The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama

by Daniel David Moses

  Our trickster story.

  I have a trickster story. It is my own. It is also now yours.

  You are there. So am I. I am here. And so are you. We’re both here and there, listening to this story as we speak it, write it, read it. We are together.

  That’s the trick.

  It’s always, for our entire lives.

  Everywhere.

  Boozhoo.

  There is something more than survival and saving ourselves: it is continuance.

  —Simon J. Ortiz

  Woven Stone

  Daniel David Moses

  King of the Raft

  There was a raft in the river that year, put there, anchored with an anvil, just below a bend, by the one of the fathers who worked away in Buffalo, who could spend only every other weekend, if that, at home. The one of the mothers whose husband worked the land and came in from the fields for every meal muttered as she set the table that that raft was the only way the father who worked in the city was able to pretend he cared about his sons. Her husband, also one of the fathers, who had once when young gone across the border to work and then, unhappy there, returned, could not answer, soaking the dust of soil from his hands.

  Most of the sons used the raft that was there just that one summer in the usually slow-moving water during the long evenings after supper, after the days of the fieldwork of haying and then combining were done. A few of them, the ones whose fathers and mothers practised Christianity, also used it in the afternoons on sunny Sundays after the sitting through church and family luncheons. And the one of the sons who had only a father who came and went following the work – that son appeared whenever his rare duties or lonely freedom became too much for him.

  The sons would come to the raft in Indian file along a footpath the half-mile from the road and change their overalls or jeans for swimsuits among the goldenrod and milkweed on the bank, quickly, to preserve modesty and the blood from the mosquitoes, the only females around. Then one of the sons would run down the clay slope and stumble in with splashing and a cry of shock or joy for the water’s current temperature. The other sons would follow, and, by the time they all climbed out onto the raft out in the stream, through laughter would become boys again.

  The boys used that raft in the murky green water to catch the sun or their breaths on or to dive from where they tried to touch the mud bottom. One of the younger ones also used to stand looking across the current to the other side, trying to see through that field of corn there, the last bit of land that belonged to the reserve. Beyond it the highway ran, a border patrolled by a few cars flashing chrome in the sun or headlights through the evening blue like messages from the city. Every one of the boys used the raft several times that summer to get across the river and back, the accomplishment proof of their new masculinity. And once the younger one, who spent time looking at that other land, crossed and climbed up the bank there and explored the shadows between the rows of corn, the leaves like dry tongues along his naked arms as he came to the field’s far edge where the asphalt of that highway stood empty.

  Toward the cool end of the evenings, any boy left out on the raft in the lapping black water would be too far from shore to hear the conversations. They went on against a background noise of the fire the boys always built against the river’s grey mist and mosquito lust, that they sometimes built for roasting corn, hot dogs, marshmallows. The conversations went on along with or over games of chess. Years later, one of the older boys, watching his own son play the game with a friend in silence, wondered if perhaps that was why their conversations that year of the raft about cars, guitars, and girls – especially each other’s sisters – about school and beer, always ended up in stalemate or check. Most of the boys ended up winning only their own solitariness from the conversations by the river. But the one who had only a father never even learned the rules of play.

  One sunny Sunday after church, late in the summer, the one who had only a father sat on the raft in the river as the rest of the boys undressed. He smiled at the boy who had gone across through the corn, who made it into the water first. Then he stood up and the raft made waves as gentle as those in his blue-black hair – I’m the king of the raft, he yelled, challenging the boy who had seen the highway to win that wet, wooden square. And a battle was joined, and the day was wet and fair, until the king of the raft, to show his strength to the rest of the boys still on shore, took a hank of the highway boy’s straight hair in hand and held the highway boy underwater till the highway boy saw blue fire and almost drowned. The story went around among the mothers and the fathers, and soon that son who had only a father found himself unwelcome. Other stories came around, rumours about his getting into fights or failing grades or how his father’s latest girlfriend had dyed her Indian hair blonde. And the boy who almost had drowned found he both feared the king of the raft and missed the waves in his blue-black hair.

  One muggy evening when pale thunderheads growled in from the west, the boy who had almost drowned, who had the farthest to go to get home, left the raft and the rest by the river early. On the dark road he met the king, who had something to say. They hid together with a case of beer in a cool culvert under the road. The king of the raft was going away with his father to live in Buffalo in the United States and thought the boy who had almost drowned could use what was left of this beer the king’s father would never miss. The boy who had almost drowned sipped from his bottle of sour beer and heard the rain beginning to hiss at the end of the culvert. He crawled and looked out in time to see the blue fire of lightning hit a tree. In the flash he saw again the waves in the king’s blue-black hair, the grin that offered another beer. The boy who had almost drowned felt he was going down again, and, muttering some excuse, ran out into the rain. The king yelled after him that old insult boys used about your mother wanting you home.

  The boy who had almost drowned found he could cross through the rain, anchored by his old running shoes to the ground, though the water came down like another river, cold and clear and wide as the horizon. He made it home and stood on the porch waiting for the other side of the storm, hearing hail hitting the roof and water through the eaves filling up the cistern. Later, out of the storm, he could still hear far-off a gurgling in the gully and a quiet roar as the distant river tore between its banks. The storm still growled somewhere beyond the eastern horizon.

  The raft was gone the next evening when the boys came to the bank, and the current was still too cold and quick to swim in. No one crossed the river for the rest of the summer. The king of the raft never appeared again anywhere. In the fall, a rumour came around about his going to work in the city and in the winter another one claimed he had died. The boy who had crossed through the rain thought about going down even quicker in winter river water. Then a newspaper confirmed the death. In a traffic accident, the rain boy read. None of the boys had even met that impaired driver, that one of the fathers, surviving and charged without a licence. One of the mothers muttered as she set another mother’s hair about people not able to care even about their kids. The rain boy let the king of the raft sink into the river, washing him away in his mind and decided he would someday cross over and follow the highway through that land and find the city.

  Joseph Boyden

  Born With A Tooth

  My wolf hung at the trading post for two weeks until that new teacher up from Toronto bought him. My long-legged Timber with half a left ear. A local trapper snared and sold my wolf to Trading Post Charlie, who skinned him and pinned him on the wall next to the faded MasterCard sign. He was worth more than $250.

  The teacher’s been here less than a month, sent to us by the Education Authority at Christmastime so the rez kids can learn the Queen’s English. They gave him a little house and a parka, and I think he’s lonely like me and has got a lot to watch and learn. He knows nothing about a snowmobile or guns or the bush or the insult and danger of looking in the eyes. I can tell by watching him. Maybe I can teach him. He’s got a thin face and he’s
tall and awkward. My face is round, and I can drive a snowmobile as good as Lucky Lachance.

  The one and only Lucky Lachance is my uncle, gone for four days of every week. He knows something’s wrong because lately he comes back from work saying, “Just because your name’s Sue Born With A Tooth doesn’t mean you have to stay on this reservation the rest of your life, Jesus fuck.” He works for the Ontario Northland railway on the Polar Bear Express. His train runs from Cochrane to Moosonee, mostly taking tourists in summer and supplies in winter across Northern Ontario and up to our stomping ground on the bottom tip of James Bay. The tourists call it the wilderness, but Lucky Lachance calls it the asshole of Hudson Bay. He’s French Canadian and he’s got a dirty mouth. His sister is my mother, and I think my father’s most probably dead. My father came carrying my name with him from somewhere out west. He brought my name to this place of Blueboys and Whiskeyjacks and Wapachees and Netmakers and even in this place my name stands out. Eighteen years ago my mother sewed my father his first suit, and seventeen years ago he got her pregnant with me. All I know is he was full-blood Cree and belonged to the Bear Clan. In grade four I learned that the name for French and Indian mixed is Metis. I always thought that around here that made me nothing special times two.

  Lucky says I’m looking into my fucking womanhood, and if I want to see the world he’ll get me a free train ticket to Cochrane. He says it’s time to stop moping around. “If you’re not in school, it’s time to work,” he says. But I don’t want to leave Moose Factory. I can’t imagine another place where in summer you have to canoe or take a motorboat or a water taxi to the mainland and in winter they plough a road across the ice so cars can come back and forth. My mother wants me to learn how to sew.

  Trading Post Charlie might have wondered why I was around the store so often the two weeks the wolf was there. I didn’t buy anything. Charlie’s fifty and is comfortable around me and pointed out all the pictures of his grandkids under the glass countertop once, but I could see his wife was jealous, me coming every day to drink free coffee and smoke her husband’s cigarettes. She figured my visits out, though. Charlie’s wife sold my wolf to the teacher yesterday.

  For fourteen days I just showed up in the morning, knocking snow off my boots and letting a steam of cold air in through the door. I tried to learn how to drink Charlie’s coffee and tried to make Charlie tell me everything he knew about the wolf. I think Charlie probably did know it was the wolf I came for, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye, or anyone else for that matter. He’s OjiCree and too polite. He doesn’t talk much, just sells milk and bread and shotgun shells to the locals, pelts and Indian crafts to summer tourists.

  But Charlie finally began to talk when he saw I wasn’t going anywhere. “The trapper got the wolf in a snare. That blizzard come up off the bay, and the trapper figures it was two or three days the wolf choked slow before the lines could be checked again. The trapper said he ended the choke with a bullet in the wolf’s brain.” Later Charlie said, “It’s the rare one that comes to the island and stays for long. Trapper’d seen the wolf’s prints in the snow last winter. This winter too. He tracked him a while. Usually a pack comes across the ice for a night of following moose, but they never stay so close to humans long.”

  I imagined I could see the black wire mark when I ran my hand against his fur. He’d already started collecting dust.

  My wolf was skinny but brave. He came to see me often that winter two years ago, disappeared before spring, then came back again the next freeze. I watched him and loved him.

  I still can’t sleep, my head wandering and thinking the wolf waits outside for me. There aren’t too many reasons to go outside in the dark when it’s minus forty and trees pop and crack in the cold. Tonight marks that night two winters ago.

  I couldn’t get comfortable in bed so I pulled my parka and mukluks on and went outside. It was the cold that makes your fingers burn through mittens and the moisture in your nose freeze and your toes ache no matter how many pairs of socks you wear. I walked just to walk, south on our road, smelling the woodsmoke and watching sparks fly from neighbours’ chimneys. I looked up at the black and tried to find Mars and Venus, the stars that don’t twinkle. I was hoping to see the northern lights. I wanted to walk quiet like the ancestors because I could sense them behind rocks and perched in the scrub pines, watching me and judging me. But my feet crunched on the dry snow and echoed in my ears under my hat loud enough that I felt silly. If the ancestors had been around, I had scared them away.

  When I got to the edge of Charles Island, I lit a smoke and looked out at the ice highway running across the bay to Moosonee’s twinkling lights. That’s when I first came across him. I heard his paws in the snow, so I took my toque off to hear him better. I walked home slowly and felt his eyes on my back, but it wasn’t spooky, only like an old friend come back to visit. Even though my ears hurt, I kept my hat off because I knew he was there. He followed me home but didn’t show his face till the next night. That’s when I laid my trap. Lucky’s friend had gutted a moose, and I stole some innards and put them in a snowbank in our backyard. That next night I waited by the window for him, waited until past two. Then he appeared like a ghost or a shadow, slinking, lean, sniffing and jittery. I watched him drag my present into the bush.

  Charlie tells me his name is Michael and he’s only been teaching for two years. Lucky calls him a city slicker cocksucker and asks me what this guy thinks he can teach anyone. I follow this teacher to the trading post and coffee shop and post office. He never knows it. I wait for school to let out and follow to see where he lives. He walks along with his parka hood up, dragging his boots and humming.

  I start thinking I want him to notice me, so I get bolder, crossing the street when he does and walking by him, or taking a seat near him at Trapper’s Restaurant and only ordering a coffee. When he looks at me, I look away. When he smiles at me, I walk away.

  It was three months, close to the ice breakup that first winter, before my wolf finally trusted me enough to stay in sight when I came outside. All winter I’d watched from the living-room window after Mom and Lucky had gone to their beds. At first I tried luring him with pieces of chicken or whitefish. I’d sit on the back step with my hand outstretched, waiting. But he wouldn’t leave the shadows. So I’d arrange the scraps in a circle and go inside to my window perch and watch him slink across the yard. He knew I was there but wouldn’t look up. He grew fuller and less jumpy. The night he finally ate from my hand, I knew something was going special.

  Michael comes up to me at the coffee shop today and asks if he can sit by me. I say, “Okay,” so he sits directly across the table and asks questions.

  “Why don’t I see you at the high school?” he says. I just shrug. He’ll learn soon enough. Most of the rez kids make it to grade nine. That’s when the government says it’s legal to leave school behind. And that’s when a lot of us know it’s right. He asks me what my name is, and I tell him I’m Sue Born With A Tooth. He stares at my eyes, and I want to ask him if he’s trying to insult me, but that would be rude. He’s got little whiskers and his skin is very white and the fur on his hanging parka hood frames his jaw nicely. He says my hair is long and black and pretty, and I tell him I have to go. I leave change on the table and walk outside.

  “Can we have coffee again?” he asks, following me out.

  “I guess,” I say.

  “When?” he asks. “Tomorrow?”

  “I guess,” I say.

  On the night he first touched me, I had no meat to offer the wolf, just bone and gristle. But he was lonely and I was too. It was the act of offering and the middle of a long night and each of us growing used to one another. I held the bone in my bare hand and felt the moisture on my fingers freeze to a throb. I walked to the middle of the yard. He was in the shadows but slowly walked up when I stretched out my hand. He padded slow and tense from his hiding place and raised the fur on his neck. It made him look bigger and mean, and he kept walking out as I
stood slumped and relaxed buty wanting to explode inside. He stopped a couple of metres from me. I thought that would be as close as he’d come, but I kept my stare focused on the snow by his feet. He walked closer, till his nose twitched by my hand. He flattened his ears back and I looked at the left one, ragged and bitten or shot half off. I felt his eyes on mine, so I looked too. Yellow eyes. Harvest moons. He smiled at me with his black lips and opened his mouth and the white teeth gently took the bone. He turned around and trotted slowly back to the edge of the bush, then turned his head to me before disappearing.

  I often wondered where he went all day, whether he was safe or if his visits put him in danger. I wanted to ask Lucky about the hunters on the island. I wanted to know if they knew about my stray. No one ever talked about any wolf tracks near their door in the mornings after a new snowfall. But still, I worried for him.

  My mother talks so little that there are people in Moose Factory who believe she doesn’t know how to. She works with her sewing machine out of the house. She’s very small and very smart. You can see it in her shiny black eyes, “C’est dommage. It is too bad there is so much of your father in you,” she tells me. “Unable to sleep at night, always wanting to dance with the ghosts.” I wonder how much she actually sees and how much she knows to sense. I’ve watched her sew for hours, and the day comes that I will stitch too, but for now I get everything I need from a few coins in Lucky’s money jar.

  Michael asks me out to drink coffee most days after his teaching and continues staring at my eyes. I want to tell him that I don’t think I really like coffee after all and that we should go to his house and smoke cigarettes instead. Lucky saw us and teases me at home.

  “Sue hangs out with the city fuck. The skinny cocksucker thinks he’s going to get some French and Indian ass at the same time, eh? He thinks the Metis like to mate, eh?” His words make me run to my room. But Lucky always knocks gently and tells me he is sorry. He says, “Metis means that you are stuck in the middle, Sue.”