As Long as the Rivers Flow

by James Bartleman

  His mother had emerged from her bedroom where she was drinking when she heard Spider and Joshua greeting Raven as they came through the door. Martha said nothing and threw her arms around him, crying uncontrollably. Spider hugged her in return but grew concerned when he smelled the alcohol on her breath and she refused to release him. Joshua and Raven came to the rescue, gently prying her arms from around his neck and sitting her down on a chair.

  “Welcome back, bro,” Raven had then told him. We really need your help now.”

  Joshua waited until Martha sobered up and then shocked her by saying that Raven needed help to prevent her from killing herself. He had been doing what he could, but in the end, the only person who could save her was her mother.

  “Frankly,” he said, “with your depression, drinking problems and crying jags, you’re in no shape to do her any good. That’s why it’s important you attend the circle with your family. You might learn things about yourselves you never suspected. At the least, it will be good therapy. And I have some surprises up my sleeve that should help matters along.”

  Their grief was still visible on their faces when the parents of Rebecca, Jonathan and Sara came in to sit next to Raven and Martha. They were followed by two clerics, a younger one, unsmiling and serious with a purple band around the waist of his cassock, and an old priest, tall and fat with a deeply wrinkled but cleanly shaved face and light blue friendly eyes. The band around his waist was black and a large cross hung down at the end of a long silver chain from his neck. He stood for a minute looking anxiously around the room before sitting down.

  Martha could not keep her eyes off the elderly priest. He was someone she knew, she was certain. The priest looked down and began caressing a rosary and quietly praying. His devotions completed, he raised his head and locked his eyes on Martha’s and slowly smiled.

  To her horror, it was Father Antoine! Martha’s stomach churned and she began to tremble. A toxic mix of rage, hate and fear hit her hard, knocking the wind out of her and making it difficult to breathe. This man who had done so much harm to her in her youth was the last person she ever expected to see again. And here he was in her home community looking at her as if they were old friends sharing secret memories of happy times together in the distant past.

  The members of Raven’s grade eight class, wearing sunglasses to conceal the grief in their eyes, came in and huddled together like so many monks at prayer on seats just outside the circle, their eyes cast downwards and the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled over their foreheads.

  The mood in the room was solemn, for the people were still in a state of shock over the deaths of the young people. It was obvious that Rebecca, Jonathan and Sara had been part of a suicide pact. But who else, the fathers and the mothers in the room wondered, had taken the pledge to die? What if one of their own kids was involved? Why were they doing it? Were they really such bad parents? What could they do to bring this epidemic of self-inflicted death to an end?

  Joshua opened the dialogue by lifting a talking stick up with one hand signifying that he held the floor. In accordance with custom, he spoke from a sitting position. As he described Raven’s visit to him and his letter to the archbishop, everyone listened in silence. But when he said that Father Antoine, and a bishop by the name of de Salaberry, had been sent by the archbishop to participate in the healing circle and were there with them that very evening, the room erupted with shouts of indignation. Men, women and children stood up to get a better look.

  “We don’t want scum like Antoine in our community.”

  “De Salaberry can stay but Antoine should be in jail!”

  “Let’s take him outside and give him a taste of his own medicine!”

  Joshua held the talking stick up high.

  “Respect the talking stick. You know that the ancestors said only the person holding it can lead the discussion.

  “Respect our visitors. You know that our ancestors said that guests, no matter how flawed, must always be made welcome in our homes and community.

  “Respect the archbishop. He sent this man to help us heal ourselves.

  “Respect the Creator. He had a purpose in sending this priest to us.”

  When the people had taken their seats again, Joshua handed the talking stick to Bishop de Salaberry as the ranking cleric.

  The bishop did his best to look happy but had great difficulty in hiding his irritation. The trip from Quebec City had been endless. There were, of course, no direct flights to the remote community, and it had been necessary to change planes at Montreal and Toronto to reach Sioux Lookout, the jumping-off point for the reserve. Just that leg of the journey, he calculated, had taken longer than to fly from Quebec City to Rome.

  Through some mix-up, his office had reserved rooms at a hotel in Sioux Lookout that was definitely not up to his standards. There was a faint odour of urine and a strong smell of cigarettes in his supposedly non-smoking room, his bed was lumpy and guests having a party down the hall had kept him awake most of the night. The food in the hotel restaurant was not to his taste: liver and onions, and hamburger steak and poutine were the house specialities. The poached egg he had for breakfast was overcooked and his orange juice came out of a can and was warm.

  At the airport, his heart had sunk when he saw the aircraft that was to take him to Cat Lake First Nation. It was a small, single-engine eight-seater, crammed to overflowing with Indian passengers and cases of pop, bags of potato chips, boxes of detergent and groceries. Although he prided himself in being open-minded, he wondered if the pilot, who was Indian, really knew how to fly. And how could people as poor as Natives were supposed to be afford to travel by airplane? Shouldn’t they be using canoes?

  Matters had gone downhill from there. The plane left an hour late, was bounced around by thermal updrafts and made three stops at other First Nations airstrips before reaching its destination. Bishop and priest emerged from the aircraft to a deserted airport. The car and driver that the chief had promised would be waiting was nowhere to be seen. When they entered the tiny two-room terminal building to use the washroom, there was no toilet seat, no toilet paper, no water in the toilet tank and no water in the faucets of the heavily stained sink. A large sign in English and Anishinabe syllabics warned the public—unnecessarily—not to drink the water.

  After relieving themselves behind the bushes, the bishop and his travelling partner picked up their suitcases and hurried down the gravel road in the direction of a cluster of houses they could see off in the distance. Clouds of blackflies, sandflies, midges, deerflies, horseflies and mosquitoes had come swarming out of the ditches and swamps to suck their blood, to tear off pieces of flesh and to crawl into their noses, ears and eyes. Crows, ravens and bluejays perched on telephone poles laughed at them as they trudged by, caked in sweat and dust and swatting futilely at their tiny tormentors.

  Eventually a woman in a passing pickup truck, the cab crammed full of curious children, stopped and said something incomprehensible to them. In due course, they understood she was offering to give them a ride. They threw their bags into the open box at the back, climbed aboard and used a dusty spare tire as a seat as she took them on a jolting, rattling ride to the band office.

  Naturally, when they got there, he had given the chief a piece of his mind.

  “Don’t you understand,” he complained, “that the archbishop is doing you a favour by sending not just one, but two clerics to participate in your healing circle? Don’t you realize the Church has never agreed to such a thing in the past? Don’t you appreciate that I am a bishop? Don’t you know that it has taken us two days of hard, uncomfortable travel to reach your reserve?

  “And how am I to interpret your failure to send a car to pick us up at the airport? If you are trying to give some sort of message that we aren’t welcome, we’ll turn around and go home!”

  It had enraged him even more when the idiot of a chief had burst out laughing.

  “No, no!” he had the gall to say. “Don’t get ex
cited. You are most welcome. We need you tonight. As for the car, I guess my secretary just forgot to send it.”

  When he asked where they were supposed to sleep, the chief told him “at the hotel, of course.”

  Only the hotel wasn’t really a hotel. It was a small building with three bedrooms with a communal washroom and kitchen. To make matters worse, the chief’s secretary had forgotten to make reservations and three rooms were occupied by technicians from the outside trying to repair the temperamental water treatment plant. Fortunately, two of them were practising Catholics and he had been able to persuade them, discreetly invoking his rank as a bishop, to give up their rooms.

  He had also had trouble keeping Father Antoine in line. When they left Quebec City, the priest had accorded him the respect and deference due to him as a bishop. But as time wore on, Father Antoine gave the impression that he was not listening when he told him about the challenges he faced in carrying out his daily duties, and had the nerve to yawn when he related several witty stories about his privileged ties with the archbishop himself. The final straw was when the priest had resisted wearing his cassock to the healing circle. The people, he claimed, wouldn’t care what they wore and the cassocks would be hot and uncomfortable.

  He had to speak sternly, making clear that bishops outranked mere priests and Father Antoine would do as he was told. He had sought to soften the blow by explaining that the Indians would be more respectful in the presence of clerics who looked like real churchmen and not like civilians. Father Antoine had reluctantly donned his cassock but had stopped talking to him.

  The entire experience had been far worse than he could have imagined. He now just wanted to get this healing circle ordeal over with as soon as possible and leave on the first available flight out the next day.

  “People of Cat Lake,” began the bishop, “your chief wrote to His Grace, Archbishop Laframbroise, to tell him that your community was going through a difficult time and asked if Father Antoine could come and join your healing circle. His Grace, of course, agreed and asked me to come as well in case I could be of assistance. Both Father Antoine and I were delighted to oblige.

  “Now before I turn the floor over to Father Antoine, who is the person I am sure you really want to hear from, I just wanted to say that I know many of you attended one of our residential schools that served the children of this area many years ago. Not everyone, I know, was happy there. Times were different and the Church did the best it could in the circumstances. I hope you will remember this if troublemakers from the outside come to you and ask you to join in lawsuits against the Church for the way your children were treated in our schools.”

  The bishop passed the talking stick to Father Antoine and said nothing further. He had done his duty by making clear the official position of the Church and the priest would now have to fend for himself.

  “My dear friends,” began the priest, holding up the talking stick in his left hand as if it was a papal cross and he was the Holy Father himself blessing a crowd of the faithful. “My dear friends,” he repeated, twisting around in his seat and looking around the room and smiling beneficently as if the people were as happy to see him as he was to see them. “I have such good memories of the years I spent with so many of you here in this room tonight up at the residential school. You were just children of six when you arrived, knowing only the ways of the bush, and when you left at the age of sixteen, you were civilized, baptized, educated and ready to found families of your own. I am so proud of you.”

  Cries of outrage drowned out priest.

  “Liar! You belong in jail!”

  “Pedophile!”

  “Monster!”

  “You ruined our lives!”

  Father Antoine sat quietly as the clamour of the crowd continued. “How can you say such things?” he said, trying to make his voice heard. “How dare you say such things!” he said, this time shouting. The room fell silent and Father Antoine smiling weakly, once again attempting to establish a personal contact with the people.

  “I made so many friends from this reserve at that school. But you have to forgive me if I don’t remember all your names. I am now an old man and my memory is not what it used to be. But I know you,” he said, turning to Martha. “You are my petite Marthe and would never betray me. Tell them they are wrong. Tell them they have forgotten how good I was to you and to the other girls!”

  Martha looked away. Perhaps what had happened had been her fault? Perhaps in some way, she had tempted Father Antoine? Perhaps she had deserved what she got?

  “Is there no one here who will help me?” he asked, his face ashen, when Martha did not speak. “Is there no one who remembers how gentle I was with everyone who came to see me in my office?”

  “Don’t you understand?” Joshua said, taking back the talking stick. “Nobody can help you unless you admit you did wrong, unless you apologize to the people you abused so many years ago.”

  “But I gave them my love,” said Father Antoine, “even if today no one wants to admit it. I would be the first to apologize if I was at fault. Would it help if I were to say I regret so many children were lonely at that school, that the food they ate was bad, and that the nuns in their desire to educate your children were sometimes harsh?”

  “I think I know what you are trying to say,” said Joshua. “But your type of love involved abusing the little girls. Don’t you see that?”

  “No! No! Absolutely not! I love Indians. My own grandmother was a Huron from Wendake near Quebec City, so the blood of an Indian flows in my veins. I can trace my family back to fur traders who travelled in this region over three hundred years ago. Many of them married Indians. Many of the last names of the children who came to the residential school were Antoine. I always thought of them as distant relatives.”

  “My friends,” said Joshua, addressing the people. “We have heard from our visitors. Now it is up to the families of the dead to have their say.”

  The mother of Rebecca, the first of the three children to die, embraced the talking stick and said nothing as tears rolled down her cheeks. She twisted her hands and shifted her weight from one side of her seat to the other, as time went by and she did not break her silence. Finally in a small lisping voice, she started to speak, holding her hand in front of her mouth.

  “I feel so bad. She was so young. Our only child. Who would’ve thought it? I’ve not spoken of my pain before. It was too hard.”

  The mother sobbed openly, abject and animal-like in her misery, and leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder. He, too, began to cry and held her tightly.

  “I was the one who found her,” she said, straightening up and no longer attempting to hide the gap in her mouth. I’d been drinking and me and my husband were fighting. Don’t even remember what it was about. He’d slugged me in the mouth knocking out most of my front teeth and opening my lip, and he hit me again giving me a black eye. I went out and got a piece of firewood and gave him a taste of his own medicine. I guess we were both pretty drunk.

  “Rebecca came in yelling for us to stop. She was crying like crazy and saying she couldn’t live no more like that. She’d decided to kill herself, she said. It was a cry for help, but I didn’t believe her. She’d said the same thing before but had never done nothing. She’d always been a handful and I thought she was just acting up. I laughed at her and told her she had it easy compared to the old days when we lived on the land when it was a life-and-death struggle to survive. I told her the government gave us everything. The government would give her everything. So what was her problem? I turned her away.

  “She was hanging by a wire from a clothes hook in the closet. I blame myself and feel bad. I should have listened to her and told her I loved her.”

  A long silence followed, disturbed only by quiet weeping from someone in the audience, and the woman began again.

  “When I look back, I realize I was always too impatient. She could never satisfy me. I wasn’t there to fix dinner for her. I never encour
aged her to do good in school. I was always shouting at her, just like the nuns used to do to me at residential school.”

  Her husband held his head in his hands and loud, convulsive sobs racked his body. “It gets worse,” the woman said, reaching over and trying to wipe away the tears of her husband with her hand. “When she was just a little girl, she told me her grandfather was touching her in her private parts and doing things to her. I freaked out because that’s what Father Antoine used to do to me, only worse. But to my shame, I blamed her for tempting her grandfather. I slapped her just as I had been slapped by the nuns when I asked them to tell the priest to leave me alone. She must have felt bad. Just like I felt when that happened to me. I know it went on for years and I never did nothing to stop it. I’m so ashamed.”

  It was then Jonathan’s father’s turn and he started speaking in a low voice. Not a sound could be heard in the room and everyone strained to hear his words.

  “I feel awful,” he said. “He was our baby. Our other kids were a lot older and they spoiled him. The last time I saw him he was smiling. He hugged me and said he loved me. I should have told him I loved him. Maybe he wouldn’t have done it. He was so happy and full of mischief when he was a little boy. When his brothers and sisters left to live on the outside, he got real quiet and sad. In the letter we found after he died, he said he had no hope and life wasn’t worth living.”

  Holding tight to the talking stick, Jonathan’s father looked down at the floor, unable to find the words to continue. Ten minutes of silence followed and he began again, this time shouting angrily.

  “How do we give our young people hope when they have lost their language and culture and they don’t know who they are? When they see us adults lying around all day with no work and doing nothing? When there are no books in the school library to read? When they’re not learning to read and write in school, what are they being prepared for? Their role models are the bootleggers and young Native hookers, the drug dealers and gang members in Regina and Winnipeg they watch on television programs. They see people on television driving fast cars, living in big houses and eating in fancy restaurants, but they know they’ll never have any of that stuff.