by Thomas King
“That’s sacred stuff,” said Amos.
“No,” said the guard. “What we have here are eagle feathers.”
“Sure,” said Amos. “That’s what we use.”
“Know an eagle feather when I see one.”
“Sometimes we use prairie chicken for certain parts.”
The border guard took a small camera out of his pocket and began taking pictures of the outfits. The skinny kid began writing on a clipboard.
“We’ll be confiscating all of these materials,” the older man said, sweeping his hand across the outfits.
“We need our outfits,” said Amos. “We can’t dance if we don’t have our outfits.”
The older guard moved in close to Amos, smiling as he came. “I can always put you in jail, if that’s what you’d like. Is that what you’d like?”
“We need our outfits.”
“Jailor home. What’s it going to be?”
* * *
Alberta was fully awake now. She was in a wonderfully warm bed. She had nowhere to be. And she was wide awake. Worse, she was hungry. Alberta closed her eyes and imagined what it would be like to be asleep.
It didn’t work. She had already begun working out what she was going to say to Lionel. What she would say to Charlie. The tension ran through her body, stiffening her back and bringing on a low-level headache. And the nausea was back.
Reluctantly, Alberta sat up and got dressed.
At first Eli supposed it was the dawn that woke him, but as he rolled away from the light, he saw that the sky out the front window was still black.
The floodlight.
They had turned the damn thing on again.
Almost as soon as the construction of the dam began, Duplessis brought in half a dozen generators and hung a series of floodlights that allowed crews to work in shifts right through the night. As the dam took shape, the smaller floods were exchanged for larger floods until the entire array was reduced to a single floodlight, a giant metal ball that floated above the dam on struts and guy wires like a miniature sun.
Eli thought they would take it down when the dam was completed, but for reasons known only to corporate vice presidents and lawyers, it remained in place, and as the litigation around the dam ebbed and flowed, the floodlight, like the water, became a calculated annoyance.
“It’s there for safety,” Sifton told him.
“Feel safer in the dark.”
“Not your safety, Eli,” said Sifton. “Ours.”
“Dam’s a dangerous thing all right.”
“You want to talk dangerous, let’s talk coal-burning plants.”
“It’s the idea,” said Eli.
“Let’s talk nuclear power.”
“It’s the idea of a dam that’s dangerous.”
Along with the injunction that forbade Duplessis from raising or lowering the level of the river beyond a certain point, Eli also got an injunction that forbade them using the floodlight after ten o’clock.
“You started it, Eli,” said Sifton. “Once you get courts and lawyers involved in a simple matter, the whole thing goes to shit.”
“It’s real simple,” said Eli. “You can’t flood me out, and you can’t turn on that light at night.”
“Guess you better talk to your lawyer.”
Eli had to admit that after all the years of arguments and threats and injunctions, he had won very little. The dam was there. It wasn’t going to go away. And, at some point in the future, Eli had no doubt that they would find a way to maneuver around him. The sluice gates would open, the turbines would begin to turn, and Eli and the house would be washed out onto the prairies.
But not now. Not tomorrow.
And in a rather perverse way, Eli had come to enjoy the small pleasures of resistance, knowing that each time Duplessis opened the gates a little too much or turned on the light a little too late, it was because he was there.
When they returned to Toronto, Karen was full of enthusiasms and plans. They would go back next year. Early. Before the people put up the tepees. They would stay for the entire time, eat in the camp, sleep in the camp. Karen would help Eli’s mother and sister.
“You can hang out with the guys,” Karen told Eli.
“It’s hard to plan that far ahead. I may have to teach in the summer.”
“I don’t mind. I really don’t mind.”
“If I don’t teach, maybe your parents will want us to come up to the cottage.”
“You know what I remember most?”
“It’s a long trip. I’d like to go back. But it’s a long trip.”
“All those tepees. That’s what I remember.”
What Eli remembered were the people. Aunties, uncles, cousins, in-laws, friends. People he hadn’t seen in years. People who greeted him as if he had never left. People who looked at him suspiciously, as though he were a stranger, a tourist who had somehow sneaked into the camp.
And he remembered the afternoon when the men came out of the double lodge at the center of the camp and danced for the first time, how, as they moved in the circle, Eli began to recognize them, boys he had grown up with who were now men. Jimmy, who had gone away to law school. Marvin, who had drowned a basketball scholarship in a bottle. Sweet, who had been sent to prison for robbery and assault before he was out of high school. Floyd, whose family was one of the wealthiest on the reserve and rigorously Catholic. Leroy, who had gone to work for Petro Can and was now, as Eli’s mother told him, a big shot.
Rudy, Clarence, Cecil, Joe, Alex, Simon, Norbert, Eugene, Henry, Ray, Dayton, Buddy, Russell, Wilton, D’Arcy, Everett.
Eli measured the coffee carefully, set the pot on the stove, and put the can back in the refrigerator. There was a note stuck to the door. “Lionel’s birthday.” Norma had left it there. “Lionel’s” was written in large, neat black letters, and Norma had circled everything with a heavy black line, drawing thinner lines out from the edges of the circle, so that the note looked like a child’s stick sun or a bright idea going off.
“He’s forty,” Norma had said. “About time you had a talk with him.”
“About what?”
“He’s your nephew. You got responsibilities, you know. Look at what he’s become.”
“Sounds like he’s doing fine.”
“Sounds like you’re not listening.”
Eli sat down and waited for the coffee to brew and looked about the house at what he had become. Ph. D. in literature. Professor emeritus from the University of Toronto. A book on William Shakespeare. Another on Francis Bacon. Teacher of the Year. Twice.
Indian.
In the end, he had become what he had always been. An Indian. Not a particularly successful one at that. The cabin was hardly bigger than his office at the university. No electricity. No running water. A wood stove. An outhouse that was at least a hundred yards away. The great improvements he had made when he arrived and decided to stay had been the installation of a butane tank that backed up the wood stove and helped to heat the cabin in the winter and a small generator that allowed for some reading light in the evening and the luxury of a radio.
Not that he had a radio, but if he did, with the generator, he could have listened to it.
An Indian back on the reserve.
At first there had been the sensation of being home, of being in his mother’s house, of reliving the memories. Then there had been the plotting, the schemes to slow the dam down, intrigues that became court cases, that began a long run of injunctions, that ended with the dam finished and silent. Eli could no longer remember what he had in mind when he moved into the cabin, could remember only the emotion he felt when Sifton told him that they were going to tear the cabin down.
“Don’t have to stay home if you don’t want to,” said Norma.
“I’m not going to stay.”
“Probably don’t have all the fancy things here you have in Toronto.”
“I just came back to see t
he place.”
“Of course, being as you’re the oldest, you can stay as long as you like.”
“It’s just a visit.”
“Everybody should have a home.”
“Probably stay a month or two.”
“Even old fools.”
Looking back, Eli could see that he had never made a conscious decision to stay. And looking back, he knew it was the only decision he could have made.
Karen told all their friends about the trip, and for months afterward, she found ways of working the Sun Dance into the conversation.
“A Sun Dance?” said Charlie Catlin. “You guys really went to a Sun Dance?”
“I just went along with Eli,” said Karen.
“So tell us about it.”
“It was wonderful,” said Karen. “But you’ll have to ask Eli.”
At first Eli enjoyed the attention, but he quickly discovered that he didn’t have the answers to the questions that people wanted to ask.
“When they do that piercing thing, do they go in under the muscle or just under the skin?”
“You saw that movie with Richard Harris, didn’t you? Just how real was that ceremony?”
“What happens if it rains?”
When Karen told her parents about the Sun Dance and how she and Eli were going to go back next year, her father asked if they could come along, too. “That is, if it’s okay,” he said.
“No problem,” said Eli.
“Did you get any pictures?” said Karen’s mother.
“Mom,” said Karen, “they don’t allow photographs.”
“That’s probably wise,” said her mother.
“Sounds like one hell of a vacation,” said her father.
Karen was disappointed when they didn’t go back the next year. Or the next. Each year, around May, Eli would get a letter from his mother. How was his health? How was Karen? Were there any grandchildren? Norma was fine. Camelot was fine. She was fine.
“Eli,” Karen asked, “you’re not embarrassed or something like that?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to talk?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know.”
Eli poured a cup of coffee and set the pot on the table. What was he supposed to tell Lionel? Happy birthday. That’s about all he could tell him. About all he wanted to tell him. But Norma expected more. In the old days, an uncle was obligated to counsel his sister’s son, tell him how to live a good life, show him how to be generous, teach him how to be courageous.
“You’re a teacher,” Norma told him. “So teach.”
Off in the distance Eli could see Clifford Sifton coming along the riverbank, his walking stick waving at the rocks.
Not today.
Eli finished his coffee and rinsed the cup. Today was Lionel’s birthday. The least he could do was take the boy out for lunch.
Eli let Sifton get almost all the way to the cabin before he walked out on the porch, waved at the man, and then got in the pickup. In the rearview mirror Eli could see Sifton raise his arm in frustration, but Eli hardly gave the man a glance as he drove the truck through the shallows and up onto the road.
Bill Bursum strolled around the store putting tapes into VCRs. Action drama for the thirty-two-inch Panasonic. A mystery for the row of Sonys. Cartoons for the thirteen-inch Hitachis. Family entertainment for the twenty-one-inch RCAs and the JVCs. A Western for The Map.
Bursum stopped by the blank videotape display and listened. This was the best time of the day. Everything was quiet. Everything was potential. Everything was imagination. In an hour or so, the doors would open and people would begin walking around the store, poking at the buttons, turning the knobs, asking the same questions they always asked.
“How’s the picture quality?”
“How’s the sound quality?”
Bursum dusted a Kenwood stereo tower and made a mental note to talk to Minnie and Lionel about keeping the equipment polished.
“What’s the warranty?”
“Is it on sale?”
The knock on the door was so faint that Bursum was not sure that he had heard anything at all. The second knock was louder. No, thought Bursum, not a knock exactly. More like scratching.
“Not open yet,” Bursum sang out, shuffling the headphones on their wire hangers so they hung straight.
Scratch, scratch.
“We don’t open until ten,” Bursum shouted. “Thank you.”
Scratch.
Bursum walked to the back door very quietly and put his eye to the security viewer.
Nothing.
He opened the door a crack and looked out. Nothing. He held the door open, stepped over the threshold, and looked up and down the alley.
Nothing.
“Hey,” says Coyote, “that was fun.”
“You got to stop doing that,” I says.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” says Coyote.
“You’ve done plenty already,” I says.
“Let’s go around to the front and wait,” says Coyote.
“Wait for what?” I says.
“For the store to open,” says Coyote.
Bursum put his feet up on his desk, leaned back in the chair, and looked at the large picture on his wall of Parliament Lake with the red circle around the piece of lakefront property that Bursum had bought just after the dam was announced. Just before Eli Stands Alone had come home.
Parliament Lake. Bursum had been one of the first people to buy a lot at Parliament Lake. Even before the dam had been started, before the contours of the lake were actually realized, Bursum had looked at the topographical map that Duplessis provided and picked out the best piece of property on the lake. A small, treed peninsula with lake frontage on three sides, southern exposure, with a dense stand of trees to the north to protect against the wind, and an unobstructed view of the mountains. Secluded. Exclusive. Valuable.
All the lot needed was a modest cabin, a boat landing, a low stone wall to discourage hikers and rubberneckers, and a satellite dish.
Eli’s cabin was another matter. Tucked in under the face of the dam, it was in the wrong place. It was too small. There were no utilities. But because of the cabin, because of the injunction, because of Eli, no one could build on the lake itself until the matter was settled.
“Wouldn’t be hard to move the cabin,” Bursum had told Eli. “Probably get the government to move it to higher ground for free.”
“Cabin’s just fine right here.”
“Might even be able to get a lot on the lake in exchange. What do you think of that?”
“Like the place right where it is.”
“Can’t stay there forever.”
“As long as the grass is green and the waters run.”
As long as the grass is green and the waters run. It was a nice phrase, all right. But it didn’t mean anything. It was a metaphor. Eli knew that. Every Indian on the reserve knew that. Treaties were hardly sacred documents. They were contracts, and no one signed a contract for eternity. No one. Even the E-Z Pay contracts Bursum offered to his customers to help make a complete home entertainment system affordable never ran much past five or ten years. Even with the balloon payment.
Indians. Bursum had lived with Indians all his life. He had gone to school with Eli, known his mother. He had eaten at Eli’s niece’s restaurant and had given Lionel a job when no one else would because of his criminal record and his heart problem. Bursum considered himself part of the family, always doing what he could to help. He had been one of the leading voices in getting the city to declare February Indian month. Each year he sponsored the basketball team from the Friendship Centre, and hardly a week went by when he wasn’t taking out advertisements in the local Indian newspaper.
Parliament Lake. The way things were going, he might as well give the lot back to the deer and the bears.
Bursum looked at the clock. Nine-for
ty-five already. Where was Lionel? Bursum hated opening the store, had of late cultivated the habit of sitting behind his desk and watching the early morning customers come into the store. It was a way to collect his thoughts, a way to get ready for the day. Each day he sat a little longer. There was no harm in it. He was tired, getting older, becoming reflective.
Parliament Lake. Bursum could picture his cabin. A long expanse of barked logs, soft yellow, glowing and warm. There were evergreens on the peninsula, dark and velvet against the lake and the mountains and white-trunked aspens and Saskatoon bushes.
Bursum sat in his chair behind his desk and looked out at The Map and dreamed about the lake and the cabin, the trees and the bushes, and he was pleased.
He was not pleased about Lionel being late. Already he could see people at the front door. Indians, it looked like. Four of them, waiting in the shelter of the doorway, moving in tight circles to stay warm. Not an auspicious start, Bursum told himself, and he leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes, and watched the lake sparkle in the sunlight.
“Okay,” says Coyote. “Let’s see if I have this right. First, Thought Woman floats off the edge of the world and into the sky.”
“I’m very impressed,” I tell Coyote. “Pretty soon you can tell this story.”
“And then she falls into the ocean,” says Coyote.
“Hooray!” I says. “Hooray!”
“Did I get it right?” says Coyote.
“Not exactly,” I says.
Thought Woman floats around in that ocean for a long time. Three months. Six months. Nine months. You get the idea.
Then she floats ashore.
Where are we? says Thought Woman, and that one sits up in the water. Where is that River? Where are those Rocks? Where are those Trees?
Hello, says a voice. About time you arrived.
Thought Woman looks around and there is a little short guy with a big briefcase.
Allow me to introduce myself, says the man with the big briefcase. And that one hands Thought Woman a card. That card says A. A. Gabriel, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.
Insurance? says Thought Woman. Burglar alarms?
Oops, says A. A. Gabriel. Wrong side. And he turns that card over. The other side says A. A. Gabriel, Heavenly Host.
