Something upstairs doesn’t feel right. There’s a hush to the floor that isn’t usually here. Did the old kookum die? I peek in her room, but she’s not there. Oh no.
I stop near Uncle’s open door. I can hear other people in the room, the low gasp of a sob. No. I’ve come to tell you that I am in love. That he can’t say the words, but that he loves me, too. I’ve finally stumbled on happiness. On something bigger than that. Don’t do this to me.
I move to the doorway. Eva’s back is to me. I can see her hands removing the breathing tubes from his nose. Mum stands on the other side of the bed, holding on to Joe. Her face is tear streaked. Joe looks happy. You asshole. You were supposedly his best friend. My paranoia was right. You are somehow involved in all of this mess. I walk into the room.
“Annie!” Mum says. She begins crying more. “You were right.”
I step further into the room, my eyes on Joe. He smiles, then looks to Mum. I will strangle the fat bastard to death.
Eva looks up. “Oh, hi, Annie. I’ll talk to you in a minute.” Her face is grim, set with her work.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “This is it, isn’t it?”
Mum gasps. “No. Oh no!” She walks over. She reaches her arms around me and squeezes hard. “No.” The flash of a child blinds me. A morning from the time when I still barely had memories, my mother holding me, sobbing. My father had left her, and he was gone for good.
“Tell me,” I whisper into her hair. “Just say it.”
Mum pushes me back so she can look at my face.
Say it.
“Joe and I were here, talking and laughing,” Mum says, wiping at her eyes, “remembering that time Will flew over Moosonee and dropped the pamphlets he’d printed up, the ones that said the liquor store was closing up and all booze was going for free. Do you remember?” She’s laughing now, still crying. “He almost caused a riot in town.”
“What are you talking about, Mum?” I ask. “Mum, what is going on?”
“Joe and I were talking and laughing, not twenty minutes ago,” she says, “and your uncle reached up his hands in the air and shook them like a Pentecostal. Then he tore his air tubes out. You were right, Annie. I thought you were fibbing to me, but you were right.”
Two hours later, and Gregor has arrived, too, has snuck in a bottle of whisky under his coat. “Speak now, people,” he says. “Speak! We are healing him with our vords!” Joe and my mum laugh. He holds the bottle out to me.
I shake my head.
“You were right, Annie,” Gregor says. “We can heal him with words.”
I look at Will so I don’t have to look at Gregor.
“You really are meant to be a healer, just like old Will here says.”
I’m embarrassed by his words. They make me think of my seizures. I don’t know why I’ve associated that word, healer, with those horrible things. But I always have. Is it because as a small child, as I was coming out from the weight of that pain, always an adult hovered near, the man I trusted, holding me in his arms, whispering those words into my head?
I’ve not even had the dark cloud of a threatening fit since I’ve come home. Since all of this has washed over me so quickly.
When another hour of talking, of reminiscing, has passed, I realize I won’t be left here alone any time soon. Mum’s happiness has softened as Gregor and Joe continue handing the bottle back and forth with louder voices than they should have here, hiding the bottle clumsily when Eva or Sylvina passes the room and look in.
He’s not out of this yet, boys. He scored a goal, but the home team still lags behind.
So much to tell you, still. So little, too, if I allow myself to think about all of this too hard. I’ll trust my gut, then. I still have words for you to hear. When the rest are gone, I want to tell you about how Gordon and I slipped back into Canada, how we stayed in Toronto a few days, sleeping in the blue tarp teepee under the Gardiner Expressway, Inini Misko and his two cronies snoring beside us. I want to tell you how Old Man urged me to go home now, that I was needed there, how he told me I must take Gordon with me because danger still lurked, in the most real of ways, all around.
I won’t tell you about how the horrible fifteen-hour bus ride up to Cochrane felt. Or how, when we climbed aboard the Little Bear train, I hid myself in the bathroom as it carried us the last six-hour leg home to Moosonee so I wouldn’t have to see or talk to old friends and enemies.
I don’t need to tell you what I found, once I arrived home. My uncle, skinny as an old man, your head now shaved and your body littered with tubes and wires, hovering in an ugly hospital by the river, and me knowing, despite your inability to speak, that you were preparing to dive in. That you were ready to go.
35
A GIFT
I’ve come to a strange place on this road. I’d gotten used to this travel, a type of comfort in the slow plod forward, until I came to here.
I hear water rushing not so far away, a big river’s voice. I’m scared of it, me. I’ve not truly felt that feeling so strong till here. Something’s there, through the black spruce, just on the other side. I can’t see it yet, though. I can’t see the stretch of water. I have to walk closer if I’m to see it. The sound of the rushing water, it makes me feel like drowning. The water closer to shore babbles like children’s voices. The sound makes me want to go to it. But I’m afraid.
The looks when I went into town to see Lisette, the chattering I could almost hear behind closed doors, the odd phone call from people I hadn’t heard from in years wanting to see how I was doing, and the following silence when I said fine, all of this pushed me back to the bush.
I ran a couple of traplines as December settled in, an old favourite and a new one. I built the simple wooden boxes and placed them on the spruce, baited them with pieces of goose or fish. The marten climbed the tree to the scent, entered the box to investigate, and triggered the snare. The real secret to snaring is to know where the animals travelled. And to know that, well, it’s an animal thing.
I’d stopped trapping marten a long while ago, but prices for the hides now made it more than worthwhile again, and if I needed anything, it was to make some money. Winter would be long and hard, even here on the edge of town. But still, I woke up mornings and wondered if all this new activity was worth it. I’d been freed from one possibility only to sink into the possibility of the depression of my old life. At least now, with the threat of running out of smokes and booze no longer part of my every day, I found I didn’t crave either much anymore.
My best old trapline, I ran it near my tiny cabin, a twenty-minute snowmobile run out from my house. The two sets of bunk beds and the wood-burning stove became a favourite haunt for Joe and Gregor on weekends. They both used the excuse that they were working with me hard in the forest, doing manly things in order to get away from their comfortable little homes in Moosonee. Really, it was a chance for them to drink and smoke and talk a lot. Just like they always had. I admit it. I liked the company.
Here in the cabin, the stillness of the world outside under a thick coat of snow, the river beside us a white cut through the trees, I found something like peace. The quiet dread of something hovering nearby loosened. I drank enough this weekend to talk to Joe and Gregor about it. I told them I feared I’d been haunted by something on Ghost River that had pursued me here. Something slipped inside me there, and I might be possessed.
“Where I come from,” Gregor said, “what you suffer from we call a sense of the maudlin.”
I wanted to know more, but Joe’s laugh made me realize Gregor was making fun.
“It’s simple, Will,” Joe said. “You’re guilty for what you did to Marius.” He took a big gulp of rye and ginger. “Me, I think it’s time to admit it.”
“I did nothing, and you know nothing,” I said. The stove creaked with the heat of the logs. “Time to go, lazy bastards. Time to check the traps.”
As we sat in our chairs, pulled on boots and coats, I heard the sound of a snow machin
e not far from the trail, like the whine of a mosquito, coming slow but steady. My heartbeat quickened to twice its speed in seconds so that I was left trying to control my breath. Frozen with fear, the buzz of the motor in my head grew louder so that it drowned out my friends’ chattering. I saw my rifle a few feet away from me, leaning on the wall by the door, but my arms weighed a thousand pounds. Was this the drone I recognized? The drone of what I’d feared for so long?
My eyes moved up to my friends, who were now standing above, staring down at me. Their mouths moved, but I didn’t hear the words. They looked at one another and then to me. The whine of the motor was closer now, almost to the cabin. Gregor opened the door and walked out onto the porch, and I wanted to scream to him to get back inside, to grab his rifle. The beast was finally at the door. Joe reached a hand down to me, eyes questioning.
The snow machine idled outside, and the world of seconds ticked by slow motion. My heart would burst. The sound of the motor throbbed with the blood in my ears, a bad piston making it cough. I waited without breathing.
Then silence, until it was finally broken by Joe’s loud voice. “Will, you okay?” His eyes were close to mine and I was back in the present. I reached my hand out for him to help me up. I stood, shaking.
Gregor bounded back in the door. “Got a visitor,” he said, moving out of the way. In walked my ancient half-brother, Antoine, smiling in his beaver hat, his thin facial hair frozen white.
I stood and nodded to old Antoine, and he gave me his missing-teeth smile. “Ever cold for December,” he said in English for the sake of my friends.
“Did you blow a seal,” I asked, “or is that just frost on your moustache?”
The four of us headed outside and admired Antoine’s ski-doo, one almost as ancient as him, tiny compared to the prowling sharks they make now, this little two-cylinder with maybe a top speed of twenty and a broken windshield, the hood duct-taped good. He was pulling a wooden sleigh behind it with only the bare essentials. “You drove down from Peawanuck on this?” I asked.
He nodded, smiling proudly. “Too old, me, to snowshoe that far anymore.”
I reached for my smokes, offering Antoine one. He took it and looked at me, wanted to say something else. But I knew he wouldn’t give much with these others around unless he was asked. He was a shy one, him. He was used to being alone.
I pulled a pint of rye from my coat and took a gulp, then passed it around. Today I was going to check my beaver traps on a few lodges not far from here, then check for the marten. We would all go together. There was still enough light left in the day for it to be a good one.
“How’d you find me out here?” I asked.
“Lisette,” Antoine said.
“You going to hang around for a bit?” I asked. The thought of his easy company made me glow inside like I’d not felt in a long while. “Northern Store is offering near a hundred bucks for a marten hide.”
“My house burned down back home,”Antoine said, looking out at the trees. “Lost everything. But it wasn’t much.”
“You stay with me for the winter,” I said. I’d get the whole story later.
He looked to my trapping cabin and pointed slightly at it with his chin. I understood, and nodded. “I’ll be out here a few days a week to keep you company. You want to come with us, check the traps?”
He shook his head. “Stay here, Warm up.”
The first trap held a large marten. It had twisted around till it strangled, the compact head baring its sharp teeth. A good enough sign for me that I would make some money this winter. The animal was long and thin, frozen in a curl. Its pelt was a thick dark brown. The next number of traps lay empty, and the feeling sunk. We found one more marten. I rebaited and set the boxes again. There was still time to at least check one beaver lodge.
I led on my ski-doo, Gregor and Joe close behind. At the pond, I cut my motor and grabbed my axe from my sleigh. Out on the ice over the narrow water, near some gnawed birch, I could see the hump of the lodge covered in snow.
Clearing the snow first, I began chopping around the pole, freeing it from the ice. Standing, I heaved the pole from the muddy bottom. It was heavy. I pulled it up out of the black water and saw that the trap had snapped onto a young adult, broke its back quick so that it didn’t have to die with the panic of drowning. Antoine would appreciate this one, its hide a nice thickness and the animal young enough to be delicious. We’d roast its tail on the fire tonight and eat the fat and muscle of it for the approaching winter. Antoine wouldn’t waste any of the animal and would skin it carefully so the fur was left undamaged. I’d give it to him to sell at the Northern Store, and he’d get enough for at least a part of a tank of gas for his little machine.
A few days later, after Joe and Gregor drove off on their machines the ten miles back to town, I too, decided to head back home for a while. The two days alone with Antoine had been good ones. He was more than happy to come out with me into the bush and helped me build more traps and carve out a bigger trapline. We spoke in Cree with only a little English, the story of his autumn coming out slow so that this morning when I was ready to head back in, I knew most all of it. The house fire was not his fault. A neighbour’s chimney, spewing hot embers because the damper had blown off years ago and wasn’t replaced, set his roof on fire. Antoine awoke to the roof ready to collapse on him, made it out with only the clothes he’d fallen asleep in. The community came together with some clothing and tools, and an old friend ready to die gave Antoine his ancient snow machine. Antoine figured it was time to hit the trail again.
“I have something for you, too,” I said, my ski-doo outside warming up, ready to go. I reached under my bunk and pulled out the old blanket that wrapped our father’s rifle. “Sometimes gifts can be a burden, but you at least need this while you’re out here alone.”
I handed it to Antoine, and he placed it on the bed, undid the rope around it, carefully lifting the blanket from the oiled gun. He admired it for a moment, picked it up, and checked the heft in his hands. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and smiled to me as he did it. “Me,” he said, “I always knew you had it.”
He placed the rifle back down on the bed. I reached under my bunk once more and pulled out the canvas sack with the two magazines and the rounds. “This is all of them,” I said. “Enough for the next while, but the scope’s way off, needs to be sighted in. My friend Gregor can find you more rounds.”
We smiled.
“You should kill a moose with it, you,” I said, “so that our whole family can eat.”
The weather hadn’t settled, this cold before Christmas already like the freeze of February. A bullying cold that made my face feel like it was on fire in the wind on the long trail back to my place.
The answering machine blinked, a gift from you, Annie, ten years ago, when you desperately wanted to learn the mysteries of the bush and complained I never got your calls. You bought me this thing with the profits from a few scrawny rabbit furs, the meat sold cheap to elders who handed over their change to you, proud you were trying to keep the old ways alive.
I pushed the button, and Dorothy’s voice flooded the room, taking the chill from my body away. Will, it’s me. Oh my god, I just heard you were back. I am, too. I’ve been down in Timmins with my daughter, trying to help her get enrolled at Northern College. Call me. She paused. I’ve missed you.
I sat on my couch in my coat and boots, snow melting onto the floor. I looked up to the ceiling and put my hands behind my head. I smiled so big I worried it might crack my face. She had been away. Just like me. That was all. She missed me. I’d see you soon, Dorothy. Something like a shout came from my chest. I’d see you soon.
Even if the river were still open water, I would have crossed it fast on my snow machine. I’d cross it by flying over with the throttle wide open. I wish it had been me, the first one this season to cross the river, and beat those Etheringtons to the punch. All for you, Dorothy.
But the river sat frozen, and the ic
e road was safe, and night had fallen before I was able to get going, going to see her. Wind in my face, beaver hat tucked down tight as I opened my machine over the ice road, bumping hard on the washboard of it. When the ice was just a little thicker, the cars and trucks would be crossing, and the road would smooth with the plow.
Dorothy’s warmth. She was shocked at my thinness once I removed my parka, running her hands through my hair, longer now than it had been in years, greying more than it ever had.
“You look, you look different. ”We kissed, and it was the easiest, warmest kiss I remember. All of everything pushed away. All of it, my nieces, and I felt my wife smiling down and nodding, turning away from me, both of us, with the knowledge she and I would see each other again in the future.
I saw the table set, pots on the stove gurgling, the flashes of her children’s faces on the mantle as Dorothy led me by the hand through her house and to her bedroom. She’d not planned this. I could tell this in her shaking hand that held mine. Both of us might have dreamed this, but neither of us truly believed it would happen again. Happen in this way. In this good and real way. I could feel this in our hands.
The taking off of what covered us, fingers stumbling with the buttons at first, the clasps, until we pulled and giggled and ripped, and we were on Dorothy’s bed and allowed our fingers, our mouths, to explore all of it. Everything.
“Give me everything,” Dorothy told me. I did without any more guilt or worry. I gave myself to her.
After, we lay there and talked. I told Dorothy of my flight out, of hunting on Akimiski, of the old couple and their grandchildren, of my haunting at Ghost River and almost running out of fuel to make it back. I avoided the why of my leaving, the questions lining up beside me to be answered. Dorothy didn’t push, and we got up and dressed and ate before she led me back to her warm bed again.