“There’s another gift for you, then, if you did not know,” the gentleman said, tipping his hat.
They both turned to go before I found my voice, and it was a thin, wailing thing.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
When they stepped away, it was like a veil had dropped between us, and they lost their sharp edges. I saw the suggestion of stag horns above the lady’s head, and the gentleman seemed even taller, tall enough to snatch down a star.
“Anything you want.”
“Yes,” agreed the lady. “Go to London and learn to dance, or run away to the Americas to seek your fortune. Find a child so you can be a mother, or shave your head and become a mendicant nun.”
“Come with us,” suggested the gentleman slyly. “Present yourself at court. The queen has a love for silly country girls who clomp and shout. Make a name for yourself, and come back in a hundred years, when Belfast might love you better.”
For a moment, they sharpened, him reaching out his hand, her reaching out her fox’s paw, and I lurched back with a cry.
The heel of my foot found no ground beneath it, and in a panic, I threw myself forward to avoid tumbling backwards into the river. I fell flat on my face on the cobbles, and when I looked up, the only thing left of the gentleman and the lady was the sound of their laughter.
I shuddered, and remembered that the friendly folk had never much cared whether the people they played with lived or died.
I wondered if I would be sorry for not reaching for them, and then thought of the man from Clonmel with his feet shredded to ribbons, and a dress folded neatly on a stump, and I didn’t think I would.
I walked home slowly, following the path of the river but keeping a healthy space between myself and its banks. Soon the Albert Clock would chime five, and I would start rousing the people who paid me to make sure they made it to their factory jobs on time. I got a penny for every room I woke up, and God only knew that it wasn’t much, but it helped.
I thought of Paul, and I thought of poor Bridget Cleary, too. They hadn’t told me whether she was a witch or not, only that it was a bad business all around. It was, and my steps faltered as I imagined Paul screaming in my face, asking me the names of God and the saints, demanding to know where his brother had gone.
I also thought about Paul’s clever hands and honest face, and how tightly he had held my hand when we came to Belfast, the dirt from our parents’ graves still dusting our shoes.
They had said I could come back when Belfast loved me better, but I knew that it would not matter if Paul were not there to love me at all.
As I walked, I knew that the stone in my belly would always be there, though it seemed lesser now than it was before. I thought about Paul having a younger sister and not a younger brother, and it grew smaller still.
There was no boy I could imagine myself being, but I could see a girl. Not a witch or a fairy, but a great clomping girl, a wandering nun, a dancer, a dairy maid, or a flower seller.
A sister.
The sky grew light and lighter still, and though I knew that Belfast had not changed, and that I had not either, everything was different, and I was not afraid.
Art by Aaron Paquette
A Deeper Echo
by David Jón Fuller
* * *
1919
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
The smoky-grey dire wolf loped between darkened hulks of wooden boxcars on the sprawling CPR train yards of Winnipeg. The early June air was already warm and the sun had yet to rise. Warehouse doors clanged open at the looming Canadian Pacific station.
The wolf came to an abrupt halt, sniffing the air. The scent of human body odor grew stronger through the heady mix of diesel and tar stench. A faint smell of pines tinged with oil lingered beneath.
The wolf’s stocky shoulders were as tall as the tops of the massive, grimy wheels, and he knew what would come next: a hostile shout, warning off strangers; or worse, a cry of alarm at the sight of a wolf the size of a bear. He’d been shot at enough in the war. Best to hurry, then. Thomas Greyeyes shivered his thick fur to adjust the army-issue satchel that hung beneath his torso.
Didn’t matter if you were a veteran of kaa-kii-kichi-miikaating, the Great War; honest work was hard for a man to come by in 1919. And though Thomas had been making ends meet in the dwindling fur trade since being demobbed, that wasn’t the reason he had come to Winnipeg. Here, white workers had shut down a city run into the ground by its white owners. The general strike would make it difficult to find who he was looking for.
Thomas slipped underneath the couplings between two cars. The grind-clap-grind of leather soles on hard-packed ground told him the man approaching was used to being in charge.
He turned his snout down to the dark ties and crushed slate and called up the power to change from the earth below. The energy flowed, melting his fur back into bare skin and pulling his snout back into his human face, the rest of his body quickly shedding all traces of his lupine form. He shivered despite the warm air, squinting to the east where the sky brightened to orange. He strained to hear – with dull, human ears, now – the man’s approach, and scrambled to get dressed in the clothes carefully folded in his satchel.
He was just tying up his shoelaces when a gruff voice said, “Hey! This is private property!” A kerosene lamp glared across the space between the cars.
Thomas stood. At thirty-nine, his knees were starting to feel sore even after the rejuvenating fire of the change. He wore the same army-issue shirt, coat, and trousers he’d had when returning from the bloody fields of France, and the cap that bore the symbol of his battalion, the timber wolf. He’d since replaced the shoes and leather belt with his own. His hair was jet-black, his nose shaped in a proud hook like his father’s, and his skin was just slightly darker than that of the white man who now faced him.
“Listen, chief: this is no hotel. Scram.”
Thomas squinted in the harsh chemical light. “I couldn’t find the room service bell anyway.”
“Company boxcars are private too.”
Thomas stepped away from the couplings. He threw his satchel over his shoulder so the Canadian Expeditionary Force sigil and the symbol of the 107th Battalion on his cap were plain in the lamplight. “Then it’s a good thing I walked here.”
“Where from?”
“Red Sucker Lake.”
The CP man lowered his light. “Infantry?”
“That, and engineering.”
The guard looked him up and down. Now was not the time to comment. If you looked too much like an out-of-work Indian they might even find an excuse to call the cops. Winnipeg’s boom years still hadn’t made it “the Chicago of the North,” and the city seemed to take out its resentment on anyone who didn’t look or sound Anglo enough.
The CP man chewed the inside of his lip. “Four hundred miles to come to the railyard? That’s a long walk, chief.”
Thomas took a deep breath. He could never be sure what would sting a white person as much as chief. Probably for the best. He put his hand into the ragged pocket of his coat and clenched his fingers for the hundredth time around the letter he’d received only a week ago. “Don’t trust airplanes much.”
The other snorted. “They have an airport up there already?”
Thomas allowed a slight smile. “Nope. That’s why I don’t trust ‘em.”
The CP man spat off to his left. “If you’re not after work, what are you looking for?”
“A family named Fotheringham.”
“What, the clothesmakers?”
Thomas shrugged. “Mrs. Alan Fotheringham?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. But you won’t have much luck at their shop. All closed up.”
“The strike?”
The CP man nodded. “Mood’s ugly in town, if you’re just in from the north. First the war, then the ‘flu, now the strike. Most of our mechanical department fellas walked off the job, but I’m still here. Police all got fired two we
eks ago when they wouldn’t sign away their right to a union, and now the city’s got some ‘special constables’ running around. Big fight with them and the strikers the other day.”
Thomas was used to dealing with the North West Mounted Police near his reserve – some of them honorable fellows – but he didn’t know much about the city police. He wondered whether the Ukrainian wolf pack in the city’s North End he’d heard about were mixed up in the strike. Best if he stayed out of their way, too. “That doesn’t sound good.”
The CP man put a hand up to the side of his mouth. “Bunch of thugs. Don’t tell anyone I said that.” He glanced to the brightening eastern sky. “Going to get worse before it gets better. Rail and post office the only things still going for sure.”
“Maybe I’ll try that shop. Do you know where it is?”
“It’s probably locked up tight – but it’s ‘Ladies’ Day’ at the Soldiers’ Parliament today.”
“The what?”
“A lot of vets aren’t for the strike, but the ones who are meet in Victoria Park. They’ll probably come after you, too. Today they’re letting the women run the show and make the speeches.”
“Hm,” said Thomas.
“Just about all the workers at Fotheringham’s are women. All on strike.”
Thomas took a deep breath. “They might know how to reach her, eh?”
The CP man shrugged.
“It’s a start. Miigwetch.”
“Beg pardon?”
Thomas had been up north long enough to have slipped into Island Lakes Dialect Ojibwe without thinking. “Thank you,” he said.
The guard waved it off. “Now, I wouldn’t stick around, if I were you. Boss doesn’t like Indians.”
Thomas clenched his jaws. The boss would probably like a wolf at his door even less. He turned in the direction of Main Street and left the CP man to his rounds. Though his infant granddaughter was safely hidden with relatives on the reserve, he needed to find this nice white woman who had made off with his children.
* * *
The Fotheringham shop was closed, all the windows shuttered. The stink of uncollected garbage muddled up the heavy air.
At Victoria Park, men in full suits mingled with women in dresses and hats. It might have almost seemed a picnic but for raised voices and pro-labor placards. Veterans hurried through the crowd in their olive uniforms. The newspapers Thomas had glanced through over lunch had made much of the “foreign” and “Bolshevik” supporters of the strike. But here, the accent that soared most often through the air was distinctly British, not Russian or Ukrainian. A funny kind of Bolshevism, Thomas thought.
One of the soldiers took a second glance at Thomas as he marched by and stopped. “The 107th?”
Thomas noted the other’s rank and saluted. “Yes, sir. Corporal Thomas Greyeyes.”
The lieutenant saluted back. “The Indian battalion. You did your country proud at Hill 70. Scared the Huns right down to their boots, I’m told.”
Thomas didn’t bother to correct him that half the 107th had been white. “Thank you, sir.”
The officer extended his hand. “Lieutenant Alexander Mackenzie, Fort Garry Horse.”
Thomas nodded. The dark circles beneath Mackenzie’s eyes that matched those on Thomas’s face spoke for them.
“I hope you’re here to show your support,” said Mackenzie.
“Actually, I’m looking for someone, sir.”
“Eh? Who?”
“A Mrs. Alan Fotheringham. She sent me a letter about my children, but I don’t have an address.” He showed the letter to Mackenzie.
“This is to your wife.”
Thomas clenched back a sob. “She died. Tuberculosis.”
Mackenzie’s face smoothed. “Terribly sorry to hear it. All we hear about is so many ravaged by the ‘flu.”
Thomas bit his tongue to keep from shouting. It might not have been Mackenzie’s fault the reserves didn’t have proper houses or enough doctors to treat the epidemic – but he still had no polite response.
Mackenzie handed the letter back to him. “I daresay some of Fotheringham’s employees might be here today.”
“Thank you,” said Thomas.
“Why not stay for a while – right ’round here, where I can find you, and I’ll see what I can do.” He saluted, which Thomas echoed, and then marched off.
Stay for a while, thought Thomas, so it seems you are standing with us. A sea of soldiers and women surged around him.
The sun crept overhead as the leaders of the event took the stage, and Thomas threw himself back to memories that had kept him sane during the war: the pleasing, awkward weight of his newborn son when his wife first handed her to him, swaddled in cotton and rabbit fur. That memory seemed more distant now than the bite of his shoulder stock when he fired into the darkness from the trenches, and it echoed more deeply through him. His children grew whenever he returned from the trapline. They tottered on pudgy legs across the bare boards of the space that served as kitchen, dining room and bedroom, little moccasins slapping the wood with every uncertain step. Then they were gangly coyotes, eager to join him in the woods, listening to stories about the Creator, the animals, and man’s place in the world – and especially, as his grandmother had told them to him, tales of the mahiinkan, the wolf. Those moments were a different world.
After three years in the service, he’d finally gotten to see his daughter and son again and they were strangers to him. Worse, since his son looked so much like Thomas’s own mother – the same long face, high cheekbones – it seemed she looked at him through his son’s eyes. The silence between Thomas and his children became stiff, uncomfortable. The way they avoided his eyes now didn’t seem a mark of respect, but shame. Could they see the invisible hole in his chest, which ached when the whine of a mosquito triggered the memory of an incoming shell? The way he felt blown apart without so much as a scratch on him? His son and daughter had stood across the room from him, the gulf between them as wide as the Atlantic. He was back in Canada after years in France and Belgium but it was like coming to a new country again, one in which he no longer belonged.
When the speeches were done and the cheering crowd began to disperse, it was late afternoon and Thomas’s uniform was damp with sweat. Lt. Mackenzie appeared again, as good as his word, with a woman in tow who gave Thomas directions to the Fotheringhams’ home.
* * *
The western sky was fading to orange when Thomas found 96 Balmoral Street, a dark red house that towered above the elm saplings on the boulevard. The row of two-storey mansions faced across a grassy expanse where scaffolding and cranes loomed against the enormous new Legislative Building. How many families could fit into just one of these places? Thomas wondered. The house on the Red Sucker Lake reserve where he and his wife had lived – and where she had died – was little more than a shack.
Thomas steadied himself with a quivering hand on the rail and crept up the stairs to the gabled front porch. They’re my children, he told himself. They’ll come.
Inside, he heard voices, plates clanging together, suitcases dragged up stairs, and closets opened and shut, punctuated by hurried footsteps. He heard a woman’s voice, calling instructions, the notes high, even shrill.
He knocked once on the solid-wood door. A small, white woman in a housemaid’s uniform opened it and said, “Finally–” She cut herself off and stared at him.
He swallowed. “My name is Thomas Greyeyes. I came to get my children.” He wanted to add, “Can I see them?” as he would with dealing with any white person of authority, but he bit the words back. They had taken his children away. He was through asking.
“I, that is, who are you?” said the woman. Her face was flushed and she seemed out of breath. A door slammed somewhere upstairs.
Thomas pulled the letter from his pocket and unfolded it. “Is this the home of the Fotheringhams?” He knew some white people didn’t know whether to trust you unless you had a piece of paper or a document to prove wh
at you were saying.
“Agnes!” came a woman’s voice from the floor above. It echoed through the porcelain-tiled lobby.
The maid glanced at the letter in Thomas’s hand and then over her shoulder. “Just a moment,” she said, and closed the door.
He waited.
When the door reopened, the maid stood behind a taller woman wearing her chocolate-brown hair up and clothed in a peach and grey dress. Her eyes were green and dark and fixed on Thomas, glancing up and down before she spoke. “Can I help you?”
Thomas took a deep breath and spoke the way he used to with the Hudson Bay Company man when he wanted the best price for his fox and mink furs: polite and firm, no smile. “I’ve come for my children, Marie and John. I understand you took them from the school they were in, but now it’s time for them to come home.”
“Shall I call the police, ma’am?” said the maid.
The woman turned to her. “The police are still on strike, Agnes. It’s the special constables now. But no. I see no need for that.” She turned to Thomas. “Won’t you come in? Perhaps we can discuss this to everyone’s satisfaction.”
Thomas didn’t like the sound of that – he caught the hard tone in her voice – but he nodded and stepped in. The maid closed the door and locked it.
“See to the luggage, Agnes, and remind the children they’re to make themselves presentable.” Her voice trailed off. Agnes waited a beat and then scurried up the stairs.
“Please join me,” the woman said. She gestured into a candlelit room off the main entrance. The air was hot and muggy. “I’m Gladys Fotheringham,” she said, extending her hand.
Thomas shook it. Her skin was soft and smooth, no calluses. “Thomas Greyeyes.”
The room’s dark walls were lined with bookshelves. Two deep green wingback chairs flanked a massive fireplace. Mrs. Fotheringham gestured to one as she sat in the other. “Please have a seat.” Thomas did. “I wish I could offer you some tea – do you drink tea? – but with the water pressure so low due to the strike, we’ve been running short. I’m sure you understand.”
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 28
