Solar Storms

by Linda Hogan

  It took Bush a while to speak. If it were up to me, I would not have found the words. “We’ve come up from the south,” she said, her voice faltering. “By canoe. We lost our mother back there. We need someone to go after her body.” Bush hesitated. “We couldn’t carry her.”

  He said, “Just a minute,” and went outside to turn off the saw. This was going to take time.

  The silence was startling.

  While Bush spoke with him, I walked about the post, absentmindedly looking at the skinning knives, trying to dull my own guilt. I was the cause of this trip to begin with, I knew. It was my search for home, and for Hannah. Worse, I’d failed Agnes, falling asleep as I traveled away from the islands of blue flowers to find the medicines, losing track of time. Tears came to my eyes.

  He spoke into the phone. “Orensen here.” To Bush he said, covering the mouthpiece, “There’s a volunteer search-and-rescue team. They’ll probably use the mail plane and a canoe. You have to pay for the plane, though.”

  She nodded.

  It wasn’t long before the sirens sounded, and then there was a silence that could break hearts and Orensen’s clear blue eyes watched us as if he recognized our parts in the death and judged us.

  He was, in truth, suspicious of everyone, and even more so of us. Women seldom traveled alone through there; this made him doubly sure we were lying. It was in his eyes. He, like the other non-Indians, was worried that a new protest had been scheduled to begin, “Where you from?” he wanted to know, his eyes piercing mine.

  “Adam’s Rib,” I said, as if the place was just around the corner.

  Bush looked about the building at the empty old chairs and benches. She was uneasy with the silence. She knew people from there and how they talked. They were worse than Italians, worse even than the women at Adam’s Rib. She wondered out loud where everyone had gone.

  A meeting had been called. That was why the store held no people. There were fears it would be like Wounded Knee. Already too many other Indians had arrived and they were stirring up trouble, and the white people thought they were all dangerous. There weren’t as many as at James Bay, but there were enough to clash with the government, the police, and BEEVCO, the corporation that was building the dams. One judge had ruled already in favor of the native people; another had overturned that decision, sharpening the conflict.

  WHEN WE RETURNED to Dora-Rouge, she was crying. Like a queen on her throne of bear coat and beaver fur, she sat, as if to belie the fact that her face was swollen, her eyes red. The death of Agnes remained with her. It always would. For all of us. It came in waves the way rings of water circle out from a dropped stone. Or aftershocks. When she saw us, she said, “This is all my fault.”

  Bush argued. “It’s not. I’m the one who came up with this foolish trip.”

  “You? What about me? It’s my mother we’re looking for.”

  Dora-Rouge was resolute. She looked from me to Bush, then away as she said, “Yes, that’s all true, but I’m the one who made the deal with water.”

  “What deal?” We both stared at her.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. She didn’t answer. Instead, she changed the subject and told us she couldn’t count on Luther anymore. He was slow in responding to her. Even when he was young, she said, he couldn’t handle tears, and he’d always eased himself away from conflict. “He told me, he said, ‘You made a bad deal back there, Ena.’ I won’t be joining him, after all, that’s what he’s mad at.”

  “What deal?” Bush asked again.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, the search team, a plane and two canoes, returned. The men said that as near as they could tell, the wind had blown the canoe to land. The body was nowhere in sight. They’d even tried to drag the waters and found nothing.

  “So,” said Dora-Rouge, as if something she’d known all along had been confirmed. But later, when Dora-Rouge was out of earshot, I heard the men say that they had found the canoe. Pieces of its frame had been gnawed by teeth, probably by wolf or bear, they weren’t sure. “I don’t want it on my shoulders to tell the old lady,” said one. Even the rope was chewed, he told Orensen, maybe by a porcupine that liked the salt or maybe it was Wolverine who knew how to pull the boat in from water strewn with petals.

  I was relieved when I heard this. It was what Agnes had wanted, to be eaten by wolves and birds, to have her hair woven into bird’s nests in spring, along with twigs, fishline, downy breast feathers, and moltings. After that, on the chance that she had been eaten by wolves, I called every wolf I saw Grandmother.

  “Where’s the meeting?” Bush wanted to know. The place was still empty.

  Orenson, with his white eyebrows and intense blue eyes, said, “Why do you want to know about it?” He moved a box from the shelf.

  Sharp-creased Levi’s sat on a shelf in the only sunny window of Two-Town Post. The side where light hit them was faded. It was the identifying mark of Orensen’s store. It also said a world about him. He left them there because he was used to each thing in its place, including people, and that was where the jeans had always been, even before there was a window, and that was where they were going to be, no matter what.

  The next day, we went again to Two-Town Post. Dora-Rouge said, “Leave me here with the things. See if you can get a chair for me while you’re at the post. I need some dignity.” Her voice was weary, but she was in command. She was anxious for us to leave. She said she needed silence to think. “And send Husk a letter. Tell him what has happened.”

  A board near the door of the post had notices and ads with rooms to rent, some in exchange for labor. While Bush wrote Husk and purchased supplies, I looked through the ads. There were places that offered meals, but most renters in these places were men who didn’t like to do for themselves. I took down a few house numbers, both at the place of the Fat-Eaters and the next town over, in Holy String Town. Then I saw the sign “Public Showers” hanging on the wall. “Bush, look. They have showers.”

  “They’re free,” the man said. “I’ll rent you some towels if you want. They’re fifty cents each.”

  Bush pulled some crumpled bills from her pocket and gave him a dollar. He handed her two skimpy white towels. “Only one’s working. That one.” He pointed. “The second one’s plugged up.”

  I TURNED THE KNOB and stood in the falling water, eyes closed. Behind my closed eyes, I saw the canoes, the fine spiderwebs, the lily pads, the swamps, and bog fires. I saw the boat of flowers, tethered, a sight which would long haunt me with its beauty and its pain.

  The hot water was a heavenly thing. It was the many hands of touching gods. It had traveled rivers. It had been to places we’d been. It came down like manna.

  “Hey, save some for me.” Bush knocked. “The heater’s not that big.”

  While we changed places, my hair wet and still tangled, the smell of hamburgers from a back room of the post pulled me toward it like a magnet. This was Angel Iron, as I now called myself, in heaven.

  CLEAN AND FRESH, we left the post, both of us drinking Coca-Cola from iced green bottles and carrying another along for Dora-Rouge.

  Now that I was clean, I wanted a bed and sheets. “Shouldn’t we look for a room?” I asked Bush. “I’ve written down some addresses.” I was anxious to get settled in somewhere and to sleep in a real bed. I dreaded one more night of camping.

  “No, we’d only have to move all our things right away. I’m too tired. We’ll camp by the water tonight and get a room tomorrow.”

  “What about the wheelchair for Dora-Rouge?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I scrambled to keep up with Bush.

  When we reached her, Dora-Rouge sat, leaning back on the furs. “You two look like a hundred dollars.” She raised herself up. “Is that Coke for me? Did you bring an opener?”

  We looked at each other. “Sorry,” I said.

  Dora-Rouge looked at the chilled Coke. “I used to be able to open bottles with my teeth.”

  “That’s probably why you have new
ones,” Bush said.

  HOLY STRING TOWN had earned its name because the houses and buildings were laid out along a single road like rosary beads on a string. The first priest there had hoped and prayed to convert every household and tenant who had tumbled in along the string. In some cases it had worked, but there were people who, although they lived in houses, still listened to other gods. There were people the priests and Episcopalian clergymen thought too sinful to change, but they’d rushed to the challenge anyway, and failed. These were the people who had entered the white world like breech births, whose feet had stepped into it first, long enough to wear wool socks and laced-up oxfords, whose legs were covered with gabardine or denim. They wore belts around their waists and their chests might have been covered with striped shirts or blouses, but that was as far as the birthing went. Their souls and minds stayed inside the older world, floating in natal waters, and they still heard the heartbeat of the Mother Earth and received her ancient sustenance. The priests and preachers had given up on these people. Partway inside both worlds, they were sometimes in neither, and they still spoke with spirits, and feared them.

  But now the priests had other things to think about. Holy String Town had been overrun by machines that traveled up and down the String, as it was called. Dump trucks and front-loaders rumbled along, and new roads were being cut into the already wounded forests. The trees, mostly conifer, were being cut. On top of it, ever since the flooding of the place had been planned, there was a stepped-up effort to strip the land’s resources. Drilling rigs were allowed past the roadblocks that were meant to keep local natives in and other Indians out. The land was being drilled to see what else could be taken, looted, and mined before the waters covered this little length of earth. And at night, the workers drank and fought. Prostitutes only needed to curl a finger at them, or lift a brow, and the men would follow. This was fresh ground for the tired priests and vicars. For them, at least, it had possibility.

  For us, it seemed, there was little possible. The next morning, Bush and I once again left Dora-Rouge at the camp and went to look at two of the places with rooms to let. Our budget was small for now, and our choices were limited. The first room we looked at was dark and sat beside a scrap heap. It smelled of unwashed skin.

  “We don’t rent to women,” the proprietor said, as if we’d want to stay there under any conditions.

  We walked toward the Fat-Eaters. There, at the next house on our list, an enormous light-skinned woman came to the door, red lipstick full on her lips, the kind that leaves prints on coffee cups. Like Frenchie’s. The best thing going for this place was that it was not in String Town, which was too dingy and noisy for our tastes.

  “Is the room large enough for three?” Bush asked as I looked around. There was a flower box under the outside window, with plastic geraniums.

  “It’s just one room, honey. Twin beds,” she said to Bush. Mrs. Lampier was her name. “But you could put a cot in it.”

  I was afraid she’d say that.

  She led us to the room, a cigarette in her hand, smoke flowing behind her toward us. “I have an extra cot,” she said. Inside, the walls were pink and a small chandelier hung from the living room ceiling. It looked out of place in the old, square, and nearly dilapidated house, like a new, shiny diamond on the hand of a worn-out woman.

  The walls of our room were as pink as Mrs. Lampier’s skin, and there were prints of Pinkie and The Blue Boy framed on the wall, and a chest of drawers. We would share the kitchen with her, and she had a little propane stove and a generator. “The electric goes out at eight sharp,” she said. “The generator uses too much gas, you know. Up here, gas is expensive.” She smiled at us. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Looking for our relatives,” Bush said.

  “The room’ll take three people easy.” She smiled at me. “Your relatives? Well, there’s not that many people here to make them hard to find.” She had a sweet but gruff voice, from smoking. She looked close at my face, then at Bush, who looked wrinkled and dry. “I’ll go get the cot.”

  “It’s okay. No hurry.”

  “Who’s your relatives?” She put her cigarette in the toilet. At least we’d have a bathroom. Unlike the House of No on Fur Island.

  Bush didn’t seem to hear her. She asked, “Say, do you know where I can get a wheelchair?”

  “What do you want with a chair?”

  “Our grandmother can’t walk.”

  “Well, will the front stoop be too hard for her?” Mrs. Lampier lit another cigarette with the silver lighter she kept in her pocket.

  “No, she’s light as a feather. Angel, here, can lift her.”

  “There’s a clinic down on Potelée Road.” She pointed the way. “You have to turn left on Atchuk Street to get there.”

  I could tell she wanted to know about our relatives, but she decided to wait until later and said nothing more about it.

  Bush gave her twelve dollars as a deposit. She put the money inside the pocket of her housedress.

  AS WE WALKED AWAY, I said, “But Bush, I want a bed!” I was emphatic. “Not a cot.” We headed toward the building on Potelee. “A real bed that doesn’t fold in half. I’m only eighteen and my back aches like an old man’s.” It was true. I was stiff every morning.

  “It’s only temporary.”

  “Well, I don’t hear you volunteering for the cot.”

  The closed-down clinic was housed in a small, unpainted building. It had been closed for over a year, no employees to be found except for a doctor no one would visit unless in desperation. The people had given up on western medicine anyway, and what with a drunken doctor, they either died, went to a medicine man, or traveled to the city.

  “I wonder where our landlady has been all this time?” I said. “She must still think it’s open.”

  What Bush and I didn’t yet understand was that in the world of the two towns, everything a person needed was hard to come by. What they wanted was rarer still.

  “Check with Father Bly at the rectory,” said a neighbor of the clinic who came to check us out. “He usually keeps a few.”

  The rectory, easy to find, was almost as stark as the clinic, except that it was painted white, and the windows were trimmed in blue. The door knocker was shaped like a fish. Bush lifted it and knocked. But no one answered. The shades were drawn. The church itself was locked. We stood in front of it and looked around. While Holy String Town was a long thin line, a single road, the town of the Fat-Eaters was laid out like a cross along two roads, with smaller, more narrow roads between.

  Bush looked at me. “Wait a minute. What about the other church? I remember Dora-Rouge telling me the town had a cathedral of miracles.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I never heard that. It must have been before my time.”

  As we walked down from the church, Bush stopped a man on the street. Although he was young, his chest was caved in. We asked him about the cathedral.

  “It’s near the fire station.” He gestured toward the place where the fire truck was parked. “But I can tell you, it doesn’t work. I went there myself and I’ve only gotten worse.” He coughed, as if to emphasize the failure of miracles. Bush thanked him and we walked at a quick pace toward the fire station.

  The little church, if it could be called that, was small and brown, another temporary building. It was little more, on the outside, than an abandoned house. A person would be hard put to believe any miracles had ever taken place there, except that in the healing room were three wheelchairs, several leg braces, crutches, and quickly sawed casts that had been thrown down beside the altar. And just inside the door was an opening in the floor, filled with sacred earth that any woman or man, whether religious or not, could touch, could let pass through their fingers back to the ground, and carry with it their ills and cares and dyings.

  Bush bent and touched it and closed her eyes. Then she went to the altar and looked over the three wheelchairs as if she were shopping. The one she chose was wick
er. It had been painted white, though it was peeling in places. A name, Mother Jordan, was written on its back in fancy red letters. A soft blue cushion, dingy at the edges, was in the seat, still indented, as if Mother Jordan had just that day stepped out of it and walked away, back to her life, past the fire truck and ambulance, and past the scraggly four trees at the bottom of the road. Bush turned the chair around and pushed it toward the door.

  “You’re just going to steal it?” I stared at her.

  “God won’t mind. Anyway, it’s not really stealing. I’m borrowing it, is all.”

  I could see there was no point arguing with her.

  “Besides, what good is it doing in here?”

  But I wasn’t so sure. Bush was acting like a stranger, willing to steal some poor person’s wheelchair. I hoped this wouldn’t bring us bad luck. “What if Mother Jordan comes back for her chair? How do you know the miracle is permanent?” I asked.

  Bush brushed aside my questions. “People always care too much about the dead. For the living, Angel, sometimes you just have to take it.”

  I followed her out of the little church. The only thing we pushed was my guilt and fear of being arrested. We went over the hill, along the trees, and down to the water. I had to admit that the big white wicker chair, with its weavings and circles, looked lovely in that world. It was almost as good as a new chair, maybe better, except that it squeaked and was difficult to push. But when Dora-Rouge sat in it, she said the best part of the chair was that it creaked. “People will hear me coming.” She smiled. It was a chair Frenchie would have loved.

  We pushed Dora-Rouge first to the post. She wanted a hot dog. “It looks just like it always did,” she said, looking around. She looked at the tobacco and knives and dusty books. We bought a Coke for her, and there was a can opener on the wall. It was the second time she smiled that day. Then we went past the only fire hydrant, up the slight hill, and along the bumpy street and plank sidewalks, all the heavy furs in Dora-Rouge’s lap, the blue bear fur slung halfway over the back of her elegant chair, and then we went to Mrs. Lampier’s.