The third time Dora-Rouge smiled was when the three of us stood before the self-glued mirror tiles in Lampier’s pink room, Pinkie and The Blue Boy reflecting from the wall behind us like anemic guardian angels. “We’re a sight!” she said. “At least they won’t mistake us for whores.” She laughed, showing her pink, babylike gums. She laughed so hard tears formed in her eyes. Bush said, “My God, we do look horrible.” I joined in, too, laughing at how life was precious and dangerous and absurd all at once.
Jean Lampier rolled in the little black-and-white, ticking-striped cot, folded in its metal frame like a trapped animal, and smiled as if she guessed our joke.
When she left, I said, “We should get our things.” Used to living in a city, I didn’t think it wise to leave our packs at the edge of water.
“No,” said Bush. “We’ve been carrying them all this time. I don’t want to do it one minute more. I’ll get someone to fetch them.”
Before long, she found two boys from the town and offered to pay them if they’d carry the packs and canoe to Mrs. Lampier’s. But when the younger kids returned, they were empty-handed. “Jon robbed you,” they said. “He stole your things.”
Bush paid them anyway. Then she went striding down to the shore, swinging her arms, looking for the teenager named Jon, and to see what, if anything, he’d left behind. I followed behind her, and behind me, the boys, who thought this was much fun, were swinging their arms just like Bush.
When we reached the site, the canoe was gone. So was the food pack and the tent and sleeping bags. All we had left were a few clothes. Fortunately, we’d carried the beaver pelts in Dora-Rouge’s lap.
“I’m going to find that kid.” Bush stood, her hands on her hips, looking at the empty place where they’d been, as if the canoe, the packs, the life jackets would all float up from beneath the water or out from under the jutting gray rocks.
FOURTEEN
IT WAS A RAW AND SCARRED place, a land that had learned to survive, even to thrive, on harshness. At first it seemed barren to me, the trees so thin and spindly, the soil impoverished, but soon I felt a sympathy with this ragtag world of seemingly desolate outlying places and villages. It was a place of rocks and mosses. Water ran all across the earth’s surfaces in every way it could, in rivulets and bogs, ponds and streams, all of it on its way to a river where it would roar away to another America or to empty into a bay. I understood this water to be the source, the origin of all the land. I saw the land in its fullness, even the trees that had been twisted by wind and dwarfed in poor soil. Everything had become strengthened by desperate and hungry needs, and by the tracts of running water. Like me, it was native land and it had survived.
And in time it would be angry land. It would try to put an end to the plans for dams and drowned rivers. An ice jam at the Riel River would break loose and rage over the ground, tearing out dams and bridges, the construction all broken by the blue, cold roaring of ice no one was able to control. Then would come a flood of unplanned proportions that would suddenly rise up as high as the steering wheels of their machines. The Indian people would be happy with the damage, with the fact that water would do what it wanted and in its own way. What water didn’t accomplish, they would.
FIFTEEN
THE PEOPLE THERE were called the Fat-Eaters, although the original name for themselves had been the Beautiful Ones. Their territory now was the settlement built around a little hill where the church sat, painted white with dark blue trim. Most of the people at the territory’s outermost edges had been resettled after having lost their own lands to the hydroelectric project, lands they’d lived on since before European time was invented. They were despondent. In some cases, they had to be held back from killing themselves. These were Dora-Rouge’s people, and mine. This was why Dora-Rouge’s return to her land was not what she’d hoped or imagined. It was nothing like the place she remembered. She looked around. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. The despair was visible on her face. Her eyes constantly searched for something familiar that was not there. I fell into a gloomy stillness, watching her. Dora-Rouge had gone home to die in a place that existed in her mind as one thing; in reality it was something altogether different. The animals were no longer there, nor were the people or clans, the landmarks, not even the enormous sturgeon they’d called giants; and not the water they once swam in. Most of the trees had become nothing more than large mounds of sawdust.
The few familiar things that remained, Dora-Rouge touched with tenderness: the gnarled trees the loggers thought not worth their trouble and had left behind, the stones, the swamp plants. And it did mean something to her to be where her ancestors had walked, no matter what the land had been turned into.
The resettled people lived in little, fast-made shacks, with candy and Coca-Cola machines every so often between them, and in Quonset huts left behind from the military who had recently used this native land as a bombing range. The better places were inhabited by men who’d come looking for oil, and a few loggers who were after the last of the trees.
The people were in pain, and even if Dora-Rouge had known the people of this last generation or two, she would never have recognized their puffy faces and empty eyes, their unkempt, hollow, appearance. It was murder of the soul that was taking place there. Murder with no consequences to the killers. If anything, they were rewarded. Dora-Rouge saw it and grieved.
One day, Dora-Rouge, in the white wheelchair, said to a young woman, “What has happened here?” The girl looked at the old woman with contempt and quickly moved away.
The young children drank alcohol and sniffed glue and paint. They staggered about and lay down on the streets. Some of them had children of their own, infants who were left untouched, untended by their child-parents. Sometimes they were given beer when they cried. It was the only medicine left for all that pain. Even the healing plants had been destroyed. Those without alcohol were even worse off, and the people wept without end, and tried to cut and burn their own bodies. The older people tied their hands with ropes and held them tight hoping the desire to die would pass. It was a smothering blanket laid down on them. The devastation and ruin that had fallen over the land fell over the people, too. Most were too broken to fight the building of the dams, the moving of waters, and that perhaps had been the intention all along. But I could see Dora-Rouge thinking, wondering: how do conquered people get back their lives? She and others knew the protest against the dams and river diversions was their only hope. Those who protested were the ones who could still believe they might survive as a people.
The pain in Dora-Rouge’s joints worsened from having to see this. Her color was poor, but something or someone had guided her there, she said, and it had drawn me along the full route with her. How else could she have known the way, so twisted and odd as it was?
WE’D BEEN THERE about a week when one afternoon Bush went to a settlement meeting up at the blue-trimmed church. While she was gone, I pushed Dora-Rouge to the post to buy some Hostess chocolate cupcakes, the ones we both craved. An old man, sitting beside the gun cabinet, watched Dora-Rouge as she sat in Mother Jordan’s chair. He frowned and studied her face, looked away and back. Finally, he said, “Say, weren’t you the woman with the corn?” He was dark and slight. Beside him sat a shaggy dog with yellow-tinged fur. The man wore a sweater that read “Eddie Bauer.” I thought that was his name but he introduced himself as Tulik. He had been a tribal judge.
“Yes, that was me.” Dora-Rouge said it in a distant way, in the same past tense he had used, so that it sounded as if it were no longer her but someone else. I suppose, truth be known, she was not the same woman who kept the kernels of corn that came from the place where people had spirits akin to hers. By now, “akin” meant wounded; no one wished for such kinship. Dora-Rouge tried to turn the wheelchair toward him, but her small crippled hands only succeeded in rocking it. A half-eaten chocolate cupcake in hand, I went over and turned the chair for her and moved her toward the small, barrel-chested man. I drank so
me soda. His skin was dark, his face bones fine and delicate, and he had happy eyes.
“I remember you,” he said. He wore baggy pants and had short hair. “You are Ek’s girl.”
She smiled at him despite the sadness in her eyes. “Yes, I’m that one.”
“Well, I’m her cousin.” He pulled his chair closer to Dora-Rouge. He said a few words in the old language and then they sat in silence, looking straight ahead, as if behind them, or to either side, the world was too painful to see or remember. I felt as if they were speaking with their minds, communicating in a full silence that excluded me. Maybe it was the silence of change witnessed, something too full for words.
He squinted at her as if he, like all the other old men I’d met, had been snow-blinded in the past, and he opened a brown bag of food, took out a sandwich made of Spam and white bread, and handed half of it to Dora-Rouge without speaking. Without speaking, she took it. She loved Spam, and for just a moment I think she forgot there were no happy young people in that place, none at all.
I left them alone. I went outside and walked on the planks that were laid down across the swampy land. I wasn’t sure if it had been a mired bog before the damming, or if it had been a lake. A boardwalk made of old wood floated on mud. It was moist and swollen, and algae grew in the spots where it was rotting. I walked along in the direction of water, to the west. Once, I slipped on the moist wood, and just caught myself from falling into the mud. The dark ground pulled at my foot. It tried to take me in the way it had swallowed that pitiful moose, a slow but firmly held tugging. My shoe was gone and I could see there was no use going after it, so I walked on without it.
A part of me remembered this world, as did all of Dora-Rouge; it seemed to embody us. We were shaped out of this land by the hands of gods. Or maybe it was that we embodied the land. And in some way I could not yet comprehend, it also embodied my mother, both of them stripped and torn.
We’d heard about Hannah from various sources. Word traveled quickly in small towns, even where there were two towns for gossip to visit, hang its hat, and drink coffee. Mrs. Lampier, when learning why I’d come, said nothing, but her eyes betrayed her thoughts. Other people, too, on hearing that I was one of Hannah’s daughters, would say a few words in the older language and then be silent. This made me all the more anxious to find her.
When I finally reached the lake, the water was dark. At first, I wanted to wash my muddy leg, but it was quiet and no one else was there, so I hid behind a rock and some trees at the edge of the lake and removed my clothing. In spite of water’s hungry desire and its cold temperature, I entered the near-black lake and immersed myself. My skin tightened. Such a cold baptism; it took my breath away. It was colder than any water I’d entered before. I didn’t count the seconds that would pass before I was in danger of dying from exposure. Hypothermia was commonplace in these waters, I knew, but I had stepped out of my rational mind along with my sweater and jeans, as if it were just another article of clothing. In the cold water, my feet hurt. I hoped the water would cleanse all the pasts, remove griefs. Inside it, naked and alone, I held my breath past my own limit. I saw my body as from a distance; it was an unwavering flame in the dark room of water, a wick of warmth holding fire in a cold chill, holding light in the vast, immense darkness. I floated in what wanted freedom, in what white men wanted changed.
I saw my arms, strong from the paddling, my legs, naked and thin, and my face with the hair flowing back with the current. I thought how Dora-Rouge had told me once about Eho, the old woman keeper of the animals. She had been sent down to the mother of water to bargain for all life, nearly swimming to her death. She was the woman who fell in love with a whale in the heart of water and did not want to return to the human worlds. She knew and could command water. She drifted to where the world was composed long ago in dark creation. Because of her, the animals and other lives were spared, but in the end, Eho could not remain in water or with the whale of her loving. Soon, back on land, she died. Now men and women were to be the caretakers of the animals, that was what the Great Spirit said, according to Dora-Rouge.
When I came up gasping for breath, I saw Dora-Rouge and Tulik walking down the little planked incline to the shore. Tulik with his funny walk, with his dog beside him, was pushing Dora-Rouge in the white chair. A redheaded woman with dark skin walked beside them. It was my mother. I knew it at once. I fell into a cold stillness made worse by the water’s temperature. Quickly, I jumped out of water, and without drying off, dressed, shivering, my fingers blue.
“What do you think you’re doing!” scolded Dora-Rouge when she saw me. “It’s too cold for that. Look at the water. It’s even black.” She waved her thin arm and shook her fist at me. “And showing off your bare fanny, too!”
IT WAS ON A SUN DAY when Hannah came to see us, when I surfaced to see them walking toward me. Someone had sent word to her at the settlement of Hardy that her great-grandmother and her daughter had been at the Two-Town Post and wanted to see her. Bush was at one of the settlement meetings and it was a good thing, we all knew, for Bush was still vulnerable, still caught in the between of good-and-evil forces that were Hannah. Whatever she’d fought in Hannah was still waiting to wage the same war, break the tie, and settle old debts. Dora-Rouge and I both could see in a glance that Hannah still resided in a dangerous world, or maybe it was that a dangerous world lived inside her.
“Let’s go to my home. It’s more private,” Tulik said. We all walked together past the store and on to his cabin.
Dora-Rouge continued to scold me. “Where’s your shoe?”
I pretended not to be cold. “I lost it,” I said, but while we walked, I searched Hannah’s face for signs of myself. Hannah was heavily made up and she didn’t like to be looked at. Now and then she turned her eyes toward a place where nothing was, but she never once looked at me with those eyes outlined in black. I didn’t know what I’d expected to feel, seeing my mother for the first time, maybe happiness or anger. At best a kind of peace, something that might order my life and explain me to myself. Like Bush traveling north, I wanted a map, something fixed, a road in. I wanted to see what was between this woman and me, a landmark, a bond. I had imagined this meeting so many times, but none of them was like this. Any path between us had long since been closed. She was, as Bush said, a wall, a place to go with no foundation.
Tulik’s house was named Lynx House, from the days before houses were numbered. It was surrounded by a fence made of whalebone, and as soon as we went indoors, a woman with protruding teeth and glasses—Auntie was her name—and a young boy looked at us, saw that this was not a social call, and went out the door. Tulik himself went to the far corner of the room and sat near an old wooden radio, mending his fishing nets. He pretended he was not listening. They were small, close quarters, and anything but private.
Hannah was quiet for a long while, and in that waiting, as I looked at the floor, I realized that she feared me more than I had ever feared her.
Finally, she said, “I never hit you.” Only that.
I looked at her for a long time. I was no longer numb from the water, but I still felt cold. I saw her. For her, I was the accuser, the sign of her guilt. I wore the wounds of Hannah on my face. They were evidence of what had happened.
Still, she had come to see me.
“I never laid a hand on you,” she said to me. “I think you ought to know that.”
I could only look at her, and what I saw was more ruined than the land. My hopes for this reunion were gone.
Dora-Rouge said, “What’s that? I hear a baby crying. Do you hear it? It sounds like it’s just over in the trees.”
Hannah glanced again in my direction. “You look fat,” she said, which later made us all laugh because I was much too thin; I had lost all my extra weight, and then some, carrying canoes and supplies and Dora-Rouge. My face was even raw-angled and masculine in its leanness.
“Can’t you hear that?” Dora-Rouge said again.
“May
be it’s a cat,” Tulik said. He, too, went outside.
What Hannah said, that she’d never hit me, was almost true. She hadn’t laid a hand on me. She had used weapons against me, I learned later—hot wire, her teeth. Once she’d even burned me with fire. And it was only later that I felt a rage uncoiling inside me at her words, but even that was a rage built on sadness and loss. It was not the rage of a directed hatred, not the cleansing fire of heat, not a sharpened-to-a-point rage, not even a seeking-justice rage. It was a futile anger that had no practical use in the world, and so I had no choice but to contain it; it had nowhere to go.
The others kept their eyes averted, as if my heart would break under their gaze, but I felt their pity. And I knew by then how badly I’d been hurt by her. I could see that there was no love inside her, nothing that could love me, nothing that could ever have loved. She tapped her finger impatiently on the table a moment, looked as if about to speak, then stood up and went out the door.
“Wait,” I called out. I tried to follow. I wanted more than that. “Wait,” I said, but she continued walking, and finally I stopped.
As she left, the mail plane flew over. It shook the walls. Mr. Tulik, as was his daily custom, went to greet it. Hannah, seeing him follow behind her, began to walk faster, as if he, too, were chasing her. I watched her vanish. She looked back again at Tulik, then ran down the road to get away and soon she simply slipped out of view.
I went inside, weeping, and when Bush returned, she came to me and said, “I’m so sorry, Angel. But I hope you believe me; it’s not her fault.”