The Stone Collection

by Kateri Akiwenzi-Damm

  I took a few minutes to curl up in my sleeping bag and ease into the day. It reminded me of those summer mornings of my childhood when I would wake in the little back bedroom at my grandparents’ house on the rez. I’d stay in bed enjoying the smell of breakfast cooking and the warmth and peacefulness that permeated the house. I could sometimes hear chickadees or the chatter of chipmunks. Soon I’d be drawn out of bed by the promise of food and my curiosity about the laughter and conversation in the kitchen. When I’d wander into the kitchen still wearing my pajamas, rubbing my eyes, and yawning, my grandfather would tease me. “Dawn of the living dead” he’d call out. “Here’s one of the zombies now.” Everyone would laugh. Usually, that was my cue to walk with my arms straight out, legs stiff, eyes staring straight ahead until I reached the table and could swipe a piece of bacon. (Back when I still indulged in the pork.)

  Outside the tent, Jesse was humming. I smiled and stretched but didn’t rise. I’d never been with a man who made me feel as safe and happy as I felt those summer mornings at my grandparents’ home. Until that moment.

  “You awake?” Jesse called to me.

  I stretched.

  “Or do I have to come over there and get you up…”

  “You’ll have to come and get me,” I teased as I stretched out, waiting.

  When I was a child my grandmother told me stories about an old woman she knew as a child. This woman was a Bear Walker and my grandmother, although young, had heard stories about her for as long as she could remember. The woman’s granddaughter, Elsie, was my grandma’s childhood friend. One time my grandmother stayed at this girl’s house overnight.

  “We slept upstairs in a loft with her grandma. During the night, I woke. Moonlight was streaming through the window. I saw that old woman, Old Ahkiiqua we called her, standing naked in ribbons of light.” Grandma would pause to see if I was paying attention.

  “Then what?” I’d ask as if I hadn’t heard the story dozens of times before.

  “I froze. But I couldn’t look away. I held my breath. I was scared and didn’t want to get caught spying on that old woman. I pretended I was sleeping—but I peeked through a spot between my hand and the blanket.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “I don’t think so. Old Ahkiiqua, she climbed onto the windowsill. She had crow feathers tied to her wrists, shoulders, and head, and crow’s feet lashed around her ankles.” She motioned with her hands.

  I stared at my own wrists, imagined them turning into wings.

  “Then,” said my grandma, “the Old Woman squatted on the edge of the windowsill.”

  I always shivered at this part, picturing the old woman perched there in the moonlight. Grandma always paused dramatically and I always raised my clenched hands up to my mouth ready to suppress a scream.

  “Then…” Grandma said, pausing again, “she turned her head and looked right at me!”

  At which point I’d squeal.

  “I felt her eyes schorching the air between us. I couldn’t breathe. Then, suddenly, she jumped from the windowsill. Spread her arms and jumped, just like that. I jolted forward as if I hoped to catch her before she fell. But instead of an Old Woman falling to the earth a large black bird flew from the window into the cold night air.”

  We let that sink in.

  “I never again stayed at Elsie’s house.”

  “I wouldn’t either!” I’d yell out.

  Grandma would laugh and shrug her shoulders. “That’s just how it was back when I was a girl,” she said.

  I was relieved but also a bit jealous that I didn’t have to worry about my friends’ grandmas transforming into birds at all hours.

  “Tell me again,” I’d say, absolutely fascinated by the idea of a little girl’s grandmother turning into a crow and flying into the night. “Please, Noko.”

  My brother has this theory. “We all want to fly,” he says.

  “No,” I say, “some of us want to fly and some of your stupid friends just want to get high.”

  But I only say that to be a smartass because that’s how my brother Fizz and I talk to each other. It started when we were tweeners and hasn’t stopped since.

  Anyway, despite my snarky remark, secretly, I believe him. We all envy birds and if we didn’t know the story about the guy plunging to his death after flying too close to the sun, we’d all be constructing wings in our basements, garages, or attics. We all want to be Superman or one of the other flying superheroes, not necessarily so we can do good deeds or wear tights and capes—though I’ve often wondered why my brother and his friends didn’t recognize a cross-dresser when they saw one—but just so we could stick our arms out and zoom off to impress the poor flightless schmucks standing there with their hands shielding their eyes as we set out to turn back time by flying backwards around the earth.

  “Hey, suckas, see ya yesterday!”

  And who doesn’t want to have a personal jetpack to strap on their back? Just every kid who ever watched the Jetsons, that’s who.

  “Okay, Mom, I’m off to visit Auntie Pat…” you could call out as you slipped your jetpack over your shoulder on your way out the door. “…in NEW ZEALAND,” you’d say real casual-like.

  “Okay, honey, but it’s Aotearoa. Don’t be late for dinner,” she’d say without even looking up. “We’re having moose-meat stew.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “And wear your helmet.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Oh, and pick up some poi on your way home, okay? Your Dad loves that stuff—that’s what I get for marrying a former US Marine stationed in Hawai’i.”

  “From the place in Hilo?”

  “Please.”

  “Sure thing, Mom,” you’d say as she mumbled something about the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement and the irony of falling in love with an American—an American MARINE for gawdsakes.

  “See you at 6:00.”

  I love birds. Except for crows. I don’t know what it is about crows. Maybe it was my grandmother’s story or Old John Rabbittail’s stories about crows, I don’t know. But they get on my nerves. You can’t go a damn place without a crow screeching from somewhere at you, sticking their beaks in your garbage, stealing your food, or laughing at you when you’re skinny-dipping with your boyfriend. Damn crows!

  John Rabbittail said that crows were the original colonizers. I thought it was a bit harsh but he was always saying provocative shit like that just to get people’s attention.

  “Yep,” he said pushing his lower lip over his upper until his face seemed to be in danger of being swallowed by itself. “Colonizers of the avian world,” he continued, releasing his jaw. “They go anywhere, steal the eggs of other birds, don’t seem to belong anywhere, take what they can get, and then some of them move on to do the same thing somewhere else. Buggers.”

  “Oooh-kay,” I said in that long drawn out way that suggests you think the other person is a nut.

  “And they don’t know enough to shut up!” He slams his mouth shut like he’s just made a very important pronouncement.

  Well, actually I had to agree with him on that. They do screech and carry on. Hmmm…I thought. Old Rabbittail might be on to something. And if crows weren’t my favourite birds as a kid they were certainly plummeting after John Rabbittail put his two-cents worth in the mix.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Damn loudmouth thieves!”

  That, I believe, was also the beginning of my burgeoning political consciousness.

  So, here’s a typical conversation between my brother and me:

  “If you don’t see that new anime film by Miyazaki, you’re stupid,” Fizz says completely out of the blue.

  “Hey, remember when Loretta and I each bet you a toonie you couldn’t eat a bowl of our homemade wasabi ice cream?” I respond in typical non sequitur.

  “You’re stupid.”

  “…mint ice cream and half a bottle of creamed horseradish…”

  “It’s all hand-drawn.”

  “…and
you were such a greedy brat you got to the next-to-last spoonful and got the heaves…”

  “It’s the best animated film ever,” Fizz says. “He’s the master.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone turn that colour of green.”

  “I hate you.”

  “So, because you didn’t finish it, we didn’t pay you.” Then I laugh. “Do you want to go to the early show or the late show?”

  My brother looks at me, rolls his eyes, and says, “Rub salt, Jackass.”

  “Mom likes me better,” I say.

  “You pay,” he says.

  Do you know what it means if you fly in your dreams?

  I used to date this guy, Junior Odemein, and he studied dreams. He was always telling me what his dream was about the night before and what it meant. This guy remembered everything in his dreams. I mean everything. It’d take him half an hour to describe one dream to me. The colours, the sounds, whether the water was hot or cold, how many windows in the building, on and on. That’s when I became a coffee addict. Sitting in Coffee Culture with Junior after school listening to him talk about his dreams then ramble on about every friggin’ nuance of each symbol, while I’m downing cup after cup of java with double cream. I didn’t know then that I was lactose intolerant—I blamed the gas on the fact that Junior was a windbag—I claimed it was contagious.

  But, in fact, I learned a lot from Junior. Not just about dreams either if you know what I mean. He had the hardest, best-defined abs of anyone I’ve ever met. Abs you could wash clothes on! Abs that could hold your filing! Abs that could save the world! Abs for world peace!

  “In the dream lexicon,” he says, “most of us speak a similar symbolic sort of language. Although some symbols have cultural meanings and some have personal meanings, kinda like dialects and accents.”

  “I’ll have a large coffee, double cream,” I say.

  “The idea is to understand your own dream language…”

  “Better give me an apple fritter while you’re at it,” I tell the uniformed kid behind the counter. That was also the year I gained five pounds. Of course that was before I read a book that told me that I can’t eat wheat or I’ll gain weight because I’ve got a hunter-gatherer metabolism.

  “What about abs in dreams?” I say. “What do rock-hard abs mean?”

  Junior got me interested in a lot of things. Dreams being one of the few I can talk about publicly. He told me that flying is one of the most positive things that can happen dream-wise. And the more you’re in control of the flying, the better. Like if you’re in a plane but someone else is piloting it, that’s good, but if you’re the pilot, it’s better, and if you’re the bird, the plane, or Superwoman flying around completely under your own power, it’s the best.

  Junior told me that this psychic poet guy he knew told him that you can learn to fly in your dreams and that you can do all sorts of things then, like flying into other people’s dreams, astral travelling, and all that.

  I was like, “Yeah, right. As if.” But actually, that was just to cover up the fact that I really, really wanted to fly and even flying in dreams sounded pretty damn cool. I started paying way more attention to my dreams after that.

  Besides getting me interested in the dream-world, Junior made other long-term impressions on me. The sight of firm, defined abs still makes me break into a 49er. “Darlin’ with the rock-hard abs, please dance over this way honey…”

  And when someone in my dream has a six-pack, I know exactly what that means. “…And take me home in your beat-up truck, waya hey-ya, hey-ya, ya-hey, OH!”

  For four years I tried to fly. After three years I could tell myself to walk in a certain direction in my dream and usually my dream self would do it. I could jump, skip, bounce, hop, and hip-hop…hell, I could spin on my head. But I could not fly.

  I got so desperate and impatient I thought about enlisting in the air force—but sanity prevailed and my girlfriend Roxy and I laughed for weeks about that.

  “You, in the military,” she said. “Wee-shtat-ahaa!”

  Roxy suggested I take flying lessons. Since I didn’t have $10,000 laying around or a rich terminally ill uncle in the cupboard, I gave up on that idea pretty damn quick. Then I thought I could take skydiving lessons. I’d get to be in a plane, which I thought sounded cool, and hurtling to the earth with a parachute strapped on my back would be close to flying, eh? The big problem is that I’m deathly afraid of heights. So, getting me up in a small airplane then expecting me to willingly jump out of it was a bit unrealistic. Roxy suggested hypnosis. Junior thought perhaps yoga and meditation would help and if that failed I could pull out the big guns and start doing sweats to help me overcome my fears. My brother gleefully offered to go up with me to give a helpful push.

  “I’ll even pay my own way,” he said.

  “Screw off.”

  “The end of your nose wiggles when you talk,” he replied.

  Reflexively, my hand touched the end of my nose. Bad idea. Very bad.

  “…Rabbit-kwe.”

  “Sally says kissing you was like kissing her little brother…”

  “It’ll be worth every penny,” he said giving the air a shove with his two hands.

  “…except he smells better.”

  I tried the hypnosis first. It didn’t help me overcome my fear of heights but I did lose five pounds and stop smoking so maybe my mind was wandering while I was staring at the necklace moving back and forth in the hypnotherapist’s hands.

  Yoga was also good. I lost another five pounds doing that and my flexibility was the best ever. Junior was thrilled, to say the least. It’s truly amazing how impressed men are by women who can bend and contort their bodies without falling over or getting a cramp at an inopportune time. Prior to yoga, I had no idea that flexible girls have more fun. A whole new world opened up to me.

  But I still broke into a sweat at the thought of jumping from a moving plane.

  Despite my brother’s constant offers to push me from a plane or tall building, I never did manage to skydive. However, I did start doing all sorts of things to overcome my fear of heights. Meditation, automatic writing, sweats, fasts, support groups. It dredged up all sorts of things I hadn’t expected. Did you know that anger is a mask for fear? And that fear covers up shame or hurt? I felt like a bloody onion and, although I began to recognize that the way I teased people was really a symptom of my deep-seated fear of abandonment, after a year I wasn’t any closer to skydiving or to astral travelling which is what had started it all in the first place. I was becoming discouraged, in a very non-judgmental, compassionate sort of way of course.

  Junior and I broke up around then.

  “You’re too angry,” he said. “I can’t talk to you anymore.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Maybe I’m angry because I am sick of listening to your endless boring monologues about your stupid freaky dreams!”

  “Quit projecting,” he said. The guy read way too many self-help books.

  “Project this,” I said, flipping him the bird.

  Soon we were both furious. So, of course, we had amazing sex, got back together, then broke up again a couple of days later just to make the breakup official.

  Looking back I think we were just looking for different things at the time. Junior wanted a tantric sex partner with an uncanny ability to hang on his every word. I wanted a man who would shut up and teach me to fly. A man with rock-hard abs.

  “Way-hey-ya ya-hey-OH!”

  It was about that time I decided that the most logical thing to do was to date a pilot. ‘But of course,’ I thought. ‘I can solve my fear of heights, get free flights and maybe an occasional flying lesson, and get some much-needed nookie all from the same source.’ All I had to do was find a gorgeous, single bush pilot with a six-pack, and I’d be all set. The perfect plan!

  Of course I had no idea how difficult it is to find a single, gorgeous bush pilot—with or without killer abs. Even commercial pilots don’t have to be hunky any more. And
which idiot at the airlines decided that flight attendants now need to be funny, not spunky? I mean, every time I fly now they’re carrying on like they’re auditioning for a spot on Last Comic Standing. “Hey, Ladies and Germs, welcome aboard. A funny thing happened to me on the way to the airport….” Suddenly, Junior’s prattle about dreams didn’t seem so bad.

  But I am nothing if not persistent.

  “Stubborn,” Fizz says, “you are a stubborn pain-in-the….”

  Amazing how a sturdy flick of the nose helps my brother to see me differently. And when he’s bent over holding his nose like that, well, call me sentimental, I see him differently too. So, it turns out those Zen vegan optimists are right—it is all good.

  Needless to say, I spent a long, frustrating couple of seasons hanging around the local airport and flying school trying to fulfill an unattainable dream.

  Then, one day I walked into the restaurant in town and there he was.

  Jesse Jones.

  I stared at him until he noticed me then I spent the rest of the time ignoring him. (I read a book one time that told women that showing interest then playing hard to get is the sure-fire way to get a man’s attention. Sadly, it’s true!) I ignored him so vigorously that I have never examined a meal as closely as I did that day. Did you know that if you stare at each item of food before you put it in your mouth, it tastes better and you eat less? Apparently that is called “mindful eating” and it’s very popular amongst people who meditate and want to be thin or have lost their money and don’t want to be seen at the local food bank. Them and people who are paranoid about being poisoned or who are trying really hard to ignore the new talent at the table across from them. Mindful eating: yet another bit of useful information from my time with Junior. Yep, I stared and stared and slowly chewed and chewed and, I must confess, a toasted egg sandwich and fries never tasted so good. Seriously. Even the ketchup seemed particularly red and delicious. Mindfulness really works. Try it.