I watched them getting on the train, not into the passenger cars — they went into the big open baggage cars. More and more and more kids. Some guy in a uniform pulled the sliding door across. I saw a face in the crack just before it closed. The face of a girl about my age with a scarf on her head. Her eyes were big white circles. The guy in the uniform pulled the door again and the girl’s face disappeared. He bolted the door closed. More trains, more people, more guys in uniforms with dogs. The camera pulled back to a shot from above showing the train moving across a field. Then night, and searchlights pointed at the train. The doors opened and bodies fell out. I thought they must have fainted because there were so many people crammed together on the train. Lines of people were loaded into big open-backed trucks. Trucks moved through the night and fog towards a building. A building that looked like the residential school.
Then men. I saw naked men. Stark naked. I’d never seen a naked man before. I’d seen girls at swimming class in the change room but never a naked man. I saw a long line of old naked men facing me and I thought oh god, oh god what kind of a movie did I walk into? I looked down the aisle to see if I could squeeze past the couple at the end. Their knees were sticking out so far I wouldn’t be able to get past them. I looked to my left. A few men were sitting at the end of the aisle. In front another man and woman — they looked old — and beside them some men were sitting alone.
I looked up again. Shaved heads. Striped pajamas. Inside the long low buildings, rows and rows of bunk beds stacked with people like chickens in a chicken coup. A woman’s big white scared eyes, like the eyes of the girl on the train. The music was creepy and sad.
The barbed wire fence again, and there was a man hanging on it, the tops of his fingers curled over the fence. Curled over like Nakina’s fingers the day I saw her climbing the chain-link fence. His head was tilted back, a hole through his forehead, and because the movie was in black and white the blood that dripped down his cheek was black. The camera pulled back and I saw that he was hanging dead on the fence, hooked there by the collar of his coat.
Rows and rows of men and boys — naked again but this time their legs were thin and I could see their ribs, and I didn’t think it was dirty that they were naked because their faces were so sad and their bodies so thin, and their penises were small and shrivelled. I wanted to wrap them in warm blankets.
I saw a country cottage. A man in a uniform with a swastika on his shoulder and a woman in a flower print dress were having tea in front of the fireplace. There was a dog beside them. The woman looked bored.
I saw the date 1942 on the screen, then more men in uniforms looking at a model of a building with a brick chimney. More trains, more trucks and women and children herded naked into the buildings with the chimneys — then bodies on the floor. I couldn’t look at the subtitles anymore, I couldn’t take my eyes off the children. Now women and children were standing in a field in front of a firing squad. There was a crack of fire as the guns went off and the women and children fell. A muffled cry, then weeping. Was it me? No, the older woman two rows down in front of me was crying. She had her head on the shoulder of the man beside her.
A body in a bed. He was dead but his eyes were wide open. That terror look again — the eyes all white. I wanted to close my eyes but I couldn’t. Piles of eyeglasses and combs, and the camera panned back to show a large pile of human hair then farther back to show a wide field of human hair. Furnace doors opened and human bones were shovelled out. I remembered what Nakina had said — genocide — the slaughter of a race.
Piles of body parts, unattached legs still wearing socks, hands over legs over heads. A tin pail of men’s heads, all with their eyes open. A head upside down with a big black hole where an eye should have been. Then a tractor. It moved slowly, slowly forward, scooping up bodies in its shovel. Forward slowly, arms, legs, ribs, heads rolled and writhed in a strange dance. A muffled scream and this time it was me.
There was colour now. Green. The wide green field. And below the words: “Who amongst us will keep watch for the new executioner? Who amongst us will keep watch?”
The lights came on in the theatre and I lowered my head and closed my eyes. I could hear the people shuffling out. I waited until it was silent, then I waited a few moments longer before moving out into the bright sun of the afternoon.
Standing at the corner of Main Street I could see both theatres. The marquee of the Odeon Theatre read Night and Fog and the marquee of the Capital Theatre read A Hard Day’s Night.
I dreamt about the Stone Man that night. He was standing in the harbour holding the hand of a little girl. The girl I’d seen on the train before the door slid shut. The girl with the scarf over her head and big white scared eyes. I could see her lips open just a bit, like she was trying to say something to me, but before I could hear what she was saying the Stone Man let go of her hand, and she sank slowly into Lake Superior. I woke up screaming and when I finally got back to sleep I dreamt I saw the Stone Man again, holding a bucket towards me. I looked in the bucket and saw a bunch of heads, some of them with black holes where their eyes should have been. The faces smiled and started singing, “It’s been a hard day’s night.”
I never told mom and dad about the movie. Don’t know why. Just didn’t, or couldn’t. Just went on with the same old, same old. We ate dinner on TV tables watching new stuff burn on the five o’clock news: burning bras, burning draft cards and Quakers, who started burning themselves on the streets like the Buddhist monks. Toasted Quaker Oats.
I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV. I liked his big sad head. After a while the nightmares went away.
chapter four
I stepped off the curb and stood in the middle of First Avenue holding my brownie camera in front of my face. “Nakina!”
“What?”
“I said watch for cars.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m trying to take a freakin photo and I don’t want to get run over.”
I was creating my masterpiece. It was 4 p.m. on March 25, 1968, and I was capturing Fort McKay for posterity. Well, maybe not posterity — I just wanted to freeze-frame what I was looking at right there the way it was. No smoke and mirrors, just the main street of the town in the raw. I shot in black and white and tried to keep everything simple. I took a photo of the clock in the Empire tower and the basket man pushing a baby carriage full of wicker baskets in front of the hardware store. I took a photo of Mary Christmas.
I never knew what her real name was, but everyone called her Mary Christmas because she wore these red and green ribbons in her hair. She was pretty festive with her make-up too. She painted bright red circles on her cheeks and when she put on her ruby red lipstick she drew outside the lines. She was old and wore a ratty fur coat that almost touched the ground. She was always wandering up and down the street talking to people or just talking away to herself. Seemed happy. Everybody knew her.
The story was she came over from the Ukraine when she was just a kid, and she was supposed to marry some guy who was waiting for her in Canada. It was all arranged like that back then. Problem was, when she got to the dock in Fort McKay — no husband. No one ever showed up to get her. That was in about nineteen twenty-something, and this poor kid was standing on the dock with her Ukrainian bride’s ribbons in her hair going nuts and screaming in Ukrainian because she didn’t speak any English. No one knew what to do with her, so they took her to the nuthouse. No kidding. She stayed there most of her life too. Eventually some Ukrainian folks helped her find a place to stay — but by then she was old. Well anyway, that’s the story.
I took the photos in black and white and planned to paint them like that too. I was thinking about that movie Night and Fog and how it was mostly black and white, so when there was anything in colour you knew it was important. For the photo of Mary Christmas, when I painted her I would paint her lips and cheeks red.
I took a photo
of the Odeon Theatre. Fahrenheit 451 was playing. It was directed by Francis Truffaut but because some of the lights on the marquee were burned out it said “directed by –ranci-T---f-a-t” Ha. I took a photo of the brass bells in the steeple of Knox United Church, and I took a photo of the park across from the church with the old chestnut tree.
I took a whole series of photos of the Lorna Doone Tea Room. The Doone from the inside, the Doone from the outside, the Doone dog — classic. Nakina was with me that day — a rare event that spring. I took a shot of Nakina inside the Doone, and then I went outside when she was eating and took a shot of her through the window. The lights of the neon sign made her face green.
She didn’t know I was taking the picture. She was looking straight ahead and had this faraway look on her face. Nakina always had attitude — always ready with a smart-ass remark or a joke, but that day I saw something different. That day she looked serious — maybe angry. When I went back in she was drinking a Coke and talking to the waitress, who bounced her cig between her lips as she talked. Talent.
A Coke and a smoke at the Doone. I took that shot too and I thought I would paint the lit end of the cigarette red.
“So what are you going to do with the photos?” Nakina asked.
“I told you.”
“Paint them?”
“Yeah.”
“So why do you have to paint them when you have the photos.”
“Come on Nakina.”
“Seriously. Seems like a waste of time if you already have the photos.”
“I need the photos to remember the details when I … never mind.”
“So, am I getting an invitation to the opening night?” she asked.
“No.” I was getting angry with Nakina but I didn’t really know why. I felt she was making fun of me because I was pretending to be an artist. And she was right. I was just messing around. I didn’t know what I was doing.
“So what are you going to call your big show?” She asked.
“I don’t know.”
“No, really.”
“Piss off!”
“Piss off. Nice. That’ll look good on the poster.”
“Very funny.”
“Seriously, what will you call it?”
I thought for a few minutes, “Sixty-eight. Get it, from nineteen sixty-eight — the year I took the photos.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t, OK.”
I took another bite of my burger. “What’s wrong with sixty-eight?”
“Leave it, Molly.” I looked over at Nakina and could see she was getting upset.
“What’s your problem?”
She was silent for a few minutes, head down looking at her plate, then she quietly said, “That was my number.”
“What number?”
“In the residential school. They gave us numbers. Not names — just numbers. I was sixty-eight.”
***
That summer Nakina came with us to our camp at Loon Lake. The camp was a couple of hours out of town on the west side of the lake. There were a lot of camps on East Loon but ours was on the far end with bush on either side. We drove to the end of the Loon Road and hauled all our food and supplies about ten minutes down a narrow path. My grandpa built the camp in 1904, and in those days, before the highway went in, they came out to the camp on the train.
Nakina and I slept in the shed near the tracks and every night at 11:30, when the Canadian rolled past, we’d sit up and watch the lights of the passenger cars flicker by.
“I’m going on that train some day.” I was leaning on the windowsill trying to see the people in the cars.
“Where to?”
“Anywhere. Out of here. Think about it, you go to bed in Ontario and wake up in Manitoba or Quebec.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. It would be different that’s all. Do you think that’s the one?”
“What one?”
“The train in your dream. The train that brought you here.”
“I dunno. Maybe.”
***
Every day at the lake that summer was perfect. In the morning after breakfast we would put on our bathing suits and head down to the dock. We swam and rowed around in the little rowboat called the Little Tink that my dad built for my mom. Some days we walked down the train tracks to East Loon to get candy from Hans Hogan’s store, and on the walk back we’d pick pails of wild strawberries that Mom made into jam. We swam until we had elephant skin and fished off the dock using worms we found under the rocks.
One day Dad and I were splitting wood and Nakina asked if she could help. Dad showed her how to set the piece of wood she was going to split on the chopping block and stand with her feet apart. He showed her how to set the blade of the axe where she was going to make her cut and to check for knots, which could be hard to split. He showed her how to raise the axe slowly over her head, sliding one hand further along the handle and bringing it down in one fast smooth move onto the centre of the wood. She messed up a bit at first but once she got the hang of it she was pretty good.
Before supper Mom and Dad came down to the lake for a swim, and while they sat on the dock drying off we listened to them talk. Mom said when she was a kid they’d sit on the dock and listen to music from Captain Nobel’s camp. He was famous. Invented some kind of gas mask I think and he had this grand piano at his camp. Don’t know how it got there — maybe they took it over on a boat. Mom said sometimes his buddy Robert Flaherty visited him. Flaherty was the very first documentary filmmaker. He went up to the Arctic and shot the film Nanook of the North. Flaherty played violin and Captain Nobel played piano, and all the folks on the lake would sit on their docks under the moonlight listening to their music.
Sometimes after supper Dad built a bonfire, and we roasted marshmallows and watched fireflies flit like Christmas lights in the trees. If it was raining we stayed inside and Dad would put a good fire in the fireplace. Mom and Dad and Nakina played board games or cribbage, and I sat by the fire and read. I’d brought a pile of art books with me from the library. It was the best summer. Until the end.
It was our last day at camp and Nakina and I had been rowing along the shoreline in the Little Tink. We’d rowed across to East Loon because I wanted to show Nakina where Sheila Burnford lived.
“Look, there she is on her dock.”
“So who is she?” Nakina asked.
“A writer. Did you ever read The Incredible Journey?”
“No.”
“I’ll lend you my copy. It’s about two dogs and a cat that get separated from their owners and they cross the country to find their way home.”
“And that’s her?”
“Yeah.” I rowed a bit closer to the dock and we could see an older woman sitting in a chair on the dock reading.
“They made a movie of it,” I said.
“Of what?”
“The Incredible Journey. It was a movie.”
Nakina was dragging her hand in the water making patterns as I rowed. I put down the oars and waved to Mrs. Burnford. She waved back.
I rowed to the far end of the lake, past the girls’ camp, and then along the West Loon shore. I loved the squeaking sound the oars made in the oarlocks when I raised the paddles. We were passing a neighbour’s dock and Nakina and I were talking about what we were going to do when we got back to town. She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and when I looked up I saw she had that spacey look she got just before a seizure.
“Nakina?”
She didn’t answer, so I turned the boat around and started rowing towards the closest dock, but it was too late. First she went stiff, then she started thrashing around, and before I could grab her she fell out of the boat. Mr. Ellis and his son were in front of their camp, and they both jumped in
the lake and swam out to us. Mr. Ellis got Nakina’s head above water but she was kicking and thrashing so hard I thought she’d take him under with her. It took two of them to get her to their dock and by that time a crowd had gathered. They laid her on the grass in front of their camp and someone ran down to the far end of the lake to get my mom and dad.
Dad drove Nakina back to our camp and put her on the couch. I sat by the fireplace watching her sleep, and I could see Mom and Dad talking outside on the dock. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I knew it wasn’t good.
Nakina woke up early in the afternoon and had a big lunch, and even though we weren’t supposed to go home until the next day, Mom and Dad closed the camp and we headed into town that night.
***
When it came to clothes Nakina and I were like real sisters — ready to rip each other’s throats out. Nakina was big on clothes. I wasn’t. The great divide. She went in for lipstick and miniskirts and backcombed hair, and I went for no make-up, patched jeans and bare feet.
“God Molly, throw this blouse out.”
“You don’t have to wear it.”
“I wouldn’t wear it; I’m not a lumberjack.”
“Lumberjack blouse. Good one,” I said.
“Seriously, you could make an effort. It wouldn’t kill you.”
“What for?”
“To look good,” she said.
“For who?”
“For anyone.”
“Shut up.”
“No, you shut up.”
“I hate your face pretty much.”
“No, I hate your face pretty much.”
We always ended our arguments with the Fort McKay official greeting “I hate your face pretty much.” It meant a lot of things, like “Hi” or “See you later” or “Go to hell.” It was versatile.
It was OK for Nakina to talk about clothes. She looked good in everything. She had it all — straight black hair she didn’t have to iron every night. Dark skin — no blotchy freckles. She had high cheekbones, a long narrow face and a thin straight nose that made her look real classy. She was built too and she knew it.
Wake The Stone Man Page 3
