Through Black Spruce

  When I was a boy, I used to sleep in a long, white room in Moose Factory, the same island that holds the hospital. My school used to be the biggest building on the island before they built the hospital. It was whitewashed and scrubbed clean with wood soap and the greasy sweat of Indian kids. The boys, we slept in one long room upstairs above the dining hall. The girls, they slept in a room beside us above the laundry room and kitchen. Me, I dreamed of slipping into the girls’ dormitory in the middle of the night and learning how to make babies. All the boys did. Some of my friends claimed they managed to learn this way, but me, I don’t buy it. I did learn how to French kiss during recess once, though, with a skinny girl named Dorothy.

  I healed over time. We all do. Your mother, she came to visit me in the hospital after the beating. She would bring a book with her and try to read it to me so that I was forced to pretend sleep. She’s a good woman, your mother, but she’s been weakened by Oprah.

  When I went home, my two remaining friends in the waking world, Chief Joe and Gregor, they came to visit more regular than usual. As spring progressed, we got into some drinking on my porch while looking out over the river for beluga whales. Gregor, he came to Moosonee twenty years ago to teach at the high school for a year and never left. Gregor, he’s not exactly white. He’s as dark as me and came from a country in eastern Europe or something. Eastern something, I can’t remember. All I know is the place has changed its name so often I don’t know it. But he keeps his accent, especially when he’s drunk. He sounds kind of like Dracula, which can be funny. Funny and creepy sometimes. You get used to anything, though, after a few years.

  I remember how Gregor and Joe sat with me on my porch like I was some new celebrity. Spring is the time when the belugas come this far up, the dozen miles or so from the bay, to make babies and gorge on whitefish. Gregor spotted a beluga, ghost white in the dark river about a hundred yards out. I’d been watching it swim, back and forth, for a while. If I was an Inuit, I’d be getting in my boat and going to get dinner. But I’ve tried beluga. Too fatty. Not a good taste at all. Like lantern oil. Give me KFC any day.

  “Look now, boys. Vales!” Gregor said, standing and pointing out, rubbing his thighs. On numerous occasions, Gregor had almost lost his teaching job due to inappropriate behaviour, especially with his female students, like asking to hold their hands so he could check the fingernails for dirt or touching their hair when they answered a question right. He says these are European behaviours. He’s what Lisette calls lecherous. But he’s a funny one, him. “My god,” he said. “Beautiful vales.” He stared sad at the beluga as another spouted and appeared close to it. Joe took another beer from the case by his foot.

  “Look at us,” I said. “Three fat guys on a porch. Does our life need to be this way?” And that’s when I made the mistake of sharing with them that my beating made me realize I needed a big change in my life. I needed to get in shape. I was going to start jogging.

  “You’re reacting to the violence perpetrated against you,” Chief Joe said, just like a real chief, using words he wasn’t too sure of. “You try running, your heart will explode and you will die. I don’t want you to die. What you need now is another drink and some serious counselling.”

  4

  LEARNING TO TALK

  Eva’s working the early shift at the hospital, so I’m up before the sun, pulling on my winter gear. I’ve stuffed the stove with wood and turned the damper down. “I’ll be back before you need to put more wood in,” I say to Gordon, “so don’t mess with it today, okay?” He lies with his eyes open on his bunk across the room. I don’t know if he ever sleeps. “If you’re bored, you can chop wood. Just don’t cut your damn foot off.”

  At the hospital, I stop in the cafeteria for a coffee, look at the exhausted faces of the night-shift workers. This is one depressing place.

  Up on the top floor, I sit beside his bed and sip on my coffee, flip through a magazine. I look at him, his face calm, mouth turned down. He twitches once in a while, and this always startles me. I keep expecting to look at him and find him staring back. He lies here in this room hovering close to death because of me. Even if this is only partly true, he is here because of me.

  My mother typically arrives mid-morning, so I plan to briefly cross paths with her out of respect, then get a few more supplies at Northern Store before heading back. I think I’ll begin a new trapline today. Eva barges in, after I’ve already closed my magazine. I heard her heavy breathing while she was still halfway down the hall. There are a couple of girls I know in ads in that magazine, and the feeling that I’m missing out washes over me.

  “Morning, Annie.” She reaches to me and touches my hair.

  “Any news on him?” I ask, pointing with my lips.

  “Same old, same old, sis.” Eva busies herself once more taking vitals. “I’m worried his muscles are atrophying. You should do the exercises on his legs and arms I showed you.”

  I nod.

  “I noticed that bony ass of his is beginning to bruise. I’m going to shift him again.”

  I watch her do this, help where I can. His body is warm. Although he doesn’t much look it, he’s still alive. “Maybe I should read to him, or something,” I say.

  “That would be a start. But wouldn’t it be more interesting for him if you talked of some of your adventures? Of our adventures, even?”

  I shrug.

  When I’m back alone with him, I hold his hand. My heart’s not in it. “Can you hear me? Do you want me to read a magazine article to you?” I feel foolish. “Well, if you’re not going to respond, then I won’t say anything at all.” I look at my watch. A little after eight. At least two hours to kill before Mum gets here. I stand and pace. The seconds tick by with the beep of his monitor. This will drive me crazy.

  “What do you want me to say?” I stop and look at him. “I’ve apologized a hundred times.” Suzanne’s the one who should be here. “I bet you believe she’s still alive,” I say to him. “Nobody else around here does but you and me, I bet.” I am the only one who holds out hope. I worry I hold on only because I am so angry with my sister. He’s here in that bed, and I’m forced to be standing here, because of her. Maybe all this is partly my fault, but she’s the real one to blame.

  Two hours still. Would anybody really know, really care, if I just left? I sit down beside him and pick up the magazine again, flip through it once more and stare at the fashion ads. A close-up of a white girl with porcelain skin, holding a jar of face cream to her cheek. A handsome man and a longhaired woman ballroom dancing across another page. I drop the magazine. “Should I try to explain how we ended up here?” I ask. His mouth twitches. “Should I at least tell you my side of the story?” His hand sits limp on the white sheet. “I won’t get up and leave you. I’ll just do it. I’ll tell you a story.”

  I think of what I can possibly say to him that he doesn’t already know. But I can hear Eva’s voice telling me that isn’t the point. The point is that there’s comfort in a familiar voice. Medical journals sometimes discuss this.

  “I don’t know where Suzanne is,” I tell him. “But I know where she’s been. I saw those places myself.” Where to begin? Begin with my sister, I guess. “Listen carefully, you, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  I lean close to his ear so that if anyone outside were to walk by they wouldn’t hear me. I’ll share this story with him but no one else.

  Where do I start? My mother’s Christian friends, the real Bible-spankers, they say Suzanne’s dead, that she couldn’t handle the pressure of success. She won’t be back to this world because she’s in Jesus’ bosom now. Their saying that didn’t surprise me. Those ones, they’re the doom-and-gloom club. It’s the old men, the true Indians, the ones who smile at me sadly and turn away in the Northern Store, who know something of the truth.

  I think Suzanne’s troubles, they started with boys. Don’t they always? I tried to convince myself growing up that boys were gross and worthless. Snotty little things.
But I was a tomboy. When I was a kid I secretly wished I’d been born a boy.

  Everyone knew, though, that the boys couldn’t resist Suzanne. But you want to know something? They couldn’t resist me, either, especially when I hit those shitty years of puberty. Maybe it’s my father’s height. Maybe it’s my mother’s Cree cheekbones. The boys have liked me since adolescence, and when I didn’t giggle and run and come right back again like a puppy, like the other girls, the names started and the teasing grew.

  The air’s so dry in here. I take his hand in mine. It feels soft as tissue paper. The gesture doesn’t feel natural, but I force myself to hold it and not let go.

  I glance at my watch. Fifteen minutes have passed. I’ve barely noticed. My hand begins sweating in his dry palm. Hey, you know what? Maybe there is something I can tell you that you wouldn’t know about me.

  No way I could defend myself from the horny little bastards, the Johnny Cheechoos and Earl Blueboys and Mike Sutherlands who waited for me after school, crouching behind the walls of the Northern Store, ready to follow me and ask me if I’d kiss them, and when I was a little older, if I’d blow them.

  Marius Netmaker, he once had something for me even if he was six years older and had a pitted face from chicken pox, a big belly from eating too well too often. But he was strong and unpredictable. A bull moose. You weren’t the only one to learn that.

  Here’s something I can tell you. When I was fifteen, Marius approached me one day when the snows had left and the sun made small flowers bloom along the road. School was done for the day. I stood by the fence separating the schoolyard from the dirt road, ready to run to my freighter canoe and the freedom of the river. The blackflies had just started coming out. I stood by myself, but close enough to Suzanne and a couple of her girlfriends to hear their talk about boys. Marius had picked some of the flowers from the roadside and walked up and tried to hand them to me, not able to look me in the eye. Suzanne and her girlfriends watched all this like ospreys. Marius mumbled a few words that I couldn’t make out.

  I was horrified that a twenty-year-old, one with a bad complexion and the habit of getting drunk on bootleg rye and beating people up, was doing this to me. “Speak up, Marius,” I said loud enough for the girls to hear. “Time is money.” Suzanne and her friends giggled, as only thirteen-year-olds can. He looked at me then, and his eyes flashed for just a second. He mumbled something more and I glanced over to Suzanne and her friends, gave them the what’s going on? look, then muttered to Marius, “You bore me,” before turning away and leaving him standing there with the tiny purple flowers in his big sweaty hand. As I walked away, I heard the girls laughing. I felt the guilt. I regretted hurting him unnecessarily, not knowing then the grudges he could hold.

  Now I can’t help but wonder if this was what started the whole war going. I doubt it. I think our two families have hated each other for a long, long time.

  I stop talking, let go of his hand. I’ve been rubbing it with my own, and I’m worried it might irritate him. This is stupid. Look at me. I’ve already turned this story into one about me. Maybe I’m more to blame for all of this than I want to admit. There’s no denying our two families hate each other. My family is a family of trappers and hunters who like the quiet of our place. Marius’s family started as bootleggers, sneaking whisky and vodka onto the dry reserves north of us by snowmobile in winter. They built false bottoms on the wood sleighs they pulled behind their ski-doos, filling those bottoms with bottles and water, placing a floorboard over their stash and letting it all freeze overnight before hitting the rough trails. They bragged about never breaking a bottle.

  In the last few years, the Netmakers discovered that cocaine and crystal meth were easier to smuggle up, and they are responsible for the white powder falling across James Bay reserves and covering many of the younger ones in its embrace. They are the importers to Moosonee and to other isolated communities around us. They are the connection to the Goofs, the silliest name for a motorcycle gang I ever heard. How are you supposed to be scared of that? The Goofs are a puppet gang of the Hells Angels. That’s what the cops say, anyways. When I think of these puppet Goofs, I picture sock monkeys on Harleys, their button eyes angry, their blood-red sock-heel mouths clenching cigarettes and sneering. But I watch the damage they do to our people here. A clenched fist is stuffed into the heads of these puppets.

  Still, the Nishnabe-Aski, the band police on the reserves, can’t do anything about it. But my family knows. The Netmakers know. Everyone in Moosonee, in Moose Factory, in Kashechewan and Fort Albany and Attawapiskat and Peawanuck knows the deal. And it’s this knowing, this choosing of sides, that has helped spawn the hatred. This hatred crept into our two very different households like the flu at night, infecting all of us as we slept with sweating angry dreams of killing the other, of turning this place where we live into our own vision of it.

  Somehow the youngest Netmaker, Gus, had avoided his family’s business, but I’d seen how tempted he was by the easy money and the dread that people felt for his kin. I saw it because I used to date him.

  The same view of spruce against snow greets me from the hospital window. I watch snowmobiles come up the bank from the river. I see people talking outside below me, breath hanging above their heads like cartoon thought bubbles. Maybe I’ll go down to the cafeteria and grab another coffee. Mum’s going to be here soon. I go back to his bed and gently take one of his legs in my hands, bend and straighten it to keep the muscles and tendons from freezing up. Mum’s coming, and I suddenly realize I have more to say to him. Funny how that works, eh? I’m hoping she’ll be late today. I’ll tell him something else quick, some of which I’m sure he already knows, that we all know.

  Suzanne left mother and me on Christmas morning two years ago and climbed on the back of Gus’s ski-doo. I remember a light snow fell that must have tickled her face. She and Gus, they drove across the frozen river, through the black spruce and into the wilderness. They were heading south with the plan of selling the ski-doo once they reached the little town that has a Greyhound station. They planned on taking that bus all the way to Toronto. But almost two hundred miles of frozen bush separated Moosonee from the town with the bus station. And don’t forget. I knew Gus’s ski-doo all too well. I was the one who used to ride on the back of it with him. It was a piece of shit.

  Suzanne. Such a Cree beauty. You know. The pride of our nation soon as she became a teen and didn’t go the way of so many other girls around here. Funny, I never thought of her as exceptionally pretty. I’d seen her enough times in the morning those last couple of months, hungover and sad, long black hair a nest of greasy straw. I was her older sister, after all, older by two years. Sometimes, that felt like a lifetime.

  She never thought of herself as beautiful either. She was always surprised when the subject came up, as it did so often, different men trying their moves on her at dances, dropping by our house in the hopes of glimpsing her. But there are only so many men in this place. And Gus Netmaker was the clear winner. He was the artist, drew eagles and bears and painted them in the colours of the northern lights. I’d brought him home first. A friend, I told him, told everyone. Not a boyfriend. He wore his hair cut spiky short and had a silver ring in his left ear. The girls said he looked like Johnny Depp.

  I let Gus go into Suzanne’s arms, encouraged it even, and ignored the sting. I was made for other things. Mum, though, she recognized before anyone else did what damage would follow.

  I can hear Mum now, talking to Eva outside the door in the hallway. I touch my hand to his face, just lightly, wanting to see what it feels like. He looks so skinny, so skinny and old now. What’s happened to him, to all of us, this last year?

  5

  TALKING GUN

  There’s a dirt road you know well, nieces, that runs past my house, goes past the dump and the healing lodge, the place the town sends Indians when they don’t need a hospital but more a place to dry out or get away from abusive husbands. The dirt road, it’s a
two-mile stretch beside the Moose River to town. If I go left out of my house instead of right, the road becomes a snowmobile trail that, if you follow it long enough, will eventually get you to Cochrane nearly two hundred miles south of here. I’m an early riser, me. Even if I’m up drinking till midnight, I’ll still wake at five, wide awake and with cloudy eyes, staring out at the dawn.

  And so I tried jogging early in the morning when I knew Marius would still be asleep, and I realized I wanted my two friends with me because I no longer wanted to be out of my house alone. I had finally learned fear. Marius had taught me the kind of fear that threatened to make me a shut-in.

  I began running most every morning, shuffling in my old boots down the dusty road. I’d walk down my drive when the sun rose, trying to stop myself from looking for Marius but doing it anyways. I was getting crank calls a lot of nights since my return home. Nothing on the other end but steady, deep breathing.

  Each morning I’d take my first few steps and force my legs to do more than a walk, the pain shooting up my spine and into the back of my head. But I kept the legs moving, moving at a pace they hadn’t in years, my breath short after a hundred yards, promising myself I’d cut down on the smoking. I’d try to imagine something chasing me, a polar bear or even an angry marten. Crows screamed at me from the telephone poles.

  Most days, I hoped to make it past the dump to the lodge and back. A mile each way. The healing lodge is the halfway point to town. I kept myself going on the vision of one day being able to run into town, running around it for everyone to see me, then turning and making my way back home in a dust cloud, running so fast they’d think I could fly.

  I once tried to get Joe out with me. “I thought about it,” Joe said. “But my truck’s running fine, so I don’t see the point.”

  Your mother thought I was crazy, too. Too many days I lay on my couch with a seized-up back or pulled leg muscles. “What are you thinking, Will?” she’d ask between chapters of whatever inspirational book she’d be reading to me. “You’re too old for this kind of nonsense. Did you shake something loose when you hit your head?”