by Steve Weiner
That night I couldn’t sleep. I heard a noise and crept downstairs. Green mantises, six feet tall, stood upright in a cold green light and ate Etienne’s gifts. They chewed his paperweight and Sauk headdress and spat them as sawdust on the floor.
Uncle Bobo died.
A freak accident – the petri dish broke in the fisheries incubator. He was infected through an open sore, lay down on his cot, went into convulsions, and died. We walked home after the funeral.
‘Death had eyes,’ Uncle Emil said, ‘even for Bobo. And Bobo was a great man.’
The lights of St Croix went out, a power failure. We groped home.
‘Touch a lamprey,’ Uncle Georges said. ‘Bang. One less Verhaeren.’
Bobo’s widow washed our hands. M. d’Aube brought wine, my father Jack Daniels whisky, Emil peppers-in-rice, crayfish, beer bread and sausage. Georges brought sweet carrot soup and custards. A shriek suddenly shook the cimetière. Paralysed, we stared out of the window, our mouths full.
‘Bobo –’ Georges gasped.
Bobo’s soul was tangled in a tree, kicking to be free.
Five
I was an Ojibway.
I went north to Manitouwadge. The hills were maroon. Indian turnips grew in a lagoon and oldsquaw flew over bitter onion. An old married couple picked radishes where the smoke gathered. Another man and his wife scraped bark. In a sod cabin two people stirred whisky mash. The sun fell low and smoky over the purple scrub when I reached the Pic where there was a settlement of Eastern Ojibway and, further north, the Crow Hill Indian orphanage.
In Crow Hill cracked posts supported the dock. A wood fishing house swayed over the lake and boats banged in the wind. Pools of dirty water rippled in mud alleys. A Dobermann with three legs chased a ptarmigan past a winch pulley. The ptarmigan turned into an alley and ran low to the lake shore.
I had lunch in the Manitouwadge Café. I had black coffee, chilli and soda crackers. Stuffed owls lined the yellow shelves. There was a moosehead over the door, a racoon rearing on the coffee machine. Posters of Montreal were festooned with strings of wild onion and garlic. An old Ojibway shuffled behind the stove in ratty slippers.
Red Two Hats, who sometimes worked for my Uncle Georges, chipped paint off a boat by the trading post. Maple leaves bobbed red in Lake Manitouwadge’s slate grey waves.
‘Nimiwanagocin,’ Red said.
‘Hello, Red.’
‘How’s Antoinette?’ he asked.
‘She’s lovely.’
‘Etienne?’
‘Sulking.’
‘Well, it’s a hole, St Croix.’
‘I want to be an Ojibway,’ I said.
‘What an ambition.’
Red introduced me to his cousin, Lawrence Woman.
‘There’s nothing to do in Crow Hill,’ Lawrence warned.
There was nothing to do in Crow Hill. Ojibways carved carcases of elk and boated back and forth across Lake Manitouwadge with cases of beer. Smoke hung inside the quonset huts. Women wild-riced. Everywhere there was stink. The Ojibways suffered from tuberculosis, pneumonia, gonorrhoea, pleurisy, arthritis. The men, the women, were alcoholic. Children ran naked with the chickens and there was chicken shit and feathers even in the stunted pines. At welfare time Ojibways came to Crow Hill to pick up cheques. All night Ojibway men ran in and out of shacks, making new wives.
‘Welcome to Crow Hill,’ Red said. ‘Fuck capital of Canada.’
I cleaned fish with Lawrence Woman. I worked with wild-ricing women. We kept the rice in blue canisters at the front of the canoe. We cooked rice and potatoes, plenty of pepper, and cranberries, with lots of fish. I moved into Lawrence Woman’s fish house and slept on a rubber sheet under the fish lymph basin. I strung up red peppers and put a candle on the knife rack. Lawrence Woman came by and gave me a red blanket.
‘My mother made it,’ he told me.
One night I was awakened by shouts. I went to the fish-house window. Peter Jennings, Jim Mekoniwas, Joseph Five Ojibways and Lester Strange stood on the edge of the dock, their hair whipped by a frigid wind. Lanterns lined the shore. They worked their organs. It was hard work. They were so drunk three others had fallen in and even in the dark lake they worked. The Ojibways bet heavily.
‘Hooray, Lester!’
‘Shoot, Pete!’
‘Come, Joseph, come!’
The pines suddenly swayed. Dogs howled on the bank. Henry stood on tiptoes, his eyes crossed.
‘Oh – !’
Father Leszek canoed in and put boxes of old clothes, books and toys into the Crow Hill orphanage. He cleaned the chapel, held mass, and blessed the fish. When he left, fish that had dangled on the smoking wires flopped in the air, trying to fly.
Lawrence Woman gave me a turquoise bracelet.
‘Blue is good luck,’ Lawrence told me.
The next night Ojibways brought stray dogs, beaten and starved, and threw them two at a time into a sandpit. They bet heavily on dog fights, too. Afterwards they washed dog blood into the lake. Jim Mekoniwas called Peewee Peacon dog soup. Peewee ripped out his knife and cut off Jim Mekoniwas’s left little finger and waggled it in Jim’s face.
‘Don’t ever dog soup me!’ Peewee said.
Ojibways grew restless. They came from as far as St Béré nice. They brought gifts of money, clothes, a transistor radio. Ojibway girls dropped out of St Bonaventure and came up to Crow Hill. All night the radios were loud, boys fought, dogs howled. Ojibways kept coming to Crow Hill. I had never seen so many Ojibways. They brought cases of whisky, venison, chicken, pig. Meat-roast smells floated through the alleys.
‘You want to be a man?’ Red asked.
‘I do.’
‘Hide in my pantry tonight. Keep your eyes open.’
Ojibways came to Red’s house, put their totems on a shelf, and began eating: chicken, peppers, beer, oranges, wild rice, corn. Dogs ate off the floor and licked men’s fingers. By midnight everybody was drunk. Red lighted a pipe. Everybody smoked it. Tommy Shanks came in. He was my friend from St Bonaventure, naked and rubbed with deer lymph.
Red Two Hats poured olive oil over Tommy’s hands, dunked them in gasoline and tossed a match. The Ojibways’ dogs, walls, totems, chicken bones, suddenly everything glowed. Tommy panicked. He threw the fire back and forth like a spring coil. Red hit Tommy in the kidneys. Tommy peed. Flames dripped from his hands. Red stuck fish hooks in Tommy’s chest and tied number five gauge wires to the hooks, picked up a hammer, and nailed the other ends of the wires to the house post.
‘Run outside, Tommy,’ Red said.
Tommy stared at him.
‘I said, run.’
Tommy ran out the door. As he passed I heard the rip rippity-rip-rip of fish hooks popping through Tommy’s pectorals. Veils of blood drifted on to the door jambs. Tommy chewed driftwood, beat his head, rolled in the sand in pain. When he came back his eyes were glazed. He ate but kept missing his mouth. Peewee threw him a loincloth. Tommy put it on, picked up his presents and went out.
I caught up to him by the fish house. Tommy’s eyes were dilated. He didn’t know where he was. He held up his hand.
‘Don’t touch me – !’ he said. ‘I am a man.’
There was a murder that October in Crow Hill. Robert Walking Shoes took Janko Petrzuski into a shack to see what it was like and beat him to death with a lead pipe.
The women and I gathered chestnuts above Crow Hill. The red tundra stretched unbroken among the pools and lagoons. I wore a bandolier of beer bottles, rodent skull and owl feathers. I called myself Johnny Hibou. The Arctic cold was coming through the forest, though there wasn’t much snow yet, and geese gathered for the long flight to Louisiana.
Tommy Shanks came by with his black rifle.
‘Go home,’ he said.
‘I am an Ojibway.’
‘This Ojibway shit,’ he sneered. ‘You ought to be locked up.’
My fingers were white as a clam shell. I coughed a lot and when I sneezed I threw it on the fish-house wa
lls. I shivered all night. Lawrence Woman came into the fish house. He stood in the doorway.
‘Should I keep you warm, Jean-Michel?’
I was miserable. I hated Crow Hill. I packed up what I owned and went to say goodbye to Red Two Hats. He looked terrible. He was wrapped in an army blanket over his hunting jacket. Sparks from his bonfire fell on him, swirled around like a storm, and he didn’t bother moving. His clothes smelled like cooked racoon.
‘What’s wrong, Jean?’
‘I feel lonely.’
‘Antoinette Hartmann?’
‘I die for her.’
‘Ojibways have woman trouble, too.’
‘Do they? Even Ojibways?’
‘Much worse.’
On Lake Manitouwadge dog bits floated on black water. A loon echoed on the far shore.
‘Animad pimadiziwin,’ Red sighed.
‘Yes. Life is hard.’
We stared into the darkness.
‘You know about women,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I do.’
‘And men?’
‘Animals, too.’
‘Tell me about Ojibway women,’ I asked.
‘Drunken animals.’
‘What do they do to men?’
He passed me a flask of corn whisky. It was warm and tasted like burnt corn silk.
‘Ojibways die many times before death and even death is not the end of their dying.’
‘How does a man love a woman?’
‘It is a very strong business.’
The Ojibway
‘I was an orphan.
‘My mother was Menominee. My father was Ojibway. My father died of tuberculosis. My mother drowned in Moose Lake. I grew up in an orphanage at Manitouwadge. It was not the Catholic orphanage in Crow Hill. It was a Lutheran orphanage.
‘The lake froze by mid-November. Cat-tails and lake sedge became brittle. The Arctic winds blew right through the barracks. The Lutherans had us working on tractors, brick-making, laying pipe for the farmers. I carried hod, hauled bags of alkali. I fixed posts and chicken-wire fences, dug trenches. James Kenaukee, Bill Rice, Vernon Lacombe and Harold Sweet, my friends, died.
‘My voice became rough. I was big for my age. I had the arms and shoulders of a man when I was only twelve. Though, like most Indians, I never grew hair on my chest.
‘One day, when the red sun sank behind dwarf pines, I packed a canvas bag with food, a lantern, extra batteries, winter socks, and escaped up the inland waterway. I lived in the marshes. I ate snakes, robbed traplines, ate bark. I watched the purple clouds rise in the north like the shapes of women. I hung around the boat docks at Twisted Leg Lake, fought and got my fine Indian nose broken. I bought a Winchester 30-30.
‘I stole from white men. I stole from Indians. I lived with a fat Slant-Eyed, Harriet Dark Arms, who rubbed bacon grease on her thighs so her dogs licked it off. But I was so hungry I had this terrible pain in my eyes. I could have torn off any white man’s head.
‘Illinois hunters hired me to take them around Grange Lake. We fished in St Lazare Lake and then portaged up to Bellefont’s Rivière. They didn’t seem to care if they shot anything or not. They were just shooting off their shotguns. They told me to take them up Otter Creek. I told them they were wasting their time. They said they would pay me $100 American. I took them, but even our fire looked sick. We slept on soggy beaches and in the daylight went looking for moose. But I could tell the moose were smarter than we were and had gone south.
That evening I pissed off the boat against the sunset. Steam rose up from the circles of red water. The hunters watched me. That night I moved my sleeping bag further into the bracken but they pulled me out of the ferns and raped me. I went to the lake and washed myself. When they were asleep I brained one with an axe. The other two ran through the woods. I picked up a shotgun and blew both barrels into the dead man’s head. Then I piled rocks over him and lit a fire. Parts of him came up bubbling.
‘I walked across brown plains. I kept washing myself in the lagoons. The horizon was like steel through which the sun never broke. I ate moss. It was the worst famine I ever saw. Not a stick, not algae. I looked into dead lakes and saw nothing but stars. I ate half-rotted carcases in deer traps. I chewed one carcase and tasted flannel. A white man had fallen into a trap a long time ago and I had bitten into him.
‘I saw Ojibway corpses, which we call chibay. We do not bury our chibay but put them on wooden platforms in trees. We give them gifts, like mocassins and watches, to travel the long road. I saw chibay ducking under pine branches, spraying snow, following me. I knew my time had come to die so I found a gulley to die in. Then I saw a white house with blue shutters on a granite hill. The blue shutters banged open and shut. I walked about twenty yards. The sun turned black and I fainted on the porch.
‘I woke in the attic and saw a woman. Isabel Sobel was a half-breed, a widow. She was mute. She had black almond eyes, very French. I was afraid of those eyes. But where could I go? There was a thousand miles of famine and blizzards outside. So I stayed in the white house with the blue shutters.
‘I hauled salt, filled the sheep pens, fixed the barn roof. I spliced copper wire to her mains. But it was a terrible winter. We had rumpless black Orpingtons, Wyandottes and little dumpies. Each morning we’d find hens pecked to death or blinded. I made a second floor for the brooder house and coated it with tar.
‘One midnight Isabel came to my room. She lifted my nightshirt. I was so scared I couldn’t move. She dropped the nightshirt, turned and left. I wanted to run away but the tundra had frozen, and a blizzard whistled through the dwarf pines all night. In the morning I dressed, went out the gate, but there was a wall of white. The real storms had begun, so I came back.
‘There were chibay behind the barn. They were on platforms along a row of granite rocks, in ragged flannel shirts. Each time I came behind the barn the chibay were in different positions.
‘Isabel stopped feeding me. I rummaged through the cupboards and ate dried soup, bacon grease, lard. All night I heard unnatural laughter. I peered into Isabel’s room. The curtain was blowing heavily. Snow drifted on to the floor. Isabel lay under a chibay, her legs around its belly. The room stank of chibay.
‘I went back to bed and locked my door. I was really afraid of her now. She watched me in the morning with those deep black, French eyes, distant as the frozen ponds. The wind shrieked over the house out of the blind, white tundra. I washed out the heifers. I chopped cow shit. A chibay was draped over the barbed wire. I put it on a sheet of plywood and nailed the plywood between two dwarf pines.
‘I boiled a dead chicken in its own blood and ate it behind the coop, hardtack sopping up the stew.
‘All night the chibay howled. I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than that sound. I went to get Isabel’s shotgun to blow their heads off. But Isabel caught me. Suddenly chibay came in from the windows, tied weights to my hair, spun me around until I threw up in circles. They hauled me into the yard and rubbed me with barbed wire.
‘In the morning I staggered across the drifts. There was a moonbow over the sheep trough. I wandered aimlessly and started crying. I couldn’t take it no more. I took a crowbar from the truck and hammered a chibay apart. I caught a second behind the house and broke his back in two. I jumped a third and pried it apart. I went to the barn, got a can of kerosene, and started carrying it toward the house.
‘Isabel came out with a rifle. She marched me to the smokehouse and hung me from meat hooks. The pain of the hooks was so bad I pulled on the hooks to die. The moon and stars burst in my head. I saw my Ojibway and Menominee ancestors carrying blankets, coffee and mocassins, my death shirt.
‘But the roof broke and I fell. I put mud and snow in my wounds and slept in moss. The next evening I stole to Isabel’s house. The low sun glowed blood-red across the pink snow. I dragged her upstairs and raped her. Our baby was born. It had no legs, no arms, just black ears and a grin. I hacked it apart at the sheep trough and bu
ried it behind the chicken coop.
‘In the spring I drifted down to Lake Superior. I worked the fishing boats. But I come back to Crow Hill and go north to Isabel Sobel when my need is on. She’s white-haired now, but still strong as a diesel. She can lift a jeep right out of the road. We drink all day like maniacs and rut like animals, standing up. My vision turns me into a moose.
‘Jean, know the art of woman’s love.’
Six
‘Le petit est malade,’ my mother whispered. ‘Le petit va mourir.’
I dreamed I rose on an ostrich of white plumes and wore a Chinese gown embroidered with my sins. The clouds parted and I flew into a corridor of pyramids and obelisks. I sailed over the Nile of death. At the base of the Sudan mountains altar boys swung censers billowing smoke. A bishop interrogated me. I refused contrition.
I fell. The air became dark, darker. I sank into St Croix.
‘Y va mourir!’
My mother made tarte à la fatlouche. I sucked molasses and raisins off my fingers. But she, my mother, went into the living room and beat her hands against the walls.
Father Ybert called me to his office. He wore bifocals now, but they weren’t right. He kept taking them off and rubbing his eyelids. Sometimes he rolled his bloodshot eyes to the right.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Jean-Michel goes on vacation.’
‘I was in Crow Hill.’
‘Who did you think you were, Louis Riel?’
‘At least.’
‘Did you like Crow Hill?’
‘It was cold.’
‘Perhaps, for you, the world is cold.’
‘And getting colder.’
‘Drop your trousers.’
Father Ybert warmed my buttocks.
‘How is your father?’ he asked, putting his ruler back in the drawer.
‘He works.’
‘It is so hard in an area like this, keeping a job. And his troubles with the Jamaican Barrault. How is Barrault?’
‘He has pneumonia now.’
‘We keep them both in our thoughts.’
‘Thank you, Father Ybert.’
Ignace worked his diorama. Dromedaries, elephants, black archipelagos of lagoons and palms went by as he turned the handle. Dolphins leaped under a sacred heart. He turned the handle and Palestine passed. The Holy Family travelled in some kind of empty banana cart.
