Leather harnesses were draped along one wall, all straps and buckles, and a horse collar with the stuffing bursting out of it that was the size of a toilet seat. Two pairs of snowshoes with woven sinews were criss-crossed on the wall. Hanging beside them were wooden-handled rakes and hoes, and shovels ranging from a small spade to a huge rectangular metal blade. I wondered why anybody would need a shovel three feet across, then realized with dismay that it must be used for snow.
To my relief, I spotted the storm windows leaning against the wall. Our firewood was stacked on the opposite wall, reaching nearly to the roof. Old Joe had ordered us two cords of split pine, delivered and stacked before we arrived. It looked to me like there was enough wood to heat the city of Moscow, and I felt alarmed again at the prospect of needing so much.
I shut the barn doors and turned to the log cabin sitting beside it, my great-aunt’s first home. A piece of antler nailed to the wooden door served as a handle. A cast iron stove bearing the inscription “Woodland Belle” stood in the centre, a stovepipe leading to a hole in the roof. I could see the chisel marks along each hand-hewn log.
The barnyard was empty except for a corral made of split rails, now half-buried in the grass. Six wooden granaries backed on to the dense forest behind. The renter must store his grain somewhere else, probably in those gigantic silver cylinders we had passed on the way. I would ask him if I ever saw him again.
Back in the house, I seated myself at the simple cabinet piano in the living room, and lifted the lid on the keys. They were real ivory and in perfect condition, without a chip. I hadn’t touched the piano for many years. My mother played beautifully, and I had taken lessons until The Accident. The Sampsons had not owned a piano and it was never mentioned again.
I touched the keys tentatively, thinking it must be terribly out of tune. Surprisingly, it didn’t sound bad at all, although some of the keys in the upper register were flat. The only piece I could remember, ironically, was called The Happy Farmer. It must have belonged to the repertoire of every kid in America. I began to play without thinking, and the music came flowing back through my fingers without the slightest effort on my part.
I didn’t hear Bridget come up behind me. “Mama!” Her eyes were wide. “You can play the piano!”
“Yes, a little.”
“Can you teach me?”
“Sit beside me and I’ll show you the most important note: middle C.” I counted with her while she recited the eight notes in an octave. Then I showed her how to play the first piece that I had learned. I even remembered the name of my first lesson book: Teaching Little Fingers to Play. “Here we go, up a row, to a birthday party.”
She picked out the notes with great concentration. It was natural for my meticulous daughter to fall in love with the precision of a row of black and white keys. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of it before.
As I heard the familiar tune played by her small fingers, I experienced one of those vivid fragments of memory. This time it was my mother’s hands that sprang into my mind’s eye. I recalled her lovely hands on the keys, her coral-painted nails and the antique topaz ring she always wore on her left hand. I waited for the familiar stab of agony, but it didn’t come. Instead, I felt a suffusion of warmth. My mother’s hands, a child’s earliest and happiest memory, had come back to me.
A few days later, Bridget was colouring at the kitchen table — inside the lines, of course — and I was washing our lunch dishes when I glanced out the window and almost dropped a plate on the floor. Someone was standing beside the back steps, as motionless as a stone statue. After my initial shock, I realized it was a young girl, a child, really. She looked about twelve years old.
I opened the back door and stepped out. “Hello, there.”
The girl glanced at me quickly and then dropped her eyes. “Hi.” Her voice was so quiet that I barely heard her.
“Would you like to come in?”
She didn’t speak, but she followed me into the kitchen, glancing around curiously. Caught off guard by the unexpected stranger, Bridget hastily scrambled under the table. One blue eye peeked around the table leg.
“My name is Molly Bannister. And who are you?”
“I’m Wynona Bearspaw.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“My mother named me after Wynonna Judd.”
Wynona was built along the stocky lines of her namesake. Her skin was a beautiful colour, the shade of my morning coffee after I added evaporated milk, but her ragged ponytail was dull and greasy. A few strands had come loose and one of them hung over her left eye.
“Would you like to sit down and have something to drink, Wynona?”
“Do you have any Coke?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“How about Red Bull?”
“Sorry, we don’t have any soft drinks.”
“Coffee?”
“Just milk or water.”
“Okay, water.”
Wynona sat at the table while I pumped a glass of water. When I gave it to her, I couldn’t help noticing that her fingernails were bitten to the quick and her hands weren’t very clean. Casually, I walked over to the basin and washed my own hands.
Wynona glanced at Bridget’s face peeking out from under the table and looked away again without any expression. “Is that your little girl?”
“Yes, that’s Bridget. She’s very shy.” I prayed Wynona wouldn’t speak to her.
“Who else lives here?”
“Nobody, only us. Where do you live, Wynona?”
“On the reserve. Over there.” She jerked her head toward the north.
The reserve was almost three miles away. Or should I say, five kilometres.
“How did you get here?”
“Walked.”
“That’s a long way!” I was trying to make conversation, but it was difficult.
“I’m used to walking.” She slurped her water noisily and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her oversized burgundy sweatshirt. “How long are you staying here?”
“Until next summer. Then we’re going back to Arizona.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s in the United States.” I wondered if she had any knowledge of geography.
Wynona’s eyes roved around the room again. Then she drained her glass and stood up. “I better go.”
“It was nice to meet you, Wynona. Please drop by any time.”
“Okay.”
Without another word, she left by the back door, closing it behind her.
Bridget came out from under the table, wrinkling her nose. “Mama, that girl’s jeans were dirty. And she smelled funny.”
I didn’t want to encourage her to be critical. “She has the loveliest eyes, though.”
After Bridget put on her jacket and went outside with Fizzy, I dropped into the rocking chair and remembered my own lonely teenage years. My elbows started to throb.
The loss of my parents had left an emotional hole in my centre, a volcanic crater that rumbled and smoked. I had conducted my life ever since on the edges of this smouldering black hole, trying desperately not to fall in.
When I was fifteen, I began to notice boys. They distracted me, giving me one way to avoid the crater. Not that I acted on my feelings, heaven forbid. But I started obsessing over the boys at school. I mooned over them when I should have been paying attention in class — every class except math, that is — and doodled their names in my exercise books. I waited for them outside the school grounds, and followed them at a safe distance. I was close to becoming a stalker — although, a perfectly harmless one.
One day a boy named Roger whom I had been yearning after for weeks stopped in the street, turned around and smiled at me. I stared at him in a blind panic, then rushed away in the opposite direction.
It was nice of him to do that much, considering my appearance. To this day, looking at my school photographs made me cringe. My naturally curly black hair looked like a cluster of bedsprings attached to my head. I was
tall and ungainly, hunched over to hide my small breasts. Since foster care didn’t run to orthodontics, I had a gap between my two front teeth, although it closed after my permanent molars finally pushed them together. My pale skin was always pale, even in summer. For years my cheeks and chin were dotted with scarlet blemishes. How I envied all those tanned, blonde Arizona girls.
My blue eyes were my best feature, framed with thick lashes and heavy, dark eyebrows, but they had a curiously blank expression, as if they were painted onto the surface of the photographs. I recognized that same blankness in Wynona’s eyes.
September 7, 1924
A party of Cree from the nearby reserve came to the door last week, looking for food. At first I was afraid I might end up shorn of my locks, but then I realized they were simply hungry. I made pancakes in my big iron skillet, and for the little ones, I added a drizzle of birch syrup. I’ve never seen people eat so much, but at least they went away with full stomachs.
Three days later, the Indians surprised me by leaving a brace of prairie chickens hanging on the step. When I mentioned to George that this seemed odd, since they had come looking for food only a few days ago, he told me that their food supply is inconsistent and depends solely upon the success of the hunters. I suppose that the hunting party must have been lucky in the last day or two.
These birds are a dull brown colour and not attractive in the least, but they are delicious when fried, tender with a lovely flavour.
I wanted to know more about the lives of the Cree and George explained that although they have been granted their own land three miles away, they prefer to move around like nomads, following the game. They live in teepees made of skins, cleverly designed with a chimney hole in the top. A flap keeps the wind from blowing the smoke back down inside. They cut willows to make the triangular base for the teepee, and when they move on, they leave the naked triangles behind, so you can always see where they have been.
Outside each teepee is a rack of green willow branches over the fire. The Indians preserve their meat and hide by cutting both into strips and smoking it in a cloud of poplar bark for three days. The dried meat is pounded into powder called pemmican, which makes an edible paste when mixed with berries. The hide turns into leather, and the leather strips can be boiled in water to make broth.
I find the Cree to be handsome people, with glossy black hair and flashing white teeth. The hair of both men and women is worn in braids tied with buckskin laces. The men’s clothing is made mostly of hide although one gentleman wears a battered Stetson on his head. The women love their printed calico skirts and shawls, with brightly coloured bandanas tied over their braids. On their legs are hide leggings or wrinkled black stockings. I saw one young girl in a green tartan frock, her hair braided and tied in loops with ribbons — not unlike the dress and hairstyle I favoured at her age.
The women seem very placid. They simply adore their children and never scold them, even when they deserve it. One showed me the papoose she was carrying on her back, and it was a dear little thing with eyes like black coals. They use moss for nappies. I feel sorry for the women, as they do all the work. The men hunt, and the women do everything else.
When both men and women grow older, they are treated with great respect. The Cree revere their elders, as they believe that age brings accumulated wisdom. The advice of the oldest band members, both men and women, is followed with regards to hunting, travelling, and camping.
One of their elders, named Annie Bearspaw, is a beautiful woman with a regal bearing. She also knows a few words of English. George has lined the path from the house to the toilet with buffalo bones he found here when he arrived. Annie bent down and touched the bones and said “him gone,” meaning the buffalo. She stood up and extended her arms to the north and the south and said: “Many, many.” She mimicked holding a rifle and said: “Bang, bang.”
I understood that she was telling me the buffalo have been hunted almost to extinction. Although other types of game are still plentiful, it is very hard on the Indians to lose one of their primary food sources. At times the tribe is close to starvation.
When I lived at home and read western novels, I rejoiced at our victory over the red-skinned savages, but now I feel quite differently. We seized their land, killed the buffalo, forced them to live on reserves, and tried to inflict our religion on them, not to mention infecting them with our diseases. The influenza epidemic of 1918 that took so many lives in Europe arrived in these parts like a scorching wind, decimating the Indian population by half. Only a few hundred local tribe members remain.
The evil drink which the Indians call “firewater” has also had a disastrous impact. A few days after that first visit, a man stood outside and shouted to summon me. When I opened the door, he held out his hand and said: “Whiskey!” I shook my head firmly and shut the door again. Coming from the old country, I know the damage that strong spirits has done to my own people, but that is nothing compared to the suffering it has caused to this proud and independent race. George tells me that Annie Bearspaw preaches tirelessly against the perils of drink, as she believes it will ultimately destroy her people.
She is also the tribe’s medicine woman and knows a great deal about healing. I suspect it’s a lot of jiggery-pokery, but I suppose if you have no access to modern medicine you must turn to the witch doctors.
Yet perhaps there is something in the old ways. My granny claims that an earache may be cured by soaking a piece of black lambswool in heated butter and inserting it into the ear canal. My father himself, the eminent Dr. Bannister, was forced to admit that this often works although he disagrees that the wool must be black in colour. As he says jokingly: “Everyone in the world is quite mad, except for me and thee. And sometimes I have my doubts about thee!”
Days remaining: 333.
9
September
When three gentle knocks sounded on the back door, I leaped from the rocking chair as if I had received an electric shock. My nerves were frayed after lying awake beside Bridget all night, trying to decide whether to give up and go home. Yesterday, when Bridget followed Fizzy into the bush and got lost, this benevolent wilderness had suddenly turned on us like Dr. Jekyll transforming into Mr. Hyde, snarling and savage. I knew full well that if it hadn’t been for Wynona, I would never have found my missing child.
“Fizzy was chasing something in the grass, and I ran after him, and then we both got lost in the trees!” Bridget sobbed. I tried to make light of it for her sake. My only consolation was that she had scared herself so badly she would never leave the yard again.
Now she darted into the dining room while I opened the back door. “Wynona! I’m so glad to see you! I wanted to thank you again for what you did yesterday. You have no idea how grateful I am.” I wanted to fling my arms around her, but I was reluctant to intrude on her personal space.
“It was nothing.” Wynona ducked her head modestly.
“Believe me, it was something. You saved Bridget’s life!”
“Maybe. Anyways, I got a surprise for you guys.”
She turned and snapped her fingers. Around the corner of the house crept a mangy dog with mixed black and brown fur, a bushy tail curled into a circle the shape of a hula hoop over its back.
“Is this your dog, Wynona?”
At the sound of my voice, the dog’s ears cocked forward and he looked up at me. His eyes were a startling blue, rimmed with black as if he were wearing eyeliner.
Wynona spoke in her usual low voice. “He’s your dog, if you want him. You guys need one if you’re going to stay out here with no phone.”
I looked at the dog doubtfully — the last thing I needed was another living creature to worry about. “What’s his name?” I asked, stalling for time.
“He don’t have no name. He’s a stray rez dog, just running around on his own.”
“I don’t know.” I had never even considered owning a dog. “Is he friendly?”
“Yeah, he’s real friendly,” Wynona
said. “You can pet him and stuff.”
Cautiously, I patted the dog’s head with my flat palm. He gave a whine of pleasure.
“I’m afraid we can’t keep him inside the house.”
Wynona snorted. “This one don’t even know what the inside of a house looks like. He’s part Siberian. He can stand the cold. All he needs is food and a place to sleep. And he’s a good guard dog, he’ll make sure nobody gets lost.”
I remembered yesterday’s experience and felt sick all over again. “Well, leave him here and we’ll see how it goes. Should we keep him tied up?”
“No. If you feed him, he won’t go very far.” We left the dog on the back steps and Wynona followed me into the kitchen. Bridget was peeking through the crack in the dining room door. Wynona noticed her, but she glanced away without speaking.
I poured a can of beef stew over two pieces of bread in a dark-blue speckled enamel bowl that had once served as a dog dish, judging by the teeth marks on the rim. I opened the back door and set the bowl on the steps. In three or four gulps the food was gone and the dog was licking his lips, trying to extract the last bit of flavour.
“I wonder how much it would cost to feed him,” I said, remembering with chagrin how much I had paid for the stew.
“He can eat table scraps, and he’ll catch squirrels and rabbits, too,” Wynona said.
I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. The dog didn’t look like it had caught many rabbits lately.
Without saying another word, she patted the dog and left. I thought he might follow her when she disappeared around the corner, but he seemed happy to stay behind.
Bridget emerged from hiding and came out to the steps. I didn’t know how the dog would react, so I restrained him by clutching a handful of thick fur at the back of his neck. Timidly, she let the dog sniff her hand. His tongue came out and he licked her fingers. I tried not to think of the germs flourishing inside a dog’s mouth.
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