For Joshua

by Richard Wagamese

  “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” I asked.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” he replied.

  “What if something happens? What if some big animal—a bear, or a wolf or something—comes along? What do I do?”

  He smiled. “You’ll figure that out if it happens.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No. But I’m not the one who has to be,” he said with a grin.

  “But why? Why is it so important that I put myself through something like this?”

  “That’s what you’ll find out when it’s over.”

  And he walked away.

  I

  INNOCENCE

  There are silences in this life that can open up and swallow you whole. You tumble into them, senseless and disoriented. The sudden lack of direction leaves you immobile, foot-stuck, and mute, language suddenly a guttural rasp in the voice box. As I stood in that small copse of trees and watched John make his way back down the hill I wanted to shout that I wasn’t ready for this. I needed more time. I didn’t know enough. I was scared. But I couldn’t find my voice. My throat was dry and coarse with desperation and I took a big swallow of water to ease it. The further away he got, the more alone and isolated I felt and the bigger and emptier the world seemed. When he got into his car and began to pull away I waved my arms at him, but he either didn’t see me or was content to leave me on that hill.

  I watched his car until it disappeared and then I slumped down to the ground. There was the first chill of an evening breeze and the shadows thrown by the sun were suddenly deeper and longer. It would be evening soon. I looked around at the view that had seemed so friendly before this day but now was heavy with unseen dangers. I was scared. More scared than I could recall ever having been. Without a fire at night I would have no way to prevent anything from coming into that circle. I was afraid to be hungry. Four days without food is a long time and even though we’d had a really big meal before coming to the hill, the thought of being hungry for days frightened me. I was afraid my water would run out. I was fearful of the weather suddenly turning into a summer storm, of lightning, thunder, hail, and cold. I was afraid of insects. But mostly I was afraid that I would fail. Failure at this ceremony would mean that I didn’t have what it took to be Indian, to be Ojibway. It would mean that I belonged nowhere, that I would be alone forever.

  So I sat there with all my fear and waited. It was beautiful there. The swell and toss of the foothills reminded me of the ocean and I imagined myself on the start of a long voyage. I was a mariner unmoored from the security of the pier and set free on the wild blue abandon that is the sea. It was a good thought.

  Before long I settled into the silence. I began to notice that silence wasn’t really silence at all. As I sat there looking around, observing, I could hear things I had never heard before, voices of the world that I’d been deaf to, noises and shifts of sound that filled all of that great space around me. There was rustling and cracking coming from the bush below me, the sibilant whisper of wind through the trees, the rattle of gravel spilling down the cliff, and bird calls, squirrel chatter, the lowing of distant cattle, and further away the swish and hum of traffic on the Trans-Canada Highway. The more I strained to hear, the more I began to feel transported, taken back into my life. And I started to recall things, vague memories of times long before in a childhood I’d learned to block off, to refuse to revisit, to mythologize, or lie about completely.

  I’d been born in surroundings like this. My life had started amidst the rough and tangle of northwestern Ontario and the sounds I was hearing were the very first sounds I heard when I entered the world in October of 1955.

  My family lived a traditional life. The first home I lived in was a canvas tent, deep in the bush across the bay from the small railroad depot at Minaki. I was surrounded by family. Along with my mother and father, sister Jane and brothers Jack and Charles, I lived with aunts and uncles and their children. Our lives were spent hunting, fishing, trapping, gathering berries, smoking fish, and living as Ojibway people had for generations before the settlement of Canada. There was a part of me that remembered all of that. Not in a real way, not with clarity, but more a vague, shadowy recollection, like ghosts moving across a room.

  When I closed my eyes that first night the sounds around me stirred those shadows into image and I saw canoes beached in a cove, laden down with furs and traps. The pines back of the small clearing on the shore were thick and green, moving mysteriously into jade, emerald and deeper, into brown and fading to black. There were people moving about in front of canvas tents and in the air was the tang of wood smoke. In my mind’s eye this was a happy place, and the family that worked and cavorted around those fires was a happy one engaged in a life, a way of being, that was timeless, unalterable, and real. Tears began to burn the backs of my eyes at the thought of that life and I opened them, shook my head to clear them, and looked about at the world around that hill. That was the life I’d been born to.

  I never learned the truth about the reason that life ended for me. Instead I was given different versions of the story from different members of my family, stories that never quite filled the holes within them. I could relate to that. I’d never filled the holes that existed in the story of my life either. As I sat on the hill and looked around I thought that perhaps when you’re hurt it’s easier to mythologize the past than to explain it, easier to find a source of blame than a source of truth. So I didn’t know the real story of how we kids came to be wards of the Children’s Aid Society. I did know that alcohol, even then, was a titanic influence and that it was the negative energy of drink that led my brothers and sister and me into the custody of the Children’s Aid when I was still a toddler. I can’t remember that. Can’t recall the moment of separation, or the condition of my life when it happened.

  But my sister can. She tells a story about how we were all together in a foster home with the Wright family on Carlton Road outside of Kenora. There was bush all around and, according to her, I really liked it there. Of course, I was far too young to know that I had been stripped from the family tree and that I was a foster child. All that seemed to matter to me was that I was with my brothers and sisters. I followed them everywhere. But they were all old enough to go to school. I stayed at home every day and Jane recalls how I loved to play in the sandbox with the one toy I had—a little red truck with one wheel missing. I played for hours in that sandbox and I loved that little red truck.

  One day, she watched out the back window of the school bus as it pulled away. She doesn’t know why it was so important for her to look back that day, but she did. She watched me huddled in that sandbox playing with my truck until the bus followed a bend in the road and I slipped out of view. When they got home that night they were told that I had been moved to another foster home.

  Jane says she walked outside and stood by that empty sandbox. The little boy she had watched that morning was gone, and all that remained of him was a little red truck with one wheel missing, already partially buried in the sand.

  I was gone for more than twenty years and when she told me that story for the first time we hugged each other, held on for a long time, and cried.

  My first clear memories are of living in a foster home on the outskirts of Kenora, Ontario. I was four years old.

  We lived in a house that was less than a quarter-mile away from the bush and rock I loved even then, and where I played my first games. I had a friend in those days. I’ll call him Paul. He and his family were the only Ojibway people in the area. Their house was a small four-room shack with a big black pot-bellied stove in the middle of the centre room. The pipes from that stove went through the walls into each of the other rooms and I used to get a big kick out of seeing his father’s long johns and grey wool work socks hung over those pipes to dry. I don’t know how many days I stood leaning against the doorjamb listening to his father play guitar and sing. He had a really good voice and his hair was always slicked back like Elvis
Presley’s. Of course, this was at the end of the 1950s, so he was probably right in style. I’d stand there tapping my feet and wishing that I could make music like that. The songs I heard in that kitchen had titles like “Ring of Fire,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and “Memphis, Tennessee.” I loved those songs. I still do. When Paul was ready we’d dash out of the house with music ringing in our ears, on the hunt for big adventures in the northern Ontario bush that started right behind their house.

  I’d like to think that Paul and I were good friends. After I was taken away from that foster home years later I never, ever saw him again. But I still remember him. We were both pint-sized Ojibway boys and we both loved to run through the bush. Our games were hunting games. I remember playing hide and seek. It would take me hours sometimes to find him. I know that I too was good at hiding, and that he took just as long to find me.

  We loved that bush. We loved that land. We loved it because of the freedom it represented to us. We loved it because it was always there waiting for us and always, always willing to take us just as we were. Naturally, we never used such words to define our love of the woods, and we were too young to understand the connection that exists between an Ojibway and the land. Even if we had known, I don’t think we’d have stopped running long enough to consider what it meant to us and the men we would become. We were just boys and all we knew was how much fun it could be prowling about that wide expanse of bush country.

  When I close my eyes to recall those days I can still see the patterns the shadows made amongst the trees, the dappled grey faces of the boulders, and the hushed, swaying sound of white water just beyond the ridge. I felt more at home there, hidden behind a thicket of spruce, behind a tumble of boulders, or in the depths of a berry patch than I did in Kenora or the foster home.

  Paul felt more at home there, too. His daddy drank too much and often beat him up—beat up his mother and two sisters, too. Thinking back about listening to music in their doorway, I remember seeing bottles on the table, and bits of smashed glass littering the carpet. I guess you’re ignorant of those things when you’re a kid, or maybe somehow you know by instinct to look past them, to wait with bated breath for the dash to the sunshine, for the chance to lose yourself again in the golden warmth of friendship. But I knew that he always felt safer in the bush. At least out there, he always knew what to expect.

  We were like any other Ojibway kids. We were more than a little wild, reckless, careless, and self-centred in our play. Nothing mattered except the total freedom of running through that landscape. Years later, as I looked across the tops of the trees in the foothills, I would recall learning to find rabbits, track foxes and deer, how to recognize fresh bear droppings, and to move extra carefully after that. We learned a lot on our own.

  Paul and I both loved fishing. From the first sign of melt in the early spring to the first fall of snow in winter we were mad for fishing. We learned to spear suckers in the spring after Paul saw something similar on television. We made a gill net out of baling twine we had found and we learned how to drive fish along the shallows into the mouth of that net. We learned how to read water for the best places for rod-and-reel fishing.

  But most of all we learned to love the land. To love its feel, its smell, its motions, and its stillness. But we had no one to teach us, and everything we discovered we found on our own. The downside was that we never found out that Ojibway boys were supposed to learn to behave like caretakers of the land and all the life it held. We didn’t know that simply being Indian by doing an Indian thing like fishing wasn’t enough. We didn’t know that what made something the Indian thing to do were the teachings that guided the process. We didn’t know that all life is sacred and needs to be respected. We didn’t know how to offer that respect. We didn’t know this most basic of teachings because there was no one to teach us. It was only that night, after John left me alone on that hill, that I mourned the absence of teachers for two young Indian boys who only ever wanted to feel more at home on the land from which they grew.

  The home I lived in was a good home. I lived with a family called Tacknyk. It’s a Ukrainian name, and that family tried its hardest to make me feel like I was a part of things. For the most part, that’s what I recall. But I always knew I was different. Being the only brown face in photographs was always a dead giveaway. Being teased by the kids at school because of my Ojibway name—they called me Wobbly Knees, Wagon Wheels, and the standard repertoire of Wahoo, Chief, Wagon Burner, Squaw Hopper, and Savage—was another solid indicator of my difference.

  One summer it all became clear to me. It was to be my second summer with the Tacknyks, and by that time I’d grown used to calling Mrs. Tacknyk “mom” and referring to her daughter Cindy and son Bill as my brother and sister. On the surface, the Tacknyks were my “family,” and I’d grown comfortable with that idea. But as spring days lengthened into early summer, the family began talking around the supper table about plans for a vacation to Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. As the talk grew more and more involved, I began to hear and use phrases containing the magic word “we.” We will ride horses. We will go canoeing. We will camp out and have fires at night. I thrilled over that tiny word and began to dream about the trip. The word “we” meant that I was included, too. My excitement was almost uncontainable. As the date of our departure neared, the more excited I became. I’d never been anywhere before, and the thought of riding in the car, getting closer and closer to the fun and adventure that awaited us, was enough to keep me awake every night. Then, the day before we were to leave, I came into the kitchen after school and saw my little suitcase sitting by the door.

  “Am I all packed up already?” I asked.

  My foster mother looked at me from the kitchen table where she sat peeling potatoes. “Yes,” she said. “We’re taking you to stay with Stan and Bunny for two weeks while we’re gone.”

  That was the first time I learned that the world can drop away from beneath your feet and that your heart can break and still keep beating.

  I know that my foster-parents must have had what they thought were good reasons for leaving me behind. But no such reason can salve the betrayed heart of a five-year-old boy. That night I was driven to the other side of Kenora and dropped off with Stan and Bunny, two people I hardly knew. When the car pulled away that night, I stood in the yard waving, crying, and for the first time in my life hearing, very clearly, words in my head: “There’s something wrong with you. There’s something wrong. If you were lovable you’d be going along. If you were wanted you wouldn’t be standing here. If you were good enough you’d be going with them.” I heard those words as clearly as if they were spoken to me, and my heart was broken.

  They tried to make me feel a part of things after that, but I could never forget the pain of standing in that yard as I watched the people who said they were my family drive away from me. Leaving me. Still, I was just a little boy and I clung to the hope that I would fit, that I would be one of them and I wouldn’t be left alone again.

  But I was.

  I was adopted when I was nine years old. I’d been in the Tacknyks’ home for five years—and when you’re nine, five years is a lifetime in itself. No one told me what adoption meant. No one told me that it meant I was about to leave the land I loved so much or the only home I could remember. No one told me I was about to begin learning how to be someone else. All I knew was that I was going to a “new home.” I didn’t want a new home. I wanted to stay in the one I was in.

  The last morning in the Tacknyks’ home was very hard. Every minute felt painfuly stretched. I was nervous and scared. I went for a walk and I cried as I stood in the bush that I loved and started to say goodbye to the rocks, the trees, the river. The taste of my tears was bitter and as I looked around at the bush that had been my playground I wanted to run. I wanted to run deeper and deeper into it, set up a camp on a point of land somewhere and live there. I wanted to go where they couldn’t take me away. I wanted to go
somewhere that would never change, never be disrupted, never allow me to be separated from it or the things I loved. But in the end I was just a little boy, powerless and scared, and I turned around and walked back to the Tacknyks’.

  I was tossing a ball absently up and down in the yard when they arrived. When they reached out to touch me I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there staring back at them, this man and this woman who were taking me to a new home. My mother and my father. I wanted to scream at them to go away. To leave me alone and let me stay in the only place I could remember. I wanted to scream that I didn’t want to go. I wanted to kick and punch and drive them away. But I was just a little boy, alone, afraid, and powerless over the big people and what they chose to do. We got in the Tacknyks’ car and drove to the Kenora train station.

  Remembering the event of my leaving is like watching a scene from a movie. That’s how clear it is. But it is a movie in slow motion with each sound amplified and keen. My new parents and I were boarding the train. They were chattering away at me animatedly, as big people do when they’re trying to soothe and give comfort. To me they were just sounds. As I looked back I saw my foster mother standing on the platform, watching me leave, waving and crying. Then, as we found our berth, I looked out the window and she was standing right outside it. As the train started to pull slowly out of the station she began walking alongside it, looking at me, reaching her hands towards me and crying, crying, crying. Her face was red with tears and grief and pain. She walked faster and faster as the train picked up speed, huge tears rolling down her face, and when she reached the end of the platform and flicked out of my sight I heard myself asking, “Why? Why are you letting them do this? Why are they taking me away? If seeing me go makes you feel so sad why don’t you stop them? Why?”