by Thomas King
James and me were on the roof one day, and Mrs. Oswald came up and walked to the edge and lifted her arms over her head as though she thought they were wings. When she saw us, it startled her. She smiled and waved at us and yoo-hooed the way she did, standing on her toes and leaning forward. Wasn’t it a beautiful view, she said. Wasn’t it a fine, manly wind, too, and how it blew and made your eyes water.
* * *
—
“YOU HEAR ABOUT the letter, Will?”
“What letter?”
“RCMP found it on the bed. Jake still had the pen in his hand.”
“What’d it say?”
“It was a long letter, Will. Seven or eight pages. Written on some fancy stationery. Thelma said it was neat with nice handwriting, all the lines straight.”
“What’d it say?”
“Must have taken Jake an hour to write that letter. Thelma said it made her cry, Jake saying all those nice things about January and the kids, just before he shot himself. You know why he’d do that, Will?”
“Probably depressed. People kill themselves when they’re depressed.”
“No, I mean the letter. Why’d he write a letter like that. You know, those suicide notes you see on television just say ‘I can’t go on, please forgive me,’ you know, like that…short.”
Everybody was at the funeral. All of Jake’s brothers and sisters came, and all the boys from the team were there. Jake was popular. Most of January’s family stayed away, except for her sister, Irene. January had left the kids with her mother. Louise would have come, but South Wing had run a fever the night before. I was there because of January, and Harlen was there because there was a funeral. It was Harlen’s way of keeping track. And seeing him at funerals and weddings, bad times and good, was somehow reassuring.
The service was short. The priest wouldn’t come because it was a suicide, so January got this fellow she knew from the Mormon Church. Harlen made a little speech about how life was like basketball and how Jake had just fouled out of the game. The Mormon guy came over after and told January how sorry he was about her husband’s death, and he told Harlen how much he enjoyed his life-is-like-basketball talk and would it be okay if he used it some time.
* * *
—
IT WAS LENA who told us that her father hadn’t really died, that her mother was hiding from him because he beat her. The last time, Lena told us, he had hurt her mother so bad, she almost died. My mother just nodded when I told her about Mrs. Oswald, and she told me I should leave such things be, that it was best to let white people work out their own problems.
One day, after school, Lena came downstairs to our apartment and asked my mother if we could help her. Mrs. Oswald was sitting in a chair by the window. She had a towel pressed against her face, and it was covered with blood. There was blood all down her dress, and her face was bruised and swollen. Her left arm lay on the arm of the chair at a funny angle. My mother looked at Mrs. Oswald for a long time, and then she called the ambulance.
* * *
—
I DROVE JANUARY back to town. She leaned against the door. The clouds were beginning to pile up against the Rockies. In the distance, you could see the rain squalls moving out on the prairies.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay, Will.”
We drove along in silence. January was crying. People have ways of doing that—crying without making a sound. I could see the tears staining her lap, but she wasn’t shaking and she wasn’t making any noise.
“I guess you’ll miss him.” I was just saying that to myself. “At least you’ve got a good job. Good kids, too. Things will get better. Give them a chance. Everything looks bad now, but they’ll get better.”
January turned to look at me. She had on dark glasses, so I couldn’t see her eyes. Her lips were drawn tight against her teeth. “Will, you think they’ll arrest me?”
“They don’t arrest people for suicide,” I said. I was glad she had the dark glasses on.
“You think they’ll arrest me for writing the letter?”
I dropped January off at her mother’s. When she got out of the car, she took off her dark glasses, and I could see the yellow and purple bruises around her eyes and the deep, black cuts across her nose.
“I’ll be okay, Will. Things are better already.”
Harlen wasn’t surprised when I told him about the letter.
“Jake wasn’t much of a writer. Thelma said the handwriting was too nice for a man. Woman’s hand is what she figured. January said that, huh?”
I didn’t tell Harlen everything January had said on the ride back from the funeral. I don’t know that I understood it all.
“I found him like that, Will. Lying on the bed with that shotgun. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he was just fooling around. There wasn’t a note. So, maybe it wasn’t suicide. Maybe it was a mistake.
“You know he beat me. Broke my arm the last time. I was coming home from the hospital when I found him. Everybody else he was good to. He hit the kids sometimes, but not like he hit me. I don’t know why he did that. Sometimes he’d apologize.
“Last few years, he stopped apologizing and just beat me. I had to wear these glasses at work. Then…he’s dead. He should have apologized before he died. It must have been an accident.
“So I did it for him. Wrote that letter. Pretty silly, huh? He says some real sweet things. You think the RCMP will give it back? I want it for the kids…when they’re older.”
* * *
—
MRS. OSWALD STAYED in the hospital for about four days. Mrs. Wright, who lived two floors up and who had two girls of her own, looked after Lena. The police came around a couple of times, and they asked about Mr. Oswald, but no one I knew had seen him.
When Mrs. Oswald came home, she was her old cheery self, though her arm was in a cast and her face looked like it still hurt a lot. Her lower lip was all split and some parts had been sewn together. The little black ends of the thread looked like bug feelers hanging out of her mouth.
Lena told James and me that, when she got home that day, her father was in the kitchen drinking coffee. There was blood all over, but he was just sitting there. Mrs. Oswald was on the floor in the living room, and by the time Lena had helped her mother to the chair, her father had left.
Mrs. Oswald finally got her arm out of the cast, and it looked okay, except it was bone-thin and white. Her face took a while longer to heal and her lip hung off to one side like part of it had died. She smiled and talked about her “accident.” If you looked, you could see where there were teeth missing.
* * *
—
THE RCMP CALLED Jake’s death a suicide. Elwood and Leroy said they figured that January had shot him because Jake was a hunter and knew his way around guns and wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. And besides, they said, he had everything—good-looking wife, nice kids, good job.
“People like that,” said Elwood, “don’t shoot themselves. Shit. Only mistake Jake made was turning his back on January. That women’s liberation’s what’s doing it. Fellow puts a woman in her place once in a while don’t give her any call to shoot him. Hell, we’d all be dead.”
Leroy’s sister was married to one of January’s brothers. “Sure, Jake pushed a little bit. That’s what men do. But January should have said something. Jake would’ve stopped. No good letting things build up like that.”
Everyone had an opinion, and most of them got back to January. Harlen and me figured that Jake probably shot himself maybe because he hated himself for beating on January or because he was angry at the time and didn’t have anyone but himself to hit.
It was funny, in a way. Jake’s suicide, I mean. For a month or so after the funeral, everybody mostly worried about him, as if he were alive. We all had Jake stories, and even January was anxious to tell about the times Jake had taken the kids shopping or made a special dinner or brought her home an unexpected and thoughtful present. I wasn’t sure how, b
ut she seemed to have forgotten the beatings and the pain, and in the end, all of us began talking about the letter as if Jake had written it.
“Jake really had a way with words.”
“You can see he cared for his family.”
“Hard for a man to say those things.”
You could see that January wanted it that way, and when you thought about it long enough, I guess it wasn’t such a bad thing. After a while, we all forgot about the Jake January found lying on the bed, his head hard against the wall, the shotgun pressed under his chin, one hand on the trigger, the other holding a pen, trying to think of something to say.
5
Big John Yellow Rabbit was Evelyn Firstrunner’s blood nephew. Her father had married Rachael Weaselhead, which made Harley Weaselhead Big John’s great-grandfather on his grandmother’s side, which meant that Eddie Weaselhead, whose grandfather was Rachael’s brother, was blood kin to Big John.
Evelyn’s sister, Doreen, had married Fred Yellow Rabbit just long enough to produce Big John before Fred went off to a rodeo in Saskatoon and disappeared. Doreen married Moses Hardy from Hobbema, who wasn’t related to anyone at Standoff, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the trouble.
“You know John Yellow Rabbit, don’t you, Will?”
“Director of the Friendship Centre?”
“Know Eddie Weaselhead?”
“Charlie’s cousin?”
“You been down to the centre lately?”
Whenever Harlen had something important he wanted to tell me, he’d sort of float around the subject for a while like those buzzards you see above Blindman’s Coulee all the time. He’d start off cold and slow and have to warm to whatever he had to say.
“Martha Bruised Head came to see me yesterday. You know Martha?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“She’s the secretary at the centre. Her mother’s Rita Blackplume, Mike Bighead’s granddaughter. You know, she married with Buster Blackplume who used to call all the rodeos on the reserve and over in Cardston.”
Sometimes Harlen would circle for hours.
“Martha was there when it happened. She called the police.”
Three years ago, the Friendship Centre was in bad financial straits. An Ojibway fellow from back east had been the director before Big John. The guy was nice enough, but he didn’t watch the books—great ideas, no sense of money. Spent more than the centre had. Big John turned all that around. Most everyone was grateful because he had kept the centre from closing. There were a few complaints. Some of the traditional people didn’t care for the three-piece suits that Big John liked to wear.
“Them suits make us think of Whitney Oldcrow over at DIA,” Bertha Morley told Big John at one of the powwows. “And why’d you cut your hair?” And the staff at the centre grumbled about the no smoking signs Big John put up around the place.
“People going to mistake you for a Mormon.” Bertha had a whole armload of opinions. She’d go around and collect them and give them to you all at once. “You maybe should get rid of that poodle, too.”
“Will, do you know why two friends would be trying to kill each other?”
“Who?”
“Big John and Eddie.”
“They’re not friends.”
“They’re related. Like you and James.”
“But they’re not friends.”
“Maybe not good friends, but that’s no call for Eddie to go and throw a knife at Big John.”
* * *
—
MY MOTHER’S BEST FRIEND was a white woman she worked with named Erleen Gulley. Once a week, on Thursday, Erleen would show up at our apartment in a good blue print dress and high heels. She would bring the newspaper, and the two of them would sit at the kitchen table and cut out the coupons for Safeway’s and IGA and Woodward’s. Then my mother would put on her green dress and her good shoes, and the two of them would go grocery shopping.
Most of the time, James and me had to go along. But it wasn’t much fun. Mom and Erleen would get a cart, and both of them would push it up and down the aisles. They’d go up and down those aisles from the meat section at the one end to the fruits and vegetable section at the other. The first time through, they wouldn’t put anything in that cart.
“You guys didn’t get anything.”
“We’re just getting started,” said Erleen. “You can’t just grab the first thing you see.”
Erleen would wink at Mom and toss her head like she owned the world. My mother would laugh and tell James and me to run along and play.
“In a grocery store?”
The two of them would go back to pushing the cart, and James and me would sit by the magazine rack and read comic books. Later, we’d help Erleen and my mother carry the groceries to Erleen’s car. The two of them would laugh, tell stories, and sing songs all the way home.
I didn’t mind going with them. James was always willing to stay home.
* * *
—
EDDIE WEASELHEAD was the social director of the Friendship Centre. He had been there a long time. When the Ojibway fellow left, Eddie applied for the director’s position. He thought he should have got it, but Indian politics are complex. Eddie wasn’t raised on the reserve like Big John, and he didn’t speak Blackfoot either. At least, not very well. Eddie was raised in Red Deer, which wasn’t his fault. And he was a half-blood, which also wasn’t his fault. But you can see how things just pile up sometimes. And then there was the way he dressed. He always wore a ribbon shirt to work and a beaded buckle. He had four or five rings and an inlaid watch-band that he wore all the time and a four-strand choker made out of real bone with brass ball bearings, glass beads and a big disc cut from one of those shells.
“You look like a walking powwow poster,” Bertha told him. “You got more jewellery and stuff than that queer guy used to play piano on television. You maybe give us a bad name.”
“How about it, Will? What would make two good friends act that way?”
“A woman?” I was guessing. I figured that Harlen had the answer all along.
“A woman? Damn, Will. How come I didn’t hear about her? Who is she? Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess.”
Well, I guess it could have been a woman, but it wasn’t.
“Did he hit him?”
“Who?”
“Eddie…with the knife?”
“Nope, bounced it off the wall. Not even close.”
“What happened to Eddie?”
“That’s the other thing I came to see you about, Will.”
Eddie was looking pretty tired when I got to the jail. The police had taken his beaded buckle. They had taken all his rings, his watch with the inlaid band and the bone choker. They had even taken his ribbon shirt and given him a faded blue shirt. Eddie looked drab, like someone had plucked him.
“Will, what are you doing here?”
Which was a very good question.
“Just thought I’d see if I could help.”
“I’m okay. They’re just holding me till I cool off. Said I could go in the morning. No charges.”
I didn’t have Harlen’s finesse or his patience.
“So…you threw a knife at Big John,” was as close as I could come to gliding around a subject.
“Hell, it was just a jackknife.”
“Good thing you missed, eh?”
“Blade wasn’t even open.” Eddie laughed and shook his head. “Just threw the whole thing. Scared the piss out of him.” Eddie wiped his hand across his face. “Son-of-a-bitch called me a pretend Indian.”
I really hate it when Harlen decides to help somebody with a problem. Generally, the first thing he does is to come see me. It was his idea for me to go see Eddie. And of course I had to see Big John too.
“Will, come on in. Hey, put on a little weight.” Big John Yellow Rabbit had on his dark pin-striped suit with a white shirt and a burnt-orange tie with ducks stitched into it. I had seen one of those ties in Hunt’s Men’s Store. They call
ed them club ties, and they were expensive. Bertha had told him if he was going to wear a tie like that that he should stay off the reserve. Someone might mistake him for a flock of geese and take a shot at him.
“Thought I’d drop by and see how things were going.”
“Heard about Eddie, huh?” Big John was more cat than buzzard.
“Saw him at the jail last night.”
“What’d he say?”
“Said you called him a pretend Indian. Said the jackknife wasn’t even open.”
“Could have put out an eye or broken a tooth. Eddie doesn’t like the truth. You see how he dresses all the time. You ever listen to him? Good thing the cops got here when they did. You know me, Will. Don’t get angry much. Nobody throws a knife at me.” Big John leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. “Nobody calls me an apple.”
* * *
—
I GUESS ERLEEN was older than my mother, because she had three kids who were grown. She had a husband, too. His name was Herb, and she liked to tell stories about the time they went to Waterton Lake on a fishing trip or the time they went to Florida on a fishing trip or the time they went to Mexico on a fishing trip.
James and me liked Erleen’s stories. She’d sit at the kitchen table and cut out coupons and tell stories. The one bad thing about her was she smoked. Whenever she’d start a story, she’d light up a cigarette, take a couple of puffs and set it on the edge of the saucer. She’d leave it there until it burned down to the filter. Then she’d stab that one out and light another.
One evening, when Erleen was over, James said that her husband must be one great fisherman, and before I could stop him, he asked Erleen if Herb would take us fishing some day. Mom didn’t like us doing that, and James knew it.
“Herb’s dead, honey,” Erleen said. “Cancer got him.”
