Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  “Did I wake you?” she asked.

  Her voice held the proper measure of concern, but laughter flickered in her dark eyes.

  “I wasn’t really sleeping,” Tommy told her.

  “Oh?”

  “No, I was composing limericks. This one’s for you: There once was an aunt of the cloth’—that’s you, of course. A play on your name.”

  “Very clever.”

  “‘Who never was known to cough. Till one day a biscuit, got caught in her brisket, and the hack nearly took her head off.’ “

  “Brisket?”

  “I needed the rhyme.”

  “You’d have been better off sleeping.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse. Do you have any tea?”

  “Ah.”

  Tommy wasn’t exactly a homebody. He lived off his welfare check, not because he was too lazy to hold down a regular nine-to-five, but because a regular job wouldn’t let him do what he considered his real work. Welfare paid for his apartment, the meals he ate in diners and fast-food joints, gas for his pickup, but little else. Happily, the life he’d chosen didn’t require much else. His apartment was utilitarian—though perhaps apartment was a misnomer. There was one small room that served as a combination bedroom and living area, furnished with a sofa bed that had only once been made up into a sofa since he’d moved in, and a wooden fruit crate turned on its side that held a selection of paperback books missing their front covers that he replenished as needed from the trash behind one of the bookstores on Williamson Street. There was a closet of a kitchen which he rarely used. There was an even smaller closet of a bathroom with a claustrophobic shower stall, a toilet, and sink crammed into the remaining space.

  But he didn’t need anything else. He’d made a promise to the Creator when Angel got him into detox the last time: Let me live through this and I’ll dedicate my life to Beauty. That everyone had food in their stomach, shelter, knew a few words of kindness—that was his definition of Beauty. He believed in following what David Monogye, the elder of another tribe, had called humankind’s original instructions.

  “The original instructions of the Creator are universal and valid for all time,” Monogye wrote in a letter to the United Nations. “The essence of these instructions is compassion for all life and love for all creation. We must realize that we do not live in a world of dead matter, but in a universe of living spirit. Let us open our eyes to the sacredness of Mother Earth, or our eyes will be opened for us.”

  When one considered the world in such light, Tommy thought, what need was there for personal property or a hierarchy of worthiness for those with whom he shared the Creator’s gift of life? His only luxury was a pickup truck that his mother had given to him when he last got out of detox, and he only used it to get back and forth from the rez.

  “There’s no tea,” he told his aunt. “Not much of anything, really.”

  “How about a kettle?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I’ve got a pot that holds water—and the left burner on the hot plate works. At least it did the last time I used it.”

  “Which was probably a month ago.”

  “Two weeks, actually. I had a hot date so I went all out and splurged on some gourmet TV dinners. We dined by moonlight.”

  His aunt’s eyebrows rose.

  “Okay. I was reheating a take-out soup.”

  Sunday reached into the pocket of her shirt and pulled out a pair of tea bags. All his life Tommy’s aunts had had this ability to pull a needed thing from their pocket. Candy, gum, a smudgestick, herbs, charms.

  “I’ll go put the water on,” she said. “Do you take your tea black?”

  Tommy grinned. “Today I do.”

  She shook her head and got up from the bed.

  “Get dressed,” she told him. “We need to talk.”

  He waited until she’d stepped into the kitchen, then flung back his blanket. His clothes hung from the arm of the sofa bed. It only took him a few moments to put on jeans, T-shirt, a checked flannel shirt. Straightening the blankets on his bed, he went to stand in the doorway where he watched his aunt rinse out a couple of mugs. They hadn’t been dirty, simply dusty from disuse.

  “Aunt Sunday,” he said after a moment. “Why are you here?”

  “We’re worried about you.”

  He didn’t have to ask who she meant. “We” would encompass Sunday herself, his mother, and their fifteen other sisters, his aunts. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would have been like to have grown up in that household when they were young, all those gangly girls with their broad, happy faces; a pack of rambunctious and fey tomboys, by all accounts, running wild through the rez, touched by Mystery and Beauty. But they’d been grown women by the time he was born—the unhappy reminder of his mother’s bad marriage, though no one ever said it in so many words.

  “I chose this life,” he told her. “I know I’ve never amounted to much, but what I’m doing now is a lot better than lying drunk in some alley.”

  Sunday turned from the sink to look at him. The humor that usually sparkled in her eyes had been replaced with an unfamiliar sadness.

  “We’ve always been proud of you, Tommy,” she said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  He’d left home when he was fifteen, full of an anger he couldn’t explain, torn between the traditionalists—best exemplified by his aunts, or by the Warrior’s Society—and those who’d simply given up, the kids sniffing glue and gasoline in back of the community center when they couldn’t score some booze or drugs, killing themselves slowly instead of the way the more desperate did: putting the barrel of a hunting rifle in their mouth, or taking a drop from the garage rafters with a rope around their necks. He’d just needed to get away. Away from the losers. Away from that house of women. Away from the sweat-lodge boys and the Indian Power champions.

  So what did he do? He tracked down his father in the city and went to live with him. The first couple of weeks were great. Frank Raven welcomed his son into the seedy apartment he had in Lower Foxville, proudly introducing him to everyone as the long-lost son “the bitch” had stolen from him. But blood was true and a father’s love always won out in the end, because here was his boy again, making a man’s choice, the right choice, living with his father, where he belonged. There was a party every other night and no one said he was too young to join in. It was, “Welcome to civilization,” and “Here, Tommy, have a brew,” and “Fuck the elders; we’ll make our own good times.”

  Then one night, without provocation, Frank beat the crap out of him in the middle of one of those parties and threw Tommy out on the street to fend for himself.

  “You ever come back here again,” Frank told his son, “and you’re dead meat. Got it?”

  Tommy lived on the streets then, too proud to go back to the rez with his tail between his legs, too scared to approach his father again. Frank’s friends, when they saw Tommy, took to calling him Dead Meat after his father’s parting words.

  Life hadn’t been easy after that. He turned to sleeping on the streets, panhandling, or turning tricks down at the Y. Some of the guys hanging in the changing rooms got real turned on by an Indian kid. They’d call him Chief, or Squaw Boy, slip him an extra few bucks if he’d use B-movie Indian dialogue. A year later he was in juvie hall where Angel bailed him out.

  Angel. Her real name was Angelina Marceau and she looked like an angel—long dark hair falling in a waterfall of natural ringlets, heart-shaped face, the warmest eyes you could imagine. All she was missing were the wings. They called her the Grasso Street Angel, not because of her looks, but because of the way she helped people, especially kids and the homeless, out of a street-front office on Grasso Street.

  Like most of the men who knew Angel, Tommy was half in love with her from the first time they met. She’d organized an all-ages teen dance at the Crowsea Community Center which Tommy and a few of his street pals crashed, six of them, high as kites and drunk, floundering about on the dance floor
, pushing kids around and having themselves a grand old time until suddenly Angel was standing there, staring them down. She didn’t have to do anything. Just the look in her eyes shamed them into leaving.

  But Tommy came back and helped clean up after the dance. He wouldn’t talk to anyone—especially not Angel—but he wanted to be near her. There was something in her presence that soothed the constant anger that sometimes the drugs and alcohol dulled, sometimes they fed. To this day, he couldn’t explain what it was. In those days he didn’t even try.

  He didn’t turn over a new leaf after that night. A month later a brawl landed him in juvie where Angel bailed him out. She wasn’t there to help him, but when she saw him slouched on a bench, she came over and sat down beside him.

  “I remember you,” she said. “You were at the dance last month.”

  Tommy stared at the floor, unwilling, unable to look at her.

  “What are you in for?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Fighting.”

  “Did you start it?”

  Tommy hesitated, then finally looked up at her, saw himself reflected in those warm, kind eyes of hers. He nodded.

  She smiled. “Well, at least you’re honest. You think it’ll happen again?”

  “Probably.” That wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but he couldn’t seem to lie to her. “But I’ll try not to.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment, just studied him. It was weird, the way she looked at him. It wasn’t judgmental, but it was definitely taking his measure. She made him think of his mother, he realized. His mother and the Aunts. They had that same way of looking at you that made you stop and think about what exactly it was you were trying to prove.

  “I… I just get angry,” he found himself saying. “I guess I’m always angry.”

  “What about?”

  “Don’t know.”

  She nodded. “Let me talk to the sergeant,” she said. “I’ll see if I can get the charges dropped.”

  Tommy had tried to do good after that. Angel got him into AA, found him a room in a boardinghouse, a job bagging groceries at a store on Grasso Street, just a couple of blocks away from her street-front office. He’d come into her office from time to time and help out, sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows. Mostly he’d listen to her talk, his own tongue stuck fast to the roof of his mouth so that he could only reply in monosyllables. Things were going well, but after a while he drifted back into the street life, why, he didn’t know. But he started calling in sick at work, stopped going to AA meetings. He’d hang with the guys, drinking, fighting, boosting car stereos and the like. He didn’t see Angel again for about a year, not until he was picked up and dumped off in a holding cell at the Crowsea Precinct.

  He was lucky. The only charges they had against him were vagrancy, and being drunk and disorderly in a public place. He didn’t know how she found out, but when he looked up from the bunk in his cell the next morning, she was standing there on the other side of the bars.

  “Hello, Tommy,” she said. “How’re you doing?”

  He thought he’d die of shame. There was no recrimination in her voice, or in her eyes, no sense that she was disappointed in him. But seeing her there made him disappointed in himself.

  “Not so good,” he told her.

  She stood up for him again. It was back to AA, another boardinghouse, another job—this time on the janitorial staff at a high school, cleaning up at nights when the place was empty. It was good to have something to do at night—it kept him from seeing the guys, falling back on his old ways. He could sleep through the day, work at night. Sometimes, when he finished up early, he’d go to the school library and read for a couple of hours.

  The routine held until the day he found out that his father had died— drunk as usual. Frank had managed to choke to death on his own puke. One more loser brave, dead in an alleyway. Tommy didn’t even think about what he was doing. He just walked into a bar and had himself a celebratory drink. Then he had some more. When the barman stopped serving him, he went to a liquor store and bought three mickeys of cheap whiskey.

  When he came to a day-and-a-half later, he was lying in a nest of trash at the back of some alley. For all he knew it was the same one in which his father had died. He lay there for a long time, then finally stumbled to his feet. Hung over, sick to his stomach, reeling. He knew what he should do. Call his sponsor. Head for the nearest AA meeting. But what was the point? Like father, like son. It was in the genes, ran in the blood, and it was never going to go away. But at least when you were drunk, you couldn’t think. Everything bad just blurred, was bearable.

  So he went and bought himself another couple of bottles of oblivion.

  When Angel found him in the drunk tank this time she had them open his cell so that she could sit beside him on his cot.

  “I heard about your father,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  She still shamed him, but today he had a voice. This was territory he knew too well.

  “I’m not.” he said.

  “Every death diminishes us.”

  He still couldn’t look at her. “You sound like one of my aunts.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  That drew his gaze to her. “You know them?”

  “I’ve met a few of them. Zulema helps me with some of the Native kids.”

  He nodded slowly. “So that’s why I’m one of your pet projects.”

  He’d often wondered why none of his family had interfered with the mess he’d made of his life. In the first few months that he’d been on his own—and knowing his mother and her sisters—he’d constantly expected them to come drag him back to the rez. Now he knew why they hadn’t had to bother. They’d just deputized Angel to stand in for them.

  “Do you really believe that?” Angel asked.

  He shrugged and returned to studying the floor.

  “I didn’t even know you two were related until a couple of weeks ago.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Have I ever lied to you before?” Angel asked.

  The unfamiliar edge in her voice pulled his gaze back to her.

  “No,” he said.

  Angel smiled. “Okay. So long as we have that straight. I’ve talked to the judge and he says they’ll drop charges if you’ll voluntarily check into detox and then, once you’re clean and back at work, you pay off the damages.”

  Tommy blinked. “Damages?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head.

  As Angel started ticking off the items—plate glass window of a photography shop, glass and frames of photos on display—it began to come back to Tommy. One of the photos had been part of an advertisement for a photographic gallery show featuring the rez. He’d been stumbling by when the image of some fancy dancers at a powwow caught his eye. He’d picked up a garbage can and put it through the window, then to the soundtrack of the store’s alarm, had systematically begun breaking each of the framed photos in the display.

  “Why do you keep helping me?” he asked Angel.

  She gave him a long serious look that made him want to flinch and look away, but he couldn’t move his head.

  “I believe in you,” she said.

  He thought of Angel saying those words to him in the drunk tank, how they’d actually pulled him out of the inexplicable anger and despair and set him on the road he walked today. It had been a long, hard struggle, but this time he’d stuck it out. He still had dreams about those days, but he savored the mornings when he woke up, knowing that was all they were. Dreams. The past.

  He looked at his Aunt Sunday now, and made a sweeping motion with his hand.

  “You’re proud of this?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Lifting her hand, she laid her palm against his chest.

  “We’re proud of this,” she said. “The heart that beats in this man’s chest. His generosity of spirit and strength of purpose. You have grown into a good man, Thomas Raven.”


  Tommy smiled. “Then why are you all so worried?”

  “Ah…”

  She took the pot from the hot plate and turned the heat off. Dropping the tea bags into the boiling water, she leaned against the kitchen counter and sighed.

  This didn’t bode well, Tommy thought. He couldn’t think of a time when one of his aunts had been at a loss for words. They were never hesitant in offering an opinion, passing along a piece of advice, telling a learning story.

  “It has to do with manitou” she said finally.

  That was the last thing Tommy had expected to hear.

  “Manitou,” he repeated.

  Sunday nodded. “Ours and theirs.”

  “Theirs?”

  “The Europeans.”

  Now Tommy was really confused. “The Europeans have manitou?”

  “Of course. What would you call the spirits that followed them here?”

  “I never really thought about it.”

  He’d never thought that they might have even brought spirits with them, never mind what they might be called.

  “They want our land,” Sunday said.

  “People always want our land.”

  “No, I mean the spirits. They mean to take the sacred places from our manitou.”

  Tommy’s head filled with questions. Was such a thing even possible? All he knew about the spirits he’d learned through stories—stories that took place in some long ago, before the People had been forced to share their world with the Europeans. The stories had always been entertaining, but he’d never considered them to have much relevance to the present world.

  “What does any of this have to do with me?” he asked.