The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama
Page 23
FATHER
My daughter will save us all.
OLD MAN
So lovely, that girl.
MOTHER
Let him have her.
OLD MAN
Oh thank you, thank you.
GRAND
You can’t fight witches you can’t see.
OLD MAN
I will fight them. For her, I will fight them.
GIRL
(with bucket, entering) Grandma, my uncle and cousin, at the creek, said my father—
FATHER
Here I am, girl. Come here.
GRAND
No. Over here.
GIRL
What is it, Grandma?
GRAND
Come. Sit by me.
FATHER
Sit with your Grandma.
GIRL
What’s wrong? You guys fighting again?
MOTHER
Be quiet.
FATHER
This is the trader.
OLD MAN
Hello, Girl.
FATHER
Listen to your Grandma. She has something to ask.
GIRL
What is it, Mama?
MOTHER
Listen to her.
GRAND
This man?
GIRL
Why’s he looking at me?
GRAND
He’s brought us some medicines.
FATHER
He might make you better.
OLD MAN
I’ll try.
FATHER
He says he’s going to stop the dying.
GIRL
Stop the dying?
GRAND
He needs help. Will you help him?
GIRL
Me? How?
GRAND
Will you marry him—?
FATHER
Marry him—
MOTHER
Marry him!
GRAND
Will you be his wife—?
MOTHER
His wife—
FATHER
His wife!
GRAND
Look at me. What’s the matter?
GIRL
A pain. Like a blade.
MOTHER
Good for nothing.
UNCLE
(O.S.) Mother? Mother, are you there?
The Girl’s UNCLE, a scrap of blanket in hand, enters, followed by her AUNT and the BOY.
GRAND
What is it, son?
UNCLE
Look at this. Look.
MOTHER
What’s wrong, brother?
UNCLE
This is the blanket. This is all that’s left.
BOY
It reeks!
UNCLE
The platform’s a mess.
GRAND
What are you talking about? This is what blanket?
UNCLE
Where we put my wife and child. It’s gone.
FATHER
The platform’s gone?
UNCLE
Their bodies are gone.
OLD MAN
This is witchcraft.
UNCLE
Witchcraft?
OLD MAN
This is the witchcraft for sure. Witches use dead bodies in their tricks.
GRAND
What’s going on...?
OLD MAN
What else could it be? I hate to think what those witches will do to that poor little baby’s body.
UNCLE
I’ll kill them! Show me how!
MOTHER
Don’t cry, brother.
UNCLE
I’ll kill them.
OLD MAN
Will you give her to me now? I promise I’ll kill them. I’ll stop the dying.
MOTHER
We can fix things now.
GRAND
I feel like crying.
MOTHER
Grey Hair knows how.
OLD MAN
Give her to me!
GRAND
Go on. Go to him.
GIRL
Mama? Papa?
GRAND
Go to Grey Hair. Take his hand.
GIRL
Grandma, no.
FATHER
You’ll do as you’re told—
MOTHER
Do as you’re told!
GRAND
You’ll marry him in the morning.
OLD MAN
I’ll treat you good. I’ll make you better.
GIRL
No!
The GIRL exits at a run.
SCENE 8
The new moon hangs over Niagara Falls. The BOY sits in his mother’s lodge in the village. The moon grows full during the BOY’s monologue and dawn comes at the monologue’s end.
BOY
Who knew she could run like that? But that old man, hey, you’d run away from him too.
They chased her – we chased her, out of the village. Down the street, through the gate, into the dark. Mostly it was her father, her uncle and me chasing, us and the dogs. Everybody looked at us like we were crazy. Maybe we were. The dogs barking, thinking it was all a game.
Out the gate into the dark and once around the fields, like she used to playing tag. I could have caught her, I saw what she was up to then, circling back, but— Later on my mom says, You know, pumpkin; yeah, like I’m still her pumpkin— You know, I used to think maybe you and her would get together someday. I mean I’d never thought of it before that but I think I probably thought so too, yeah, otherwise why’d I let her get away like that? I thought about it later a lot, because I thought I’d let her go die.
Yeah, she runs out along the path, along the creek past the springs and gets to the river and gets cornered there out on the point. I don’t think she’s ever been that far from the village before.
I catch up to the men in time to see her climbing into a canoe.
What it’s doing there, who knows, but it’s white like the moon, like the birch bark ones the Ojibwa use, so afterwards her mother says that proves it was just more witchery. It’s strange to see, the way it moves out over the river, over the rapids, like a bit of light on the surface, and her not needing to paddle it at all. We call after her to come back. Her grandmother and the other women are there too by now, calling her, saying she don’t have to marry the trader after all. He’s standing there, just standing there grinning all three teeth, watching it all.
All too late. The canoe rides out to the brink of the falls, out toward the thunderhead of mist, rides out and goes, just like that. No one else sees it. I ask. There’s a rainbow, yeah, the ghost of a rainbow there in the dark, just where she’s disappeared.
We can’t find her, or the canoe. Or the old man – he just isn’t there the next morning. We keep on looking for her though, her grandmother’s so sad, right until freeze up. Her grandmother starts to get old. Her uncle too. Her father and mother can’t even look at each other anymore on the street. My ma and me, we try to help—
And then one day, in the spring, walking back in through the gate and up the street, there she is, big as life— Big with life, mutters my ma, dogs and kids following her, following her past her grandmother’s house, her father’s house, straight into the meeting, the meeting of the council.
SCENE 9
Day. The Girl’s MOTHER, GRANDmother and AUNT sit on one side of the council house, her FATHER, UNCLE and the BOY sit on the other, the GIRL stands in the space in the centre near the fire. They stare at her.
BOY
She looked around.
GIRL
They were just staring!
BOY
Then her grandmother—
GRAND
Are you alive?
GIRL
I’m alive, Grandma!
BOY
Then the rest of us, we got brave enough to touch her too. Her story was—
GIRL
I’ve been in the caves. The
caves under the falls? With the God of Cloud and Rain. The Thunderer. His helpers saved me. When that witch canoe—
MOTHER
It was a witch!
GIRL
When it carried me away over the falls—
GRAND
I wanted to cry!
GIRL
—the God’s Helper caught me in a rainbow blanket. He took me into their lodge and gave me rainwater and made me well.
Sunset. Moonrise.
GRAND
We were so sad.
AUNT
We missed you, didn’t we, son?
MOTHER
What about the witch?
GIRL
The God’s Helper, he told me the witch is still there. On the island in the river.
FATHER
The Grey Hair!
GIRL
Watching for his chance at the rest of us.
GIRL
The Grey Hair’s been trading with a giant snake, it lives underground, dreaming of the meat from dead bodies. The Grey Hair’s been trading our dead for power.
UNCLE
A snake that big must get hungry—
GIRL
So that old man’s been poisoning our springs.
GRAND
So we die before our time. It isn’t fair.
Moonset. Sunrise.
BOY
So the very next day—
FATHER
—we moved the village across the river, away from the snake and the poison.
AUNT
We weren’t there four days before there’s this rumbling coming louder than the falls.
BOY
Worse than the ice at break up.
UNCLE
That snake must have been hungry!
AUNT
It crawled out right in broad daylight.
MOTHER
It’s following us! If it gets across the river—
AUNT
Nobody could miss it. The earth was shaking and quaking!
UNCLE
Look at the size of that thing!
BOY
Thick as an oak.
AUNT
Where’s it going?
MOTHER
It’s heading for the river!
UNCLE
Look at that thunderhead!
GRAND
It’s walking off the river.
BOY
The Thunderer! It’s the Thunderer!
MOTHER
He’s chasing that snake.
FATHER
He’s throwing rocks at it.
AUNT
They’re turning into bolts of lightning.
UNCLE
Lightning bolts!
BOY
The snake’s trying to bite at them but they’re too bright!
FATHER
Too loud!
UNCLE
Too many forks!
GIRL
And sharper than it’s own tongue. The snake’s dead.
Sunset.
BOY
The body falls into the river and floats down stream.
MOTHER
That body floated by—
FATHER
—and by—
UNCLE
—and by...
AUNT
Lullaby?
Moonrise.
BOY
Then the body gets stuck—
FATHER
—stuck on the rocks—
UNCLE
—at the brink of the Falls.
MOTHER
Under all that weight—
GRAND
—the rocks there finally give way.
AUNT
Crash!
FATHER
Boom!
BOY
Bang!
AUNT
What a mess!
BOY
Which is why those falls don’t go straight across today.
GIRL
That crash wrecks the God’s cave, so he and his Helper pick up and move out west somewhere. I never saw him again.
AUNT
Typical!
The sun and moon both rise over Niagara Falls.
MOTHER
Later, she whispers to her mother about the God’s Helper.
GIRL
I’m not afraid because he’s so beautiful. I can’t see his face but I know he’s beautiful. He speaks to me. His voice is soft, like falling rain far away on leaves, even though he’s right here beside me. The words he uses, it’s strange, but I understand him all right. He puts a finger to my lips and kisses me.
MOTHER
Later, she makes her mother a grandmother.
BOY
Later, we— We have other children, but when her oldest child grows to be a man, he almost kills me with a lightning ball.
GIRL
So I send him west.
BOY
To live in his father’s new house.
GRAND
She lives to be as old as her grandmother.
BOY
The witch disappears from the island and is also never seen again.
GRAND
For which we give thanks.
GIRL
We give thanks to our Mother, the Earth, for sustaining us.
BOY
We thank the rivers and streams for giving us water.
MOTHER
We give thanks to all herbs who furnish medicines for the cure of our sicknesses.
GRAND
We thank the Corn, and her sisters, the Beans and Squashes, who give us life.
UNCLE
We give thanks to the bushes and trees for their fruit.
AUNT
We thank the wind who banishes sicknesses.
FATHER
We give thanks to the moon and stars who give us their light when the sun is gone.
GIRL
We thank our grandfather, the Thunderer, for protecting his grandchildren from witches and serpents, and for giving us his rain.
BOY
We give thanks to the sun for looking upon the earth with a beneficent eye.
GRAND
Finally, we thank the Giver of Life, who embodies all goodness and who directs all things for the good of his children.
The sun and moon both set over Niagara Falls.
The End
Katharina Vermette
what ndns do
i walk home with rita just after midnight. we had left the bar after only three beer. a week night and i promised i wouldn’t keep her out too late.
the night is brisk, too cold for first snow. we are walking fast, puffing on smokes, and swimming in the shallow waters of only three beer. we are so weary. weary from our work weeks, weary of our sadnesses. she is seeing a white guy she isn’t really into. i am suffering from my most recent broken wing, the first guy i’ve been excited about in a long, long
such a long time.
i had made a wish this past summer - i wanted so badly to be excited about someone. only, i forgot to order that he should be excited about me too.
“it wasn’t right for him to treat you like that,” rita spits out cigarette smoke and ill will. “i think i might’ve lost all respect for him.” she pauses her speech to inhale, then flicks her butt down the sidewalk without losing a pinch of stride. “i hope you know that, lou. i hope you know that that is how rude he was.”
“i did my fair share of fuckery, reet” i defend.
“naw i don’t believe that,” she shakes her head, combs her long bare fingers through her messy black hair. “i think it would have turned out the same no matter what you did.”
i shrug in the new cold knowing rejection stings like the first bite of winter, a shock you will get used to in a few days. adapt to.
“it was so... deliberate, his shtick, his...” she made a fishing motion with her cold, red hands - the universal sign of casting out and reeling in.
“but i was the one who asked him out!” still d
efending.
“that just told him you were up for it, babe.”
“really?” i ask.
“yes” rita says definitively. “really!”
“that’s sad.” i say and mean it.
“tell me about it” she looks aside at me.
i think i see pity.
i am happy she loves me enough to feel protective, and i didn’t entirely disagree with her. but still, if i was being truthful, i am also happy to have had his attention, if only
for a little while.
i saw you like i see everything, like it is poetry. your story, your narrative arc was just a path to me, a path meandering off into the distant landscape. so many of us are so distracted by the twists, the turns, the journey. but me, no, i didn’t care much about all that. i was bent at the side of your road, distracted by a simple pretty little flower growing wild and unnoticed. i wanted to know its pedals, its stem and leaves. had no interest in your story, what has been, said, so many times before, the typicals, the ego. i was only hung up on those little bits, those tiny gems, flowers, those minute rays of light that shone out through the briefest cracks of your thick, iron clad, armour.
rita thinks i am too forgiving; i think she isn’t paying attention.
she assures me that he is just a good example of what arrogant ndns do. and i can only nod, not knowing what to say about this.
i don’t understand arrogance. never have. that blatant lack of humility, or more often, the indignant lack of self awareness. a thinly veiled attempt to ward off the merest trace of vulnerability.
maybe?
this latest misstep all started a few months ago. too long ago. not long at all. rita and i and a warm late spring patio night, patio season is so very short and oh so beloved. we sat nestled into oversized windows drinking tall pints in narrow glasses. smoking too many cigarettes.
i was recovering from the reality of my first one night stand since i was 19. it was relatively painless. considering. rita was looking forward to summer.
“hey, that guy you like is single now you know?” she said with a smirk over her half empty glass.
“what guy?” i grinned, sipping draft coyly knowing exactly who she was talking about even before she laughed her knowing laugh and lit another smoke.
i met you like a clap of thunder out of a near clear summer sky. you were a noise that demanded attention. and i remember you vivid, walking toward me with your beautiful bulk and latent cynicism. you shook my hand with a polite smile and all the things i wanted to do to your body flooded through my brain like prairie rain, solid, smooth, constant, heavy.
you said, nice to meet you.
i think my exact response was, uh duh duh.
then you introduced your girlfriend.
“so?” i smirked at rita.
and we laughed, rita and i, into the new light night. we laughed because we knew it was all good and nothing mattered and everything is so beautiful in june.