Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Later she understood how much her mother had given her. In every grade they put her in, Helen was the oldest student – a difference the nuns and priests interpreted as the intransigence of her ignorance, ungodliness. But she had language the other children didn’t, words for all the ways a river is not just a river but a whole lexicon of different animations – rain-stirred, pollen-clouded, ice-covered, meltwater fresh. She had had eight summers of wild tobacco, whose taste she would conjure to heal her swollen cheeks, beaten with a ruler by the frocked instructors every time she spoke her Mohawk words.

  Ruby and Bertie arrived together eighteen months later, with fewer years of Lena’s wisdom and ferocity to hard-coat them, fewer Mohawk words, and no such taste of tobacco to conjure as a salve against the hurts. It was because of this, Helen believes, that Bertie could not resist the nuns’ ideas about salvation, her uncleanliness in the eyes of a punitive god. She came out of that school and kept her crucifix, her prayer book, her rejection of Shonkwaya’tihson, the Creator. When Lena was out of earshot, she announced that she was a Catholic. What Ruby and Helen saw was a casualty.

  By the time they all returned to the reserve, their mother had been bent and silenced by too much forfeiture. The stand of maples and the little creek had been expropriated by the government for a four-lane highway that cut a convenient diagonal from the big cities in the northwest to the shoreside cottage district in the south, bisecting the o’tá:ra, making it smaller still. One day, as car after car whizzed past, Helen walked among the ditches that diverted the creek under the asphalt, and she searched until she found one plant with a lemony blossom. The next spring she came back, crushed the blackened pod against the rim of a galvanized steel drainage pipe, and sowed wild tobacco seeds all along the culvert, keeping just a few for her mother’s garden. In this way she made change and its inevitability something circular; in this way she reminded herself that not everything of the past can be swept away, that choice and intention are palpable forces of resistance.

  The memories lighten the heaviness of the June afternoon and the niggling worry about the unfamiliar faces at the barricade, the ones that make her chew the inside of her mouth. It’s a large reserve; she doesn’t know everybody. But so many of these new faces belong to men, burly ones. Until now, theirs has been an action of women – small, determined mothers and aunties like herself, supported by a handful of teenaged boys, some grandfathers, and middle-aged men with arthritic knees. And Shayna, who has abandoned an expensive education, the certainty of financial reward, for the pull of history and her own nature. These other men seem like interloping weeds to her, unruly in ways over which she has no control.

  Helen finds her niece sitting on a toppled oil barrel, fussing with her phone, staring at a number as if daring herself to call it.

  “Shayna. We have visitors, no?”

  The late June light feels stiff as starched bedsheets. Helen squints and points to the outer rim of the property. A half-dozen beefy figures, two in camouflage cargo pants, gesture like prospectors over the expanse of graded dirt.

  “What do you think?”

  Her niece stands and shades her eyes with her palms.

  “Advisers.”

  “Advisers from where?”

  Divisions stripe their people like plaid. There are those who belong to the other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy – Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora – among them some who resent the Mohawks’ pre-eminence, their persistent activism, their nationalism. There are those who follow the old longhouse religion and buy their groceries and play bingo beside all variety of Catholics, Protestants, Pentecostals, evangelicals, and atheists. Within their own faith are those who believe an oral version of the Great Law that prohibits war and violence, and those who follow a written version, which interprets resistance as using whatever means necessary.

  “Rotiskenrahkete,” says Shayna.

  Helen takes a small step back, closes her eyes for a moment. The appearance of these men, from the Warrior societies on the shores of the great river in the east, suggests a shift. She thinks about how, even with a clear sky, the subtlest cooling of the air makes any kind of weather possible. “Who sent for them?”

  Shayna shrugs. Helen need not have asked. Land has a way of stirring up competing agendas. It doesn’t matter; they are here. Everything is already different.

  Helen looks into the sun, feels the heat on her cheeks, and forces herself to accept. There is nimbleness in certain kinds of acceptance. She has spent a lifetime mastering this nimbleness.

  Across the field from the barricade, the big man squats. With less agility, the five men around him fall to their haunches too.

  Shayna wanders over. She won’t confront them and they will pretend she is not here, a compromise they both can live with. For now.

  “It’s a bitch that they cut down all the trees,” the big man says.

  They nod. She watches them survey the lack of cover and lookouts with worried brows.

  “One flyover and they’d nail all our positions. Our numbers.”

  Shayna looks up. Ex-military men who understand the way land is defended do not frighten her the way they frighten Helen. When her older sister, Rita, was four, Bertie, her mother, moved them away from the Smoke to live beside Big River, whose rapids swallowed a yearly sacrifice of unskilled canoeists and rafters. Shayna was born there, the daughter of a Warrior named Rick, a thickset man of few words who did his best to treat both girls as his own. But Shayna was so clearly made from the same clay as him, so clearly his. She followed him everywhere. She just assumed she’d be an activist like him; he never gave her reason to think otherwise, for all the times Bertie snorted at the suggestion.

  The big man lights up a cigarette. The next man to speak has a scar on his mouth: his upper lip looks like a beheaded worm. “Whaddya think there, Louis? Foxholes? A berm or two?”

  Everything is in plain sight. Shayna wishes the developer’s backhoes had left at least a hillock. The trick is always to make them believe you have more men, more firepower and technology than you do. When she was ten there was an action at the rapids. Against Bertie’s wishes, Rick let Shayna follow him around as he instructed her Mohawk aunts and uncles to leave dummies sitting in their pickups. They ran past the soldiers, put on different jackets, ran past again – the press reported there were twice as many of them. They painted shoeboxes black, mounted them high on posts so they looked like cameras or strapped them to their backs like claymore mines. The women sewed bags in the shape of semi-automatic cases, filled them with sand. At night they unloaded them from the backs of trucks where the soldiers could see. It bought them time. Those French cops get buck fever, Rick told her. They’ll shoot at anything that moves. And shooting first is a great weakness, the thing to be avoided.

  “Nah. This place is too flat, too naked. I think we have to switch it up maybe.”

  The man named Louis once more surveys the land around the barricade. She wonders if it disappoints him that there will be no army for such a territory. Calling in the military didn’t work out so well for the politicians last time. And when the cops shot a native protestor at an Ojibwe reserve five years earlier, there was an inquiry. Still, these men would prefer facing down an army than a patchwork of cops.

  Shayna remembers her father as she watches Louis. The military has more discipline. We understand each other; there is even some respect, Rick had said. Cops are always confused about who is running the show. The army at least tries to weed out the bigots. The cops promote them.

  But this is so small-time, she thinks, there isn’t going to be much of an adrenaline rush. And men like them need their highs. That’s what Bertie said anyway. She said Rick had a temper, spent her money on drink and drugs, though Shayna never saw the evidence. After a decade with Rick, a decade when Shayna felt watched over, Bertie moved her two daughters back to the Smoke without him. Rita dropped out of school at fourteen, and Shayna swore she would not speak to her mother ever again.
For a year she mostly made good on her threat.

  Louis sucks on his cigarette, and Shayna notices a faint shake in his wrist that he’s trying to ignore. He pats his pockets, fishes out a caramel, sticks it in his mouth, and sucks. Out of the corner of her eye, Shayna sees Cherisse parking Ruby’s truck by the small bridge spanning the creek between the reserve and the new development. A new worry. Cherisse shimmies out of the passenger side of the truck and jumps so that she lands like a video-game heroine, raising dust whorls from the dirt. Two bags of takeout food, blotched with grease, are clutched in her hands.

  She barrels over the bridge and through the thicket that separates her from the flat acres of baked mud. She is quickly snared in brambles that catch her forearm, dragging thorns along her skin. Shayna watches her niece lick her arm clean like a kitten. Even from the distance the bushes shimmer with the shiny dark eyes of ripened berries.

  The summer that cancer felled Bertie, their Aunt Ruby dragged Shayna and Rita to all the reserve’s best patches, made them pick until their fingers were the colour of midnight and their arms looked as if they’d been attacked by horny tomcats. A berry for every tear they cried, or couldn’t cry. But Cherisse is oblivious to the berries, as she is to the history that sweetens them – makes them bitter too. The food delivery is a chore, some payment to Ruby for all the free snacks Cherisse charms from her. It’s obvious, even from a distance, that she wants to get it over with without being seen by townies, or anyone who will assume she’s in league with her aunties; otherwise she’d have driven up to the barricade from the highway.

  When Cherisse is ten metres away, two of the Warriors stand. The girl straightens from ankles to chin in the heat of their appraisal.

  That one has no idea who she is, Shayna thinks.

  “Hey, it’s Hot Red Riding Hood. You takin’ food to Gramma, baby?” They chuckle, a low roll of thunder.

  Cherisse has rules for escaping the rez. The cardinal one she’s told Shayna more than once: Don’t get involved with native men unless they have swag like Elijah Barton and live somewhere where there’s high-speed internet and no boil-water advisories.

  “You better watch out, because we’re all Big Bad Wolf clan.” More laughter.

  “Hey, what’s your name? Come and have a beer. What’s your name, sweetheart? Don’t leave. Don’t leave.”

  Shayna had wanted to ask Louis if he’s met Rick, but she realizes he is no older than her. And the only father she’s ever known died in a work accident a year after Bertie left him, an event she broke her silence for, if only to assure her mother that she didn’t blame her. She walks towards her niece, puts a protective arm around Cherisse, and steers her towards the barricade. The men pull back into their group.

  The first time Cherisse ran away, she left Joe Montagne’s trailer in daylight and ended up at Shayna’s door just before two a.m. She was eleven years old, barefoot, wearing a thin nightie, the big toe of her right foot mashed and blackened with blood, her shins covered in mud. Through the door’s thick screen, her bright green eyes atomized like shattered gems.

  Where have you been? Shayna said, adjusting her sight to the darkness.

  I went for a swim! The girl laughed. Shayna raised a finger to her lips, pointed to the room where Pete-Pete slept curled against her husband, Clarence.

  Cherisse pushed the screen door wide, opened the refrigerator, and drank strawberry juice straight from the jug, damp hair ends staining the cotton down her back. For the next two years Cherisse would call Shayna’s house her home, yet disappear from it at all hours of the day and night.

  Mix of coyote and bobcat that one. Can’t do much to contain her, a resigned Joe said when he dropped off a garbage bag of clothes that summer. Nocturnal as shit, just like her mother. She’ll come back when she’s hungry.

  Where is her mother? Shayna asked. Where is Rita?

  Dunno. Joe shrugged his shoulders. Dunno this time. And because of the heaviness of his eyes, Shayna didn’t press.

  When Cherisse slipped away for her night rambles, Shayna couldn’t sleep for the imagined dangers of the unlit roads, the forest, the river currents, men stumbling out of the Legion. The social workers who were always around, making notes. But Cherisse always found her way back, even when at sixteen she ran away again. That time she left the reserve entirely, unmooring the demons of bad dreams into Shayna’s sleep: Cherry’s face and body bloated and bruised, her hair shorn away, those beautiful eyes sinking away from the world. But Cherisse came back, thinner, even more reckless. It was this ability to return – or her inability to stay away for long – that made her different from her mother.

  There’s a hardness to Cherisse’s glance, a twitch of disappointment in the corner of her smile that reminds Shayna of Rita. Just last week Joe told her that Cherry had quit her correspondence courses again, determined to become a recording artist. Hey, she got the voice, Shay. She’s anytime as pretty as that Crystal Shawanda. Shayna had rolled her eyes when he wasn’t looking.

  Cherisse drops the bags of food at Shayna’s feet, gives her a cool peck on the cheek. “Yo, Auntie. Food from Ruby.”

  A group of teenagers race around in the dirt on their tricked-out bikes. A tall, slim boy emerges from the barricade crowd and approaches them on foot. The bikes drop into the dust and the group gathers around the new kid. Shayna watches. When she worries that she will become one of those shrewish older women, perpetually disappointed by the young, this guy – this Nate Bastine – is tonic to her. If only he were a few years older, he’d be perfect for Cherisse. He came out of the detention centre a different boy, one with a straight back, jaw thrust out towards the horizon, and eyes hardened with purpose. That wasn’t the usual outcome. Some kids gotta have a taste of where they don’t want to be to know where they do, Rick told her once.

  She clasps her niece’s arm, tries to turn her head towards Nate. But it’s like clutching a butterfly by its swallowtail. And now the boy is sauntering over to the huddled Warriors.

  “Come, let’s find a place to sit and eat some of this food. You look thin,” Shayna says. Maybe Nate will turn around, wander back towards them. If she could just get the two to talk. Perhaps two years isn’t such a big difference.

  “No time there, mama. Lots to do tonight. Gotta fly. Just here ’cuz Ruby asked.”

  Cherisse yanks free from Shayna’s grip, gives her a quick squeeze, and turns back the way she came. Shayna watches her niece hurry back across the mud field, kicking up catcalls again from the group of men. She feels the urge to chase after her, to protect her from herself.

  “I’m your auntie. I’m your friend,” she says aloud. But Cherisse has more understanding than she lets on.

  Helen comes up behind her. Shayna can feel the older woman’s warmth, the brush of her arm, the glance that follows her own, watching Cherisse’s skinny jeans and teetering heels disappear into the berry patch.

  “Leave some of the worrying about that one to me,” Helen says. Shayna reaches for her hand, leans her head like a child on the older woman’s shoulder.

  “Truck’s in the driveway.” Helen turns her niece around, points to Coulson’s farmhouse across the highway.

  Shayna shakes her head. “I need a shower.”

  But it’s more than that. Shayna aches to see light cut through her own back windows. She wants to open and shut her kitchen cupboards, shake out the pillows on the wicker rocker, walk from room to room, lean against the door jambs with folded arms and imagine a chair she will reupholster, a wall she will paint.

  “Go,” Helen says with a gentle push. “But don’t leave him waiting too long. Never let a fire go out if you expect to be warm another time.”

  Thirty minutes later Shayna pulls past ditches overgrown with cattails into a hidden gravel drive that leads to a low-slung house, pushing up from the cheek of earth like a winking eye. She opens the door, half expecting trouble – marauding raccoon kits or meal moths. But there is only quiet and dust, reminders of her uneasy contentment wi
th solitude.

  She kicks off her shoes, sinks her bare feet in her granny’s braided rag rug. Its faded coils release a sharp, old scent. Shayna fills her lungs.

  Her mother gave their childhood home to Rita, who let it rot away during her serial abandonments. But the land itself was left for Shayna. She had no need of it until her marriage ended. Suddenly the house she had with Clarence felt too much like his ally: the gleaming modernity of its taps and surfaces, the walls that had witnessed her worst tempers. She moved out. Clarence moved away. And a cousin named Mark, along with his round-bellied wife, backed a packed GMC into the driveway and unloaded their much happier lives into the compact three bedrooms and unfinished basement.

  It had rained every day of the four weeks it took Old Man Johnson to build Shayna a new home. She insisted that it rise up across from where the carcass of the original house had been long interred. They used century-old blueprints she’d found in the archives, and reworked them to include bigger windows, entrances at both ends like a longhouse, plus a third opening out to a patio, from the kitchen at the centre of the house. Helen helped scrounge timber from all over the reserve and raised a crew of men paid with Ruby’s cooking and twists of her garden tobacco.

  She moved in on a crisp May weekend when the rainclouds had wandered west. It was not a perfect structure. The lintels tilted ever so slightly. The front room’s slant necessitated cedar wedges under the tables and shelves to keep them plumb. On a humid day she smelled again the rainy month when the house rose up from the earth. Still, it was comfortable, solid as the women of her clan, and like them, it held memory older than its bones.

  That very first weekend, Ruby arrived with Lena’s rug. How could she refuse?

  It’s old, Ruby said, handing it over, rolled up in newspaper. Still, don’t get precious about it, Shay. That old woman would have preferred it disintegrating. Long as it was touching the treads of her clan. You gotta step all over this thing. Make your granny smile.