The Marrow Thieves

by Cherie Dimaline

  “Who do you think they are?” I didn’t bother to whisper; we’d been left largely alone while the intruders chatted by the firepit. I cringed to see the asshole using my tent bag as a seat.

  “Not sure yet. But I do know the old guy.”

  “You do?” I spun around to face him. “Who is it? Did we meet him on the road?”

  “No.” He was slow to answer. “I can’t be sure right now.” He was being evasive, and that, on top of being sassed by someone my own age, frustrated me. I left him to finish up and joined Rose, who was now dressed in a pair of jeans and a grey shirt. She had braided her long, curly hair in one thick rope that fell over her shoulder. Even now I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she was.

  She saw me and smiled me over to a stump where she’d helped prepare supper the night before. “You’re a mess. Sit down.”

  My own braid was two days old, and tufts stuck up here and there. She untied the bottom and pulled it apart. I noticed the asshole watching us, a peculiar look on his face like jealousy, and I smirked. She brushed my hair hard and re-braided it for me. Much better than a stupid ponytail like some people. I felt real nishin.

  Ready to go now, I followed Miig’s lead and walked behind the newcomers into the woods. Despite our recent tragedies, he seemed less stressed about this new development than I was. Though I was still acutely aware of my missing gun.

  They walked us through the bush, in a semicircle, and then southeast. After about half an hour we arrived at a tree-lined hill and stopped.

  “What the heck? There’s not even anything here.” Slopper sat on a rock, exhausted and cranky at having to wait for his breakfast this long.

  “Look closer, big man.” One of the crossbowers clapped his hands, and two bodies in camouflage stepped out of the trees at the base of the hill, bows pointed at us.

  “These are the guests, coming to join us,” he called out, and they stepped back into the trees. We walked towards the hill, and now I could see a cave carved into it. This is where we went, single file, into the hill itself.

  I felt panic when we’d gone through the door, past more guards and into the dark. I thought of RiRi and Minerva then, and aggression filled my limbs like adrenaline. Miig put his hand on my shoulder and I deflated, but only just a bit.

  The cave opened into a low, wide room filled on both sides with tents and makeshift abodes of impressive structure: panel walls, blanket doorways. The space was clean and orderly with a hum of activity. Children were gathered in one corner, taking turns reading from a paperback book under the stern eye of an older woman who watched us with a face that revealed no interest as she shushed the children back to work. Some faces appeared in the doorways of the “homes,” but they quickly disappeared. We were a quiet sensation.

  We were led to the back of the cave and into a smaller tunnel than the entrance, one of four branching off the back wall. I hesitated at the mouth and had to be pushed forward by Rose, who walked behind me. “We’re good. All good.”

  “What if we’re not?” I whispered back.

  “Nothing we can do about it anyway. There’s too many of them.”

  This was very true. We were kind of screwed if they turned out to be Recruiters, or traders, or some kind of cannibal tribe like the twins’ wiindigo people.

  She left her hand on the small of my back, and I reached behind to grasp it in mine. I decided right then that I might be okay with dying at this point. I had lived. I recalled the moment we’d found water, and even here, in this tunnel with the potential of being eaten by cannibal Indians still undecided, all the blood rushed away from my head. At first I thought that this was what made my eyes squint, what made them take in too much light. But then I saw we were coming to the end of the path and daylight was up ahead.

  We emerged into a valley, surrounded on all sides by high walls of smooth rock. It was about thirty meters in diameter, and the ground was lush. Here the grass and weeds were sharp and thick and grazed our shins. I was so busy looking down and holding onto Rose’s hand that I forgot all about being anxious.

  Then I smelled it.

  Tobacco. Cedar. And the thick curl of something more, something I thought I’d only ever smelled with the memory of smell.

  “Holah, that’s sweetgrass!” Rose slipped into her old accent, picked up from years with the elderly before she’d come to us.

  “We grow sweetgrass here.” It was the man from the woods. “That’s what you see all around you.” He was smiling, patting the tips of the longer strands we stood in.

  “Miigwans.” He approached us, arms open. “We are so pleased to have you with us. When the Council gets out of the lodge we’ll all talk.”

  I looked back to where he pointed, against the far stone wall. There, at the base, was a squat, round structure, piled with layers of old blankets and tarps. In front of it burned a low fire and two piles: one of wood, the other of round rocks.

  “Is that a sweat lodge?” I could barely breathe. An honest-to-God sweat lodge? Here, in this weird valley hidden by stone hills? Where the hell were we?

  Then I heard the other word. Council.

  “Council?”

  Just then the flap on the front of the lodge was opened, a gust of steam poured out and up like a giant’s breath, and men started to crawl out. One by one, naked to their briefs, old and young, Native men came out on their knees and stretched back to full height. Each one smiled our way, and Miigwans started to smile back. He smiled so big his eyes almost disappeared in the folds of it.

  The last man out of the lodge took an extra minute to stretch out to his full height. He leaned heavily on the man beside him, and I saw that the bottom half of his right leg was missing. I was distracted by it, too distracted to look into his face until he spoke.

  “Francis?”

  His hair was longer and his face sagged a bit more at his hard jaw, and then there was the missing lower half of his leg. But there he was.

  “Dad?”

  I crossed the distance between us with my packs still strapped to my back. I don’t remember when I pulled them off. All I know is that when I threw myself to the ground and into the circle of his arms I was small again: no baggage, no years in the bush, no murder. I was small and he was huge and everything was okay.

  We cried together like that, happy in a way that had no words, until he suddenly pulled back and scanned the group behind me. And I knew what he was looking for. I caught his gaze and shook my head slowly. Then we cried for a different reason.

  Time moved slowly and quickly and we didn’t care. Eventually we were sitting at a round table on stumps and rocks, all level to the same height. I sat between my father and Miig, who had embraced, as they made introductions between their respective groups.

  “This is the Council, what’s left of the original one and newer members we’ve picked up along the way.” Dad went clockwise around the table. “Clarence, Cree from the old prairies territory. Mint, Anishnaabe from south in America. Bullet, she’s Inuit. Jo-jo is Salish and came to us just last month. This was his introductory sweat we just had, to bring him onto the Council. General is Haudenosaunee and Migmaw. And Rebecca is Ho-Chunk, also from across the border. Seven of us all together.”

  They were passing around a copper vessel, sharing water that embroidered the outside with beads of cool condensation.

  Miig spoke for us. He knew some of the men there but not all. It was different; usually we spoke for ourselves, but I could tell some protocol was set aside. The group was worn out from their sweat, and everyone, not least of all me and Dad, was drained and emotional. He was quick, pointing around the table to our faces with his palm up.

  “Chi-Boy, Wab, Rose, Zheegwon and Tree, I’m Miigwans, Slopper, and this is Jean’s boy, Frenchie.” He paused. “There’s eight left.”

  “Left?” Bullet, who was clearly blind in one eye, turned toward
s Miig. “You’ve had some recent losses?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. Our little girl, RiRi, passed on in the middle of a kidnapping attempt. Damn traders. And our Elder, Minerva, was taken from us by Recruiters.”

  Bullet’s head swung to her right. The older man with the yellowed mustache, General, leaned in to whisper to the small man with the bald head they called Mint.

  “What? What is it?” I asked the table.

  It was my dad who answered. “We’ve heard of your Minerva.”

  “What? Where is she?” Chi-Boy used his seldom-heard voice and sprang from his chair as if he would run to her right that moment.

  “That’s why we came this way, to try to find her. We thought someone in Espanola or thereabouts would have some idea of which school we could go to to try to find her,” Miig explained.

  General and Mint whispered again before the older man answered. “She’s not in a school. She’s here, in town, I mean. In Espanola.”

  THE MIRACLE OF MINERVA

  The Council had a man on the inside, so their information was good. They told us what they had learned of Minerva after she was taken away from us.

  We had been wrong about the marrow, but not about the theft.

  Three Recruiters drove an Anishnaabe elder, female, to School #47E, the school closest to the Espanola settlement. She was compliant, jovial even, and Recruiter #1 noted in his log that there might be something fatally wrong with the subject’s mind. She hummed on the five-hour drive in and began singing in increasing volume as they processed her: cutting her hair, shaving her skin, scrubbing her body, and preparing her to be hooked up to the conductor. Sensible words — English words — could not be made out, and she refused to answer any questions, not that that was integral to the process. All they needed was to insert the probes, tether the wires, and begin the drain.

  Recruiter #2 left halfway through the preparation. He’d been on the job for over a decade and had never encountered someone so “spooky” (in his own words) and suffered nervous twitching that spread to his bowels. He rushed to the washroom on the seventh floor, sadly in a removed area of the building without a local fire escape, sealing his fate in a stall filled with his own anxious stench.

  Really, the Recruiters were just there as added sentries at this point. Being at the delicate cerebral stage, it was time for the Headmistress to take over and the Cardinals to carry out the procedure. Recruiter #3 stayed to satisfy his sadistic nature, and Recruiter #1 slouched off to sleep at his desk behind the storage closet with its cages of balls and padding; he didn’t find this part interesting. The chase was the crux; after that, who cared how the savages screamed or cried?

  The Recruiters would later be identified through dental records.

  Minerva hummed and drummed out an old song on her flannel thighs throughout it all. But when the wires were fastened to her own neural connectors, and the probes reached into her heartbeat and instinct, that’s when she opened her mouth. That’s when she called on her blood memory, her teachings, her ancestors. That’s when she brought the whole thing down.

  She sang. She sang with volume and pitch and a heartbreaking wail that echoed through her relatives’ bones, rattling them in the ground under the school itself. Wave after wave, changing her heartbeat to drum, morphing her singular voice to many, pulling every dream from her own marrow and into her song. And there were words: words in the language that the conductor couldn’t process, words the Cardinals couldn’t bear, words the wires couldn’t transfer.

  As it turns out, every dream Minerva had ever dreamed was in the language. It was her gift, her secret, her plan. She’d collected the dreams like bright beads on a string of nights that wound around her each day, every day until this one.

  The wires sparked, the probes malfunctioned. Bodies rushed around the room in a flurry of black robes like frantic wings beating against mechanics. The system failed, failed all the way through the complication of mechanics and computers, burning each one down like the pop and sizzle of a string of Christmas lights, shuddered to ruin one by one.

  The Council’s man on the inside was called to School #47E the day after the incident to take stock and investigate. He noted that several Indigenous people were on site, camping around the edges of the property while it still burned, low now but full of thick smoke, unafraid of the inhabitants and curious as to the cause of destruction. Gossip spread fast.

  The school had been imposing: a fallacy of glass and steel against the dusty expanse of the north shore clearing, like a middle finger thrown into the sky, built in record time. Now it was nothing more than one storey, maybe two, of jagged edges, melted poles, and broken cement. A spew of office chairs, smashed computer parts, and chewed-up bricks lay on the ground around it. The fence was mostly thrown down, but the fortified gates still stood.

  When the Council’s man exited his black vehicle and walked the remaining path to the gate, strewn with debris from the explosions and subsequent fires and maybe even some looting, the campers moved in closer. Soon the road behind him was dotted with spectators following him to the useless gates holding nothing from a broken system, torn down by the words of a dreaming old lady.

  The wind shifted so that the heat and smell bore down on the road. And with the Council’s man watching, the campers made their hands into shallow cups and pulled the air over their heads and faces, making prayers out of ashes and smoke. Real old-timey.

  LOSS

  That night we slept in the clearing. We chose to stay outside. Inside seemed too claustrophobic, and besides, we were more than happy to be close to the lodge.

  “Son, plenty of room in my place.” I’d helped my dad to his place and had waited in the main living space while he went behind a screen to change and get ready for bed.

  His spot backed into a natural corner in the cave so that two of the four walls were stone. The other two had been crafted with a wooden frame hung with wool blankets. The structure had a roof, an old hospital blanket that sealed in the idea of privacy if nothing else. In the space was a cot and a small shelf made from planks of wood separated with cut logs and filled with books, folded clothes, papers, and some braided and bunched herbs. His rosary beads hung from a corner of the shelf, and in between a pile of sweaters and a stack of spineless books was a framed plastic id card. I went in close, checking that he was still busy behind the screen first.

  It was my mother’s health card. The green plastic embedded with white letters that spelled out her name: MARY E. DUSOME, SEX: F, DOB: 03/15/2027, ISSUED: 04/11/2049. The rectangle for her picture was harder to make out. It was dark with age and wear, like she was standing in the shadows even then.

  He returned, his eyes half closed even as he spoke, leaning on a carved crutch that curved under his arm like a smooth cradle. The reunion, the sweat, the long day had all taken their toll. He wore a pair of grey sweatpants and a droopy wife beater that showed the sagging skin on his arms and the strength still hard in his chest. It also revealed a series of scars knotted like bark up his side, around to his back, and climbing up his neck into the back of his hairline.

  “Nah, I’m okay. Just gonna help the crew with their stuff. Maybe I’ll sneak in after?”

  He nodded, pulled me in with one ropey arm for another hug, and patted me hard on the back, digging his chin into the crook of my collarbone so that I knew he was working out the reality of my physical presence.

  I turned to leave, pausing at the exit. “Dad?”

  “Yeah?” He was lowering himself onto a cot.

  “Mitch gave himself to them, so that I could get away. Mom, well, Mom couldn’t …”

  Dad hung his head, perched on the edge of his cot, knuckles flat against the mattress like a resting gorilla so that his shoulders sat high by his ears. He didn’t say anything. It was too much right now.

  “Maybe soon we can talk about them, eh?”

  “Real s
oon, French.” He kept his face tilted towards the floor. “Real soon.”

  I was exhausted, but we needed to talk. The others knew it. When I returned they were already sitting at the fire. Someone had thoughtfully helped Slopper with his tent, and he was already passed out inside of it. I could hear his reedy snore through the canvas.

  “You staying out here?” Tree seemed surprised, but also a bit relieved.

  “Yeah, I’m still a part of this family, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah,” Zheegwon answered. “It’s just that you have a real family now.”

  “Real? What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not real?” I picked up a stone by my foot. “So this won’t hurt, then?” I chucked it at him through the fire.

  “Oww, jeez.” He rubbed his shin where it had bounced off his shin. “All right, all right, we’re real.” We laughed.

  “So, we need to figure some things out then, I guess.” I addressed Miig, who was sitting up very straight, staring into the low flames.

  “No, not really.” I was surprised by his answer.

  “What do you mean?” It was Rose. “Don’t we need a plan?”

  “Sure we do,” he replied. “But the end is the same. We are going to get Minerva. French was led here by that belief, and it turned out to be a good one. Minerva is close by, and he found his dad. That’s a pretty overwhelming sign we’re on the right path.”

  I think we expected more hesitation, and maybe a story or seven about what happened at the schools. Not that Miig was weak or cowardly. Not at all. Just that we expected him to be more skeptical, to calm our feverish ambition. To be the voice of steadfast reason. Instead we found a tired old man and a cooperative soldier all wrapped up in one Indian. It was like he had faded, somehow.

  “I just mean the dreams. The words. Don’t we need to talk about Minerva finding the key?”