fir I’ve visited before. In among the trunks I squat, facing the mountains. Bill pushed hard for me to take him out to the farm. I kept putting him off. You just like to keep us all in our separate boxes. I knew they wouldn’t get along. But Dad would like Doug.

  “Your father came here as a missionary?” Doug asks when we’re on the road again.

  “The way he tells it, it’s mostly an adventure story. Two young women escaping the constraints of the old world. The woman he was with was more serious about the religious part.”

  “Does he talk about Native people in his stories?”

  “No. Not until the sixties when a Cree man called John worked on the ranch.”

  “They must have been there.”

  “But not in his stories. It’s like there are all these separate worlds slipping past each other.”

  “The settlers worked pretty hard to put Native people in a separate world. The few who were left.” He looks across at me. “Ninety percent had died by the time the first Europeans actually settled here.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Best estimate. And it didn’t stop. Eliminate or assimilate.”

  “Residential schools did both, didn’t they?” I hesitate.

  Doug looks at me. “What?”

  “It’s weird, not knowing which lens I’m looking through. I’m used to it on the receiving end, how people see me as Native or not, depending on how I’m dressed, what I’m doing, but it’s the other direction too. Am I the Ukrainian settler? The displaced Cree or Blood or Dene?”