The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama

by Daniel David Moses

  “I’ll be damned. Joelle, turn, around slow and look up on the top of the fridge.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Up there, look! Look at that damn rat!”

  “Rat!” she shrieked. “What rat?”

  “There, right there – look at it!”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t see no rat.”

  “You don’t see him. Right there. That rat?” The rat sat up on his haunches, spit into his paws and gave himself a good old cleaning.

  “Where are you looking?”

  “There, goddamn it! Washing his ears!” I pointed frantically.

  “I don’t know what you’re smoking, but there is no rat on the refrigerator. You’re giving me the creeps.”

  There were two of them. Something caught my eye. I looked over by the sink and there was another one.

  “You don’t see anything at all strange in this kitchen?” I asked.

  “The only strange thing in this kitchen is you.”

  When Joelle left, I called over to the rez. I called my Auntie Betty.

  “I got rat problems,” I said.

  “You got rats,” Auntie Betty said, practical as always, “you got to go out to the field they live in and explain to them you ain’t got no extras to go round but you’ll try and leave them some of what you can spare if they agree to respect your stores.”

  “Ain’t that kind of rat,” I said.

  “Well, what kind are they?”

  “The kind only I can see. And I been dreaming about them, too.”

  “Oh. That kind of rat.” She paused. “I’ll call you back.”

  I knew she was going to go pray some and ask her spirits what was going on over at my place. I’m not as good at this direct stuff as she is. I drank two more cups of tea waiting for the phone to ring.

  “You got problems in your house, eh?” she said. “You got marriage problems.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “He’s got some bad stuff around him. Very dark stuff.”

  I didn’t say anything. I remembered the look on his face when he threw the plate.

  “He’s got anger twisted up in him, that one. You got to be careful. You know what I mean?”

  “What should I do?”

  “What you asking me that for? You gonna listen to me? You gonna come back home? You gonna leave that white man?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Uh-huh,” Auntie Betty said. “I thought so. OK, now you listen to me. Animals don’t take the time out of their busy day unless they got serious business. You hear me?”

  “I hear.”

  “You got to listen to them. You got a bad sickness coming into your house. You need to clear things out. I don’t know if it’s too far gone, but you got to smudge out your house good. You got sweetgrass? You got sage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, use’ em. Smoke that house up good, smoke your bed up good. Put a red blanket on the bed.”

  “OK.”

  “Then you go get these plants and boil ’em up. Drink the tea.” She named some herbs and plants.

  “One thing, Nell. One thing I got to ask. Is he hitting you?”

  “Naw. Not really.”

  “What the hell is ‘not really?’ Either he is, or he ain’t! You better get ready. His anger’s gonna bust out all over you. I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know. You should come home for a while.”

  “I can’t. I love him, Auntie.”

  “Love! Phooey! Should go back to the old ways! Let your aunties pick you out a good red man. Stay where we can keep an eye on you! You young people! All the same!” She went on for a while, but I didn’t listen much. I knew this part by heart. And besides, I was too busy watching the rats run back and forth from the bedroom to the bathroom.

  “Nell? You listening?”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  “OK, one last thing. Fat as you are these days, you ain’t gonna be able to dodge him if he comes at you. You offer tobacco to these rats and ask them for a tuft of their hair. You braid it into your hair. That’ll make you nimble like they are. Give you a chance if you need it.”

  “I never heard that one before.”

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t strictly ours, eh? That one’s from Africa. I learned it from that black nurse works with me midwifing. We trade stuff sometimes. Don’t matter. All the same medicine. You just use it, you hear? Spirit rats or flesh and blood, they’ll give you what you need. They’re here to help.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  I promised to call her tomorrow and made her promise not to tell my mother, not to tell my brothers, for what good it would do. I know how gossip passed around out on the rez. Wouldn’t be long before everybody knew what was going on at my house. Which maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. Get a few of the old timers burning tobacco for me. Long as my brother Jimmy didn’t find out. He’d be over wanting to kick some white man’s butt.

  I went out and offered my tobacco and found a tuft of rat fur up on the windowsill. I braided it in my hair. I picked the herbs. I drank the tea. I smudged the house. I put the red blanket on the bed.

  It was Sunday the next day, and I knew John’d be out drinking with his buddies late that night. It could go either way. Maybe he’d just come home and pass out. Maybe he’d come home mean. I slept with one eye open, tucked up under the protection blanket. I didn’t see no rats, but didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad. Rats abandon a sinking ship, or a house where there’s a fire coming.

  I heard the truck skid through the gravel around 3:00 a.m. He was drunk as a cowboy after a long dry cattle drive. He came in the kitchen, slamming stuff around and stumbling and cursing as he barked his shins and banged his elbows. I heard him pissing in the bathroom, then heard him coming down the hall. He stood in the doorway a few minutes, swaying. I knew he couldn’t see my open eyes, dark as the room was, and I sure wasn’t going to close them, not knowing what was coming. He took a couple of wide-legged steps toward the bed, trying to keep his balance, and finally toppled like a cut pine across my body. I heaved him over and left him snoring on top of the red blanket. Man, he smelled bad. Whiskey and smoke and beer and, although it broke my heart to admit it, some woman other than me.

  I got up and went to the living room and cried myself to sleep, dreaming about rats on river rafts and rats in sewer drains and rats caught in traps.

  I woke up the next morning to the sound of John puking. I went to fix him some coffee and orange juice, figuring that’d be about all his stomach could handle. I reached into the cupboard to get his favourite mug, the big one with the bucking bronco on the side of it. Sitting in it, with his little pink paws hooked over the top, was the rat.

  “Morning, little buddy,” I said. The rat jumped out and stood next to the coffee-pot. I opened the fridge to get the orange juice. A rat sat on the stack of cheese slices. He didn’t budge when I reached in. I wondered if he’d learned how to turn the light on in there when the door was closed.

  I heard John behind me and turned. He was still in his boots, his jeans, only his shirt was gone, and I guess he’d puked on it. Even mad at him as I was, there was a twinge down in my belly at the sight of his naked chest, all hard muscle and sinew, his stomach flat, with pale golden hair running down into the top of his jeans. There was a rat sitting on the top of his head, yanking up his hair between its long pointy teeth.

  “Oh, man. My head’s killing me.” His eyes were bloodshot and yellowish, like two ketchup-covered eggs with runny yolks.

  “Serves you right.” I wanted him to be hurting. I handed him his coffee. The rat on his head jumped off and disappeared into the living room.

  “I ain’t in the mood, Nell.”

  “But I guess you were in the mood last night.” I stood with my hands on my hips. I could feel the hurt starting to switch around to righteous anger. I knew I should keep my mouth shut, but I was too mad, too hurt.

  “Leave it alone.” His voice was ragged and dangerous.
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  “I don’t want to leave it alone. You smelled like a goddamn whorehouse when you came in last night, you bastard. I want to know who you been with!” Out of the corner of my eye I could see a flurry of rat fur, diving under counters, through the window, skittering around door jams, and out of the room.

  He slammed the cup down on the table, sloshing the coffee over the rim. His hands balled up into fists. He leaned towards me.

  “Well you can bet your fat ass it was somebody under 200 pounds.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes and my face went red.

  “Look at yourself, you think any man’d want you?” He ran his eyes up and down my body and sneered. “You used to be a good-looking woman, but now you ain’t nothing but a sack of lard.”

  “I am a good wife to you, John McBride. I can’t help it if I gained weight.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you can’t help it? I ain’t the one stuffing food down your throat! If you’d get off your floppy ass and do some work around this place, maybe you’d lose some of it, maybe I’d want you again!”

  “I do all the work around this place! You don’t spend long enough here to do no work.”

  “You saying I’m to blame for how disgusting you got? You blaming me, bitch?”

  He took two steps toward me and I backed up until I found myself up against the counter.

  “I ain’t blaming you, but goddamn John, it ain’t me who’s the problem here – it’s you!” I couldn’t stop myself. “Out whoring around, mean drunk all the time – I ain’t gonna take it no more, you understand?”

  I didn’t even see the blow coming.

  Even with the rat fur charm braided in my hair, I couldn’t duck the first punch or the second, or the one after that. I lost count then. He went for my face, I guess, because it would be the place where the hurt would show the most. Proof that there was some small spot in the world where he could have an effect. My nose. My lips. My cheeks.

  I went down, and, a gal my size... well, I went down hard and stayed down. I could see his boots in flashes of motion, misted in red.

  I think it was all this flesh that saved me from getting worse than I got, and that was bad enough. But I was bundled way down deep inside the womb of myself and even though his hands left bruises, they didn’t break no bones. It didn’t hurt. I kept thinking it should hurt more, but it just felt like numbness everywhere, great stains of frozen places bursting out from under his icy fists and feet.

  “John, John...” I just kept repeating in a whisper. My heart speaking to his, willing him to hear me, see me, to stop... You’re breaking me, I thought, you’re breaking me apart. Then everything went quiet.

  I could hear ragged breathing, great gulps of wet sobbing air. I thought it was me, but my moans were underneath that lung-punctured sound. I took my hands away from my face and as I did I heard my Auntie’s voice, steel-strong and even.

  “You step back, John McBride. Step back now.”

  I looked up at my husband. He stood over me, his face a twisted, crooked thing. Tears poured down his cheeks. His stomach heaved. He looked down at me as though he had no idea of how I’d fallen. He brought his bloody fists up in front of his own eyes and began to howl like a wild dog. He pounded his own face, first with his right hand, then his left, sparing no force.

  “Bastard!” he cried. “Bastard!”

  “Stop this! Stop this now! You hear me!” Auntie Betty stood in the doorway behind John. She filled the space with her square bulk. Her long grey braid was decorated with megis shells. She was dressed for serious ceremony work. Ribbons in her spirit colours on her skirt and blouse. Medicine pouch. In her left hand she carried the hawk-wing fan, in her right the sweetgrass basket containing her pipe, tobacco, other things known only to her.

  John hit himself square in the face with both fists.

  Auntie Betty put her basket down and walked up behind him. She reached up and smacked him on the back of the head.

  “Don’t be any more of a jackass than you already are. There’s been enough hitting for one day, eh?” She glared at him as he spun around. She raised the hawk-wing fan and fluttered a circle in the air around his head. John let out a strangled noise, clamped his hand to his mouth and pushed past her out the door. I heard retching noises.

  “Good. Puke up all that bad stuff,” said Auntie Betty, coming toward me. “Come on, little one, let’s see what kind of shape you’re in.” She bent down and helped haul me to my feet. I was shaky. There was blood on my dress, dripping down from my nose.

  “Looks like I got here just in time. You’ll live. Could hear it in the wind this morning. Time to come visit. Had Jimmy drop me off in the truck down the road a ways. Didn’t think this’d be the time for him to come calling.” She leaned me up against the counter and ran the tap water good and cold. She wet down a tea towel and put it in my hand. “Press that up against your face. You need ice.” She waddled her wide, bowlegged walk to the fridge.

  I started to cry, salty tears burning into my split lip. I heard the tires of our pickup squeal as John skidded out the drive and down the road.

  “Don’t waste your time crying, girl.” She rolled ice in a plastic baggy. “Here, use this. What we need is a cup of tea. He’s not coming back for a while. I guarantee. Sit,” she ordered, and I did as I was told as she puttered around my kitchen and fixed the tea. She reached into her basket and took out a skin pouch, sprinkled some herbs into the teapot. “This’ll help the hurts, inside and out.”

  I didn’t feel much of anything just then, except glad Auntie Betty was there, glad someone else was taking control of things. I felt as limp as a newborn baby and just as naked. We drank the tea. I held the ice to my swelling-up eye. Auntie Betty held my hand.

  Later she reached into her basket.

  “I brought this for you,” she said, and laid a carton of rat poison on the counter. “You got yourself a vermin problem.”

  “Poison?” I knew Auntie would never suggest such a thing, it went against the natural respect she had for one of all her relations, spirit rats or full bone and fur. “I don’t need that,” I said, my chest tight as a drum.

  “I think you do. You got these kinda rats, you got to get rid of ’em. White man’s rats need white man’s measures. This here’s white man’s poison.”

  “You can’t be serious. You’ve lost your mind!”

  “No, and you better remember to respect your elders! I ain’t lost my mind, but you better start using yours. I ain’t talking about poisoning nobody, not that some people don’t deserve it,” she snorted with disdain, “but I been giving it some thought. Rat spirit chose to show up here, not no other. No bear or wolf or snake.”

  “You’re scaring me, Auntie, and I been scared enough for one day.”

  “Well, let it be the last day anything scares you. You shed that fear skin and maybe you’ll shed that fat skin too. Oh, don’t look at me that way, you know it’s true. Big woman’s a fine thing, but not the way you’re going at it. You can’t grow another baby in you by trying to stuff if down your mouth. You weren’t meant to be as big as you are, you ain’t got the bones for it, not like me.” She patted her belly and cackled. “But that’ll take care of itself once you start taking care of yourself, and for now, that means getting rid of this big old rat.”

  “He didn’t mean it. You saw how sorry he was. It’s the pressure. We been going through some hard times.“

  ”What a load of horse shit! Times is always hard. That ain’t no excuse for what that man’s doing. He needs to learn.”

  “I can’t leave him.”

  “You can and you will. He might be able to get away with taking out his shit on soft-minded little white women, but no Indian woman’s gonna stand for it.” She leaned over and took both my hands in hers, looked into my battered up face.

  “You think he’s gonna stop unless you make him stop? You think it’s not going to just get worse? Don’t you watch Oprah?”

  I didn’t say nothing.


  “Nellie. Answer me. You think it’s gonna get any better unless he knows he’s gone too far, knows exactly what it’s cost him? Look me in the eye and tell me that.”

  She was right. I knew she was right and it caved in my heart to know it.

  “I know.”

  “Well then.”

  “But Auntie, I...”

  “Don’t you even think about telling me you love that man! The man you fell in love with is gone. I don’t know whether he’ll be back or not, but what you got living in this house with you at the moment, sure as hell is not a man to love. This is an evil thing, all twisted over on itself.” I made a motion to protest. “Don’t interrupt me. Sometimes you put poison out for rats and like magic they disappear. Seems like they know it just ain’t safe no more.” She looked at me, her eyes flashing like stars among the wrinkles. “You understand?”

  And I did.

  She stayed all afternoon, and as night fell she smudged the house up good. Then she called Jimmy and had him pick her up. She waited out at the end of the driveway so he wouldn’t come in and see me. Jimmy’d be just as likely to go off into town with his rifle and look for John, and nobody wanted that kind of trouble.

  John didn’t come home that night, and I shouldn’t have expected him because Auntie Betty’d told me as much. Still, I lay in bed all night straining to hear the sound of his tires on the gravel. I finally fell asleep around dawn, too tired to mind the aches and pains, and didn’t dream about nothing at all.

  The next day I fasted. I smudged the house again. Around my neck I put the leather pouch with the lightening stone in it that Auntie’d given me. She’d dug up the round red stone from between the roots of a tree where lightening’d struck last spring. It was powerful protection. I wore my ribbon dress. Green ribbons, white ribbons, black and rose. This was my ceremony.

  I fixed the food just so. All the things John liked. Fried chicken. Lima beans. Mashed potatoes. Carrot salad with raisins.

  I heard the truck in the yard just before 6:00 a.m. I took a deep breath. Smoothed my hair. Said a prayer. I heard the screen door shut and then John was in the kitchen. He stood in the doorway, a bunch of red roses in his hand. He was wearing the shirt I’d given his brother Philip last Christmas, so I knew where he’d spent the night. His hair was combed down neat. He looked like a school kid showing up at my door to pick me up for a date.