Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

  Doug’s drawing out a note in the way that means the end of the tune is near. The bow lifts away from the fiddle.

  Dad says, “It’ll take a while to open her up but she sounds better already. You learned to play from John Arcand?”

  “Then from some Métis old timers. In the Red River settlement in the eighties. I was supposed to be doing research for a thesis but I was more interested in hanging out with the old guys. What about you? Where did you learn?”

  “I studied piano,” He considers Doug for a moment. I know what he’s about to do. “When I was a girl.”

  “Uh huh,” Doug says. I could kiss him.

  “So I could read music. And I was lonely. Fiddle’s the closest thing to a human voice. Besides, I never really knew what to do with myself in a group of men until I had an instrument in my hands. Then it was easy. I didn’t have to talk.”

  Doug’s nodding, his eyes soft, the curve of the fiddle resting on his thigh, denim worn almost to white, the lacquered wood rich and golden brown.

  “Do you know St Anne’s Reel?” Dad asks.

  “I think so.”

  Doug lifts the fiddle to his chin.

  “Can we listen too?”

  I jump half out of my skin.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  They’re each holding a wooden folding chair, Manfred in a blue and black plaid flannel shirt, Victor in rust and ochre, their matching belt buckles holding up more perfect jeans. Time for a trip to Value Village if I’m going to live here. Or I could try Dad’s baggy canvas version.

  Doug lowers the fiddle.

  “Don’t stop. It was lovely, the wind carrying the music.”

  He picks his way through the reel the first time. When he falters Dad hums the notes. Then he plays it through twice, beautifully, the low notes rich and throaty, the high ones clear. Dad’s foot is tapping in time. Then Doug slides into a tune I’ve never heard before. After a while Dad’s foot falters. His eyes are open, watching Doug’s hand on the fiddle neck. Doug’s looking at Dad, nodding.

  “That’s one of the Métis tunes you were talking about,” Dad says when Doug finishes.

  Doug looks at me. “There are some beats missing.”

  The brothers nod.

  “What’s that tune called?” Dad asks.

  “The Devil’s Reel.”

  “Here’s what I’d like for my big birthday.” He’s looking at me. “For Doug to come and play my fiddle. At the Cardinal Divide. All of us, we could go up there, buy sandwiches at the store. Have a picnic, the way we used to. Remember?”

  “What do you mean, your big birthday?”

  “In July.”

  I stare at him. “You’re not ... No wonder you didn’t want to celebrate.” I look at Doug. “When he supposedly turned a hundred. In March. He said it was because of Mum. He was in mourning.”

  “No, I said it was too soon. Which it was. I was born on the 9th of July, 1901.” He looks around.

  “Jesus Christ.” Doug and Victor and Manfred are looking from one to the other of us. Three little marionettes. It’s almost funny. I look at Dad. “This one’s yours to explain. Excuse me.”

  I walk upriver, close to the edge. Water murmurs over shallow stones. I can’t see the stones but I can. They’re shining, each one rimmed in silver. The river joins them all. It flows on and on from the mountains through the prairies all the way to Hudson’s Bay. In the city the river’s frozen bank to bank. The beavers rest in their lodge. And the coil of golden hair, it isn’t there anymore.

  Acknowledgements

  Quotations from Georgina Binnie-Clark, Wheat and Woman, Toronto 1914 Lyrics from I Will Survive, Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris, 1978 Snowbird, Gene MacLellan, 1969 Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed, 1972

  As a gender queer child, as a lesbian who’s been called ‘sir’ for forty years, as someone who enjoys messing with people’s categories, I have been researching this book my whole life. At the same time I want to express my gratitude to particular individuals and institutions.

  Thank you, Richard Jenkins, Cree/Métis educator and activist from Moose Mountain, Alberta, for sharing traditional Cree understandings of gender and sexuality with me, and for the work you have done to gather and preserve this precious knowledge.

  Thanks to the Alberta Native Friendship Centre who hired me to research and write about the situation of two spirit youth.

  Thanks, too, to the Provincial Archives of Alberta, a remarkable resource where I first encountered the Sunday School Bus.

  The Clarke Historical Library of Central Michigan University is a digital treasure trove of Aladdin Mills’ kit house catalogues from the early twentieth century.

  I acknowledge the support of the Province of Alberta through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

  I recognize the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.

  Thanks to my editor, Lindsay Brown, who spared me an embarrassment of verbal tics and lazy phrases.

  Special thanks to Anne Bishop for our years of winter meetings, for talk and critique, encouragement and companionable complaint.

  I live in Mi’kma’ki, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people. I am grateful to this land which sustains me in every way; to our sheep and dogs and chickens who amuse and instruct, and to Alexa Jaffurs, my beloved companion in trouble and fun. A woman of few words, she wields a sharp pencil.

  About the Author

  Nina Newington’s first novel, Where Bones Dance, won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Georges Bugnet Award for Novel in 2008. She is currently finishing a memoir about living illegally in the US for twenty years. A former Kennedy scholar with an MA in English Literature from Cambridge, she makes her living designing gardens and building things. English by birth, she and her American wife immigrated to Canada in 2006. They raise sheep on unceded Mi’kmaw territory near the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.