Above us and to the east, trees were being felled, the coal stripped away, and roads had been cut into every sacred site the people had grown from, known, and told stories about.
“Our children want to die,” she said, looking out the window as if distance were a comfort. There were logging machines, she told us, with monstrous jaws that ripped trees out of the ground and threw them away as if they were already the toothpicks they would become. “It is too late for us,” she said, thin-voiced, “so I’ve come to help you. Because when I heard that girl on the radio, I knew you were next.” She looked at me. My face reddened. And maybe, she told Tulik, if they could stop the work here, her people could come here to live.
She looked at me with pride. “Also about your car. She told all that. Tulik, she’s a girl who turned into a human. Maniki, we used to call them. Here, I have the hundred twenty-eight dollars.” Miss Nett took a roll of bills out of her sleeve and gave it to Tulik. “If you help drive me, I’ll get the truck out for you.” She took another roll of bills out of the bodice of her dress and counted them out, laying the softly wrinkled bills, of the same denomination and texture Agnes had mailed to me the year before, on the table beside an empty yellow plate.
Tulik hated to accept money but Auntie picked it up quickly before he had a chance to turn it down, which he surely would have done, being a leader and an overly proud man. “Thank you,” said Auntie.
Tulik invited Miss Nett to stay with us—where, I could only guess—but except for that one night, she preferred, instead, to be driven back and forth. She loved her home no matter how loud it had become, no matter how devastated even with mud on the floor. According to her plan, we would pick her up—sometimes along with a few of the men from the Nanos—in the early morning, and drive them to the protests she helped plan. At night we would drive them home, past the piles of fresh earth, past the buildings made of tin, past the wounded land and the despairing people.
“Okay,” said Tulik. “It’s a deal.”
She sniffed the air. “What kind of cake is that I smell?” Like me, Miss Nett cared for sweets.
By now it was out of the oven. “Lemon,” said Auntie.
“I do love chocolate.”
She ate the cake with great relish even though it wasn’t chocolate. I sat and watched her take forkfuls of it into her mouth.
After that, we only made chocolate cakes. Auntie and I saw to that every day. We needed Miss Nett. We would feed her. And after that they began to call me Maniki. The name stuck. It was always, Maniki, would you bring some tea. Maniki this. Maniki that.
MISS NETT ALWAYS WORE a scarf around her neck. It kept her bones from aching, she said. She talked late into the night. She told us about the younger men from the city, those who had not grown up there, and their ideas about how things should be done. It was her way of warning us that they were careless, that some of their actions only made things worse. “Don’t get me wrong. I love them,” she said, “but they endanger the people.” The more intelligent they believe themselves to be, she theorized, the less smart they actually were. “Us old women have had our hands full with them, trying to hold them back.” She didn’t smile when she said it.
Even Aurora seemed to listen to Miss Nett.
Miss Nett and Tulik stayed up talking through most of the night, if you could call it that, now that the nights were as light as twilight. Dora-Rouge stayed up, too. She listened intently as they spoke. There was so much to say, to hear. The older people wanted to catch up on recent events, but they also talked about what it had been like years before. “Remember the time,” they would say. That night, playing cards with Grandson, I eavesdropped. I heard Miss Nett weeping, and then Tulik’s soft voice comforting her.
Later, before Miss Nett went to sleep on the platform near me, the workers returned to sit outside Tulik’s home. We heard their machines approach. This time they only sat there idling, talking among themselves, shining lights around the land and at the house. We thought it was probably because of Auntie that they’d singled us out. She was seen as a ringleader, as was Bush with her photographs and her typing. Her friendship with Charles, too, had marked her as a radical. On top of all this, Miss Nett had a bad reputation with them; they knew her to be an activist. She had fought them up at Two Thieves.
I sat in a shadowy place in the house and watched the men as they played loud music on battery radios and threw back Cokes. I studied them.
“This is what they did to us,” Miss Nett said. “They did this at our place, too.”
The next morning, early, Auntie packed the blue waterproof bag once again.
“Let me guess,” I said, watching her pack it. “I’m going fishing?”
This time Auntie was prepared. She’d even boiled eggs for me to take along.
I picked up Aurora and bounced her while Auntie put Fig Newtons in the bag. Aurora smiled with happiness.
In a way, I truly was fishing, though I never cast a line. I was learning a new element, observing creatures unfamiliar to me, struggling with people and ideas from another world.
LUCE WAS A SOLITARY WOMAN, a reader and thinker. Dora-Rouge had been lonely with Luce, even a little hurt by her reluctance to chat. But Dora-Rouge and Miss Nett became the closest of friends. They talked together for hours, having much in common. Both were widowed. Both liked checkers and cards. They played for hours on end, Miss Nett clapping her hands, saying, “Look, I win!”
Dora-Rouge would say, “You cheated.”
Or, “I raise you.” Laughing.
Dora-Rouge, playing for time, would give her a look full of suspicion. “Let me see here.” On occasion, she insisted on counting the cards to see if Miss Nett had some up her sleeve. Once proved innocent, and merely lucky, Miss Nett would give us all a satisfied smile, and wait for Dora-Rouge to say, “Okay. You win,” and Miss Nett would chuckle, her eyes bright.
One afternoon when Tulik was out, I heard Miss Nett say to Dora-Rouge, “He holds a fire for you. A torch. I see it burning miles away.”
Dora-Rouge looked at Nett’s face. “Oh, come on.”
In what seemed like the same breath, Miss Nett added, “I pass,” and protected her hand by bringing the cards close to her chest.
I realized it was true, what she said. I had nearly missed it. Now that I thought of it, I realized I hadn’t even noticed the silences from Luther, or that Dora- Rouge no longer got the faraway look on her face, never spoke to thin air.
And then one day I saw Tulik brushing Dora-Rouge’s hair. Oh, he did it with such great tenderness, it nearly broke my heart, the heart filled with my own loneliness. And now, as if I turned into the gossipy, nosy old woman I was sure to become, I watched them. Sometimes, late into the night, they sat and chatted at the table and it seemed they were alone in the house. Dora-Rouge sometimes talked about Minneapolis, and Tulik would nod and say, “Just like when I went to Montreal. We got bilked, too.” Or she’d talk about Luther in the way people speak of their lost relationships before they begin a new one. “Yes, we knew each other since childhood.” Dora-Rouge and Tulik had a budding romance, and the stem and flower had been growing beside us all the time and no one had noticed until Miss Nett pointed it out.
One afternoon Auntie and her father, Tulik, had a falling-out. I was on the porch sitting in the chair when I overheard her say, “She’s too old! She’s old enough to be your mother!”
Tulik laughed, which made her more upset.
Unlike Tulik, I hid my laughter. Imagine that, I thought, tough old Auntie, jealous!
Then one day, while “Indian Time” was on, as if fate decided to take charge of things, Dora-Rouge, trying to turn up the radio, slid out of her chair and took a bad fall, injuring her hip and hitting her head against the music box. Tulik put a cloth on her forehead and he bent at the knees and lifted her up to his bed. That completed what had started between them, I think. The same night, when I was awake, I saw that her little bed beneath the window was empty. Later, sleepless and curious,
I peered behind the divider and saw that they were curled up together, Dora-Rouge in his arms, Mika at the foot of the bed, snoring.
After that, a person could feel the love they had for each other. Dora-Rouge was happier then, but sometimes still a sad look would come to her eyes and I knew she was thinking of Agnes, not of my grandfather, Luther, not anymore.
In this way, my grandfather was finally put to rest. Dora-Rouge left him alone at last. Perhaps he was relieved to be finished with flesh people, but I wondered if he was jealous. I tried to strike up a conversation with him. I called him by name. When that didn’t work, I called him Grandfather. I needed the voice of my ancestors. But Luther had said all he was going to say, and now he was silent.
MOST DAYS AND SOME NIGHTS, the intruders turned on lights and moved earth, using the bulldozer or backhoe to carry it from place to place, their machines beeping. Now we learned why they had tried to intimidate us: they were rerouting a river. They wanted to make its new bed pass between Tulik’s and the post. But wherever they went, we followed, blocked their roads and machines, and protested. At first we were only a small group and still we were able, at least for the time being, to keep them from Tulik’s house.
On quiet nights at one of the construction sites with a temporary stay of noise and earth moving, we sat before the fire, our eyes shining in firelight, thinking about our own worlds, how we had come to this through history, how there’d been a prophecy that we would unite and become like an ocean made up of many rivers. Even though we were afraid, it was a full feeling. We thought maybe this was our time. We believed in what we were doing, and like the others, I felt hope that we would succeed, that we would be able to protect the earth and her people. On those nights the evening light turned rosy and a cloud or two rose up from water. At those times, they too, our enemy, were lost in their own worlds, worlds of girlfriends, parents, cars.
Sometimes the only sounds were voices, water, and the rare, solitary cry of a loon or a coyote. But at other times Tulik’s house was filled with noise. It became something of a headquarters. Our lives were filled with activity, with planning, and talk. Young people came in and out at all hours of the day to drink coffee, rest, or listen to the radio. We were like a hive of bees, producing something sweet and golden. And always there was the sound of Bush typing. She had been smuggling our story out to newspapers in the United States and to cities in Canada. Luce edited the stories for her.
Aurora slept to the rhythm of the typewriter, the buzz of voices. “Just like Totsohi,” Tulik would note. “He could always sleep.” And Grandson grew hyper with all the action, running around from person to person, inducing them to swing him, inviting them to a chase. “Not now,” some would say. But others would match his energy and throw a ball or dance with him, his feet standing on their feet, singing songs.
We were so busy that I barely noticed when Bush no longer spent any of her nights at the house. When I did miss her, I assumed she was at the church, or at her hidden-away campsite, or maybe with Charles. She spent much time with him, and as curious as I was, it wasn’t my place to ask her about it. Even so, I watched her like a hawk for clues. As always, she was placid, calm water on the surface, no matter what fast or pulling currents were underneath.
ONE DAY MR. ORENSEN, the owner of Two-Town Post, knocked on our door.
I opened it. He stood there looking uncomfortable. “Tulik?” he said.
“Just a minute,” I told him. “I’ll get him.”
But Tulik, seeing Orensen, said, “Come in.”
“There’s a phone call from the prime minister. They want to talk to you at four o’clock.”
At first, Orensen resisted our struggle. I think he believed we would hurt him. It was an ancient fear, that we would retaliate for past wrongs. He remembered the old roots of these new events. There was a time when our people had killed the animals, persuaded by the Europeans who would, even then, starve out anyone who didn’t cooperate. Then, when the people were hungry, the Europeans had dumped food into the lake to demonstrate their indifference to the hunger of the Indians. It is why the post had such thick walls, so no one could shoot into it. Orensen’s family, however, had done well there because they’d stayed out of the problems of Indians, and Orensen learned this lesson well. But now he brought with him several bags of homemade doughnuts.
Orensen was worried about us. I think he saw what the government and corporation were capable of doing. To Tulik, he said, “The Two-Town Post is open to you and the others. It’s cooler in there.”
He took up our cause because the injustice was so blatant that not even one of their own could abide it. He was a fair man, and in spite of my first impression of him, I began to like him. Eventually we set up shop at the post, where there was a phone, and an electric fan on the ceiling. Many days were hot and uncomfortable, and the whirling fan felt like heaven. The presence of showers was an even greater boon. Plus, I liked having Tulik’s to ourselves again, if you could call it that, with all of us squeezed in together, Miss Nett eating cake and beating Dora-Rouge at checkers or cards, Auntie watching her father and Dora-Rouge the way an osprey watches a fish. Bush came in occasionally, overworked and tired and too thin. She looked pale from spending so much time in the darkroom she’d set up in the church kitchen, watching images come into being from under chemical baths.
It was a great relief to be rid of the piles of clothing, shoes, shaving gear, and other belongings of protesters.
Mr. Orensen—Joseph, as I began to call him—was on our side. He brought in cots for people to sleep on in the back room of the post. They slept among the few remaining dried beans and peanut butter jars. There was no longer much else to store, not even the jeans with faded squares on the front thigh; all of the supplies had disappeared quickly, and now it was next to impossible to get deliveries to the post via roads or waterways.
On some evenings, Orensen himself needed to escape the crowding at the post, and came to Tulik’s to sit with us. By this time I could tell he was sweet on Bush. Many of the men were interested in her, but this fact never occurred to her. It was probably a good thing, because however wise and intelligent she was in the forest and on water, that’s how stupid and foolish she was about love.
THE NOMADIC PEOPLE, the hunters, showed up from time to time in between their trips into the diminishing wilderness. It was a sad thing for them to see a forest turned into rubble and stump, the land stripped of game. Now they traveled longer distances and down to the south and west to find animals; because of this, they too wanted to help us. There were stories for everything, they said. But not for this. We needed a story for what was happening to us now, as if a story would guide us.
Oh, there were stories all right, like those in The Greater River News, about how we “Occupied” Two-Town Post, as if we’d stolen it and taken it over by force, as if we were soldiers who knew what we were doing. How quickly we became the enemy; and we, the enemy, sat there on quiet nights, warm with hope, and no bitterness among us.
But now I know it was a story of people eating, as toothy and sharp and hungry as the cannibal clan was said to be—eating land, eating people, eating tomorrow. And memory is long about these things. It happens that in a crisis, all of the time between one history and another falls away. It disappears and the two times come together, gathered as one. Remembered.
Memory is long about other things as well; the men began to sing the oldest hunting songs. The songs made the wind rise. I felt it on my neck, my face, my hair, a cool-fingered breeze touching me.
AURORA LOOKED at the world with eyes bright enough and clear enough to see what was all around her: the old people, the shadows of birds, dragonflies that floated like the ones at Fur Island, through the air and through the house. I saw the world new again through her eyes, as if I had grown old, laid down in a common remembering, and returned once again, restored.
One evening, Tulik prepared beaver meat. He boiled off the fat and I chewed it for Aurora, then gave it to
her to eat while Tulik told her a story.
“When Beaver was an infant,” he said, “Crow swam into the icy water and stole her from the den. Oh, Crow tried to preen the little infant. He carried it into his nest in the trees. Beaver would help, Crow reasoned, with so many things—the cutting of tree limbs, the carrying, the making of new water and land, and when danger was near, Beaver would hit its tail against things, the earth or tree, and make a loud noise. The noise would scare away those who did not belong. It would scare away those who made dams that did not belong. Yes, Beaver would hit the surface of water.” He hit the table, startling Aurora, making her laugh.
The meat had filled out her little cheeks. I looked into her mouth. “Look,” I said, “she has another new tooth.” I smiled at her. She leaned her head against me. Oh, she was loved, and her face showed it. “Pass the baby,” people would say after dinner, as if she were sugar or salt. Everyone wanted to hold her. I wondered at times about her first half-year. Sometimes a look came to her eye and I’d think of my sister, the one who’d eaten glass and smiled at me with her bloody teeth, the splinters and crystals of glass on her lips and tongue. I’d think of my own scars, and of Hannah’s body with the words of the newspaper reversed across it. “Man Injured in Hunting Accident,” and “Dam Construction Begins at St. Bleu Falls.”
SOON THE RAILROAD began running again. Its purpose was not for human transportation, but to carry the land and trees away. Sometimes it sounded like an earthquake as the train passed by, carrying our world.
“You’ve got to stop that train,” Luce said.
Her words were on the mark and that’s how easily it came to us, the decision to block the railroad tracks. We had been quiet up to now, and even gotten a man in canoe past the block toward the south seeking help for us, telling other tribes of our travails, mapping possible ways to enter, seeking support. It was Luce’s idea.
“That’s it,” said Tulik, thanking her. “We will stop the trains.” And that day we busied ourselves dragging, carrying, hauling, and driving things to the blockade. We blocked the tracks with whatever we could find: sawhorses, fenders. We even put Tulik’s chair in the pathway, me and Auntie carrying it with more difficulty than I’d ever had carrying my old grandmother.