Ivy felt a deep pride for her mother that she rarely expressed.
“Until the Depression, over half the wealth of Canada was owned by fifty men living in the Square Mile neighbourhood right next door to the hospital,” Miss Hobbs continued. “We looked after their health. Who knows, Miss Durling? Maybe one of these entrepreneurs will contribute to new boilers as well as donating a blanket.”
With a “Good luck” from Miss Hobbs, Ivy, wearing her obligatory chapeau, left the hospital, heading south to Sherbrooke Street through the McGill University campus and yanking a five-seat toboggan behind her. As she passed the greystone McTavish Reservoir, she had the measure of Montreal’s grandness. The reservoir just holds water but is as elegant as the buildings around it, she thought. According to Miss Hobbs, the money in the Square Mile came from industries such as furs, shipping, timber, mining, railways, and banking. Ivy was thrilled to be on the McGill campus where many of the doctors at the Galt Hospital had trained.
Winter had only begun, but already the snow was deep. A dozen men heaved the heavy white blanket to clear pathways for the students, many having already left for the holidays. She was glad she had purchased fashionable winter boots at Ogilvy’s. Since the clothing requirements for nursing students only listed galoshes, she didn’t mention the boots in her letters home, certain she could economize on other things to stay within her budget. Clara never mentioned her financial concerns, but Ivy knew about her mother’s sacrifices.
Ivy passed through the Roddick Gates onto Sherbrooke Street, the principal east-west corridor. She intended to go door-to-door on the small streets running north or south from the main route. She had been warned and thus wasn’t surprised to see two mansions on Sherbrooke with FOR SALE signs. Ivy decided to try both houses. There was no answer at the first. A young man was clearing the sidewalk a few mansions along, and Ivy approached him.
“My family moved to Westmount,” he said.
“Would anyone have left anything behind?” Ivy asked. When the man looked surprised, Ivy quickly added, “I’m a student nurse collecting blankets for elderly patients because our heating system is down.”
The man continued to stare at Ivy. She was turning to leave, and he grabbed her arm. “Wait! There are boxes left for a charity. I don’t know what’s inside. I’ll have a look.”
Ivy stood at the bottom of the steps. Clara had warned her of the dangers of men. “Always carry a hatpin,” she had said. “A quick jab and the element of surprise is enough to get away,” she had added. Ivy giggled at the recollection of Clara’s old-fashioned ideas.
The man returned with an armful of blankets. He secured the piles with a rope, slipping it through the cord that ran the length of the toboggan. Then he insisted on pulling the toboggan up the mountain.
Ivy argued to no avail and then thanked the man.
“I’m Hugh Carsley. My parents bought a smaller house in Westmount. No one wants to buy a mansion these days. I keep the walk shovelled for the real-estate agent.”
CHAPTER 20
While Ivy was finding her way as a nursing student in Montreal, Clara was in the Soo patrolling the site where the new school was to be built. She was disturbed to discover the Shingwauk children were playing in the excavated muck. They had made a slide into the gaping hole for the foundation. The chasm was filled with rain and melted snow typical for November, reminding Clara of the bomb craters where many soldiers of the Great War had perished. Few of them could swim, and if they could, crawling up the slippery mud slopes was next to impossible.
The new location was high on a hill behind the original Shingwauk. The old school had weathered seventy years, but the fire department and health authorities had condemned the building years ago. The lack of fire escapes in such an outdated structure was a constant worry for Reverend Hives.
Clara stood on the perimeter, watching a ship loaded with steel cargo navigate the St. Marys River, which separated two countries and joined two Great Lakes. This is where Chief Shingwauk had wanted to establish a teaching wigwam, she mused, gazing down at the dismal structure, the “teaching wigwam” that would be torn down. Chief Shingwauk believed Natives had to learn the white man’s ways. He didn’t want them to abandon their own, she thought. Clara flinched, recalling an episode she’d witnessed from outside Agnes Boniface’s classroom.
Soon after Clara began work as the school nurse, a little girl named Aka Round Stone arrived in the middle of the week when classes had already started. Shoved into the classroom by a custodian, the shy girl repeated her name when asked.
“In this school, we don’t use the names of minerals, animals — or plants, for that matter — to identify a student,” Miss Boniface replied. “You’ll be Number 321 until I can think of something to call you. Now, Number 321, please go to the back of the classroom and sit in the empty seat.”
As little Aka walked to the back, Clara could hear giggles, and minutes later Aka was being shepherded into the corridor, her shoes sopping. The girl’s legs were chapped from the urine, and Clara wondered if this was a first accident for the little girl.
“You needed to use the toilet,” Clara said softly.
Aka stared up blankly.
Clara knelt and embraced the child. “Oh, my, you don’t even know the word.”
The memory of little Aka depressed Clara until she returned home to find a letter from Ivy. She was overjoyed that her daughter would have three weeks of summer vacation. Ivy’s holiday would be a week longer than the other nursing students — a reward from Miss Hobbs for securing a large financial donation to the hospital as a result of her blanket campaign.
“I’m like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl,” Ivy wrote, causing Clara’s mood to brighten. Ivy had tucked in a note from her patients addressed to La Poupée. Clara chuckled when she recalled Ivy’s disdain for learning French. The image of her daughter lugging the heavy Petit Robert off the stage at graduation made her smile.
Ivy’s letter made Clara look forward to the summer and prompted her to call Maggie, the real-estate agent, to ask if the cottage beside the Donnellys’ was still available to rent. It was.
Then Clara wrote to Ellen Donnelly with the news that she and Ivy would be at Batchawana in August. Ellen’s reply indicated her daughter, Jean, wouldn’t arrive at Batchawana until Ivy’s final week. She did say her sons, Red, Jack, and Ian, would be at the cottage on weekends.
Clara decided she wouldn’t mention that Jean’s arrival at the cottage would be delayed until the last week of Ivy’s vacation. However, she relayed the good news that the Barnabys would be renting a cottage nearby.
Ivy replied that she already knew, and Clara buried the hurt that she hadn’t been able to surprise her own daughter. She wondered how often Lily and Ivy corresponded with each other.
CHAPTER 21
Once Lily got one project on its feet, she quickly looked for something else to initiate. She had established an English-language teaching centre in the west end of the Soo. It was running well and she no longer spent much time at the West End Library. As she was considering what might be an interesting pursuit, she recalled with pride how she had started a speech therapy program for stutterers while she was a student at normal school. A new opportunity arose when Clara dropped by to discuss the ongoing problem with sixteen-year-old Tina Courtney after the girl delivered her baby. Clara thought Lily might have some suggestions as to how she could help the girl who had arrived from Port Hope in a float plane.
“Reverend Hives has refused to let Tina return to finish her schooling,” Clara said. “He suggested she’d be a bad influence.”
Lily listened with interest because all she knew of Native girls was that many in Lethbridge had been forced into prostitution in a seedy area just outside the city limits dubbed “The Point.” Lethbridge was the first place where she had heard the demeaning word squaw to describe a Native woman. It was this violent, disease-ridden area that caused the mayor of Lethbridge to pass a bylaw creating a
segregated area where prostitution could be regulated. Chinese laundries, brothels, immigrants, and young couples searching for low rent populated this part of town. Lily and her first husband, Ed, had rented an apartment above a Chinese laundry.
“Tina was turfed out of the home for unwed mothers on the northern outskirts of the city a week after Little Feather was born,” Clara continued.
“What an interesting name,” Lily mused. She had her own story, having delivered a son with no one to support her. Ed had died in a mining accident while she was pregnant. Unable to pay her rent at that time, Lily was hired by the wife of the manager of the coal mine where Ed had worked. She struck an agreement with Lily to do light housekeeping in return for food and accommodation. With a crying baby, the arrangement didn’t last long. Financially strapped with a child to look after, Lily accepted to manage a brothel where her son was fussed over by the young prostitutes.
After hearing Tina’s story, Lily offered the girl room and board in exchange for help with her energetic twelve-year-old daughter, Jane, who was in the local public school and full of opinions. Jane was Lily’s daughter with James Barnaby, her second husband. Teddy, Lily’s strapping sixteen-year-old son with her late first husband, Edward Parsons, was boarding at Scollard Hall, a boys’ private school in North Bay. Ed had been a Roman Catholic, and Lily, who held no particular doctrine, believed her son should be brought up in the faith of his father.
“You’ll have your hands full with Little Feather and Jane to look after,” Lily said when Tina accepted the live-in job.
Clara thanked her niece for the job offer.
Lily smiled. “I think it’s because I lived in my glamorous sister’s shadow that I favour the underdog. I suppose I’m sticking up for myself or reliving my childhood.”
Clara hadn’t known Lily when she was growing up but suspected that was what had shaped her as the advocate of underdogs. Lily was her mother’s reminder that she had gotten pregnant before she was married. It had turned out well in the end but not without leaving a mark on Lily. Amelia, Lily’s mother and Clara’s eldest sister, had become pregnant and was sent from England to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to deliver her baby. She boarded with an Anglican minister and did light housekeeping for a member of the church who was ill and feeble. Amelia fell in love with the parishioner’s son, a pharmacist, and they were married before Lily was born. Lily’s mother had favoured her younger daughter, Beth, who was quite happy to eclipse Lily. Robert White was more than Lily’s father in name. He adored her.
Clara had first met Lily when she was running a brothel and fiercely defending “her” girls when upright ladies in town insulted them. During prohibition, brothels in Lethbridge were often the only place to get an alcoholic drink. The prostitutes gave dancing lessons alongside their more conventional services. Men gravitated to them for the socialization they didn’t have at home. Their wives, of course, treated the young entertaining ladies with disdain. Clara was proud to have witnessed Lily’s underdog mindset that had allowed her to run a brothel in Lethbridge, teach English to marginalized Italian women in the Soo, and more recently to offer refuge to a Native child.
I’ve occasionally sparred with Lily, Clara thought, but never disrespected her. Her recollections of the past were broken by Lily’s enthusiastic outburst.
“I’ll get Tina back on her feet and returned to her community in Fort Hope with Little Feather in her arms,” she promised. “In the meantime, Jane, who’s too old for dolls at twelve, can practise mothering a real baby.”
Tina settled in well at the Barnabys’ house and was teaching Jane to speak Ojibwa. One scorching hot day, Clara arrived to check on Tina, only to find Lily full of excitement about a play chronicling the life of a fictional Ojibwa hero, based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. The performance would take place outdoors at the end of July in a small town called Desbarats, thirty-five miles east of the Soo. Lily had heard that rich Americans from Chicago attended the annual performance of Hiawatha, including the famous actress Helen Hayes, who had a summer cottage on Lake Huron.
Clara went looking for Longfellow’s epic poem and found a tattered handwritten copy in the school library. She speculated that the pages, laboriously written in English, had been a punishment for a language transgression. Discovering Clara poring over the pages, Reverend Hives asked if she was aware of the Garden River performers.
Clara admitted she wasn’t, but then said, “I do have a vague recollection that Longfellow’s poem was originally published to much acclaim.”
“His story of an Indian hero did indeed delight the American public,” Reverend Hives said. “And now we have a local performance!” He picked up the well-worn library copy of Longfellow’s book-length poem. “This is only a few of the poem’s verses.”
“Is the production a musical?” Clara asked.
“Natives prefer the oral tradition, but drummers provide a musical background. The production gained international acclaim when a cinematographer, Joe Rosenthal, while visiting friends at Desbarats, filmed the performance. He presented his work in small opera houses across the United States where Americans were ready to pay to have their pictures taken with a ‘real Indian.’ That was the financial incentive for the impoverished Garden River community to perform annually.”
“Such interesting local history,” Clara said. “It must be costly to put on.”
“It is, but Indian agents with railway interests pay for teepees, headdresses, drums, and other props, justifying the cost because the play increases tourist travel in Algoma.”
“I thought Native ceremonies were forbidden,” Clara said. “I’m still trying to figure out what is and isn’t allowed under the Indian Act.”
“The Department of Indian Affairs likes money,” the reverend said rather matter-of-factly. “Were it not for their lucrative production, the Garden River Indians would have to succumb to our assimilation policy. Fortunately for the Garden River residents, unlike most Indians, they can hold powwows, sweat lodges, drumming ceremonies, dances, and peace-pipe smoking.”
Clara didn’t feel she should ask the headmaster his opinion of the policy. I might not like the answer, she thought, and thanked Reverend Hives for sharing his knowledge. He admitted he had attended the play in Desbarats many times and had always enjoyed it.
CHAPTER 22
Clara and Lily, with year-old Little Feather strapped on Tina’s back, took the train to Desbarats where they planned to stay overnight at the six-bedroom hotel not far from the Hiawatha performance. The hotel had a small dining room popular for its home-cooked food and famous for its butter tarts. The ladies had time to eat, and Tina fed Little Feather before they crossed the dirt road to Kensington Point, a spit of land projecting into Lake Huron.
As the sun dropped in the western sky, the Americans, identifiable by their expensive casualwear, secured their mahogany inboards to the dock by heavy metal cleats. Emblazoned in gold on the sterns were names with double meanings such as Just in Time, Never Again, and Too Old? Already some feather-adorned actors danced and drummed on a torch-lit stage overlooking the lake, waiting for Hiawatha to arrive by canoe. The smartly dressed Americans, bundled in sweaters and shawls against the cool night air, found spots on the crude wooden benches at the edge of the platform. Children sat on the ground cross-legged, swaying to the drum music.
“Let’s sit over there,” Lily said, heading toward a bench away from the Americans. “I can smell the privilege,” she added with a snort. A tall grey-haired man with a red wool sweater draped over his shoulders stood behind the bench with his hands on his wife’s shoulders. “That’s James Scutter from Lake Forest, Illinois. He has his own squash court.”
“How do you know that?” Clara asked.
“My neighbours have a camp on the mainland. Mr. Scutter invited them for a drink. Americans don’t hate Canadians. They just think we’re boring.”
Tina had joined a small band of Garden River Natives not in the pa
geant, who had huddled under a tarpaulin that served as a tent. She knew a few of them from her time at Shingwauk. The reserve was close to the Soo, and the children from there were able to spend the summer with their families.
Kisses were being planted on Little Feather’s bow-like mouth. Clara rose to her feet with a scowl.
“Leave her!” Lily said, grabbing her sleeve. “She’s with her own people.”
“There’s a risk of TB with each kiss.”
“Barnaby says it’s a problem in the poorest reserves. Garden River’s rich by comparison. Let’s not argue, Clara. Hiawatha is arriving!”
Natives in elaborate feathered headdresses paddled their birchbark canoes with swift tandem strokes. Hiawatha stood on the shoreline, looking majestically over the water they had just traversed while his men silently and efficiently pulled the canoes onto land. Hiawatha’s headdress stood out with its elaborate, colourful beading and abundance of eagle feathers. His waistband held a hatchet and on his back was a quiver of arrows — the tools of a warrior.
Hiawatha leaped onto the stage to join his feather-adorned dancers. They bowed while the seated drummers on the edge of the platform continued their beat.
“We must do this at the school,” Clara whispered breathlessly.
Lily arched her eyebrows. “A Hiawatha pageant at Shingwauk?”
“I’m sure Reverend Hives will agree,” Clara said, countering Lily’s skepticism.
“Let’s watch.”
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