“Some say that I can do what I do on accounta I’m Indian. But I wasn’t raised Indian. I don’t know that I know what I was raised as. The old man had no truck with churches or religions of any sort. He mostly had no proper teachin’. He only ever had the land and that’s what he gave to me. I figure I can do what I do because that land’s my home. That land’s my deepest wish, my wildest dream, the only prayer and the only temple I’m ever gonna need.
“There’s great love out there. I know that better’n most because it was the land that was my mother all my life and it always will be. That might sound Indian. I don’t know. All’s I know is that it sounds like me. My truth. What I carry around inside my belly now instead of lonesome. Lately, I’m comin’ to know more of love and I sorta think it ain’t no great mystery at all when ya look for the core of it, an’ that core is that lovin’ something or someone is you allowing it or them to lead ya back to who you really are.
“Them creatures sense that I know that and they let me shoot them as they really are. Ain’t no big secret. Like everythin’ else in this life it all comes back to love. I’m not askin’ them to pose or rearrange or alter themselves a whit to please me. Just let me capture a tiny bit of who they really are. An’ the payoff ain’t in big fancy shows like this. The payoff is in knowing that I’m capturing a bit of who I really am at the same time.
“Love is unbroken country. Every step ya take deeper into it changes you. Makes you more. Changes the geography of who ya are. And if yer brave enough to enter it alone and find your place in it, ya can’t never be lonesome again on accounta you come to live in everything love touches. I only hope every picture I take shows I’m still believin’ that.”
* * *
—
He walked to his seat and the applause was thunderous around him. Emmy stood and hugged him, her eyes glistening with tears. Roth stood too and shook his hand wholeheartedly, and when he sat Winnie came and sat in his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed hard. He laid his hands on her small back and felt the warmth of her spread across his palms. Deacon thanked him and announced that Starlight would sign purchases at a table set up against the wall behind the podium. People rose and moved back into the show area and there was a great hubbub of talk and appreciation for the works on display. It seemed to Starlight that the line for signatures would never end and he scanned the room for Emmy, Roth, and the girl. When the crowd finally dwindled and the gallery room began to clear he stood with Deacon at the bar while Deacon sipped wine and he drank more water for his parched throat. He had a brief conversation with the newspaperman Deacon had told him about and when the reporter left Starlight rejoined Emmy and they prepared to leave.
“You did amazingly well, Frank,” Deacon said. “For someone afraid to speak to people you didn’t give a hint of that.”
“Yeah, well, the podium kept ’em from seein’ my knees knockin’ together,” Starlight said.
“It was a beautiful speech, Frank,” Emmy said.
“You looked bigger up there,” Winnie said.
“Geez,” Roth exclaimed. “This galoot gets to be any bigger we’re gonna have to build a bigger house.”
They all laughed and Deacon shook Starlight’s hand and they made ready to walk back to the hotel.
“That story will be in tomorrow’s paper, Frank. I’ll bring you back a copy. And again, thanks for doing this. I know how much it took for you to do it,” Deacon said.
“Don’t know where all them words come from but they appeared to like it.”
“They were hanging on your every word, my friend. You did well.”
They shook hands again and the four of them walked out of the gallery and into the street, where there was still a lot of foot traffic and Starlight was amazed at the sheer numbers, all framed in a backdrop of neon and storefront.
“I’m gonna get this young’un back to the room and into bed,” Roth said. “Then I’m gonna lay out and see if I can find a movie on any of them hundred or so channels. You two take your time gettin’ back. I got this,” Roth said.
“Thanks, Eugene,” Emmy said and hugged him.
“Now that there’s prime babysittin’ fees. My pleasure,” he said. “I’ll see ya both later.”
They watched Roth and Winnie head back in the direction of the hotel. Starlight breathed deeply of the night air and when he was ready he nodded and they walked down the street together in silence. Emmy took his hand but he slung his arm about her shoulders and they moved together through the great bustle of the city night. They crossed at an intersection and Starlight stopped to look at a display of wood carvings and Emmy reached up and gently touched his cheek and turned his face toward her and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. The kiss lingered a long time while people flowed past, and when he broke it off and opened his eyes and looked at her he could find no words so he settled for putting a hand to her waist and they moved together toward the hotel.
Neither of them saw the two hulking men following slowly behind them.
“I TOLD YOU WE’D TRACK HER DOWN,” Cadotte said.
They sat in a dingy bar with a sad country song in the background and the noise of people seeking to lose themselves in booze, the night, and perhaps the company of a random stranger.
A Note on the Ending
Richard Wagamese died on March 10, 2017, before he was able to complete a draft of this novel. Based on the recollections of trusted intimates with whom Richard periodically shared his ideas about his novel-in-progress, we have some indication of what he intended for the remainder of the book.
There was to be a tender love scene between Frank and Emmy, which shows Frank, a man who has lived without a female figure in his life, learning how to relate to a woman, and Emmy, a woman who has been abused throughout her life, learning how to trust a man. Their burgeoning love changes them both in profound ways.
When Frank, Emmy, Roth, and Winnie leave Vancouver and return to the farm, Cadotte and Anderson follow them. Once they make their presence known, Cadotte and Anderson are lured into the backcountry around Frank’s farm, where they are tracked by Frank or Emmy, or both. Eventually, the men are restrained. Then Emmy, now armed with a knife, aggressively confronts Cadotte and Anderson—and struggles with her long-simmering rage and desire for revenge against the men who have hurt her. Richard, however, believed that “despite everything, every horror, it is possible to move forward and to learn how to leave hurt behind.”* The arcs of his novels tend toward reconciliation and healing, and Starlight was to be no different. Frank’s gentle influence guides Emmy to the realization that violence will not bring her peace, and in the end she shows Cadotte and Anderson mercy.
* * *
In 2007, Richard Wagamese wrote a collection of three novellas. Although the collection was never published, he later expanded two of the novellas into his novels Indian Horse and Medicine Walk. The third novella, titled “To Fight No More Forever,” provides the foundation for Starlight, and several of the scenes set in the backcountry around Frank’s farm are taken directly from the novella. There are clues that Richard intended to adapt the last scene of “To Fight No More Forever” for the final scene of this novel (we know, for instance, that Richard intended the last line of Starlight to be “And then they began to run”). We present the novella’s concluding scene here as an epilogue, so readers might have an idea of what Richard envisioned for Starlight’s closing pages.
* From the essay “Returning to Harmony” by Richard Wagamese.
THEY RAN EASILY THROUGH THE TREES. There were seven of them and they loped across the alpine meadow where it broke open before them and a few of them nipped playfully at the back paws of the ones in front. When they hit the trees on the other side they changed speed and ran lower to the ground, more purposeful, and silent. There was no playfulness. Instead, the wolves prowled and their muzzles were pressed close to the ground, and the alpha wolf steered them steadily forward, only altering course to avoid a thicket or clump of b
oulders. They ran relentlessly. At the top of a rise they broke into a lope and against the skyline they were shadow runners, skimming across the line of earth and sky, the bounding rise and fall of them a great wild and kinetic wave, and the man and the girl loped behind them and followed them into the trees on the downward side of the rise. The wolves snaked down the cut and when they reached the bottom where a stream flowed, they stopped and huddled on the huge rocks strewn about the shore. The man and the girl trotted out of the trees and waded across the stream a hundred yards from the pack and made their way down the opposite shore until they were directly across from them. The alpha wolf watched them and when they settled down on their haunches among the rocks, he lay down and panted and then rested his muzzle on his forepaws.
The girl stood. She crept forward, easing over the rocks until she climbed atop a large flat stone and knelt there, keeping her eyes on the alpha male. They stared at each other across the brief width of stream. The great wolf sat up. The others followed suit. In the silvered purple light of the moon they gathered around the alpha male and stared across at the girl. She slid the camera from her back and raised it and aimed at the pack, who sat like triangular shadows with only the glint of their eyes visible. She pulled the focus tight and the wolves seemed to stare right into the lens, intent and wild, perched mere yards away, facing the girl and the camera. When the whir of the shutter sounded they stood as one and with a look over his shoulder the leader trotted from the rock and leapt forward into the trees and she could see the line of them ease into the shadows of the trees and disappear. Only then did she breathe. She clambered off the rock and the man stood, waiting by the water. He bent forward on his knees and scooped water in his palm and drank and she did the same. He stood and motioned to the trees with his chin. The girl slung the camera back around onto the flat of her back. She looked at him. He smiled at her in the moonlight. Then she stepped toward the trees and broke into a crouching run and the man watched her disappear silently into the shadow. He smiled again. Then he ran after her.
Publisher’s Note
When Richard Wagamese died, we lost one of our most beloved and important storytellers. And so when Richard’s literary agents, with the full support of Richard’s Estate, submitted the manuscript for Starlight to McClelland & Stewart in July 2017, it felt as though we had received a final gift from this much-loved writer.
The manuscript was lightly edited. Grammatical errors, word repetitions, inconsistencies, and continuity issues were addressed, and occasional cuts were made for pacing, clarity, or flow. Punctuation was also added to aid reading, though only after close examination of the style used in Medicine Walk.
Given the incompleteness of Starlight, we wanted to let Richard close the larger narrative circle himself. On the following pages, we have included an essay by Richard titled “Finding Father,” which was a finalist for the CBC Non-fiction Prize in 2015, and is previously unpublished in book form. Readers of Starlight will recognize the ways in which the themes and images in this deeply personal essay resonate beautifully with those in the novel.
Throughout the process of readying Starlight for publication, we were guided by something that Richard wrote:
“I once saw a ceramic heart, fractured but made beautiful again by an artist filling its cracks with gold. The artist offering a celebration of imperfection, of the flawed rendered magnificent by its reclamation. I loved that symbol until I came to understand that it’s not about the filling so much as it’s about being brave enough to enter the cracks in my life so that my gold becomes revealed. I am my celebration then. See, it’s not in our imagined wholeness that we become art; it’s in the celebration of our cracks…”
While it is a tragedy that Richard did not have the opportunity to complete this novel, what he achieved in Starlight is deserving of celebration. And what better tribute to Richard Wagamese, a man who believed in the healing power of story, than to share his majestic last novel with readers.
Finding Father
An essay by Richard Wagamese
IN THE DREAM I AM RUNNING. There’s a dim trail through the trees making the footing dangerous. Everywhere there are humped and snaking roots of trees and rocks broad across the back as bread loaves and tall ferns and saplings that whip across my face. But I’m moving as fast as I can. The oversize gumboots I wear make speed even more treacherous. They slap and clap against my shins and flap around my feet at every stride. Still I run. There’s a break in the trees and I can see the flash of white water from the rapids and I can hear the river’s churning. From behind me I hear my pursuer. Heavy footfalls. Ravaged breath. I run hunched over, trying to keep the gumboots on my feet, fleeing for the safety of the river.
When I burst clear of the trees the sudden flare of light blinds me. But I sprint out onto the long, flat white peninsula of granite that pokes out into the river above the rapids. There are canoes there. I hope to jump into one and push it out into the current and down the chute of the rapids. I never get that chance.
Giant hands sweep me up. I’m spun in a wild circle. Large, strong arms enfold me. All I see is a whirl of long black hair like a curtain descending around me, falling over me, removing me from the world, the scent of woodsmoke, bear grease, and tanned hide, then deep laughter and the feel of a large palm at the back of my head. I’m laughing too as the gumboots fall from my feet. The world becomes the heat of the sun on my back and the feel of a big, warm heart beating against my tiny chest.
That dream is all I ever knew of my father.
I am Ojibway. My people occupy the large northern reaches of Ontario. We are bush people, river people, hunters, trappers, and fishermen. I was born in a canvas army tent on a trap line. The first sounds I heard were an eagle’s cry, the slap of a beaver’s tail, the crackle of a fire and soft roll of Ojibway as my family talked and told stories around that fire. I was born to be one of them. But time and politics and history prevented that from happening.
I became one of the disappeared ones. I became one of the thousands of Aboriginal children across Canada swept up in the Sixties Scoop. This was an action by the government in conjunction with foster-care agencies to arbitrarily remove kids from their people. We were transplanted hundreds and thousands of miles away from our home territories. Some were even sent to different continents. We were routinely sold to outside foster-care agencies. I was one of those disenfranchised kids. I disappeared into non-Native care before I was even two. I didn’t make it home until I was twenty-four. Most of us never did.
My father’s name was Stanley Raven. There were a number of men who adopted the name and role of father in my life when I was disappeared. None of them affected permanence. None of them fit the parameters of my dream. Stanley Raven was my one and only father and he died in a fall from a railway bridge the year before I made it home. There are few pictures of him. A bushman’s life seldom includes photographs and all I learned of my father were stories my mother and elder sister told. He lives for me in the rough and tangle of the northern Ontario landscape. I hear his voice in the rush of rapids, in the pastoral stillness of a northern lake at sunset, in the rutting call of a moose and the haunting soliloquy of a lone wolf howling at a gibbous moon rising above the trees and ridges. Stanley Raven. In those four syllables lays a history I can never reclaim and a connection to this earth, to the territory of my people I can never fully forge—and in this my wound became geography.
The land itself haunted me. I couldn’t walk the Winnipeg River without an all-consuming tide of loss washing over me, could never stand on that railway bridge without scanning the rocks and trees for the dim path that might lead me to the camp he had set in the bush beyond it, could never hunt without the idea of him guiding me, teaching me, assuring me, could never watch the moon rise there without a wild keening rising from the depths of me.
So I set out to find him in the early fall of 1983.
“Where was the camp where I was born?” I asked my sister Jane.
; “I don’t think I could even find it,” she said. “But it’s across the bay from Minaki. There’s a long narrow cove with big birches at the end of it. It’s somewhere back there.” In a landscape of bush and rivers it was an inadequate description. “Who’s taking you there?” she asked.
“Just me,” I said. “Something I gotta do alone.”
She looked at me searchingly. Then she nodded. “Picking up the trail,” she said.
I nodded. She never asked me any questions after that. Instead, she helped me fill a backpack with things I would need for a couple days in the bush and arranged for a family friend to loan me a boat motor for the trip. When I pushed off from the dock she stood there and watched and waved until I disappeared around a bend in the river.
Our family name, Wagamese, means crooked water. It’s in reference to the Winnipeg River. It refers specifically to my great-grandfather, who worked a trap line through sixty miles of bush that ran along that river. It’s my family’s territory and my legacy even though we were all removed from it by the fall of 1983. But setting out alone on that river felt right to me and trailing a hand over the gunwale of the boat I felt a connection to its tea-coloured depths. If history has a smell then the mineral scent of that river on my hand is mine. If time can be erased and geography can return us to the people we were born to be then the wash of that water across my face was my act of reclamation and redemption. All through that trip downriver, around the cascade of rapids, into the long, sleek, flat muscle of channels, around the hem of islands jutted with white pine and birch and thrusts of pink granite, I let it seep into me and found release in the sudden spray of heron from a tree, the sovereign stance of a moose knee-deep in shallows eating lily pads, and the dark punctuation of a bear against the loose paragraph of the hills.
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