Violet finds me in the bedroom, flipping as fast as I can through the magazines. She grabs me. “Time to get serious about what we’re going to wear tonight.” I thought I had on what I was going to wear. I take another gulp of wine from the bottle. It’s warm and heavy. Good. I think I like real wine. More mature. I laugh. My sister’s in here, somewhere. My head tingles and I feel like sharing. I take another gulp.
“Goddamn!” Violet shouts over the music that has grown in volume the last while. “I know I’ve told you this, but you are so fuckin’ butch!” She leans down and kisses me full on the mouth.
“I got to tell you now,” I say, “a friend of mine …” I look her in the eyes and think I feel something like love for her. “I invited a friend by.” She smiles at me wide-eyed and happy. I told Gordon to come here. “He might come by, but I doubt it.”
“Partay!”Violet shouts. “And it’s gonna be a boy showing up!” She hops away dancing. Once again, I’m left to follow. The three girls pick up and toss clothes back onto the floor, their trail eventually leading around once again to the same bedroom I just left. They pull on then remove different tops in the bright light. No curtains or blinds on the huge window, and I worry that people in the other buildings might see them.
Violet dances over to me, puts her arms over my shoulders as she tips her head back and laughs. I feel like I might topple off my feet. “You feeling it?” she asks. “You feeling me?”
I can only nod, and when she lets me go I fall back onto the bed, my chest tight and expanded at the same time. I feel like my skull is in a bubble, and I take deep breaths.
“Indian Princess!” she shouts over the music that seems to thump louder. “Have I got a surprise for you!” She heads to the mirrors on the other side of the room and slides them apart, revealing a closet. She digs through it, tossing more clothes, shoes, empty boxes behind her. She emerges smiling, holding a garbage bag. She places it on my lap. “Some of your sister’s stuff.”
I stare at the black bag.
“Go through it, girl!”Violet says. “No! Wait! First stand up!” I obey. I have to. “You’re not too different in size. You’ve got bigger boobs, bigger thighs.” Violet looks me up and down, chin in hand. “Ten pounds, I bet. Tops. But Suzanne was way skinny last time I saw her.”
I feel embarrassed standing here in this bright light, the other two girls now appraising me as well. “Let’s see what she has that might fit.”Violet empties the bag on the bed. Expensive-looking jeans. Far too small for me. T-shirts that look so thin and soft they might tear at my touch. Skirts, lots of them, some made of shiny material, others from rags.
That’s when I see my grandfather’s moosehide hat hanging from the spilled-out bag. Suzanne took it on Christmas morning when she left with Gus on his snowmobile. I grab it and clutch it to me. I’ve found something of us. “My moshum’s hat,” I say to the girls. “See? He made it himself.” I hold the hat out to them, show them the stitching, the beaver fur, how the flaps go down over your ears when it’s really cold. Holding it warms my hands.
“That’s so cool!” Violet and Amber coo together. Veronique ignores us.
“That hat’s the fucking bomb,”Violet says. “You got to wear it to a go-see.”
Violet grabs some of Suzanne’s shirts and demands I try them on.
“I won’t fit into my sister’s clothing,” I say. “My sister is so little.”
“It’s all about how you feel,”Amber says. “You have to feel it, then you can work it, girlfriend.”
Veronique keeps her eyes on the big window.
Violet tugs at my T-shirt and begins taking it off. I don’t want the others seeing me in my bra and black skirt. But they’re not paying attention to me anymore. I lift my arms like a child and feel them tingle. “Skirt, too,” Violet says as she digs through more of my sister’s clothes.
“How do you have Suzanne’s clothes?” I ask, standing in bra and panties and boots in front of Violet, clutching my moshum’s hat. From the corner of my eye I can see my reflection in the huge mirror, but I can’t look at it. I will crash if I look. Everything will crash and I will be left in this place so far from home that I will throw myself from the window. I will never be able to look like these women. I will not look. I will not look.
Violet pulls a T-shirt over my head, so soft it feels like a spiderweb. “Silly!” she says. I think she’s talking about how the shirt looks on me. “She stayed here when she was working in Montreal.”
Suzanne was here. She slept in this bed, and wore this shirt that I now wear, tight across my bust.
“I recognize you!”Violet says. She doesn’t seem to care that I feel like I’m going to drown now.
She hands me a black skirt, red, red roses all across it. Vines of roses, intricately stitched. I want to run my fingers over them. They glow.
“This is going to work, girl!” Violet squeals, forcing me to put one foot, then the other, into it. She pulls the skirt up my legs. Her fingernails are electricity on my skin. She leads me to the mirror and hovers right behind.
I take a breath and open my eyes. I can’t quite believe what stares back. I see the long black hair first, then the tall, thin body. The high cheekbones. Then I see the bright eyes. What has happened?
I can see you, Sister. I see you, Suzanne.
21
A FEW FEET
BELOW THE EARTH
Bush life is simple. Repetitive. My father knew that only three necessities exist in the bush. Fire, shelter, and food. You dedicate your every waking moment either to the actual pursuit or to the thought of these three things.
When I arrived, I knew I was good for a while. The laziness set in. I had canned food, cigarettes, and whisky. Summer was at her peak. I caught a few pan-size trout in my first casts, and that added to my complacency. But August had come and was going. Already the nights were cooling down, and the sun took longer to warm me in the morning. So I shook off the blanket of content and began to prepare for the autumn and winter.
Plenty of animals live on the island, this island that would take days to walk across. Beaver and muskrat, otter, ptarmigan, grouse, geese and ducks. Plenty of black spruce, alder, tamarack, but no hardwood, and this would make the collecting of winter wood a constant chore. I’d been setting snares again. Goose wings tied to willow for the fox, and carefully built cubby sets, little teepees built big enough for a lynx to enter, a rabbit fur tied to a stick inside that tempts the lynx into the wire noose.
I slept in a canvas prospector’s tent on a small rise by the river, my plane nearby, concealed in spruce boughs so that it couldn’t be seen from above. I had no choice but to keep a fire going at night, and the light of it could give me away if they were truly searching. I needed it not so much for the heat but for the companionship, the comfort. I didn’t worry too much, my fire a tiny sparkle of sand on a gigantic beach.
Each day I rose before the sun and made the smallest pot of coffee I could manage. I did not sleep well, me. My leg bothered me most at night, the ache of it a dull annoyance. I tried not to obsess about what I had done. Just the opposite. I focused on my daily existence and scouted this new area, found a few beaver dams, and made note that with the freeze I would begin to set traps here for them. I found the rabbit trails and made a note of them, too. I’d wait till closer to winter to begin that snaring. Rabbit would be the key to my existence if I didn’t shoot anything bigger.
I worked on and by the means I’d chosen. Fire was the first. Keep it going. Collect what I needed to in order to keep it going. Repeat dozens and dozens of times a week. Not much gas to waste for the chainsaw, so I relied on the saw and on the maul. I found the fallen and dead wood that hadn’t rotted, sawed it into lengths, and dragged it to my camp. I built a pallet for it to keep it off the ground. My arms and back ached each night when I lay down to sleep.
I cast for trout in the dusk river using the worms I’d dug from the earth. Every other morning I paddled my canoe across the lake and fish
ed the creeks running into it, kept the good trout and threw the others back, filleting my catch. The way their smooth skin glittered in the sunlight, nieces. I missed the fight of the pickerel, the pike, the sturgeon, but trout is a special fish, and the fight gives its flesh a good taste so that I had found myself in the situation that I had too much fish to eat. I gave up my sleeping place in order to begin smoking and preserving the fish in my canvas tent.
August waned and I set out to build an askihkan, one that would allow me to live warm and comfortable through the winter. I dug and hacked out a circular pit on my rise, long enough for me to stretch out in with room for my essentials and a firepit in the centre. When I was a few feet below the earth, I began to search out and cut long saplings that would serve as a frame. I dug their ends into the ground around the hole. It took me two days to do this properly, so that when I was finished the round frame sat secured and ready to be shingled with big strips of sod. When winter was closer, I’d cut lengths of sod from the ground before it froze and place them over the frame as insulation. But for now, the birchbark strips kept out the sun and rain. Each night I crawled into the earth, and kept a small fire that drafted out the small hole in top. I slowly became wild like a rabbit or a bear, living in the ground, emerging each morning to hunt and to prepare.
I think I was beginning to look good, me. I was leaner and feral, my gut growing smaller, my arms and chest getting used to the drag of the saw and the swing of the axe. My leg bothered me plenty, and I made sure not to exert it too hard.
My father told me that fire and food and good shelter were the three things I needed to concentrate on out here. But he didn’t mention a fourth. Company. The days felt long, the sun not setting till late into the evening, and some days I found myself talking out loud, to the black spruce, to a rabbit or trout that I had caught, to my rifle. I’d brought three rifles—besides my shotgun—with me. One of the rifles I’d already thrown from my plane. The second was for hunting bigger game. The third, it was my father’s gift from the war. I continued to keep it wrapped in a blanket because I understood its power. I wouldn’t talk to that one because I knew what might happen. And so it lay still, almost pulsing in its old blanket in my askihkan. A Pandora’s box, your mother Lisette would say. Don’t unwrap it.
Loneliness grew like moss out there, crawling onto my legs and onto my arms. Each morning that I woke, it had crawled up a little further, covering my limp cock so that I didn’t even dream about Dorothy anymore. I realized this moss had crawled onto my lower belly one morning, taking my hunger. Soon it would cover me entirely so that I was camouflaged, invisible to the rest of the world, and so I talked more to the trees and to the whisky jacks that had made a home near my own. I asked the whisky jacks to visit me, to stop the moss from spreading too quickly. I fed these birds bits of bannock and fish. They became friends, lit down beside me unafraid after a couple of weeks so that I fed some by hand.
The case of rye began to beckon. It was still full, minus the one bottle from my first night. But when the rye called for me to have a conversation with it, I was not friendly. Fuck off, rye. Don’t talk to me. I knew it would talk even more shit if I was to open up one of the bottles. And so for now, with the caps tightly closed over their mouths, the bottles could only mumble and groan.
The days felt too long to focus only on my work. My head, it began to drift back over the last months since my beating. I’d tried hard not to think of my sister, of my friends, of Dorothy. Too much pain there. Too much questioning what I had done, what I had done to change my world forever. This wasn’t the best plan to do what I did to Marius. An act of revenge, an act of anger, and especially of fear. The cold fire of payback was the warmth that drove me to do it.
As summer died, I came to understand that the revenge I’d sought didn’t stem from my beating, from the killing of my sow, even from what Marius did to me and would have done to my family, but from what Marius was doing to damage the children. I convinced myself of it. I killed him to save the children. The big white building that I thought was finally gone came back into my nightmares again when I began to contemplate the Netmaker clan. What Marius and his friends brought into our community was more destructive than what the wemestikushu brought with their nuns and priests. But there was nothing I could do with this realization now. It was as pointless as having a microwave in my askihkan. And so I collected the regret and the fear in my arms before they could fester, and I threw them in the river.
I thought of my friends as I sat on the bank of the river one day after fishing and building and collecting wood. The case of rye murmured to me from where I had stashed it out of sight. I worried that if I began to drink it, I wouldn’t stop. I tried to ignore it. My cartons of smokes were dangerously low, but I had tins of tobacco and liked the slow focus of rolling my own. That night, a pack of wolves came near and woke me with their howling. I lay awake and listened to them come closer so that a fear I’d not felt in years crawled over me and left me paralyzed in my blanket. Wolves didn’t scare me. The knowledge that they were a pack, that they had each other, made me desperate. If I’d been able to move, I would have crawled out and opened a bottle. But eventually, I fell back into a fitful sleep, remembering my friends, my family, you two, my nieces.
The morning after the wolves, it rained. I left my askihkan anyways to collect wood and to tend to the smoking of fish.
After, I sat in the rain and watched the river in front of me. The warm drizzle fell and beaded on the top of the water before joining it. I rolled and lit a cigarette, smoked it so that the brim of my baseball cap kept the cigarette protected. The rain fell harder, hissing in the water, and still I didn’t get up from the bank. I’d have to build my fire up, and it would take a while for me to dry out, but the rain was the last of summer, and I felt good that I had built this new, little place, this new, little life. No danger of starving or of freezing right now. The fear came from sitting so far away from others. I watched the smoke rise up away from me into the wet sky and did something I hadn’t in a long time. Something I watched my father do as a child. I whispered what was inside of me, did what my father taught me to do.
See that smoke? he’d say one of those times he rolled his own cigarette and light it. I’d nod. Watch where that smoke goes.
I’d watch it, hard as I could, follow it as it swirled from his mouth, from deep in his body, and drift up into the air, curling and weaving, disappearing as the wind took it and carried it up into the sky.
Where did the smoke go? I’d ask.
It goes up into the sky, into the heaven where your relations who have left us stay.
Can they smell it? I’d ask.
He’d laugh. Yes, me, I think they can. They can see you in the smoke that gets to them. You tell them what you want them to know. What you want them to watch out for.
In the rain now, I took a deep drag and exhaled, whispered a hello to my father and to my great-auntie Niska. I asked them to watch out for all our relations. I asked them to say hello to my wife and two boys. I asked them to somehow let my lost family know that I was finally moving on, to let Dorothy know that, one day, I would like to return to her. Only then did I get up and head back to my shelter, strip off my wet clothes and allow myself to drift into sleep, to remember what I had left behind in that town.
The dying summer rain didn’t let up for days, kept me captive in my askihkan. I only left it to bring in more wood and to patch the roof with mud as the water found its way in. Boredom snuck up quick. I talked to myself, told myself that soon I’d be kept so busy preparing for winter that I wouldn’t have a moment to think. I told myself to enjoy this time alone, to take advantage of days with little to do. My god, I wished I had asked Dorothy to come with me. She’s a good one, her. She would have understood why I needed to do what I did to Marius. The son she never spoke of once stole a ski-doo and broke through the ice near the Kwetabohegan Rapids. He wasn’t found till spring. The cops said he was high. High and drunk. He was
a good kid, though. A wild child, but a good kid. His death nearly killed Dorothy, too. So many kids dying useless deaths on my side of James Bay.
I marked the passage of days by scratching on a split log, but like many things I did that didn’t fully capture my imagination, I got lazy with it. Who needs the white man’s calendar when you have the sun and moon and stars? When I thought September had come, I decided to celebrate by letting a bottle talk. My first drink since my first night in my new home. This was by far the longest I’d gone without a drink in twenty years.
With the rain still falling, I crawled outside and dug up the pit where I stashed the case of rye. Those bottles, their murmuring became chattering that made me shake when I heard it, so I had to find a way to shut them up. The thin daylight told me it was still early morning, but out here in the bush, time is what you make it. I was my own man now and had not had the company of another human for at least six weeks. A matter of pride, I think. I chose my own path, and now I walked it.
In my askihkan, I held the bottle in my hands, stared at the amber liquid, and lifted it up to the light that came in through the chimney. There was a moment when I thought that instead of opening this bottle, I’d just hold it, admire the colour. But that thought passed quick, and the crack of the cap as I twisted it brought butterflies to my stomach.
I took a first gulp, and with the gag that sometimes came as the liquid scratched down my throat, the rain began to ease up. A good sign if I ever had one. I took another gulp, and the effect was fast, faster than I remembered it. I’d not eaten much in days. I lay back on my blanket, stared down at my long body and really admired it for the first time. My gut was all but gone. I pulled up the sleeves of my shirt and gave my arms a gander. They were as roped with muscle as when I was twenty-one. For the first time in weeks, I felt something that overpowered that sense of dread that had hung close to me like fire smoke. I felt something I’d not in a long time. I felt young and useful again. I felt powerful.