The Marrow Thieves

by Cherie Dimaline

  Copyright © 2017 Cherie Dimaline

  This edition copyright © 2017 Cormorant Books Inc.

  This is a first edition.

  A previous version of “Frenchie’s Coming-to Story” was originally published by Theytus Editions, copyright © 2016.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dimaline, Cherie, 1975–, author

  The marrow thieves / Cherie Dimaline.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77086-486-3 (paperback). — ISBN 978-1-77086-487-0 (html)

  I. Title.

  PS8607.I53M37 2017 jC813’.6 C2016-907292-4

  C2016-907293-2

  Cover photo by Wenzdae Brewster

  Cover design: angeljohnguerra.com

  Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, bookstopress.com

  Printer: Friesens

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Manufactured by Friesens in Altona, Manitoba, Canada in April 2017.

  United States Library of Congress Control Number: 2016945346

  Dancing Cat Books

  An imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.

  10 st. mary street, suite 615, toronto, ontario, M4Y 1P9

  www.cormorantbooks.com

  For the Grandmothers who gave me

  To the children who give me hope.

  “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,

  the way the whites are taking care of the Indians:

  killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.”

  — William S. Burroughs

  “Where you’ve nothing else,

  construct ceremonies out of the air

  and breathe upon them.”

  — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

  FRENCHIE’S COMING-TO STORY

  Mitch was smiling so big his back teeth shone in the soft light of the solar-powered lamp we’d scavenged from someone’s shed. “Check it out.” He held a bag of Doritos between us — a big bag, too.

  “Holy, Mitch! Where’d you get that?” I touched the air-pressurized bag to confirm it was real. My dirty fingers skittered across the shiny surface like skates. It was real. My mouth filled with spit, and a rotten hole in one of my molars yelled its displeasure.

  “In the last house back there, hidden on top of the cupboard like Ma used to do when she didn’t want us getting into stuff.”

  Mom had only been gone a few months, so talking about her still stung. My brother popped the bag to cover our hurt. And like cheese-scented fireworks, that loud release of air and processed dust cheered us up.

  We were in a tree house somewhere on the outer rim of a small city that had long been closed down like a forgotten convenience store. We were a few hours out from Southern Metropolitan City, which used to be Toronto back when there were still so many cities they each had a unique name instead of a direction. West City, Northeast Metropolis, Southern Township …

  It was a great tree house; some lucky kid must have had a contractor for a father. It was easily two storeys up from the unmown lawn and had a gabled roof with real shingles. We’d been there for three days now, skipping school, hiding out. Before he’d left with the Council and we never saw him again, Dad had taught us that the best way to hide is to keep moving, but this spring had been damp; it had rained off and on for over a week, and we couldn’t resist the dry comfort of the one-room tree house with built-in benches. Besides, we reasoned, it was up high like a sniper hole so we could see if anyone was coming for us.

  It probably started with that first pop of air against metallic plastic, no louder than a champagne cork. I imagined the school truancy officers — Recruiters, we called them — coming for us, noses to the wind, sunglasses reflecting the row of houses behind which we were nestled in our wooden dream home. And sure enough, by the time we’d crunched through the first sweet, salty handfuls, they were rounding the house into the backyard.

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  Mitch put the bag down and turned to the window cut into the north wall.

  “Francis, you’re going to have to listen to me really carefully.”

  “What?” I knew it was bad. He never called me Francis, no one but Mom ever did, and then only when I was in trouble. I’d been Frenchie since I could remember.

  “Listen, now.” He turned away from the window to lock eyes with me. “You are going to climb out the back window and onto the roof, as low down as you can get.”

  “But, Mitch! I can’t climb out a window.”

  “Yes, yes you can, and you will. You’re the best damn climber there is. Then when you’re on the roof, you’re going to grab the pine tree behind us and climb up into it. Stay as close to the trunk as you can. You have to shimmy into the back part, where the shadows are thickest.”

  “You go first.”

  “Too late, buddy; they know someone is up here, just not how many someones.”

  I felt my throat tighten to a pinhole. This is how voices are squeezed to hysterical screeching.

  “Mitch, no!”

  He turned again, eyes burning with purpose, bordering on anger. “Now. Move it, Francis!”

  I couldn’t have him mad at me; he was all I had left. I clambered out the window and folded upward to grasp the slats on the roof. I shimmied up, belly to the wood, butt pulled down tight. I lifted my head once, just high enough to look over the small peak in the center, just enough to see the first Recruiter lift a whistle to his mouth, insert it under his sandy moustache, and blow that high-pitched terror tone from our nightmares. Under the roof I heard Mitch start banging the plywood walls, screaming, “Tabernacle! Come get me, devils!”

  Fear launched me into the pine. The hairy knots on the sticky trunk scraped my thighs, sweat and skin holding me there. The needles poked into my arms and shoved into my armpits, making me tear up. I pulled my sweaty body towards the other side of the pine, scrapes popping up red and puffy on my thighs and torso. All the while the whistles, two now, blew into the yard.

  “Come get me, morons!”

  I saw both of the Recruiters now: high-waisted navy shorts, gym socks with red stripes pulled up to their knees above low, mesh-sided sneakers, the kind that make you look fast and professional. Their polo shirts were partially covered with zip-front windbreakers one shade lighter than their shorts. The logo on the left side was unreadable from this distance, but I knew what it said: “Government of Canada: Department of Oneirology.” Around their necks, on white cords, hung those silver whistles.

  Mitch was carrying on like a madman in the tree house. Yelling while they dragged him down the ladder and onto the grass. I heard a bone snap like a young branch. He yelled when they each grabbed an arm and began pulling. He yelled around the house, into the front yard, and into the van, covering all sounds of a small escape in the trees.

  Then the door
slid shut.

  And an engine clicked on and whirred to life.

  And I was alone.

  I wanted to let go. I wanted to take my arms off the trunk and fold them to my chest like a mummy, loosen my thighs from their grip, and fall in a backwards swan dive to the bottom. I pulled one hand back and clutched the opposite shoulder. Deep breath. You can do this. The other hand shook as it began to release. The skin of my thighs burned with the extra strain. Soon they too would be unclenched. Deep breath …

  If I survived the fall, which was possible, I’d be taken to the school with Mitch. This thought was appealing at first, and for a brief moment I had some kind of TV reunion in my head: me, Mitch, Mom, Dad … but I knew that’s not how it would go. A few had escaped from the schools, and the stories they told were anything but heartwarming.

  “There’s a man named Miigwans who came by Council last night,” my father had said one night when we were still together. “He escaped from one of the satellite schools, the one up by Lake Superior.” Dad had bags under his eyes. He’d gathered us around the kitchen table to talk, but spoke haltingly, like he’d rather not. “He told us about what’s happening to our people. It wasn’t easy to hear, and was he frantic, tried to leave right away, looking for this Isaac fellow.”

  “Jean, maybe the boys should go in the other room for this …”

  “Miigwans says the Governors’ Committee didn’t set up the schools brand new; he says they were based on the old residential school system they used to try to break our people to begin with, way back.” He paused and drank half the liquid in his greasy glass, a kind of moonshine he kept in an old pop bottle on the back stoop. He placed it hard on the picnic table we’d hauled into the main room of the cabin. The glass echoed the wood in its hollow curve. It was punctuation. It made me jump. He was in the gloomy place he went to when he spoke about how the world had changed. He said we were lucky we didn’t remember how it had been, so we had less to mourn. I believed him.

  “Okay, boys, that’s it, off to bed.” Mom shooed us off the bench, pushing us out the door before we could formulate an argument to stay. Dad stopped me to kiss the top of my head, and I felt safe, even just for a minute.

  We heard Mom crying as we lay in bed that night. And the next day, we packed up that small cottage we’d been staying in since our apartment in the city had lost power and things had gotten dangerous. We hadn’t even spent a full year there, and none of us were keen on leaving, especially me and Mitch. We had family here, blood and otherwise. There were other families, people like us, who had settled here. The old people called it the New Road Allowance. And now we were jamming clothes and jars of preserves wrapped in blankets into our duffel bags to move again. I thought about our walk into this settlement from the city.

  “We walk north,” Dad had said then. “North is where the others will head. We’ll spend a season up by the Bay Zone. We’ll hole up in one of those cabins up there and I’ll try to find others. We’ll find a way, Frenchie. And up north is where we’ll find home.”

  “For sure?”

  “Hells yes, for sure. I know so because we’re going to make a home there. If you make something happen you can count on it being for sure.”

  “What will we find up there, Dad?” I’d been nervous it would be all empty and wet, the constant rain making pools in our footprints before we could completely empty them of our feet.

  I was tired and hungry, and my shoes were as thin as cardboard, but I tried not to let any of that color my voice when I spoke. I knew we were all tired and hungry and trudging along on leather-skin shoes. I knew to be positive in that way that a little kid comes home from school and can tell there’s been an argument that day by the way the air smells in the front hall and decides this is the day he’ll start his math homework without being asked. Survival, I guess.

  We were out by old Highway 11, having slipped the noose of the last suburb of East City. Unlike the smaller city outskirts where I’d later lose my brother, these suburbs were open and vast, a maze of darkened windows and burnt cars in kaleidoscopic boroughs that branched out like a geometric blossom of asphalt and curb and erupting driveways.

  I’d felt kind of special then, before I knew how dangerous special could be. I guess I was proud of my family, with our ragged shoes and stringy hair; we were still kings among men. I held my twiggy walking stick like a scepter, chin tilted towards the ashy sky.

  And now here we were again, getting ready for another journey into another unknown, driven by fear. But we never made that move, not together, anyway. At what was supposed to be my father’s last Council meeting before he took his family north, it was decided they’d make one last-ditch effort to talk to the Governors in the capital. They never came back.

  I knew I’d never see my family if I were captured; we wouldn’t be reunited at the school. I had to get down from this tree safely and keep moving. Mitch had sacrificed himself so I could live, so I had to live. It was the only thing left I could do for him.

  I pulled myself back against the tree, hugging the craggy trunk so hard I had tectonic imprints on my cheek and thighs for three days after. I stayed there until the van drove off, until I couldn’t hear the engine anymore, until the day filled up with grey, until the grey turned indigo. Then I shook each sleepy limb, each screaming muscle back into service and half slid, half climbed back down the tree to the ground. The landing vibrated into my shins and set my kneecaps loose like baby teeth. I sat there a moment before the memory of the shrill siren of the Recruiter’s whistle shoved under my feet like slivers. I was almost to the house next door before I remembered to turn back for my backpack and the half-eaten bag of chips.

  The first night I kept going, running when I could, crawling against every surface that offered a shadow. I even pissed on the run, dribbling on my duct-taped boot. The morning after, when I was truly alone in the bright of day, I was all panic and adrenaline. I found a rain barrel behind a small detached bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac somewhere by the outlet mall and drank as much water as I could, then right away threw most of it back up. At least my boot was clean again.

  Here the sidewalks were shot through with arterial cracks and studded with menacing weeds that had evolved to survive torrential rain and the lack of pollinators. Wildlife was limited to buzzards, raccoons the size of huskies, domestic pets left to run feral, and hordes of cockroaches that had regained the ability to fly like their southern cousins. I had been scared of them all when I was still running with my brother. Now, in the wake of his removal, they were nothing. I crunched over lines of roaches like sloppy gravel, threw rocks at the pack of guinea pigs grunting at me with prehistoric teeth from under their protective awning at a corner grocery.

  “No one cares, you little shit!” I screamed at the largest male, who stood his ground on the outer perimeter of the awning, stomping his boundary on surprisingly muscular front legs like some kind of caricature of an old bulldog. Behind him huddled his nuclear family, a circle of two smaller females and about eighteen bucktoothed guinea pig children.

  “We’re all dead anyway. I should make a shish kebab of your kids.”

  I didn’t mean it. I looked at their round eyes, wet and watching but not nervous enough for the threat of a human. Their dad was there, after all, and they knew they were safe. I felt tears collecting behind my own eyes like sand in a windstorm. I opened my mouth … to say what? To apologize to a group of wild guinea pigs? To explain that I hadn’t meant what I’d said? To let them know I just missed my family? A small sob escaped instead. I cupped a dirty hand over my mouth to catch it, but not before the male smelled my fear and turned his back to me. I was no danger to them. I was no danger to anything. At best, I was prey.

  It was early evening when I hit the edge of the trees. According to the small plastic compass clipped onto the zipper of my backpack I was now heading northeast. Dad had said we should head north to the old land
s. We’d told mom we were heading east when we lost her at the seniors’ home. I figured northeast was the safest bet.

  Now I was alone, leaving the smaller cities that had winked out long ago like Christmas lights on a faulty wire. The trees here were still tall, so I wasn’t very far north, but they were dense, so I wasn’t too south anymore, either.

  My legs screamed from a night and day of ache and stretch marinated in old adrenaline and scabbed with tree bark cuts. I collapsed under a pine. It was still spring, and I knew the night would be too cold for a single boy with no real shelter other than a thermal wrap and a couple layers of hoodies. The early moisture would set in, and I couldn’t afford to get sick. So I built a modest fire just big enough to cut the chill and lay on my back, backpack under my head.

  Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes. And surrounded by these silent trees, beside a calming fire, I watched the bones dance. This was our medicine, these bones, and I opened up and took it all in. And dreamed of north.

  Cold is an effective alarm clock, and I was up before the sun. The fire had gone out, but not long ago, since there was still smoke. The cough I’d been cultivating over the past few days was more insistent now. I coughed, and each push of air brought a fresh ache out of my back and legs. The jump and the run had really done a number. Still, I stood and started my jumping jacks, following Mitch’s morning warm-up routine even though he wasn’t there to motivate me.

  “C’mon, French. I’ve seen higher from a boulder!”

  I rolled up my sweaters and the wrap and jammed them in my backpack before a quick breakfast of the second to last tin of meal replacement drink and a granola bar with a bite already missing. My stomach grumbled when I finished, but there was maybe a day and a half of food supplies left in my pack and I was heading into the woods. There’d be no grocery stores or abandoned duplexes to raid for leftovers and non-perishables. I wasn’t quite sure how I would do it. Mom had said her uncles and grandpa were great hunters, that it was a family trait. Maybe it would just come to me, like a blood memory or something. What would I even kill an animal with, a stick?