I Heard The Owl Call My Name

by Margaret Craven

  At star-fall a young buck walked through the village to drink at the river. He was unafraid of guns. The Indian hunted for food, not for fun, and when he found it necessary to kill a deer, he did not shoot him. If pos­sible, he knocked him over the head with a club.

  Just before dawn when day and night were locked in their tug-of-war, and day began slowly to push away the dark, Ellie, the little lost one, returned to the house of Sam, her father. Ellie went willingly to the bed of any man who beckoned her, and since, at thirteen years, brutality was all she knew of masculine attention, she liked best the man who mistreated her the most.

  4

  IN THE MORNING WHEN THE YOUNG VICAR stepped onto the rickety porch, it was as if the funeral of the weesa-bedó had never happened. The village was quiet, and utterly at peace. In the river he could see a long, black canoe moored, and as he watched, an older Indian woman waded out into the icy water, climbed into the canoe, poled into the centre of the stream and dumped her garbage, and he knew that was what he would do — in the sun, in the sleet, in the rain, and the snow.

  When he tried to start a fire in the kitchen stove, the wood was wet and the stovepipe smoked, and when he went to open a can of coffee, there was no can opener, and he finally extracted sufficient coffee for two cups by hammering a hole in the top of the can with a nail. For the first time it occurred to him that just to stay alive, fed, and clean here was going to occupy many hours a day.

  After breakfast, he went to the church, and for the first time noticed that the tower was broken, that there were no altar hangings and no candles. When he approached the altar, he saw that the frontal piece — no doubt given by some small town church that had acquired a new one — was propped up on old crates. And, more important, on this fine day of early fall, the little church was dank and cold. He knew that unless he wanted to stand by the golden eagle on a winter Sunday and watch his congregation freeze between the ‘dearly beloved brethren’ and the blessing, he must manage somehow to nail plywood over the bare stud­ding and insulation behind it. He knew also that even if he managed it, he would be up at dawn every Sunday hurrying along the little path from the vicarage, a coat hastily flung over his pyjamas, on his way to rattle up a fire in the big, round, black stove.

  Then he returned to the vicarage and went over it carefully — all two rooms of it. There was no plumbing. The paper hung in shreds from the walls. The walls were discoloured and warped where the rain had entered. When he tried to open a window, the whole sill came loose in his hand, and the floor sagged under him. There was no doubt about it. The vicarage was falling down. He had come to give and he was going to begin where every man is apt to begin who is sent to hold some lonely outpost. He was going to begin by begging. ‘I want this. I need that. I need paint. I need plywood. I would appreciate a couple of hundred pounds of insu­lation, and if it isn’t too much trouble, send me a new vicarage complete with plumbing.’

  It was all wrong and he knew it. In desperation he shot an arrow prayer into the air: ‘Oh, dear Lord, what am I going to do about this vicarage?’ He sent it aloft at ten in the morning and the Lord answered him promptly at twelve. Chief Eddy came to the door with a letter from the Bishop which had been brought in the mail bag by one of the fishermen some days pre­viously, and forgotten in the confusion of yesterday’s funeral.

  The young vicar sat down at the kitchen table and opened it slowly. He knew it must have been written before he and Jim had started north, and he was afraid to read it.

  ‘I am sure,’ wrote the Bishop, ‘that when you receive this, you will be aware that the old vicarage must be replaced. When you are ready, I shall make arrange­ments to have a prefabricated two-bedroom house de­livered at the float at the end of the inlet. I can, of course, send no one to help you put it up. You must begin by working with your hands. The Indians work with their hands. This is the way they will respect you and this is your ministry.’

  Mark read it twice and had a sudden and appalling vision of hundreds of boards, kegs of nails, bolts and shingles, perhaps even a bathtub, all heavy, stubborn and totally inanimate, piled high on the float, waiting to be carried up the river by canoe.

  He scurried through his luggage for paper and pencil, and he seated himself at the kitchen table and wrote to the Bishop.

  ‘Please, my lord, do not send me a vicarage. At least, not yet. I do not even know how to get it lip the river, much less put it up. I am going to begin today by cleaning the church. When I finish, I shall patch up the vicarage. It’s strange, but since receiving your letter, I do not seem to find the sweet smell of death too oppres­sive.’

  He sealed the letter and gave it to Chief Eddy to go out by the first boat. Then he returned to the church, and in the tiny vestry in back he found an ancient broom, and he swept the church carefully. He made a fire in the big round stove and heated water. Then he scrubbed the strip of red linoleum that covered the centre aisle.

  ‘There is a bear loose in the church,’ said Mrs Hud­son, the matriarch, to T. P., the elder. ‘What a clatter he is making! ‘

  ‘By evening he will he quieter,’ T. P. told her. ‘By evening the bear will have blistered both paws.’

  The Indians were polite. They were not unfriendly. When he had cleaned the church, he worked on the vicarage with the broom and the scrub brush, and when he wearied and ambled to the river’s edge where the women were smoking and drying fish, they smiled at him shyly. When he stopped in the door of the cere­monial house and looked beyond the dirt floor to the carved posts and the two-headed serpent painted on the rear wall, old Peter, the carver, who was working on a canoe, answered his questions.

  ‘How are you going to widen it?’ the vicar asked, and Peter told him he was going to fill the canoe with water and drop into it hot rocks to make the wood expand to the cedar stretchers, and when this was done, he would singe the bottom. They were polite and this was all. When Jim returned from fishing, they went again down the river to the float and by the boat to the other villages which were part of his patrol, and in each he arranged to hold church in a schoolhouse or a private home once a month. It was always the same. The sad eyes. The shy smiles. The cautious waiting.

  But for what? How must he prove himself? What was it they wished to know of him? And what did he know of himself here where loneliness was an unavoidable element of life, and a man must rely solely on himself?

  On the river on the way back to Kingcome in the little speedboat, the young vicar knew that the Indians belonged here as the birds and fish belonged, that they were as much a part of the land as the mountains themselves. He was a guest in their house, and he knew, also, that this might never change, and he told himself what does it matter if a man is lonely? One does not die of it.

  When they reached the village, he hoed out the wild grass that had grown rank around the vicarage. When this was done, he visited the sick. On his way back to the vicarage, he passed a small, weathered cedar house, its owner out in the yard trying to start an ancient washing machine hitched up to a small gasoline engine, and he stopped to help him.

  The next morning he removed the broken board of the vicarage steps and the Indian he had helped came by to offer him a saw and found him a board for a new step.

  In the afternoon he climbed up on the roof to see if he could stop the leaks, and Chief Eddy walked by to watch him.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall through?’ And Mark answered that he considered it not only possible, but likely.

  ‘I’d rather come down on top of the vicarage than have the vicarage come down on me,’ and for a moment he saw the humour rise in the sad eyes and hold.

  He did not mention the Bishop’s offer to send him a new vicarage. He had made up his mind that he would not ask help in getting it up the river, or putting it up. He would wait until they offered help, or do without it.

  Sam, the ne’er-do-well, came over to watch him work, shedding large tears and shamelessly begging money, and Mark turned him down.

&nb
sp; Also, the teacher accosted him on the path, asking that he intervene with the authorities that he be given proper supplies. Even the smallest villages were given more pencils and pads. Also, he was expected to pay for the paper tissues which he dropped so generously for the sniffling noses of his pupils. Furthermore, his house had no electricity, and its tiny bathroom was so small that when he sat upon the throne-of-thought he could not shut the door without hitting his knees, which was an outrage.

  The young vicar suggested the teacher cut two round holes for his knees to stick through, and offered to trade his outhouse for the teacher’s bathroom, but the teacher was not amused. There was one more thing he felt it his duty to inform the vicar. The vicar might as well know right now that, as for himself, he was an atheist; he considered Christianity a calamity. He believed that any man who professed it must be incredibly naïve.

  The young vicar grinned and agreed. There were two kinds of naivety, he said, quoting Schweitzer; one not even aware of the problems, and another which has knocked on all the doors of knowledge and knows man can explain little, and is still willing to follow his con­victions into the unknown. ‘This takes courage,’ he said, and he thanked the teacher and returned to the vicarage.

  When he closed the door, he sensed he was not alone, and when he turned slowly, he welcomed his first visi­tors.

  They were six years old perhaps — a little girl and boy. They had entered without knocking — never would he be able to teach them to knock — and they stood like fawns — too small to be afraid. They stood absolutely still, and they did not speak, or touch anything. When he smiled, they smiled, slowly and gently. When he asked their names, they did not answer, watching him from their soft, dark, sad eyes, as their ancestors must have watched the first white man in the days of inno­cence.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I shall go for a little walk,’ and the little boy said, ‘We will go with you.’ When they went out the door, the boy ran ahead to the grease pole that stood in front of the church, and up it, hand over hand.

  Mark held out his hand, and the little girl took it, and they stood a moment, staring up at Whoop-Szo, the Noisy Mountain, towering beyond the river, and she said, as if it were very important, ‘I love the snow on the mountains.’

  Thus, the children were his first friends, and for love of their laughter he always kept his door ajar. One day, when Chief Eddy stopped to see if he had fallen yet through the roof of the vicarage, the young vicar stopped his patching and descended the ladder.

  ‘Chief Eddy,’ he said earnestly, ‘there is something I have been meaning to ask you. How do you pronounce the name of your tribe?’ It is spelled Tsawataineuk.

  ‘Jowedainó.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Would you mind saying it again?’

  ‘Jowedaino,’ and Mark listened more carefully than he had ever listened to any word in his entire life and could not tell if the word was Zowodaino or Chowu­daino.

  ‘And the name of the band to which your tribe be­longs?’ which in the books of anthropology is written Kwakiutl.

  ‘Kwacutal,’ and Mark listened and could not tell if the word was Kwagootle, Kwakeetal or Kwakweetul.

  ‘And the name of the cannibal who lived at the north end of the world?’

  ‘Bakbakwalanuksiwae,’ and it came from the chief’s lips like a ripple.

  ‘What chance did he have with a name like that? And what chance have I? I shall never be able to spell or pronounce even the name of this tribe.’

  ‘I can’t spell it myself,’ said the chief. ‘Begin with something easier. Try saying how do you do. Weeksas — weeksas.’

  After that when Mark passed the Indians on the path, he said, ‘Weaksauce; exactly as the chief had said it, and saw the humour take their eyes.

  On the first Sunday morning he tolled the church bell half an hour before the service. He was sure no one would come. He stayed in the tiny vestry behind the altar and waited.

  He was wrong. Everyone came except the teacher, Sam, the sick and the very young. On the very first hymn he found he must never for an instant let go of a high note because if he did, his congregation would sink an octave and never come up again. He was young enough to be a little proud of his first sermon, to which he had given considerable thought : ‘It is better to be a small shrimp in the sea of faith than a dead whale on the beach.’

  When the service was over, he stood at the door, try­ing desperately to learn what the Indians called their English nicknames and to affix each to the right face. Marta Stephens was last, and it was now she presented the toque.

  ‘To keep your head warm on the river,’ she ex­plained, and the young vicar thanked her, and put it on.

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Like an egg. Exactly like an egg.’

  He walked down the steps with her, sensing somehow that she was to mean much to him.

  ‘Mrs Stephens, tell me something. Do you remember the first man who came here for the church?’

  ‘Yes. He had a long white beard. He had to learn our language so he could teach us his. He said, “What is this? What is that?” and sometimes we told him the wrong word to tease him. I am ashamed of it now. He was so patient. He was patient even with the children who pulled his beard.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because,’ Marta said, ‘I was one of them.’

  5

  OFTEN IN THE FIRST WEEKS, Mark was beset by a sense of futility, and always he was lonely. On the patrol to the other villages, which somehow he had to bind together into a parish, hour passed hour and neither he nor Jim spoke a word. He gave up trying to know Jim, even hoping to understand him, and learned to wait, cling­ing staunchly to Caleb’s Victorian we. In his turn Jim served him well and dutifully, the cautious waiting still in his eyes.

  Then one late afternoon there was a change. They had been to the float store to pick up a load of plywood to cover the bare studdings in the church, and when they reached the government float at the end of the inlet, they left the load to bring up the river by canoe the next day, and started for the village in the speed­boat. When they neared the river mouth on a rising tide, Jim stopped the engine and motioned Mark to be still.

  They sat quietly, the boat drifting slowly, Jim watch­ing a ripple line on the clear and sunless water. Then they saw it. A run of humpback salmon was entering the river to spawn in the Clearwater. Two or three feet beneath the surface Mark could see hundreds of silvery fish, pressed tight, moving secretly, almost stealthily, with a kind of desperate urgency, as an army moves to hold an outpost which must be reached at any cost. He watched, fascinated, until they had passed, and for a moment he was not sure that it had happened at all.

  ‘ “Come, swimmer”,’ he said. “I am glad to be alive now that you have come to this good place where we can play together. Take this sweet food. Hold it tight, younger brother.” ’

  Then, for the first time, the watchful waiting left the Indian’s eyes and he said eagerly, ‘How did you know that? Where did you hear it?’

  ‘It’s a prayer your people once said to the salmon, and I read it in a book written long ago. The hook was called “younger brother”. The halibut was called “old woman”. When your people pulled a halibut into a canoe, they said, “Go, old flabby mouth, and tell your uncles, and your cousins, and your aunts how lucky you were to come here”. But they spoke with respect of the salmon and they called him “swimmer”.’

  ‘The salmon is still the swimmer in our language, and I can remember my grandfather speaking to him as you do now. I had forgotten.’

  ‘Do you see him enter the river often?’

  ‘No, not often. He enters usually at night.’

  ‘And in the end, does he always die?’

  ‘Always. Both the males and the females die. On the way up the river the swimmer will pass the fingerlings of his kind coming down to the sea. They want to go and are afraid to go. They still swim upstream, but gently, letting the river carry them
downstream tail first, and the birds and the larger fish prey upon them to devour them, and pretty soon they turn to face their dangers.’

  ‘And when they reach the open sea?’

  ‘Then they are free. Nobody knows how far they go or where. When the time comes to return, their bodies tell them, and those hatched in the same stream sepa­rate from all the others and come home together. And in the end the swimmer dies, and the river takes him downstream, tail first, as he started.’

  ‘Could we see the end?’

  ‘Easily.’

  On one of the last lovely days of September Mark packed a lunch and he and Jim went up-river in one of the smaller outboard canoes to seek the end of the swimmer. Above the village where the river curved left into rapids, they stopped at a pool at the foot of Che-kwa-lá, the falls, on a stream that fell into the river. Here it was cool and misty, the spruce and the hemlock hanging with moss, one huge cottonwood standing guard. They stood for a long time watching the troubled restless water of the falls coming to rest in the deep quiet pool, and neither spoke.

  Then they went on up the rapids of the river, and a bear, fishing for the swimmer, saw them come and scrambled into the trees, and the two deer that had come to the river to drink saw them also, and were gone in one lovely fluid leap. Well up the river they passed cedar shake cabins, smoke coming from the holes in their roofs, and Mark could see some of the children of the tribe playing under the trees.

  ‘They have come to smoke fish,’ Jim told him. ‘Each fall, families come to do this. It is a time everyone likes. The children run wild and the women talk. And at night the men sit by the fire and tell the old myths, and when they return, they are as well smoked as the fish.’