Empire of Wild

by Cherie Dimaline

  George suddenly found his feet interesting. Junior held Joan’s gaze, slowly nodding his head. And her mother kept that pity firmly affixed to her face. Joan felt tears well—how were there still more tears—and pulled her arms through her coat sleeves. She turned away, then paused with her hand on the doorknob. She said over her shoulder, “I won’t be in this week. Hopefully I’ll be back with Victor by the weekend. And you can ask him whether he abandoned me yourselves.”

  She slammed the door behind her.

  * * *

  She wore her red coat and the cream heels she’d bought for their wedding. She never did wear them; she was too worried about losing her balance and maybe wrecking her eight-hundred-dollar shoes to put them on. She kept them in a box in the closet, each one in its own special bag. But in the dream, they were firmly on her feet. They made it difficult to walk across the field, but she had to, because the tent was just there, up ahead. Every few feet she came across a dead fox, teeming with maggots and swarming with flies. She stepped over each new corpse, unable to stop looking down at them, watching the way the maggots were running on a sped-up loop so that the bodies were melting under their labour. The tent was so close she had to keep going, pulling the slim heels out of the muck each time they sank.

  But something wasn’t right up ahead. As she got closer, the tent seemed like an empty plastic bag, with nothing inside to crisp up its shape. And it was quiet—no music, no loud prayers, just the low hum of a woman softly sobbing as if exhausted with grief. She stepped over another fox, whose dead eyes looked like scratched taxidermy inserts. She had the urge to stick a fingernail behind the orbs and pop them out. She could carry them in her pocket.

  The tent was just ahead. Except she couldn’t get to it. So she kept walking, through the field with the foxes rotting into the dirt around her pretty shoes. And then she heard a scream, so high and loud it hit her like a cramp in her thigh. She fell to her knees in a mushy pile of snapped ribs and decomposing flesh, the soupy mess splashing up her legs.

  “Zeus?”

  A distant howl answered her.

  “Zeus!” She yelled so loud her eyes closed. “Zeus!”

  She opened her eyes, gasping, and then clutched her thigh where pain twisted her muscle. The bed was a mess of sheets and sweat. She sat up, knocking the last bits of the dream away, rubbing her skin to make sure there was no blood, no maggots. Then she got up to walk the last bit of the charley horse off.

  “Fucking Ivy and her art photography.” Saying it out loud into the room made her feel better. And proved she was awake.

  She used the washroom, then came back to sit on the edge of her bed. She was rattled. The worst part of the dream hadn’t been the decaying animals but the crying she’d heard from the tent. The sound of it, even in memory, made her chest ache. Before Zeus had screamed, he had been crying, and the sound woke something in her that she wasn’t sure was supposed to be awake. It made her feel powerful and vulnerable at the same time. She thought maybe this is what it felt like to be a parent, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.

  VICTOR IN THE WOODS: CHRIST IN THE CLEARING

  He felt her terror like a weight on his chest and bolted upright, clambering to his feet.

  “Joan.”

  The clearing was illuminated by a hollow grey light, which revealed the chair. He examined it frantically, throwing it on its side and upending it, and then with meticulous care. The screws were silver and cheap, and the seat cushion was new enough to not yet be indented from people sitting on it. There was nothing miraculous about the chair, save for the miracle of it showing up here.

  He pulled a crescent moon of fingernail out from between his bottom front teeth. His mouth tasted like he’d been sucking on a penny: Joan’s fear and his own, he realized.

  He righted the chair, sat down, then wrapped the hem of his T-shirt around his right pointer finger and rubbed at his teeth and gums. Ugh. This was not helping. The metal tang grew so that his silver fillings sang a cruel note. He stopped, unwound his finger and breathed as shallowly as possible. A thin blanket of scent crept over him. He inhaled, his head tilted. He could not tell where it was coming from, besides suddenly everywhere. It was wild and refined at the same time, like a corpse dressed in fine linen. It stirred him.

  He scanned the space around him. Sharp evergreens, heavy spruce, the delicate veins of thin birch branches against the grey light. The ground rose at the outer edges of the clearing in a ridge topped with scrubby grass and a luxurious fan of ferns like filigree against the backdrop of trunks. Nothing out of place. Every leaf and blade accounted for.

  What was this smell? He sniffed at himself. Nothing. No smell at all. Maybe he was a ghost. What had he done to deserve this? He’d been a good son, coming back home to care for his mother until the cancer took her, burying her beside his father with the knife she always carried in the fold of an apron. He’d been a good husband, like his father before him. That was easy. He loved Joan with a ferocity that scared him.

  He felt a twinge in the back of his head. Something he couldn’t quite remember. They had fought, he knew that much, but he’d left the house rather than be angry in her presence. Surely that couldn’t be held against him. He pushed his fingers into his tangled hair and tried to massage the twinge out of his scalp. Impossible.

  No. He was not dead. He was afraid, and what would there be left to fear if he was dead?

  He stood up and walked the perimeter of the clearing, sniffing the air. The smell grew stronger and the grey muslin light was fading.

  “No, please no,” he said to the darkening emptiness around him.

  He heard a low cracking sound.

  He turned, the light pushing shapes into shadows. A figure was now sitting in the chair, calmly regarding him with that same tilt of the head. It held its upper body stiff, perfectly straight from the waist up, and its chaotic hair looked like spokes against the darkening sky. It reminded Victor of a stained glass Christ wearing a dangerous-looking halo. Perhaps he was dead after all.

  “Jesus?” he asked.

  The seated figure gave a deep laugh. The sound filled the clearing like vomit, like a menacing growl. And the sky grew darker for it.

  If he were capable of regular functions, this is when Victor would have pissed his pants.

  15

  MEETING GOD

  They were headed south for a change, so Cecile should have been happy. Except Ivy had been the one to suggest it, which rankled. So she slept most of the trip with her head on a folded MNR fleece propped against the cool van window. Let the others take care of navigation and choosing pit stops and keeping receipts for a change.

  “Cecile.”

  Someone was shaking her by the elbow.

  “Cecile, wake up.” It was Greg.

  “What?”

  “Ivy says we’re still about two hours away from the retreat, so we’re going to stop for a quick picnic here. You hungry?”

  Goddamn Ivy. She answered him with a sigh, unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out of the van. He was already unloading the coolers from the back. “Great,” she said. “Sandwiches and warm juice at a cold rest stop.”

  He ignored her sarcasm, just kept whistling “This Little Light of Mine” while he stacked checkered blankets on top of the coolers at his feet.

  Cecile stretched, getting out the kinks that came from being cramped in a back seat with other bodies and duffle bags for hours. She looked around. The lot was almost empty, except for an older model camper, a grey sedan and their three blue vans, parked side by side. It was late in the season for road trips, and there wasn’t much to recommend the spot. Only a thin row of pines protected it from the highway. Beyond the locked-up visitors’ centre was a map of the area on a wooden post; a few metal picnic tables hunkered at the edge of an open field that ended in a patch of woods. She walked over and studied the map. It showed a small body of water called Lord’s Lake on the other side of the trees. Lord’s Lake: What were the odds? So that’s whe
re she headed, passing the others who were laying food out on the picnic tables.

  “Cecile, aren’t you going to eat with us?” Ivy called. “We could use some help, you know.” Cecile kept walking, savouring the exasperation in the younger woman’s voice. Good. Be frustrated. Let me be the cause of your frustration.

  She followed a narrow dirt path into the woods, worn smooth by the sneakers and sandals of travellers seeking respite from the road. The trees closed in on both sides like an evergreen cross-stitch. At last she popped out of the dark onto a small beach lit grey and brown by the water and the clouds collecting chill over her head. “Lord’s Lake.” She said it out loud, like the beginning of a prayer.

  Cecile spotted a flat rock near the water’s edge and sat down, pulling her knees up and wrapping her beige sweater tight around them. What now, she wondered. She wasn’t afraid of fighting for what she wanted. She knew how to fight and win—she’d figured out that no one else would do that for her by the time she was ten years old.

  * * *

  Little Cecile had been good at keeping her adults happy. She knew what to say and when. After her mother was gone, she lived with her daddy and his mum, Grandma Pat, and wore the gingham dresses and little aprons the old woman sewed for her on an old sewing machine she set up on the kitchen table.

  “You look like Holly Hobbie,” Grandma Pat would coo around a Marlboro Light after she’d dressed the girl in her latest creation. Cecile didn’t know who that was, but she twirled on the linoleum in her sock feet anyways.

  She had no memories of her mother but pretended she did because her father liked that. At least most of the time he did.

  Sometimes he cried, holding her tight as if she might blow away. “Such a small thing,” he’d whisper into her neck. “Such a tiny little thing you are.” Other times he refused to look at the girl, growing angry when she came to find him. “Jesus, Cece, don’t you have anywhere else to be?”

  On those days, Cecile closed her bedroom door and let her gerbil, Bella, out of her cage. She built mazes on the carpet out of books and Lego pieces and prodded the little creature along pathways and around corners, pushing it into the rooms of her dollhouse, pinching it when it lingered too long. “Get out of the kitchen, Bella. Jesus, don’t you have anywhere else to be?”

  Cecile’s mother wasn’t dead. She’d left them when Cecile was three. Her father would sometimes make a point of reminding her that he wasn’t the only one her mother had abandoned. “She walked away from us both. Can you imagine a woman who would leave her husband and kid to go to Florida to be an actor?”

  “To be a whore, you mean,” Grandma Pat would always say. She was smug. She’d warned him.

  “Don’t people run away to California to be actors?” Cecile had once asked.

  “Don’t be a snob,” her father answered.

  One night, Grandma Pat came into the living room to find her son weeping into his daughter’s narrow neck while he held her down on his lap by the shoulders. Her grandmother walked out again without saying a word. The next morning at the breakfast table she told her son, “It’s time to find a mother for that child.” Cecile’s stomach suddenly felt too heavy to carry. She didn’t want a new mother.

  But her dad took the hint. Women of all kinds started showing up. Women with limp bangs and adult acne. Overweight women with rouged-on cheekbones and soft voices. Women who smoked with Grandma Pat and gave Cecile side-eye. Women who moaned through the walls and left her father’s bedroom smelling like an aquarium. But none of them stuck, until Karen.

  Karen wore her hair clipped short to her head so that she looked like she was wearing a helmet. She had a thick waist and muscular calves and a voice that rang like a porcelain bell. She bought cartons of menthols for Grandma Pat and six-packs of Coors Light for her father.

  Grandma Pat approved of Karen. So did her father. After a while he invited her for an introductory family dinner, where she showed up with the dessert, behaving as though the next time she’d be coming with her luggage. There were more dinners, a few outings with the kid tagging along, lunches, and then, after a few months, a weekend in Niagara Falls.

  Grandma Pat and Cecile were left at home to fend for themselves. Grandma drank a glass of whisky after they shared a frozen pizza, and toasted the happy couple. Cecile went to bed early. “Shut up, Bella,” she hissed at the gerbil, which ran and ran on its plastic wheel.

  To Cecile, Karen smelled of onions and old blood, like a pocketful of pennies. She couldn’t live with that smell. She would die. She got on her knees the night before Karen was to babysit her for the first time so that her dad could take Grandma Pat to the dentist, and asked God to step in, beseeching the ceiling for help. She fell asleep waiting for an answer.

  The next morning, Karen showed up in her burgundy minivan with a canvas bag full of half-used colouring books. What a cheap-ass, Cecile thought. Couldn’t even buy me a brand new one.

  As soon as her daddy and Grandma Pat pulled out of the driveway, Cecile went to her bedroom and shut the door behind her. She poked the eraser end of a pencil into her gerbil’s shredded paper nest, prodding Bella awake, then opened the cage door and picked up the sleepy pet. She flopped on her bed, sitting Bella on her chest. “Go back to sleep, numbskull,” she ordered. The animal was just starting to settle down, the rotations of her whiskers growing intermittent, when Karen barged in without knocking.

  “Shut that door!” Cecile shouted, surprised by the volume of her own voice.

  Karen was also surprised. She stood in the open doorway, with her plucked-thin eyebrows arched. “What did you say to me, missy?”

  “I’m not a missy.” Cecile sat up against the headboard, and Bella toppled to the bed.

  “You’re not polite either.” Karen held her ground.

  “Shut it! Bella could escape.”

  “But she hasn’t. She’s right there.” Karen pointed to the gerbil, who was now pissing on the white comforter. She paused, then regrouped, saying in a calmer tone, “Besides, I would help you find her.”

  “I don’t want your help.” Cecile pictured this ridiculous woman sleeping on her father’s chest. Rage made her limbs itchy.

  Karen put a hand on her hip. “You would rather Bella got lost?”

  “I would rather she was dead.”

  Karen gave a small, nervous laugh. “You don’t mean that.”

  Cecile picked up the gerbil, tucking the tiny, warm body into her right palm and closing her fingers around her. Looking Karen directly in the eye, she tightened her grip. Bella squirmed, let out a quick chirp that stuttered at the end and then, in desperation, dug her long front teeth into the meat of Cecile’s thumb. The girl squeezed harder and Bella stopped squirming.

  Karen backed out, closing the door. Cecile heard the front door click, the minivan start and gravel spitting on the driveway. Karen didn’t stick after all.

  * * *

  Looking out at Lord’s Lake, Cecile thought, once again, about how people could only make themselves small for so long. She had spent too many years pretending to be small enough to crush. She was bigger than that, and she deserved more than that. She used to think the way to do it was to serve at the Reverend’s side, but that dream died in the woods. Now she understood that little episode was God’s way of reminding her that only He deserved her obedience and sacrifice. The lesson was clear now.

  She unbent her legs, pulled off her desert boots and socks and dug her toes into the cold sand, which soothed the still healing cuts on the pads of her feet. She felt at peace. It had been so long since she felt this way, she almost didn’t recognize it.

  The Reverend had a weakness in the form of a woman. Cecile, at this moment, was strength in the form of a woman, and she could use that strength to deliver him unto temptation. She could be the Eve to his Adam, with Joan as both apple and snake.

  She needed to do it in such a way that she was blameless, though, so she remained the best and most obvious choice to replace the Reverend. Sh
e wasn’t Native, but she could transcend that. She could prove to Mr. Heiser that she was truly chosen. After all, there was no such thing as race in the eyes of the Lord.

  She closed her eyes, steepled her hands and prayed. God would show her the way.

  She registered a change in the light through closed eyelids and shivered as she felt the presence of a divine ear and a loving heart. It was better than the rewards of humble service performed in His name, more touching than a full tent of raucous prayer, more powerful than a meth rush. She breathed deep, attempting to be fully in this moment. The air grew cold against her hands and neck, and she felt the zing and clatter of electricity. She was heard and so she would also hear. God would let her know what was to come next.

  Just as she opened her eyes, the sky was torn open by blue light and the wind rushed to fill the gap. The clap of thunder that followed was so loud it rippled the water and shook her bones. Cecile turned her face upwards and smiled into the rain that fell hard, solid like wet sheets on a clothesline. She scrambled to her feet on the rock, opened up her arms and was baptized anew. Purposed. Bigger than ever before. Maybe just big enough.

  16

  DECAY IN THE NORTH

  Joan lifted the newspaper and stared at the small picture of Heiser in a line of men until his face was a dot matrix. She was parked outside a diner, smoking and pacing under a street light in front of the Jeep. The night was cold and she shivered in her thin sweater. She reread the headline:

  New Development Announced for Northern Region—Local First Nations Sign Agreement on Consultation