Wake The Stone Man

by Carol McDougall

  “We should go back in,” Merika said. “Time to get the formal part of the evening out of the way. You OK now?”

  “I’m good.”

  I went back into the main hall with Merika and she gathered people around the middle of the room.

  “Good evening everyone. My name is Merika Goodchild and I am the Director of the Fort McKay Art Gallery. I want to welcome you here tonight to the launch of our inaugural series of new and emerging northern artists. This series is designed to nurture artists whose artistic vision has its roots in the north. It is my great pleasure to introduce Molly Bell, who tonight launches her show ‘Witness.’ In a series of acrylic images Ms. Bell suspends a moment in time in Fort McKay in 1968. In describing her work, Molly Bell says, ‘In these images can be found the layered and complex portrait of the human politics of a small northern town.’ Please welcome Molly Bell.”

  I stepped to the front of the crowd and could feel my legs shaking. I had prepared some notes to introduce the show but as I looked over at Toivo’s smiling face I slipped the notes into my pocket. “It is good to be home,” I said. “When my plane was landing the other day we flew over the Nor’Westers and across the Kam River over the Riverview Cemetery. In that cemetery, buried in the red clay soil along the banks of the Kam, lie my ancestors — my parents, grandparents and great grandparents. My roots are here. I grew up in the shadow of the Stone Man. This is the geography that shaped me and the inspiration for ‘Witness.’ It is an honour to be here tonight to share my work with you. Thank you.”

  When the crowd began to thin Kikko and Toivo grabbed Merika and asked her to take a photo of the three of us in front of the Stone Man. Toivo was complaining that there wasn’t any beer and Kikko said her feet were killing her so I headed to the lobby to get our coats. I walked across the exhibition hall. As I passed the centre of the hall I noticed a woman in a red dress.

  She was tall, with dark skin, and her hair was pulled up under a silk scarf. She was looking at the painting of Nakina — Nakina sitting at the Lorna Doone — me outside the restaurant reflected in the glass. The words of silent apology between us. As I walked behind her, the woman in the red dress turned.

  Nakina.

  For a moment we stood frozen, and as I moved toward her the space between us dissolved. I held her tight, afraid to break the embrace. Afraid that if I let go she would dissolve in my arms. We stood together locked tight and I felt the sharpness of her ribs and the bones of her shoulder blades. Too thin. I pulled back to look at her face. Thin, drawn but beautiful.

  “Hey white girl,” she said.

  “Hey Anishinaabe. I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “I told you I’d come to your show when it opened. Remember?”

  “Yeah. I remember, but I never thought you’d…”

  “You changed the name of the show. ‘Witness,’ very artsy. Personally I thought ‘Piss Off’ was a better title.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “You haven’t changed. Still a bean pole.”

  “Of course. You look good.”

  “Bullshit.” Nakina put her hand to the edge of the scarf and pushed it back a few inches. Underneath her head was bare except for a few soft hairs.

  “Oh god, Nakina. ”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Breast cancer. But I’ve finished three rounds of chemo and I’m feeling great.”

  Merika interrupted. “Molly, can I grab you before you leave?”

  “Sure. Just give me a few minutes.” I turned back to Nakina. “Where are you living?”

  “I have an apartment near the hospital.”

  “Can we get together tomorrow? God, I still can’t believe it.”

  “I have an appointment at the hospital tomorrow at ten. We can get together after that.”

  “Why don’t I meet you at the hospital. I have Toivo’s truck. There’s someplace I want to take you.”

  chapter twenty-three

  Nakina slept the whole drive to Kamanistiquia. I rolled up my coat for a pillow and she curled up on the seat and went to sleep. The appointment at the hospital had not gone well. When I got there she was still in the waiting room. I thought she might have someone with her, but she was alone. I sat down.

  “Have you been waiting long?” I asked.

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  I looked at her and saw the worry in her face.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” she smiled at me.

  “Do you want me to go in with you?”

  “Would you?”

  “Of course.”

  When Nakina was called we went into a small examination cubicle. There were only two seats so I stood. The doctor didn’t waste any time with small chat.

  “We have the results of your tests, and they’re not what we had hoped to see. The tumour has continued to grow despite the treatments, and the CT scan shows evidence of metastases in your liver and lungs.”

  “So, what does that mean? What happens next?” Nakina asked.

  “We’ve exhausted our options I’m afraid.”

  “There must be something.”

  “We’ll keep you comfortable.”

  I looked across at Nakina but her face was stiff.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “We can’t really say. Every patient is…”

  “How long? Best guess,” she said.

  With no emotion in his voice he said, “You need to think of your life now in terms of months, not years.” He asked if we had any further questions. Nakina said nothing, just got up and left the room.

  She didn’t speak again until we got back to the truck. “I feel nauseous.”

  “Should I take you back to your apartment?” I asked.

  “No. I’ll be OK. I just need to lie down.”

  ***

  Nakina was still asleep when I pulled the truck into the driveway of my house in Kamanistiquia. I didn’t want to wake her so I slipped quietly out of the truck and walked past the house into the field in front of the barn. I had been away a long time. I closed my eyes and drank in the smell of pine and cedar. I turned and looked at the house. Still standing solid. I looked up at the hills and remembered the ski trails I’d made back in the woods. When I turned again I saw Nakina sitting up. I walked back to the truck.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Where are we?” She got out, stretched and looked around.

  “Kamanistiquia. My place. I lived here for a year before I went east. Come on inside, I’ll put a fire on.”

  “You go ahead. I need some time alone.” Her voice was flat.

  “Sure.”

  Nakina walked past the house into the field. I got out the key and opened the door. The house smelled musty. Standing at the kitchen window I saw Nakina walking slowly across the field. I could see the anger in her body as she walked. She stopped outside the barn, picked up some broken bricks and went around the side of the barn, out of sight. Silence and then a wailing, raging scream and the sound of shattered glass as the bricks hit the barn windows.

  I couldn’t move. After a time the screaming stopped and there was silence. I waited. There was nothing I could do.

  When I went to her she was sitting in the grass. I sat beside her and put my arm around her. It was early spring and the ground was still cold. In the sky a formation of geese was returning home.

  We went inside and she sat by the stove. I boiled some water and found a tin with tea bags in the cupboard. We didn’t say much. I knew she needed to think.

  “Is this yours?” She was looking at Celeste’s painting.

  “No, a friend of mine painted that. Really sweet kid.”

  “So you really lived here?”

  “I did.�
��

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Nakina got up and walked through the kitchen into the living room. She stood cupping her mug of tea and looked out the window. “Months, not years,” she said. “I thought … I felt like I was getting better. I thought the news would be good.”

  ***

  When I got back to town I told Kikko and Toivo what was happening and asked them if I could stay with them a while. Kikko told me I didn’t have to ask.

  I phoned Halifax and let the college know I wouldn’t be back for a few months.

  Toivo told me there was a message for me from Merika. She’d sold two paintings, the basket man and Mary Christmas. The guy who bought Mary Christmas said he knew me and left his phone number. I looked at the piece of paper Toivo handed me. Lars. I put the number in my wallet.

  The next day I went to Nakina’s apartment. She offered me coffee and we spent some time looking at old photographs. She still had the shoebox full of photos she’d taken up at Rocky Lake. “That’s Auntie,” she said. “She made the Jingle dress for me. And Moses.”

  “I remember. I still have all the letters you sent me from Rocky Lake,” I said.

  Nakina went to the closet and came back with the stack of letters I had sent to her that summer, tied up with a leather string. She read some of the letters and we looked at photos and laughed. She told me more about being in Rocky Lake, and it was clear that her time up north was a touchstone for everything that came after.

  It was so good to be with her but the more we talked the more I could feel we were talking in circles around the things we couldn’t say, the weight of those things pushing us apart.

  ***

  Over the next few weeks I drove Nakina to the hospital for tests and appointments. Kikko made homemade soup, but Nakina wasn’t very hungry. We still didn’t say much. She was getting weaker so I focused on helping her feel comfortable. After a month a bed was available on the palliative care floor and Nakina was admitted. I knew she didn’t want to go, but she was so weak she could hardly get up to go to the bathroom.

  The day I took her to the hospital she packed a small bag. “Is that all you’re taking?” I said.

  “I have a favour to ask.”

  “Sure.”

  “Here’s the keys to the apartment. After you drop me off could you come back and sort out the last things. I’ve left a note on the table telling you what you need to do. Then drop the keys with the landlady downstairs.”

  “No problem. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Nakina?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think maybe sometime we could talk?”

  She looked up at me and I knew she understood what I was saying, but she brushed it off. “What do you think we’ve been doing?”

  “I know, it’s just … there are some things I’d like to talk about.”

  Nakina looked so weary I didn’t push it any further.

  ***

  I left Nakina in the admitting department at the hospital and told her I would come back that afternoon once she was settled into her room. I went back to her apartment and found the note on the table. She had left a list of things she needed me to do: 1) clean out the fridge, 2) take out the garbage, 3) there’s some canned food in the cupboard, take it if you want it, 4) all the towels and linens stay, 5) there is a suitcase of clothes in the closet you can do whatever you want with, and a box of photos and stuff I thought you might like, 6) on the table is a file with some papers including a copy of my will. Take it to Mitch. He is expecting it.

  It didn’t take me long to clean out the apartment. I loaded the suitcase and box into the truck and took the file to the Native Friendship Centre. It was good to see Mitch again after so many years. He told me Nakina was leaving her money to the Friendship Centre to go into a fund they were raising to build a childcare centre.

  I headed back to the hospital in the afternoon. The palliative care wing was on the seventh floor. When I got off the elevator I saw a stained glass mandala called the tree of life — the moon was its roots and the sun its branches. I could see angels everywhere. Angel mobiles hanging over the desk, angel photos on the walls, angel figurines on the desk. Gifts from families I guessed. Seemed creepy though. I didn’t think people needed wall-to-wall angels to remind them that everyone there was dying.

  Behind the nursing station was a large whiteboard with the names of the patients, their room numbers and the nurse assigned to them that day. Nakina Wabasoon, room 734 — Hodder.

  I walked past the nursing station, past a room with a sign that read “kitchenette.” Looked like a place where people could make a cup of tea or some toast. Beside the kitchenette was a room set up to look all cozy and homey with a fake fireplace and blaring television that no one was watching. There was a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on a card table.

  Room 734 was at the end of the corridor, so I had to run the gauntlet of dozens of rooms to get to it. I looked straight ahead because I didn’t want to see what was going on in those other rooms.

  When I got to Nakina’s room she was asleep. I slipped into the chair beside her bed and waited. She looked small –a bald, shrivelled-up Nakina. She had an IV line in her arm, and her johnny shirt covered only one shoulder. I felt like pulling the blanket up over her bare shoulder but I didn’t want to wake her.

  I felt awkward about watching her. Her face looked older. She used to have such great cheekbones, but her face looked puffy and there were dark circles under her eyes. I was still trying to get used to the bald head. I tried imagining her with her long black hair and put my hand up over my eyes to see if I could pretend she had bangs.

  “Playing peek-a-boo?”

  “Hey Anishinaabe,” I said.

  “Hey white girl.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Crap.”

  “Nice room,” I said. “You can see the Sleeping Giant from your window.”

  “Good, a room with a view. Did you get that stuff to Mitch?”

  “I did.”

  “Thanks.” She closed her eyes and I thought she was drifting off to sleep again but she mumbled, “I was in the Psychiatric Hospital.”

  “What?”

  “The Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital — the LPH.”

  “The nuthouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  Nakina didn’t answer; she was asleep.

  That night at dinner I told Kikko what Nakina had said.

  “The psychiatric hospital? Oh yeah, that’s right. She was there.”

  “When?”

  “Back in high school,” Kikko said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s where they sent her when she got pregnant.”

  “You knew about that?”

  “Of course. Everybody did.”

  “I don’t get it. Why did they send her to a psychiatric hospital to have a baby?”

  “That’s where they sent the Indian girls who got pregnant.”

  “So, she was right here in town. All those months she was away from school she was just a few miles away.”

  “That’s right.”

  We sat down at the table and I filled my plate with Finnish pancakes and sausages. I was thinking about Nakina in the psychiatric hospital — thinking about what happened that put her there. I looked up at Kikko.

  “What?” she asked.

  I started to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. I put my head down, took a deep breath and tried again. “I was there that day.” I said.

  “What day?”

  “The day Nakina was attacked.”

  “Attacked?”

  I looked at Toivo and Kikko, and after so many years of silence the words finally came.

  “Not attacked,” I said. �
�Raped. She was raped by Bernie Olfson, the cop.”

  “Olfson. Christ Molly, are you sure?” Toivo asked.

  “I saw it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She had an epilepsy attack, beside the Lorna Doone. At least I think that’s how she ended up on the ground. I don’t know. I was waiting for her in the restaurant and she didn’t come. She said she’d be right in so I went outside to see where she was, and there were these cops back in the alley and they had her on the ground and Bernie Olfson was on her.”

  “Son of a bitch!” said Toivo.

  “It happened a lot then,” Kiiko said.

  “Cops raping young girls?” I asked.

  “Cops raping Indian girls,” Toivo said.

  “And they got away with it?”

  “Yeah, well what were the kids going to do, call the cops?”

  chapter twenty-four

  The next day Nakina was awake when I walked in. She looked up at me. “You look like shit,”

  “Not much sleep,” I said. “How do you feel today?”

  “When the morphine goes in, good. When it’s gone, bad.”

  “And now?”

  “Bad.”

  Nakina closed her eyes and I sat down and waited. I wasn’t sure if she was asleep. With eyes still closed she said, “You wanted to talk?”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday when we were leaving my apartment. You said you wanted to talk.”

  “Yeah, but not today.” I could see the pain in her face. “You don’t feel well today.”

  “I feel like crap every day. I’m dying. If you have something to say, say it.”

  “No Nakina, this isn’t a good…”

  “Stop!”

  “Stop what?” I asked, surprised at the anger in her voice.

  “Stop being so fucking polite.”

  I turned away from her and looked out the window. Heavy slate-grey clouds were coming in from the west. They parted for a moment and the sun broke through, sending a long band of light across the crossed arms of the Stone Man.