Wake The Stone Man

by Carol McDougall

“I’m not being polite.”

  Nakina opened her eyes. “Nice polite little white girl wouldn’t say shit if your mouth was full of it. That always pissed me off about you.”

  “I’ll get the nurse.”

  “No. We’re going to talk. What did you want to say?”

  I got up and looked out the window again. I could see a ship on the horizon. Coming in from Toronto maybe. I turned to face Nakina. So much I needed to understand.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “When?”

  “That night after I saw you on Simpson Street.”

  “I left town.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t safe. I wasn’t safe.”

  I turned to look out the window again. I was back on Simpson Street on that frigid winter night, painting under my arm looking at a hooker standing at the curb, rocking back and forth on her stiletto-heeled boots. And then she turned and flicked her long black hair away from her face. Nakina. Nakina in a fur coat looking down the street at the cars. Looking for her next john and instead she saw me.

  “You kept disappearing,” I said. “That day in high school you cleaned out your locker and left. You never talked to me, never told me what happened.”

  “What could I say? I couldn’t tell you.’

  “You could have.”

  “You had no goddamed clue Molly. No goddamed clue what my life was like. What did you want me to tell you? That the school janitor was screwing me? That his wife set it all up — took in native foster kids for her husband to screw? Is that what you wanted me to tell you?”

  “Nakina. I didn’t know.”

  “How could you? I couldn’t talk to you. Not about that stuff.”

  I turned to look out the window again. The rain had started.

  “So that’s why you left high school?”

  “I went to Social Services and told them what was going on.”

  “What happened?”

  “They investigated and he denied everything. Of course. He was so pissed off with me for reporting him that he took that money from the school office and hid it in my room. The next day when the school realized the money was missing, he told them he’d seen me hide it in my room. The principal called the cops and they searched my room and found the money. My word against his. They kicked me out of school.”

  I could see beads of sweat across Nakina’s forehead and I got a cold cloth and wiped her face. Her hands were clenched tight with pain.

  “Let me get some help. I’ll call the nurse.”

  “No. I need to tell you. I got kicked out of school. I didn’t have any place to live.” Nakina stopped for a few minutes. “I had a friend. From the residential school. She was working on Simpson Street. I moved into the hotel with her. She introduced me to the guy she worked for.”

  “Her pimp?”

  “He talked me into working for him. Said if I was going to get screwed by white guys I might as well get paid. I thought maybe he was right. Maybe it was a better option. I didn’t have a lot of choices.”

  “That’s how you ended up working on the street.”

  “That night on the street. When I turned around. You saw me and you turned away.”

  “I didn’t … I didn’t expect…”

  “Why were you even there that night Molly? Why were you walking down Simpson Street?’

  “I was looking for you.”

  “Well you found me.”

  We looked at each other for a few moments.

  “After you walked away a car pulled over and I got in,” she said. “Told the guy to take me to North Fort, to the Friendship Centre.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought of another option.”

  “So you went to Mitch?”

  “I was lucky. The guy who picked me up took me to the Friendship Centre and Mitch was there. I told him everything. He took me home and his wife Marcia called her sister in Sault Ste. Marie. They said I had to get out of Fort McKay fast. It wasn’t safe to stay. They’d be looking for me. Marcia’s sister let me stay with her in the Sault while I took some courses at the college there. Mitch arranged it all.”

  “So that’s where you’ve been. In Sault Ste. Marie?”

  “For a while. I trained to be a court reporter, and when I graduated I got a job with the government working out west on native land claims hearings. That’s what I’ve been doing. Travelling a lot. Mostly in British Columbia. I came back here when I got sick.”

  “So, you were on one edge of the country and I was on the other.”

  “Molly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you get the nurse now?”

  I pressed the call button and as we waited for the nurse to come Nakina turned to me. “I had to go right away. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “I know.”

  “It was that night wasn’t it — the night I saw you on the street?”

  “What was?”

  “The accident. Your mom and dad. Mitch told me. But I had to go.”

  “It’s OK.” I rubbed her shoulder and could feel her body shaking. “It’s OK.”

  They increased the dose of morphine and Nakina slept for the rest of the day. I left the hospital early and drove down to the waterfront. I walked along the wharf beside the grain elevators. I thought about Mom and Dad and how much I missed them every single day.

  I thought about the funeral and how softly and silently the snow had fallen on the steeple of the church. How it fell in a soft blanket onto the street making the world silent and still. I thought about how, on that day, as I followed my parents’ coffins down the steps of the church, Nakina was flying away. Flying to safety.

  ***

  “What’s that?” Nakina opened her eyes and tried to focus on what I had put on the tray in front of her.

  “It’s a cribbage board.”

  “What for?”

  “What do you think? To play cribbage.”

  “You hate cribbage,” she said.

  “I know, but you don’t.”

  “Can you get me a glass of water first?”

  I poured Nakina a glass of ice water and held the straw to her lips. “OK?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll deal.” I laid down six cards each and Nakina cut the deck. I turned up the top card.

  “Jack — dealer pegs two,” I said, moving my marker along the board.

  “I didn’t even know you knew how to play. You always had your head in a book when your mom and dad and I were playing.”

  “I read a book on how to play.”

  “Very funny. Why didn’t you want to play with us?” she asked.

  “I liked lying on the couch reading and listening to you guys talk. Very entertaining. Every time mom said ‘and one for his knobs’ I’d crack up.”

  “That was pretty funny.”

  “Fifteen two, fifteen four.” Nakina lifted her hand out from under the blanket and moved her pin along the board.

  “Run.” I moved four spaces along the board. We played for about an hour until the nurse came in to change the IV bag. I helped her shift Nakina into a new position to keep the pressure off her hips. I had bought some special Moroccan oil that was supposed to be good for bedsores and massaged it into her shoulders and arms. Then I helped her sit up while I changed her Johnny shirt. I could see she was exhausted. She fell asleep as soon as she lay back on her pillow.

  While she slept I went across the street to George’s diner for lunch. Sitting at the booth I started to draw up some plans for the garden. I could dig up another quarter acre and put in squash, like Toivo suggested. And I was thinking of adding a porch to the house along the south side. It would be nice in winter to capture as much sun as possible.

  ***

  Once I decided to move
back out to the house I talked to Toivo. “I need a car,” I said.

  “No.”

  “I do. I want to move out to the…”

  “No, you don’t need a car. You need a truck.”

  “Oh.”

  “A good truck that will handle those back roads even in the middle of winter. I got one picked out for you.”

  “Oh yeah, some broken-down piece of crap one of your friends at the Wayland is trying to get rid of?”

  “Very funny. No. I’ll take you tomorrow.”

  Toivo drove me into town the next day and we pulled into the lot of Lakehead Auto. A guy came out as soon as he saw us and showed us a few trucks. Toivo had his eye on a brand new red Ford pick-up.

  “So you had this all worked out?” I said.

  “Knew you’d need a truck to get back and forth.”

  “And you knew I was going to stay?”

  “Of course.”

  I paid cash that afternoon and drove the truck off the lot. Toivo took a photo of me in front of the truck and said he was going to send it to Anna.

  I packed my stuff, loaded up the truck and stopped at the mall on the way out of town to stock up on supplies — food, linens, two new Coleman lamps and lamp oil. I stopped at the farm supply store and picked up two twenty-pound bags of seed potatoes and a new spade and hoe. I got some seeds too — kale, squash, carrots, zucchini, beets. They grew well in the red clay soil. The sun was starting to set when I got to the house.

  I lit a fire in the stove and went into the bedroom. My overalls were still hanging from a hook on the wall. It seemed strange, like I’d never been away. I stripped the bed and made it up with the new sheets and pillows, went back into the kitchen and unpacked the groceries. I made a pot of tea, warmed up the soup Kiiko had made and ate it with bread from the Kivela bakery. Looking out the window I traced the ragged tops of the pine trees along the edge of the road. Two blue jays squawked from the birch tree beside the well. I unpacked my suitcase and put the small black shoe from the residential school on the kitchen mantel.

  When it was dark I went out behind the house and stood in the field. The sky was clear and I could see the Milky Way and Cassiopeia. There was a thin slice of moon over the hills. Later that night I was serenaded to sleep by a chorus of wolves up in the hills.

  Home.

  The next day I went out to the field with the spade over my shoulder. The morning dew made the tall grass sparkle. The garden I’d dug up a few years before had not completely grown over. I put the spade on the ground, put my foot on the rim and leaned forward using my weight to drive the spade through the hard clay. I pulled back on the handle and lifted a lump of soil, turned it over and moved along the row. It felt good to be doing something physical.

  I thought about Nakina as I worked. The things she had told me. About getting kicked out of school. About moving into the hotel on Simpson Street. There was no one there to protect her. No safe place.

  ***

  I drove into town about noon and Nakina was asleep. Her nurse said she had been asleep all morning. They had her on a new drug.

  I sat and looked out the window. I was surprised that I was missing Halifax. I missed my friends. I missed working in my studio. I missed painting.

  When I had been working in the field that morning I’d looked back at the barn and thought maybe I could do something with it. It needed a new roof, but the beams inside were strong. The windows needed to be replaced, and I could knock in some extra ones along the back to get the afternoon light. It would take a bit of work but it could make a good studio. And there was lots of space to set up a loom. I was even thinking maybe I could get some sheep.

  Nakina was tossing and turning and she started to mumble. I didn’t know if she was awake or dreaming. It was getting harder to tell. Sometimes when I was talking to her a veil would seem to drop between us.

  “I was on the train,” she said.

  “What train?”

  “Momma put me on the train. I can’t see out the window. I can’t see my mother.” Nakina opened her eyes and tried to sit up.

  “What train were you on?” I asked.

  “Can you get me some water? My mouth is dry.”

  I got a glass of water and held the straw to her lips. She put her head back on the pillow and I thought she would go back to sleep, but she turned to me and I could tell from the look in her eyes that her mind was clear.

  “They took me to the psychiatric hospital, you know.”

  “You told me. To have the baby.”

  “There was no baby. I was just over four months. They gave me a general anesthetic and when I woke up the nurse said they’d taken care of it.”

  “Aborted?”

  “And when they had me under the anesthetic they tied my tubes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sterilized me. What they did to Indian girls who got pregnant.”

  “But they couldn’t. They couldn’t just do that.”

  “They could. They did. After that I got an infection and had to stay there for months.”

  After a while she drifted off to sleep again. Curled up in the fetal position with her bald head and so thin I could see her shoulder blades through her skin, Nakina looked like a baby bird that had fallen out of the nest.

  I was holding back tears because I didn’t want to cry. Didn’t want to wake Nakina. Didn’t want the nurses or some stranger to come in and see me crying. I thought about the day that Nakina came back to school. After what she had gone through — what they had done to her — she just came back to school and picked up her books at her locker and went off to class, like nothing had happened. What else could she do?

  She slept the rest of the afternoon so I curled up in the chair and slept too. I dreamt about a train, a long black train pulled by a steam engine puffing its way through the bush. Black train, black smoke cutting a black line through the boreal forest. Past blue lakes, past moose standing up to their bony knees in the marsh, past jagged red rock cuts. Onward, farther south. Tiny faces pressed against the window. The faces of the stolen children. Nakina’s face, with her mouth opened slightly as if she were about call out to someone. Call out for help.

  When I woke up Nakina was still asleep. I sat in the chair in the dark room listening to the beeping sounds coming from down the hall. Every so often there would be an announcement over the hospital intercom: “Code blue, trauma team to emergency stat, trauma team to emergency.” Then everything would be quiet for hours. Then there would be a flurry of activity somewhere on the floor — people running, orders shouted, someone crying. Then silence again. More waiting.

  I left Nakina’s room and walked down to the family room. I spent some time working on the jigsaw puzzle. I was angry but didn’t know why. I think I was angry with myself. I felt so useless. The puzzle was an English thatched cottage surrounded by a rose garden. The thatched roof was a real bitch.

  chapter twenty-five

  The next day when I arrived at the hospital I could hear Nakina screaming all the way down the hall. I ran to her room. “Do you want me to get the nurse?” I asked. I could see she was in pain.

  “I want you to get the fuck out.”

  She had kicked the blankets off and I could see her thin boney legs kicking against the metal rails of the bed. Nurse Hodder came in with another nurse who was carrying a tray with medication and an IV bag. I stepped back into the washroom and watched through the doorway as they worked quickly to change the line and hang the new IV bag. Nakina had stopped swearing and was making low moaning sounds. The nurses stripped the top sheets and remade the bed, swaddling her flailing arms and legs. The moans got softer till they sounded almost like a kitten purring. The nurse turned to me.

  “Come here. Molly, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  She handed me a jar of clear cream. “Could yo
u sit there. No, pull the chair closer to the bed. Good. Now take that cream and rub it on her lips.”

  I was afraid to touch Nakina. Afraid she would start shouting again, afraid to feel the dry peeling skin on her lips.

  But the nurse was watching. “Good. Now, try to do that every few hours. Down in the kitchenette you can get ice. Straws are in the left-hand drawer. Keep a glass of ice water by the bed. It’s comforting to keep the mouth moist.”

  “OK.”

  “I went down to the kitchenette and got some large plastic glasses and straws and filled a blue water jug with ice and water. When I went back to the room Nakina was sitting up in bed.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

  “I brought you some ice water.”

  “In a urinal?”

  I looked at the blue plastic water jug and realized it had an odd shaped wide spout.

  “Molly, you’re such an ass!” Nakina started to laugh and I dropped into the chair beside her and began to laugh hysterically. Once I got the giggles there was no going back, and the more Nakina laughed the more it set me off until a nurse stuck her head in the door.

  “Everything OK?”

  I held up the urinal, laughing too hard to explain. She smiled. “Yeah, you’re not the first one to make that mistake. Don’t know why they make them both the same colour. I’ll take that.”

  The drugs were working. Nakina was sitting up laughing and I could tell from her face that she wasn’t in pain.

  We talked for more than an hour about her work in B.C. “It was interesting. Not the actual recording; that was pretty mindless. But the hearings were interesting. I learned a lot about land claim issues. A lot of legal stuff. Met some great people. Travelled a lot. Most of our work was in Northern B.C., up around Williams Lake.”

  “What was it like?”

  “The mountains were beautiful. Snow capped. I liked hiking in the mountains. Camping out.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It was. Until I got sick.”

  “And then you came back here?”

  “Right. I could have gone to the hospital in Vancouver but I wanted to come back here.” Nakina turned onto her back and adjusted her pillow. She looked tired. “So what about you? How is Halifax? How is the art college?”