“I hate that name. You’re not Lillian.”
By now, he had managed to move to his hands and knees, and he stretched like a cat.
“Don’t be like that. I can’t stay long. Here, I brought you something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.” They both knew that was a lie. “What… what did you bring?”
Near the bottom of the rear wall of the shed, about a foot of one plank was missing, broken off when a shovel had once been carelessly tossed into the back. Through it, she passed a wrapped-up packet, and Sam groaned in pain as he reached for it.
“It’s just some toast and jam. That’s all I could sneak out.”
Trying not to look ungrateful, he took the offering and slowly opened it. He was an angry boy, and life was unfair, and a large part of him wanted to piss off the entire world. But there was still enough of the little boy from the Otter Lake Reserve to know right from wrong. And to be gracious when someone was being kind.
“Thank you” he managed to mumble. Trying to show some restraint, he ate the toast as slowly as possible.
“You shouldn’t be here. They’ll catch you and you’ll be on the inside looking out, like me.” He watched as his cousin looked around warily.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m cold. I’m hungry. I’m mad. But I’m okay.”
All of this was spoken in Anishnawbe, the forbidden language. Sam revelled in it, but Lillian switched quickly back to English. It was bad enough that she was here now, but if anyone overheard them, who knew what they would be in for.
“Why do you always get yourself in trouble like this?” whispered Lillian. Licking his fingers of the last remnants of jam, Sam just shrugged. “I can’t keep sneaking around in the middle of the night to bring you food. If either of us gets caught… And someday, you’ll get yourself into so much trouble that they’ll send you away and I won’t be able to help at all. You should just do what they say. It’s less trouble.”
“I don’t care about trouble, I just want to get back home. This place is no good. I’m going to run away,” he answered in Anishnawbe.
Lillian shook her head. “You’ll get yourself killed. You don’t even know which way home is. Remember Daniel River and James Magood.” They were both silent for the moment.
“I’m not them. I know where home is. I saw it in that book. I saw the river and the islands. I’m sure that’s them. And I know the bush.” Sam paused for a moment. “Wanna come?” From somewhere near the kitchen, they both heard some of the kids yelling as they played a quick game of soccer before classes. “No, huh?” Lillian leaned against the shed, making it squeak. “You like it here, don’t you.”
“No. Not really.”
“Then why don’t you want to go home?”
Sam could see her hair squeezing between two of the boards as she rested her head against the shed. “I’m older than you, Sam, so you listen to me.”
“Only by three years.”
“That doesn’t matter. I get to go home next year. And I like learning. I like knowing there’s so much out there. I’m still trying to figure things out. Remember that map they showed us of the world? My grandmother used to tell me all of us were sitting on the back of a Giant Turtle. That’s what we were taught. I didn’t see any turtle there, Sam. It’s a big… they call it a continent. There’re lots of them.”
“I’ll find you a turtle if you want one so badly.”
“I thought the world was full of magic. I don’t think it is. Maybe once it was. Not any more.”
“What are you so depressed about? I’m the one in the shed.”
“And I kind of like this Jesus guy they talk about all the time,” she said.
“You like a White guy?”
“They say he’s Jewish, and that’s not the same.”
“Looks White to me.”
Silence surrounded them, and Lillian looked behind her to make sure she hadn’t been discovered. Her life up until then had been divided into White people and her people. “I think they are White too—but a girl here told me that it has something to do with their dicks. And pigs. I think.”
“Dicks and pigs? They’re weird. That guy Shylock is a Jew— and he was mean. Fine, then. I’ll go home alone.”
Lillian turned and looked at him once more, one eye peering through a separation in the slats. “I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“I’m not staying here. I won’t stay here.”
“Sam, please be careful. This place is no good, I know. But if you just pretend, it’s so much easier. Don’t make such a fuss.”
“But it’s different for me than you—that priest…”
“Oh, Sam, he’s just a big bully. He can only hurt you if you let him. Don’t you remember what you promised your folks? That friend of your mom’s—you said you wouldn’t end up like her. Nothing is worth that.”
“But I can’t stay here—I just can’t.”
“Sam, that guy’s just mean. But at least he’s teaching you all about Shakespeare. You told me you loved that stuff. You’re so smart.” She had slipped into Anishnawbe without realizing, until her tongue tripped on that old writer’s name. She checked herself—if she wasn’t careful she might be keeping her cousin company in the shed some time soon.
For the first time, their eyes locked. “What, what is it Sam?”
But he couldn’t tell her what it was; he hardly knew what it was himself. “Goodbye, then, Mizhakwan…”
She glowed inside—he had said her name aloud in the forbidden language. And she knew that he was right. The best thing was for him to get away any way he could—and she should help him too. But these people had eyes in the back of their heads. Both of them would be punished. She looked around and walked stealthily away.
She was so confused. It was possible to be right and wrong at the same time. This place was challenging everything she had ever known before. But at least she was learning more than she ever learned back home.
TWO
It was hard to tell which hurt worse, his stomach, his head, his elbow—or his pride.
He had once more forgotten to turn off the single light bulb that burned over his bed. Light bulbs cost money and he was one of those people whose other needs took priority over being well lit. In fact, he once spent a whole season in the dark. Except he couldn’t recollect whether it was a physical or spiritual darkness. It didn’t matter. Dark was dark, and both involved walking into walls.
Except this morning. He arose in the bright mid-morning light. His foot slid onto the cigarette-scarred floor, knocking over some empty bottles. He started the day as he did every morning— with a deep breath and a vague understanding that the way he was living was wrong. But like the nausea in his stomach and the pounding in his head, the feeling would go away. There was an underlying fear that one day it would not go away. But he would worry about that tomorrow. Today he had woken up, and that was something, at least.
Now came the next step. Getting to his feet. A much more complex and difficult manoeuvre than most would expect. Immediately he found himself leaning for support on the sink next to his bed, his elbow throbbing from some recent impact. He let the water run, hoping against experience the water would get cold enough to numb his elbow. But it never got hot enough when he needed it to, either. Instead, he stared into the mirror. His face had changed so much over the years, he always startled himself.
“Good morning,” the old man said to himself, barely recognizing his own voice. He didn’t find many occasions to talk in this life, other than for panhandling and buying vast amounts of alcohol. On top of that he now spoke only in English. His former life had been tucked away in some dark recess of his mind. Hidden from reality with a security door protected by an eighty-proof lock.
The water, dripping from the semi-clogged sink onto his untrimmed toenails, made the reality of the room and his life all the more apparent. The sink had been partially plugged since he’d found himself here but a lack of
both competent landlords and initiative on his part had left it unrepaired. So, his feet were wet, but he had survived far worse. He turned off the tap and dipped his hands into the full sink, then wet his face and hair. The shock of the water always brought him to the teetering edge of his past life. The knob on that locked door in his mind momentarily rattled. But the closer he got to where the water took him, the more he remembered, and the more he turned away. This time was no different.
His hair and face still dripping, he walked to his lone window and looked out. Outside he saw concrete and telephone poles. Mail and newspaper boxes. Cars. And the odd half-dead tree rising out of the sidewalk. As he stared off into this world he’d surrendered to, he was barely conscious of the cockroach that approached his wet feet, drawn to the water. The cockroach and the man had been roommates for the past couple of months. Sensing a bond with the man, a fellow reject relegated to existing on the fringes of society, doing what it could to survive, the cockroach didn’t fear him.
The old man, on the other hand, felt differently. He viewed the cockroach as just another immigrant from some far-off land, staking a claim to Native land, pestering him. Just another example of immigration gone wild. Same with those damn pigeons and doves. Who asked them to come to this country anyways?
The antennae of the cockroach gently touched and probed the man’s feet, but due to the calluses, scars and bad circulation, the man was unaware of the cockroach’s friendly intentions until it crawled over his toes. The result being a loud scream, a kick of his foot, a flying insect, and an old man falling backwards onto his ass. There the old man sat, even more aware that this was not the path the Creator had chosen for him. The man had chosen it for himself. Once more he stared out the window onto a world he hadn’t created and didn’t belong to, noticing a car that was driving by. On its rear-view mirror hung a dreamcatcher. On its back bumper was a sticker that said: this is first nations country.
Something loud and anxious started beating behind his mind’s locked door. Curious, he crawled to his knees, momentarily intrigued by what was struggling to get free. He leaned out of the open window, trying to get a better look. The car stopped next to a roti shop across the road. Out got a woman, obviously Native—the eyes, the skin colour and the turquoise jewellery gave her away—and extremely pretty. In her hand she carried a cloth bag that from the man’s window appeared to be filled with clothes. The woman entered the dry cleaner next to the roti shop. Through the large storefront window, the man watched her pull from the bag two sweaters, a skirt and a large blanket sporting a Native design. She seemed to be on familiar terms with the Asian man behind the counter.
Something continued to stir deep in the man. Something familiar, yet it had not reared its head in a very long time. The woman was pretty, that was obvious. He watched her as she took her receipt and exited the building. Taking a chance for the first time in a long time, the old man waved to the woman, his arm swinging wildly out the window.
“Hey, you—up here! Hi! Hello!” He had no idea why he was doing this, but something inside made him.
It took a moment before the woman located where the voice was coming from and concluded that it was directed at her. She glanced at the ground floor of the old man’s building, and followed his voice up to the third floor.
Excited that she was looking at him, he continued gesticulating and calling. “Hello! Hello! Up here! Yeah, me!” A sliver of light spilled out from underneath that locked door, and the man spoke a lone word.
“Ahneen!”
Where that had come from, he wasn’t sure. But he couldn’t hold it back. He yelled it a second time, then a third, but then the expression on the woman’s face silenced him, and the light from the locked door disappeared. He’d seen the expression before, a thousand times. It was a combination of disgust, pity and embarrassment. It stung the old man, the remnants of his pride struggling to come out of its coma. Hurt, the old man mustered his strength and responded in the only manner he could.
“Fuck you!”
As it turned out, he had summoned up a little too much strength. The virulence of the “f” and “ck”’ sound was more than his worn teeth and gums could stand, and as those two words went sailing out of his mouth, so did his right bicuspid. Out over the sidewalk and landing four feet from the woman. Looking shocked and more than a little repelled, the woman got back into her car and drove off, leaving her dirty laundry and the crazy letch in the window behind.
The old man, equally shocked but for different reasons, watched her leave. So this is what he’d become. Once a mighty battler of monsters, creator of creatures, teacher of tales and both chief troublemaker and champion of Canada’s Native people, he was now… pathetic. He sat back down on his ass, not really knowing what to do or feel. And though he’d gotten up just ten minutes before, he fell back onto the floor.
He lay there for hours, fading in and out of consciousness, bits and pieces of past lives trying to claw their way to the surface. Wendigos, his long-dead mother. Women and men he’d known, fought and loved. Hunting deer. Buffalo. Whales. Creation. More memories than a hundred people could possibly have, yet they were all his. He just lay there, as his past ran over him, like pages from his life randomly flipping by.
Then, from the recesses of his damaged mind, she appeared. The face that had once stopped him from wandering the country, the body that had made him forget all the others (at that time anyway) and the smile that had made him hold his breath. He had known from the moment he met her, so long ago, that he could never be the man she wanted, needed or deserved, but so long as he could fake it, he had figured they would both be happy. She must be old now, he thought. Like him. Well, hopefully not like him. His eyes popped open. He hadn’t allowed himself to see her face for decades. Why now? he thought. He propped himself on his elbows, perplexed. He shook his head, trying to remove the cobwebs from his mind. This was more than a flashback. It was more than an idle memory. This—she—was real. For some reason, he looked out the window again, this time to the horizon, his eyes gazing to the far north where he had once roamed the forest, and had swum in the lakes. Something was calling to him.
Once more he managed to achieve a standing position. Like a compass, his attention never wavered from the north. A dozen or more seconds passed as he debated his options. Glancing back over his shoulder he saw again his reflection in the mirror. This time he wasn’t surprised. This time he felt the beginnings of a new confidence. Having a purpose could do that to a man. Turning to face the mirror, looking deep into his bloodshot eyes, he shook his head.
“That… will not do,” he said to the reflection, knowing he now had an appointment to keep.
But first, he vomited.
THREE
Virgil was concerned, but didn’t want to be. Everybody was rushing about, talking in hushed tones, looking downward in a respectful manner. It was true that his grandmother was dying, though nobody would admit it in exactly those words. His entire family had spent the past two weeks hovering about her house, bringing in food, taking out dishes of half-eaten casseroles, all frustrated by their inability to do anything to help Lillian Benojee.
Virgil loved his grandmother. But he was one of eighteen grandchildren and never quite knew were he stood on the totem pole of her affection. One grandchild, about ten years older than him, was well on his way to becoming a successful lawyer. Two others had started up a popular restaurant in a nearby town, providing Nouveau Native cuisine to all the American tourists. Kelly, another cousin who was only five days younger than him, had won some speech contest or something, and had just gotten back from Ottawa where she’d met the prime minister. And then there was Virgil. And there was nothing particularly bad about the boy, but neither was there anything notable about him. He wasn’t as good as some, nor was he as bad as Chucky or Duanne, whose names were frequently found on the police flyer. Virgil was just a grade-seven student who acknowledged that vanilla ice cream, ginger ale and bad sitcoms were the highlight
s of his existence. The bell curve was invented for boys like him.
Oh yes, except that most bell-curve graphs don’t include a mother named Maggie Second who happened to be the chief of the First Nations community known as Otter Lake. Virgil’s father, dead from a boating accident three years ago, had been chief before her. Seeing how hard his mother worked, and how miserable the work made her, he was grateful that chiefdom, as applied under the Indian Act, was not dynasty-oriented.
Sitting on his grandmother’s deck overlooking Otter Lake and oblivious to the warm spring air, he watched the comings and goings of his grandmother’s house through the big see-through sliding doors. Food being put out, people eating, occasionally somebody going into his grandmother’s bedroom. It had pretty well been the same since she collapsed. At the moment, there were about a dozen people in the living room, getting in one another’s way.
Then he saw Dakota, yet another of Lillian’s descendants, who was exactly two months older than him. She opened the door and let herself out onto the deck, and she was carrying something. Dakota had two brothers and a sister, named Cheyenne, Sioux and Cree. Dakota always believed the naming of her and her siblings said more about her embarrassing parents than it did about any of them. Especially since their names were Fred and Betty.
“Didn’t see you at school yesterday.”
“Wasn’t there.”
“I kind of put two and two together. Here—you don’t come inside any more,” she said, sitting in the chair beside Virgil and placing two bowls on the deck table between them. “So I thought you might be hungry.” She slid one bowl across the table toward Virgil.
There was a reason she was his favourite cousin. Virgil sniffed the bowl. “More corn soup?”
“My English teacher calls it ‘the Native chicken soup.’”
“What does that mean?”
Dakota shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s a Jewish joke or something, ’cause he’s Jewish.”
Motorcycles & Sweetgrass Page 2
