Through Black Spruce

  Marius doesn’t look anymore, from this angle, like the beefy person I remember. My eyes have trouble focusing on him. I’m seeing double, I think. His face is drawn. He’s wasting away in his expensive snowmobile coat. I look at the black wisps of the thin goatee around his mouth. His shaved head, it’s oddly shaped now.

  He speaks again in his new, high voice, the sentences quick, rising in waves. “What are you doing, Will? You want to die now, I guess? Where are they? What are you doing? I think I’ll kill you now, okay?”

  He holds the rifle in his bare hands. It is a very cold day. His hands must already be frostbitten. He raises the rifle and aims it at my face.

  The thick man with little glasses raises his golf club and places it on Marius’s rifle. “Not yet.”

  He wears a pair of crocheted mittens. They’re colourful. Girls’ mittens. I recognize them. They are the ones Marius’s mother usually wears to the Northern Store.

  I try to sit up again, but I can’t in this position. My body has trouble responding. I keep trying anyways, raising my head and my upper torso, then falling back, then raising my head and upper torso again. I keep doing this until I am rocking back and forth, until the momentum gets me closer. Marius and his friend are laughing at me. I’ve rarely known such helplessness. Only once, when everything was taken from me and thrown, burnt, into caskets.

  I know I look like a pathetic, beached seal in my big coat. I keep rocking until finally I pass that point and I sit upright. I wait for Marius to kick my head again, for his friend to smack me with the golf club, but they’ve turned away, no longer worried about me.

  “What?” It’s my voice. My hands scream. “What do I have?”

  The two are arguing again. I don’t think they hear me.

  Joe’s eyes are closed. He moans. Gregor stares at me. Kill them, I think he whispers.

  I shrug. I have nothing.

  I turn my head away from him and peer off to the creek through the trees. There’s a beaver lodge there, its chimney steaming. I won’t trap it. I’ve always only taken what I need. Now, at this moment, I wish there was something in this world like fairness. I used to think that there was, a long time ago. These two men who continue to argue will kill me and my friends, and if there was something like fairness in this world, they would just kill each other.

  My eyes catch an oddity out near the creek. A dark form moves, maybe four hundred yards away. It acts like a moose. It’s stopped now, trying to blend into the trees. That would be my luck, to have a moose present itself to me on this of all days.

  I look out the side of my eyes at Marius and his friend. They continue to bicker. I know that they are rabid dogs. If I look at them directly, they will take it as a challenge and tear me apart.

  “The bitch is here,” the one with glasses says. “Her sister told me so. These fuckers are lying. We can’t kill them yet.”

  I turn my eyes back to the form in the trees. It’s moved in the last minute. Now it stands still, near another tree. It’s watching us. I think that they’ve broken my head. It hurts a lot. The form in the trees isn’t a moose at all. Too small.

  I hear Marius’s high voice. He’s talking about money. He’s talking about Suzanne. “Even if she is in Moosonee,” he says, “what are the chances she has Gus’s money?”

  The man with the small glasses becomes very angry at this.“It wasn’t his money!” he shouts. “It was my money! It was the corporation’s money! And you and me, we’re dead if we don’t get it back.”

  They continue to go at one another. When Marius asks, the stranger claims he doesn’t know where Gus is. He says that my niece stole the money and the drugs from Gus and that Gus has gone into hiding. I can tell the man is lying. He’s raised his voice to try and convince Marius.

  The dark form is closer to the edge of the clearing now. It’s less than a hundred and fifty yards away. It’s a man. I see him crouch down. He holds something in his hands.

  It’s my brother, Antoine, and he holds our father’s rifle.

  My brain ticks. I need it to go quicker so I can figure this out. My hands throb now. At least the burn is gone, but if they ever begin to thaw again, I will scream. I can feel, even in the cold, that the right side of my head swells where the man in glasses hit it with the golf club and where he and Marius kicked me. Think! My head wanders. Think!

  I can’t let Antoine be seen. I have to show Antoine that these men are about to kill us and that he must kill them first.

  “Hey,” I shout. “My niece is no thief.”

  Both men stop their bickering. They glare at me.

  “Marius,” I say, “this one is lying. You know it. He knows the truth about your brother.”

  The man with the golf club walks over quickly, raises it in both hands. He stands over me, the club high above his head. I squeeze my eyes shut for the blow.

  “Are you going to do it?” It’s Marius’s voice. He’s excited. When the club doesn’t land, I open my eyes. “Are you going to crush him?” Marius walks closer, raising the rifle in his hands and pointing it at me again. “No, wait. You can’t yet. You said so.”

  I raise my head to them, trying to avoid looking them in the eyes.

  “What do you mean, Will?” Marius asks. “What do you mean that he’s lying?”

  The man in glasses bends and tries to pick me up by my coat. He tries to make me stand. “Let’s play a game,” he says.

  My head is too clouded, bright sun of pain throbbing just behind. Think! “He’s lying about Gus,” I say. “You can tell by how his voice goes all high trying to convince you.”

  “Fuck this,” the man in glasses says. He yanks me harder. The bastard’s strong, I can see, as he drags me to my feet. “Dirty fucking Indian,” he says. I wobble on my legs.

  Glasses man knows I know. He turns to Marius. “He’s trying to get us to argue.” He turns to me. “You want to play a game?”

  This strong, ugly man turns to Marius. “We’ll kill these three and bury them in the snow.” He looks at me. I know he’s a liar, but not about what he’s just said. I’m going to fall down. My legs are too weak. “Your sister will be easier to get information out of.” He smiles. “Hey. I’ve got nothing to lose.” He opens his mittened hands, one holding the club, as if to show that there really is nothing in them. I can’t stand any longer and fall down into the snow.

  “Let me kill him,” Marius says. “I need to do it.”

  The glasses man speaks to Marius. “This one’s mine.”

  Marius looks like he’s going to explode. “No way,” he says. “I get to do it.”

  They begin fighting again. I watch them argue like children over who gets to kill me. Finally, the man in glasses gives in. “I say we share this one, then,” he says. “You shoot. I club. Count of three.”

  I look over to Marius. He’s smiling. I stare into his yellowed eyes. He must see something he doesn’t like.

  “Wait,” Marius says. “I want to shoot him in the same place in the head that he shot me.”

  My body shivers. I truly feel the cold now. He walks around and behind me, raising the rifle again. “Okay,” he says, “you said on the number three or after the three?”

  “Careful, you fucking idiot,” the man in glasses says. “You’re going to shoot me.” He walks beside me and out of Marius’s line of fire. I watch him grip the golf club.

  I’m shaking. “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t.”

  The man in glasses is going to swing it like my head is the ball. “This’ll work,” he says. “On the number three, you retard.”

  Gregor cries in heaves.

  “Don’t do this,” I hear Joe say.

  The two men count together. They are children playing a game. “One. Two.”

  I will keep my eyes open. I will not close them. I will die like a warrior. I hear the crack. The faraway crack of a rifle. Marius lands on the snow hard beside me. It’s the last thing I hear before the club strikes me and the sky lightens to white and my hea
d breaks apart.

  My eyes are open. I’ve forced myself to open them, and it’s the hardest thing in the world to do. Marius’s eyes are open as well. We lie beside each other, staring at each other. I want to turn my head to see something else, but I can’t. Black swallows the snow all around Marius. I understand that it’s blood. My eyes no longer see colour. I stare into his eyes. Something inside me tugs at me to close my own. I try to fight it, but it is like trying to fight deep sleep.

  Marius opens his mouth to say something to me. Blood rushes from it instead, covering the snow between us. We stare into each other’s eyes. I understand that he is dying. He understands that I am close, too. I stare into his eyes, and he stares into mine. I try to open my mouth, but it doesn’t work. I want to tell him that my father and Marius’s great-moshum, Elijah, were once close friends, and it is sad that our lives have come to this.

  I watch the light in Marius’s eyes drain. I’m left staring at him as darkness comes quicker.

  Before all the light is gone, I see that the man in glasses has fallen across Joe. His glasses lie in the snow beside them. I can’t hear anything. I’m watching a silent movie in slow motion. The man has fallen dead onto Joe. I watch Joe struggle slowly to get the bleeding man off of him. Blood stains the snow around them. It is black on the white surface.

  I can’t fight it any longer. I can rest now. My friends, my nieces, my sister, they will be okay. I close my eyes.

  Now that I am beside this river, I finally understand how I’ve gotten here. I can put it to words. Just under the current I hear the babbling of voices. They are the voices of my family and of my friends. They are excited. They are happy. I’m warm again here, even if the right side of my face still feels frozen. The river’s sound is pleasant, and the sun through the spruce makes me sleepy.

  I want to go to the voices of my family. First, though, I’ll rest. Gain some strength. I’ll try not to sleep, just doze for a while. I need some strength for the long walk. Don’t fall too deeply asleep, though. Just a short nap.

  38

  CURING THE HEAD

  We give ourselves to each other. This part consumes me. It’s what I think about when I’m away from him, and when I’m with him, we act like we’re starving.

  Some small part of me tells me that I should feel guilty. I should be spending more time with my uncle. But then my rational brain kicks in and tells me that visiting every day is enough. Uncle has been showing more signs of waking. His hands move more often, and Mum was there when his eyelids fluttered. Dr. Lam tells us that Uncle might be fighting to wake up, and all of us have come together—Joe and Gregor, Mum, Dorothy—to try and urge him to consciousness with our chattering. When I visit him and there are others already there, though, it feels more like a wake than anything else. Although they won’t say it, I think they come to say goodbye to you, just in case. Uncle, you teeter on an edge.

  Being with Gordon is a release for me that I’ve been starving for. And so I won’t feel guilty for this pleasure that comes rushing through my door and leaves me exhausted and smiling. The two of us deserve this for all that we’ve been through.

  Mum notices the change in me, in Gordon. She can tell it as sure as she knows a warm front has moved in. And it has. The skies are overcast each morning that I wake up, and the snow is turning soft. The grey skies are a welcome relief, strangely, from the blue skies that promised bitter cold for the last months.

  The Indian part of Mum is happy for us. She makes us dinners of moose meat or caribou, spends hours concocting hearty soups and homemade bannock, urging us to eat, to keep up our energy. She would never be able to say the words. But she knows we need sustenance for our adventures.

  It’s the Catholic side of Mum that talks to me when Gordon is out of the room. She talks about how a young woman and a young man living together outside of marriage shows poorly on us. “People talk in this town, Annie,” she says. “You know how people talk. It just isn’t right. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about marriage.”

  My god, what a way to dampen the flames. It’s amazing how one word can kill things if you allow it. “Let them talk, Mum,” I tell her. Let them caw like ravens, let them bellow like moose if that is what they want to do. Let them babble in their kitchens and in the aisles of the Northern Store if it makes them happy. I won’t let a handful of holy rollers in this town crush what I’ve found. Winter gives way, slowly up here, to spring, and you can’t stop nature from taking its course.

  As soon as the phone rings, I know it’s her. I brace myself. I’ve been waiting for this call for two months.

  “Hiya, Annie,” Eva says.

  I don’t say anything. I hold my breath instead, waiting.

  “You there, Annie?” Eva asks. Her voice is too casual. This isn’t the call I’ve been waiting on for dozens and dozens of days, that I’ve begged for and dreaded at the same time.

  “Yeah, I’m here. What’s up?”

  “Not much,” Eva says. “I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Hi, then.”What the hell’s going on?

  “Yeah, I just wanted to say hi and to tell you to get your ass over here as fast as you can.”

  “What? What’s going on?”

  “I was sponge-bathing your uncle and the horny bastard woke up. He was smiling, Annie!” She’s almost breathless. “I know I should be more professional.”

  “What? Shut up! What are you saying?”

  “I was washing him and I see he’s got this huge erection, and his eyes are open and he’s smiling and he calls me Dorothy!” The words are pouring out of her mouth now. “He calls me Dorothy, and the horny old bastard says I’ve gained weight but he doesn’t mind. He was smiling, Annie! And he was talking like he’s barely been in a coma at all.”

  Holy shit. “I’ll be right over,” I say.

  “Listen. Wait,” Eva says. “So you know. His words were pretty slurry. He went back to sleep. Just get over here, but be careful. The winter road is real slushy today. Best thing we can do is his knowing family’s around.”

  “Call my mum, would you?” I ask. “I’ll be over quick as I can.”

  I’ve got Gordon on the back of my snow machine. We’re flying across the river, and I gun it over the watery parts. Gordon squeezes me with his arms, holding on for dear life. If he could talk, I know he’d be screaming. Across the way, over by Moose Factory, I see the tide’s coming up, pushing up from under the ice, pushing the water past the frozen bank’s lip. A tannin-coloured pool of it lies across the ice road, running up onto shore. A pickup’s stuck, spinning its wheels, kicking up icy slush behind it.

  “Hold on,” I shout over my shoulder. I hit the water and skim over it, Gordon’s weight keeping the front end up, but then the track begins to bog. I can feel the slush spewing out underneath us. I stand and put my weight over the front end of the machine and push the throttle full in with my thumb. We fishtail through the rest of the water, my skis splashing it up onto my windshield and into my face. Eyes half-closed, I feel the more solid ground under me, the ski-doo getting traction again as we shoot up the bank and over to the hospital.

  I’m expecting half the town to be in Uncle’s room, or at least Mum or his friends. But the room’s empty, and Uncle Will lies in his bed, just as stone-still as he has been for months.

  What was I expecting? I know exactly what. I wanted him sitting up and cracking jokes and asking me to go sneak him in a couple of beers but to make sure Mum didn’t notice. I wanted him sitting up in bed when I walked in, flashing his missing-tooth grin, asking me to go find his partial before Dorothy arrived.

  With our coats stripped off, Gordon and I sit by the bed. I realize I’m feeling strange, in part, because Gordon’s never been to the room before. He stares at you like you’re someone he vaguely knows and is trying to place a name to. I take your hand in mine. Gordon watches intently.

  “What?” I ask. “You think I’m just going to start talking magic to him?”

  Gordon wants
to smirk, but he knows my tone well enough.

  I’ve run out of stories to tell you, Uncle. You want me to make some up? How about you just quit being coy now, wake up for good, and climb out of this stupid bed.

  It’s over a half-hour before Eva even comes in, or anyone, for that matter. My hand that holds Uncle’s, it sweats with anger.

  Eva’s puffing, and I know she must be having a busy day. I’ll try to go easy on her. She heads over to Gordon and punches his arm. “Ever fancy seeing you here. Annie let you out of your cage for the day, eh? Any activity?” she asks, looking to me.

  “Not a bat of the fucking eye,” I say. I squeeze your hand before I realize I might be hurting it.

  Eva picks up my vibe. “Listen, Annie,” she says. “Today is a good day. Today, your uncle made the tiny percentage of patients who wake up after so long.”

  It’s her total professional voice. Yeah, yeah.

  She sees I’m upset. She sees the burn of tears in my eyes. “I should have been more professional.” She pauses. “This is huge news, Annie. I needed to tell you. He’s not conscious now, but he was.”

  Oh god, she’s going to start crying now. “You’re my tough bitch,” I tell her. “My bugger of an uncle is teasing us. He’s going to wake up.” It’s all right, Eva. You did right.

  Over the hours, Mum joins us, then Joe, Dorothy, and Gregor spill in, too. We all talk for a long time, keeping our vigil, spouting out what words come to us. Dr. Lam drops in, explains to us what’s happening in medical terms that wash right over my head. All I need to hear, though, is when he says, “Will’s making his decision.” I can understand that.

  When, after dusk, Eva’s shift change comes and Sylvina takes over, we’re all exhausted. I ask Sylvina in front of everyone that I be able to stay. Sylvina says it’s fine, and I tell the others to go home and sleep, that I’ll call if there’s any news.

  Gordon watches me as they all put on their coats and hats.

  “You go too, okay?” I say to him, holding him, feeling his body beneath his shirt. “Take my snow machine. Just remember to be careful by the water.” I know the tide’s dropped and the going should be fine. “If you see slushy places, keep on the tracks that go over them. They’ll have frozen over by now.”