“I’ve heard of you,” said Raven. “Nokomis told me about you. How that woman did such a rotten job raising you, the Children’s Aid came and took you away for your own protection. She treated me no better. She abandoned me when I was a baby and wouldn’t even come to the funeral of her own mother. I don’t know why she’s bothered to come back now that it’s too late.”
“Now, look, Raven,” said Martha, “I understand how you feel but I’m your mother and I’m responsible for you. Joshua phoned and told me about the death of Nokomis. I’ve wanted to come home to see you many times over the years but it just wasn’t possible. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do but I intend to be as good a mother to you as I can. Get your things together and let’s go home.”
In the months following Martha’s return, mother and daughter ignored each other, and the atmosphere in the family house was glacial. Martha coped by leaving home early each morning for the band office, immersing herself in her work and coming home as late as she could. After making supper for her family, she would wash the dishes and retreat to her bedroom, leaving Raven and Spider alone in front of the television. Spider would go out and spend his evenings at the home of Lester Weasel, the community bootlegger, using an allowance given to him by Martha to buy drinks. When he ran short of money, he had only to ask and his mother gave him more.
One night in late spring several months later, he returned home in the early hours of the morning in a foul mood. A group of drunks at Lester’s had taunted him, calling him a “city Indian” who didn’t speak his own language and a failure who didn’t belong in their community.
“Look who’s talking,” Spider had answered. “You guys are just a bunch of hillbilly Injuns who think modern music is the Grand Ole Opry. I bet you think Elvis is still alive and haven’t ever heard of Mick Jagger, Kurt Cobain or even John Lennon.”
“You know it all, I suppose,” a tall, middle-aged regular with an enormous beer belly told him. “You’re just a skid-row drunk from the streets of Toronto. Someone whose mother used to put out for all the guys when she was at residential school. I speak from personal experience, since I was there.”
As an enraged Spider moved toward him, the regular winked broadly at the others, and said, “I also heard she was away for so long in the big city because she was making a good living down there on the streets as a hooker.”
Spider buried his fist in his stomach and shut him up but was soon fighting everyone in the room. The battle was unequal and the patrons gave him a drubbing, dragged him to the door and pushed him down the steps face-first into the ground. Humiliated, he picked himself up and limped home, bloody and drunk, to kick in the front door—just as his father had done thirteen years earlier when the house was owned by Martha’s mother.
“You dirty whore!” he screamed, when Martha came out of her bedroom. “You ruined my life once and are doing it all over again by bringing me to this goddamn reserve! Why didn’t you leave me in peace under the Gardiner!”
He smashed his fist into her face, blackening an eye and knocking her down before sinking into an armchair, blubbering, his eyes full of tears.
“I’m really sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Don’t know why I do things like that. Tell me you forgive me!”
By this time, Raven had emerged from her room.
“Look what you’ve done to Martha, you creep! Hitting your own mother! Get your drunken butt out of this house and don’t come back.”
“No! No! Please don’t go,” said Martha. “Raven, it’s just a mistake. He didn’t mean it. He’s had a hard life.”
“He’s not the only one,” said Raven, and she went to the gun rack, removed the family hunting rifle from its place and drove her brother away into the night—just as her mother had done to their father so many years before.
The next morning, Spider could not be found and Martha was upset.
“If anything has happened to your brother, it’ll be your fault,” she told Raven. “He was right when he said I’d ruined his life. He’d calmed down by the time you came out of the bedroom with that rifle. There was no need to chase him off and you could’ve shot him by mistake. He probably feels abandoned and who knows what he might do? Maybe he’ll even kill himself!”
Raven did not answer but it did not take her long to guess what had become of her brother. A canoe was missing from the beach.
“He’s run off to hide down the river,” she told her mother.
Joshua, who had joined in the hunt for Spider, agreed with Raven.
“Over at Lester’s he’s been telling people that he’d like to live on the land the way we used to in the old days. Some of the elders told him how they fished and hunted in those days. That’s what he’s done.”
“Let’s go find him and bring him back,” said Martha.
“Do you think that’ll do anyone any good?” said Joshua. “If we brought him back he’d just start drinking and getting into trouble again. There’s no better way to deal with a drinking problem than to go cold turkey in the bush. I say leave him alone. That way, maybe he’ll find himself. I’ll have a word with the people who own the canoe he took to explain what happened so they won’t report it stolen.”
12
Spider and the River
WHEN SPIDER STUMBLED OUT THE DOOR, he wandered to the beach and sat down on a log half-buried in the sand and held his face in his hands. Why was he always so self-destructive? Was he wired differently from other people? He had turned his back on his adoptive parents who’d tried so hard to love and help him. The punks had accepted him into their lives but he had frightened them with his violent ways and drunken rages until even they avoided him, and he had ended up under the Gardiner. Now he had hit the only person who had displayed any love for him in years.
There was only one thing to do—he would kill himself. But how? He had no rope, no gun, no knife and no drugs. But there in front of him was Cat Lake. He would take one of the canoes drawn up along the shore into the centre of the lake and upset it! Not knowing how to swim, he would drown, and then maybe people would be sorry.
Grabbing hold of one of the canoes, he pushed it into the water, scrambled aboard and sat down on the floor in the centre, his back against a thwart. Although there was a paddle at his feet, he did not know how to use it, and he decided to wait for the canoe to drift out into deep water before making his move. It would be humiliating to set out to drown yourself and fail because you were in shallow water. The sound of the waves lapping against the side of the canoe, however, combined with the alcohol he had consumed, made him drowsy and his head drooped until his chin rested on his chest. Forgetting where he was, he snorted sleepily, eased himself down onto the floorboards, made himself comfortable and dropped off into a deep and drunken slumber.
And as he slept, a fast-moving current swept the canoe downstream toward the rapids.
It was about noon the next day when Spider slowly returned to life. At first he thought he was sleeping rough under the Gardiner as a convoy of heavy tractor-trailer trucks rumbled by over his head. But when he opened his eyes, rather than the familiar rough, grey concrete underbelly of the overpass, he saw a sky such as he could never have imagined, so deep and blue and cloudless it seemed to have no end and no beginning.
For a moment, he was encased in silence. A spray of cold water from over the bow then slapped him in the face and he found himself lying flat on his back in the bottom of a canoe taking him on a deafening roller-coaster ride to some place unknown. When he pulled himself up into a sitting position, he saw to his astonishment that the canoe was plunging downwards past semi-submerged boulders and logs. Certain that he was about to be thrown into the water, he seized hold of the gunnels, eased himself back onto the floor, closed his eyes and waited for the end.
But only a few seconds later, the roaring and buffeting stopped and he was still in the canoe and still alive. He heaved himself back up into a sitting position, soaked and shivering, and looked around. The canoe was
now being carried by the current down a deserted river half a mile wide and framed by heavy bush on each side.
It all came back—the beating at Lester’s, the run-in with his mother and sister, and his plan to do himself in by drowning. But he now had absolutely no intention whatsoever of ending his life. Shrugging off the pain of the cuts and bruises sustained in the brawl, he just wanted to get back to the reserve to bum money off Martha to buy booze to quench his now-urgent need for a drink. To do that, however, he would have to turn the canoe around and return to the reserve, even if that meant forcing his way back up through the rapids.
He leaned forward and picked up the paddle. Now what? He had no idea how to use it. For that matter, he had never been in a canoe before. But, he told himself, it couldn’t be all that hard. He had seen little kids handling canoes with great ease back on Cat Lake. And he was an adult. He was also an Indian—even if just a city Indian. Paddling was probably in his blood.
Leaning to one side and sensing that he needed to stay low in the canoe to keep it from tipping over, he dipped the paddle in the water and pulled back hard. Nothing happened. He repeated the manoeuvre, this time pulling back even harder.
The canoe turned ever so slightly and his spirits rose. Increasing the pace, he stabbed the water and pulled, stabbed the water and pulled, stabbed the water and pulled. The canoe slowly turned in a half circle. He was on his way.
His triumph was short lived. The current took over once again and swept the canoe and its occupant sideways downstream. He paddled desperately to impose his will on the rushing water, but to no avail. The river was laughing at him.
“Do your worst!” it seemed to be saying. “It won’t help you. I’m in charge here and you’re coming with me whether you want to or not.”
Exhausted, Spider stopped fighting, let the canoe be carried along, and used the paddle only to keep the bow aligned as he drifted throughout the afternoon and into the long summer evening past dense stands of black spruce, balsam fir, tamarack, poplar and birch. In some places, spring floods had eaten into the mud banks and littered the shores with tangles of uprooted trees and broken branches. In others, vast swamps, crowded with the black trunks of drowned trees, stretched away as far as the eye could see. In still others, encroaching walls of rock squeezed and hastened the river through narrow channels, launching the canoe on further wild rides downstream through the rapids.
Meanwhile, Spider thought only of whisky, beer, wine and gin, anything that could satisfy his now all-consuming need for an alcohol fix. The tea-coloured water that he scooped out of the river with his hands to drink was refreshing but gave him no satisfaction. He hoped against hope that he would meet other people, campers or fishermen, who would have a bottle to give him. If not, he knew what was in store for him.
All too often under the Gardiner he had seen winos, when they had been unable to bum enough change to buy booze, mouthwash or Lysol, screaming out in terror from the shakes—the seizures and hallucinations that beset alcoholics when they were deprived of alcohol. Sometimes other winos would come to the rescue, sharing their bottles, and they would survive. But other times they went into shock and convulsions and died before they could be taken to the hospital.
Then from overhead he heard the shrill, heart-rending cry of a baby in distress, frantically calling out to its mother. A red-tailed hawk was winging its way at low attitude down the river, clutching in its talons a panicked rabbit shrieking in pain and anguish, as if it already knew the fate that lay in store when the great bird reached its nest.
Just before darkness settled in, Spider steered for shore and pulled the canoe up on a sandy beach that ran along the base of a cliff. By this time, he was sweating despite the cool night air, and when he fell asleep, the first vision came.
The skinheads he had attacked with his knife when defending his punk friends years ago were back, and had surrounded him on the sidewalk outside the Eaton Centre.
“Who’s the tough guy now?” they said. “You’re gonna beg for mercy before we’re done with you.”
He screamed for help and a group of purple-haired punks approached. They were friends from the old days, but they looked on, chanting, “Break his wrists, break his wrists, he needs to die, he needs to die!”
Spider reached for his knife but it was not there. To the applause of the punks, the skinheads began lashing him across his feet, legs, torso and head with steel chains.
The pain was unbearable and he woke up shrieking. “Stop! Just stop. Just tell me what I did wrong and I’ll never do it again. I promise, I promise, I’ll be good. Pity, please have pity on me. I’m all alone, no one loves me, just stop, I can’t take any more!”
The muscles in Spider’s legs were contracting and cramps were working their way up from the soles of his feet to his legs, his groin, his chest, his back; they attacked his arms, his neck, his jaws, his cheeks, even his forehead and scalp, until he was one convulsing mass of flesh. He trembled, he struggled for air, he choked, he shit, he farted, he pissed, he puked, his head throbbed and his heart pounded until he was carried away once more by another vision.
This time, he was the one administering the beating. Robert and Amanda looked on with resignation as he kicked his adoptive parents with his steel-toed Doc Marten boots. On their knees and calmly accepting the punishment, they were telling him, “We tried, we really did. We loved you but you were damaged goods when you arrived and an ungrateful punk when you left. Don’t come to us for help now. We stopped loving you long ago and don’t want you back.”
It was then Martha’s turn and he was hitting her with his fists. “Why did you abandon me. Didn’t you love me?”
Martha was pleading for her life, saying, “I’ve always loved you and I missed you so much. I’m doing my best, please believe me, I’m doing my best. Just give me a chance!”
As the image of Martha faded, the monsters appeared. A seven-foot 51 Division cop in a pink rabbit costume morphed into a South Asian convenience store owner, who pursued him from his snug burrow in a jumble of old clothes under the Gardiner, chasing him northwards, ever northwards, past a motel with a giant neon sign flashing No Injuns Allowed, to Cat Lake First Nation where once again he found himself surrounded by enemies, this time at Lester’s, where ten-foot slobbering devils whose breath smelled of rotting flesh were beating him to the tune of Johnny Cash singing “I Walk the Line” at the Grand Ole Opry.
Just when his anguish could get no worse, he heard the voice of the river. “This will pass. Everything eventually passes, and so will your torment.”
The next morning, Spider woke up covered in vomit and diarrhoea. The monsters were gone, but he knew they would return if he did not appease them with alcohol. Too tired to rise to his feet, he rolled into the shallow water along the shore, sprawled out on his back half submerged on the sand bottom and let the waves wash over him, cleansing and reviving him. After resting for a while, he struggled to his feet and made off upstream, determined to make it back to Lester’s.
His way, however, was blocked by a swamp. No matter, he would go around it. But hours of climbing over a heavy matted tangle of fallen trees and rotting stumps, of tripping over roots and rocks, and of forcing his way through a mesh of dead interlocking branches of hemlock and black spruce trees, brought him no closer to his goal, and the swamp still stretched off deep into the interior.
In desperation, he plunged into the tepid murky water, stirring up the deep muck of the bottom and releasing the putrid smells of rotting vegetation, and fought his way through the densely packed cattails and tag alders in an attempt to reach the other side. The water became deeper and deeper until it reached his neck. One more step would bring it over his head, but he did not want to die.
He made his way back to high ground and crawled out of the mire with bloodsuckers clinging to his skin, with his arms, legs and torso raw and scratched, and his head and neck covered in mosquito and blackfly bites. After an hour’s rest, he got up and stumbled back to th
e canoe to await the return of the visions.
When night fell, he once again underwent the horrors of alcohol withdrawal. Once again, when he thought he could no longer bear the suffering, the river spoke to him, and told him not to give up.
In the coming days, Spider drew on an inner toughness he did not know he had and threw everything into the fight to survive. He would not last long, he knew, unless he managed to find something to eat. In between seizures, he scoured the lower slope of the cliff in search of berries, but those he found were green and inedible. He began to climb, hoping he would find ripe ones on the top. As he worked his way upwards, a cloud of angry, screaming gulls flew into his face and battered him with their wings, trying to stop him from going any farther.
At the summit, he found a white, excrement-splattered, rocky platform covered with nests filled with chicks and unhatched eggs. Ignoring the frantic attempts of the gulls to drive him away, he helped himself to the eggs, cracking them open one after another, greedily sucking back the liquid whites and choking down the dark orange yolks with their strong taste of carrion and the wild. For a minute, he felt wonderful, but his stomach revolted, and in one explosive convulsion, expelled the strange food. After resting for a while to give his body time to adjust, he tried another egg, and this time he kept it down.
Each day he returned to the rookery to fight off the gulls and to feast on their eggs, and each day the intensity of his seizures diminished. One morning, he woke with a soft, warm summer rain on his face and he felt at peace. The river, enveloped in a heavy mist, was not visible, but he could hear it murmuring at his side, telling him that he had won his battle and it was time to continue his journey.
From across the water came the cry of a loon—a strange and haunting sound unlike anything he could have imagined in his years in the city—rising and fading, rising and fading. Shortly thereafter came an answering song, and another and another.
As Long as the Rivers Flow Page 17
