“That’s not the point,” he said.
“What is the point?” I asked.
He didn’t answer and we were quiet for a long while until he put money on the counter and said to me, “Come home with me tonight.”
I got up before he was awake, like I knew he’d want me to. His face was turned down, so I couldn’t see what he looked like. I would have liked to see his face before I left.
I decided I could have a count to fifty. I let my mouth say the numbers while I watched his back. I was afraid to stay. Forty-nine, I thought as his hand opened and closed on the pillow and then reached for the sheet, pulled it tighter around him. Fifty. I held my breath. And then … One. A count to twenty, I thought, and then I’d be gone.
Already I had the idea that I wouldn’t see him sleep again, and after this day had happened I wouldn’t think anymore of what it had been to be this close to him and see the shape of him in the sheets beside me. To be close enough to touch him. To be the only person in the world in the room with him, near him, waiting for him to wake.
Twenty, I thought, and then I was gone.
Momma’s truck was missing in the driveway when I got home. I was glad to not have to see her or tell where I had spent the night. Whenever I used to bring my father home from the bar or a girl in town caught a disease from some white boy staying at one of the hotels, she would tell me the worst harms to our people always started with opening our legs or a bottle of booze.
I lay in my own bed till lunchtime, but I wasn’t sleeping. I could hear June in the hall, her fingers clicking the keys on the computer she’d won at school and set up in what used to be the linen closet. She was smart that way and had fixed the computer twice by herself. Now she used it to write to Jude. She said he never would write back, but she knew he liked to hear from her and it would help him remember to practise using the computer so he could get a raise at work.
“June,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” she said and the sound of the computer keys didn’t stop.
I stood up and went to the door. I leaned against it and watched her. She was wearing an old pair of Momma’s jeans and they were too short for her long, skinny legs. “I could fix them,” I said.
“What?”
“Those jeans. I could take out the hem for you.”
She stopped typing and pulled her glasses off. “What is it, kiddo?”
I looked at her. She’d done the perm herself, but it looked as good as if it had grown that way. Everybody said she was the best-looking girl in town.
She sighed. “Something you want to tell me?”
I didn’t want to tell her. Almost, but didn’t. She half knew already, I could tell. And if I told her all the way, she would make me feel, not ashamed, but something else. Like I’d taken something good and dirtied it. Taken something out that couldn’t get put back. “Maybe we could have practice outside today. Might be nice.”
She made two lines of her eyes. “That’s it?” Then she pressed a button and everything on the computer disappeared. “Well, let’s do it then.”
Outside, I laid my head back on the steps and stared up at the clouds while I tuned my guitar. Behind me, June was trying to reach an extension cord from the kitchen so she could plug in the electronic piano she’d bought two months ago. I liked it better when she played the regular piano, but it took her almost a year to save up the money, so I told her I thought the sound was good, more interesting than a real piano. “More modern,” she’d said and looked pleased.
I was thinking about lying on that porch the night before and how strange it was to be in one moment and not another, and for those two moments not to talk to each other, like Mara’s brain not able to listen to her eyes, or only one to talk to the other, so you could know what had happened but not ever know what would. And then I heard him say my name.
“Angel,” John said again and I lifted my head so I could see him, standing there in front of me on the road, wiping the shine of sweat from his face. “Angel, do you remember you asked me? Is it okay that I came?”
His face was full of worry, and his long, tall body was stooped over. I knew if I asked him to, he’d turn and go home again and think it was his fault. “I’m glad you did,” I said. “June’s in there. Lando should be here any minute. We thought we’d play outside today.”
“That’s a good idea,” John said and his face filled with a smile. “Why play music inside the house. Plenty of time for that in winter.”
“John.” June climbed down the steps and cupped her hand over her eyes to stare up at him. He was taller than even June, who was so tall. “Isn’t this a nice surprise.” She hooked her finger under the collar of my T-shirt and gave a pull. “You want to help me set up, Angie?” she asked. She nodded at John. “We’ll only be a minute.”
I followed her in and she closed the door behind us. “Angie, what’s John doing coming over here?”
I whispered to her, “I asked him to.”
She made her lips tight like Momma’s. “Now why’d you do that.”
“He was Papa’s friend,” I said, still whispering.
“Angie, he’s seen fifty come and go.” I knew June wasn’t as mad as she wanted to seem. But she thought she was meant to be like Momma when Momma wasn’t there.
“Last night he touched my hand,” I said. “I never had a feeling before like when he touched my hand then.”
“Angie, is that where you …” She took my face in her hands, and I let my eyes tell her nothing.
At last she said quietly, “Well, Papa always liked him.” She pushed open the door and said, “Maybe you’ll get free trips down to Vancouver now.”
John and Lando, our cousin who was only fifteen but a mean good drummer, were waiting on the steps, looking up at us as we stood there in the door. I’d not been to Vancouver ever.
“Hey, Lando. So, John,” said June in the voice she talked to boys with, “how’s it flying?”
“Pretty good,” he said shyly. “Pretty good.”
“How long are you in town for? It’s an awful treat to have you stay a while.”
He looked at me first before he said, “I don’t know yet. I bid for a vacation leave till August. Thought I might take a holiday here for a spell.” He was a pilot and that meant he was richer than a trucker and wouldn’t have to leave you for weeks at a time if he didn’t want to.
I looked up at her and with my eyes let her see that I needed her to say yes when I asked her, “You all ready then, June?”
He jumped up when she nodded, and asked how he could help. And I liked how serious he was, letting June boss him around and carrying chairs from the porch to the yard. I liked how he checked that the ones he’d set up for us were on the most flat part of the grass so they wouldn’t lean one way or the other, and how he took the chair with the broken arm for himself, and how I could still remember him in the basement, tipped back on Papa’s green chair that we weren’t allowed to sit on, while Papa poured into his glass until it looked like it was full of gold and said something to make him laugh, and me watching from the door, not yet ten years old, and John seeing me there and saying, “Not in front of the girl, Lou,” or how it made me happy to think that while I was just a child, he was already a man and being made to laugh by my father.
And when everything was set up, I sat on the chair John had carried there for me, and I couldn’t stop smiling. He took off his jacket and laid it on the back of his chair before he sat down. He was whistling “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye,” and when he noticed me looking at him, he stopped and then smiled a big, slow smile back at me.
“You start us off, Ang,” Lando said. “Tell us what you want to start with.”
Our mother said she named me Angel so I’d always be thinking of heaven. She said, “You won’t get in any trouble if you just keep thinking about heaven.” Papa said that while she was pregnant with me, for a time she’d got to going to church with our neighbour Sissy Grant, and she thought it would be nic
e to raise us kids like Christians, but then the mood passed. That was her way of saying it, which Papa said sounded stuck-up. But I knew he liked that she was a proud lady and that when she changed her mind, and she always did, she would toss her hand as if it were something she’d set free and say, “The mood has passed.”
Momma’s moods were clouds slipping away across the sky, but mine were heavy stones and I still liked to think about heaven. I never went to church or read the Bible, so I didn’t think about whatever Mara or Sissy Grant had thought about when they put their minds on heaven. But I thought about what might happen to a dead person there that could stop them from wanting to stay in the world, that would peel their fingers from the living. When I was a kid, heaven looked like the river when it froze, and we could sail away on our skates forever but never be anywhere else, and I could see my brothers up ahead and they never got farther away. And now that I was older, it was the basement and my father still there in his chair. Or a long sleep in a black, quiet place. Whenever I sang, I let myself think about heaven.
That day, I looked at John watching me and started singing, and I didn’t think about heaven.
When I finished the last song, I looked over at June and saw she was watching someone coming up the driveway.
“I guess we’re late,” Jason said. He didn’t say it to us but to Aileen, who was beside him looking like we’d caught her in the middle of something she shouldn’t be doing. Jason lifted his legs over the fence and then unhooked the latch for her. He looked up at me then, frowning. “You said you were having a practice today. I thought we’d swing by.”
“Jason said you’re playing at … some kind of a music festival?” Aileen asked uncertainly.
“It’s a real honour,” John told her. “Maybe a thousand or more people come up for it. It’s something special to get asked to play.”
“So,” Jason said, “did we miss the show or what? Are we going to have to buy a ticket to see you now?”
I lifted my shoulders. “We can do one more,” I said. “There’s a couple more chairs in the basement.”
“Don’t need chairs,” Jason said and grinned, but watching me closely like he still wasn’t sure what I was thinking. He sat down on the grass and after a second, Aileen sat down beside him.
“Angie,” June said. “What’s next?”
I sang about a story one of the Elders, Patty, had told me. It was about Raven stealing the sun back from Bear. I was proud of my voice lifting out of me. It was sweet and deep and when I got to the highest notes, it stopped being part of me and became part of the sky and the sticky, sweet shining sun. Down low, I made my voice like a whisper, like a grown-up, dark, rough thing being said, like someone who’d wanted you, someone who’d had you—someone who still remembered what it was to want you and then have you—would speak to you.
When I finished, Aileen was staring at something far away down the road. “Aileen,” said Jason, and I saw his hand touch her back and it was light and brief, but his hand was there for a moment and for a moment I felt that touch as if in the crook of my own back. I drew a breath into me and saw his eyes, that quick look he showed to Aileen’s face—that question in them about her and whether she was okay. And sometimes I had these moments watching him when just for a second I’d know the things he gave a shit about. And there were some other moments when I’d look at him and my breath would be cold in my throat. And I’d see how his eyes and the bones of his face were as sharp as something you could cut yourself on.
But this time I let my eyes go from him and see John stretched out on his broken chair, comfortable the way a big man or a middle-aged man usually isn’t, and his clean, round face was something I thought I’d like to see again and again. And I saw in his eyes how he’d liked the song I sang him.
And then he came over to me and said softly, “That was a good song you sang. I liked that story about Raven.” He stood there humming what I’d sung, and I sat down in the grass then and made a sign so he’d know I wanted him to sit beside me.
I saw June watching us and then she stood up and waved to Lando. “Come on inside, Lando,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
Aileen slid her hand across her forehead. She and Jason were as close as two pages of a book but not touching at all. She looked like she had something to say but hadn’t said it yet.
“Did you like that story?” Jason asked her.
She looked startled. She turned her head back and forth, slowly, and then made like a shrug with her shoulders.
Jason said, real fast, “It was about Raven. You want to know where Raven came from?” She started to say something, but he said, “And the sun and the moon.” He looked at John. “I know how everything in the sky got there. Do you know a story like that?”
John said he didn’t, and Jason looked at Aileen again and said, “I know a lot of stories. Ma used to tell me one every night. If I asked her a question, she’d always answer with a story. You asked me a question last night. I can tell you the answer. I can tell you what happened to her.”
“To Mara?” I didn’t know what the look on her face meant when she looked at him then.
“It will take time, okay. It will take till the end of the summer. Then you’ll know what happened, when the summer is over, and you’ll know if you want to stay here.” His face looked worried. “You said you were going to stay here.”
She smiled but didn’t say anything back.
I thought, from the look on his face, that he would stop talking then, but he didn’t. After a moment, he said, “Okay, then there are eight weeks until the summer is done, and I will tell you seven more stories. Eight is the right number in our stories. You must try things four or eight times before you succeed. Because we have two arms and two legs and two bones in each one. So I will tell you eight stories, because that is the right number for something that you want to happen. After the eighth story, you won’t want to go.”
“You want me to stay?” she asked, and we all looked at Jason to see what he would tell her.
He said, “You won’t want to go.”
Then he said, “Now I’ll tell you the second story.” He reminded her, “There will be six more.”
Old Man did not forgive Old Woman for what she had done to him. He did not forgive her, but one day, he found her looking at herself in the river while she braided her hair and she didn’t know that he was watching her. She wound the hair around itself, and her hands moved so fast that Old Man could hardly see what she was doing, but the thing she made of her hair with her hands was perfect.
Then he thought of how she had looked at him, before there was a world and when they were young and new. He thought of the way she had loved him then, how she would smile so all the white points of her teeth showed whenever he touched her. And when she brought him food, she would let him eat first and she would watch him as he ate as if it fed her, too, his eating. And she would gather her hair into braids to make herself pretty for him. And when she spoke to him, her voice was so soft and sweet that he thought he could taste it in his mouth. And when she took off her clothes for him, he wept.
He thought of these things and remembered how, once, he had loved her so much that he made her a ring of gold and a ring of silver, so that she could wear one on each hand and not forget that even as the ring was round and complete, so was his love for her. And he gave her each ring and she said, What lovely gifts you’ve made for me, but she did not touch them. And he begged her to put them on her hands, but she shook her head and said, If I put them on my hands to remember your love for me, what would happen if I forgot one day to look at my hands and then forgot the way you’ve loved me. What if I trailed my hands in the river to cool them one hot afternoon and then the rings were lost in the water and I forgot that you were the man who first unfastened my hair and called me beautiful. What if an animal with many teeth should set upon me one night while I slept and tear my feet from my legs and my arms from my body, and later I should wonder if I ha
d ever been loved and not know.
No, she said and shook her head. Let the sky keep them for me, so they will never be lost and I will never forget this time before time, this world between us that is before the world, when we have loved each other as a man and woman are able to love. And then she took the rings in her hand and threw them into the sky, where they stayed forever, even long after the two lovers had become cruel to each other and the rising of the moon behind the sun became a thing that mocked them.
And as Old Man watched Old Woman, he remembered all this, and he felt something happen inside him as he watched her play with the birds at her feet that were beloved to her of all things. They crept around her in the grass and followed her wherever she went. Her favourite was the largest and the blackest of all birds and she called him Raven. Old Man saw that the birds’ love for her was no less than his and that they would do anything for her.
That night, as Old Woman slept, Old Man took the birds that huddled around her and gathered them into his arms. Every bird in the world was there, and as Old Woman turned over in her sleep, Old Man threw the birds into the sky. They made a terrible sound of squawking and Old Woman woke suddenly and turned to him.
What have you done? she cried.
Old Man was confused. I have put the birds into the sky with your two rings, that you may always look at them and know how much I love you, he said tenderly.
She leapt to her feet and called to the birds, but they had forgotten her now. They were in love with their own wings and the pull of the sky upon them. They soared higher and higher, and though they sometimes came to the ground for a moment or two, or granted her a glimpse of their shining feathers when they paused for a moment on a branch or bathed themselves in the river, they were never hers again.
She sobbed bitterly and cursed him. You have taken everything from me, she said. You have taken everything.
As he watched her, he felt his face grow hard and cold. She turned her back on him and as she covered herself in blankets and let her tears soak the pillow, he said to her that he hated, You never loved me enough.
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 11
