Born With a Tooth

  Two of my brothers, Michael and Raymond, are sitting with me at our parents’ kitchen table the day after my teasing Dink, the day Gloria promised to come by to visit us. We’re drinking coffee and chatting with our otawemaw and okawemaw, our parents, inseparable after fifteen children, like two wings to the same goose. None of us three brothers says out loud that we’re here to see Gloria, but when we arrived at our house and saw one another, we all knew we were here to see her. Gloria is the baby, the spoiled one.

  We sit with our old father and speak of the spring goose hunt. “The niskuk didn’t come in big numbers this year,” my father says. “I wonder what happened to them down south over the winter. Maybe they decided they like Florida better than here, eh?”

  “They’re being overhunted by the wemestikushu down south,” Raymond says. “And then their government turns around and says we are the people overhunting!” Raymond is the political one.

  “If only they knew what bad shots we are, they wouldn’t say that again,” Michael says. My dad and me, we laugh. We’re a lot alike.

  “I don’t want to hear no swearing,” my mother shouts from the back porch. My father points at his ears and mouths, “She’s going deaf,” then says with a little volume, “If we laugh, she thinks it’s about something dirty.” We all nod and sip our coffee knowingly, as if it’s a medical fact that the more babies one has, the worse the hearing gets.

  “I’m glad Gloria’s decided to come home,” Michael speaks up. “Cities are no good for you.”

  “Wouldn’t you feel lost wandering around in crowds of people like that?” I ask. “You’d always feel like you were” — I pause for the word to come — “surrounded ... by a bunch of white people.”

  “That’s never a good situation for an Indian,” Michael says.

  “We’re already surrounded by them,” Raymond speaks up.

  “Just look at the laws we are forced to abide by. Turn on the TV and look at all the white faces spewing out white ideas.”

  “We’re surrounded by them?” my father asks, looking puzzled. “The only ones I know of are those teachers there at the school. There can’t be more than eight or nine of them.” Father stops and thinks for a moment. “But one of them doesn’t really count because he learned how to speak Cree better than most of you.”

  Raymond gets up for more coffee. He knows his arguments are like clouds to Dad’s sunshine mind.

  The sound of a car on the dirt road outside has us all straining to look out the window. But it’s only Bert Trapper in his rattle cab, dropping off the neighbour, Old Lady Koostachin. The dirt kicked up by his tires hangs in the air. The shiny green leaves of the trees are covered by the grey dust of the road.

  “We need some rain soon,” my father says. “No rain all summer means a hard winter.”

  “Looks like the road needs to get oiled again,” Michael says. “The dust is enough to choke me good.”

  We hear another car pull up in the afternoon silence. I hear low talking and what might be quiet crying. The car door slams.

  “It’s Gloria,” Raymond says, standing up and walking to the front door. He opens it and in comes Gloria, with sunglasses on, looking a little chubbier than when she left, like she’s been able to find enough goose down in Toronto. I think the weight looks good on her. She’s always been such a skinny kid.

  We all say our hellos and I point to the sunglasses she’s still wearing in the cool darkness of the house. “Did you become some kind of movie star when you were down there?” I ask. She just smiles.

  “Tell us about the south,” my father says to her, my mother in from the porch now and hugging her, cooing over her.

  “It’s scary down there,” Gloria says quietly. “Too many people. Everywhere you go, people.”

  “I was down there before,” Raymond says. “When we did that march and protest over unceded lands.”

  “Here, take those off,” Mother says. “I need to see your eyes to talk to you right.”

  She reaches up to remove Gloria’s sunglasses, but Gloria reacts quick as a rabbit, stepping back and reaching up to hold her sunglasses in place. “What’s this all about?” Mother asks, reaching up again to Gloria, this time Mother the quicker one, snatching them away.

  We all stare at Gloria, none of us talking. Her right eye is puffed almost shut, the area around it black, circled by lighter shades of green and yellow.

  “What’s this?” my father asks. “How did you hurt yourself?”

  “I ... I ... it’s a long story,” Gloria says. “It doesn’t hurt as bad as it looks.”

  “Did somebody hit you?” Michael asks, his voice full of disbelief. He is six foot three and maybe the strongest man on the reserve.

  “Was it a city person?” I ask.

  “It was Dink,” Gloria says finally. My first reaction is to assume it was some sort of accident.

  “He hit you?” Michael asks.

  “He’s not been himself lately,” Gloria bursts out. I can’t picture Dink hitting her. “He’s sorry for doing it,” she says. “I know it.”

  Michael and Raymond are already in action, walking towards the door. I run to join them. “You stay at my place for a while,” I say to her before my brothers can.

  “Please don’t hurt him,” Gloria says. “That’s not going to make anything right.”

  We walk out into the afternoon sun, us three brothers, walking long strides down the dirt of the road, looking for Dink. I’m torn. I know I shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t have hit her. But I’m torn.

  We get down to the trading post and people hanging about know something’s up. The Bird brothers are obviously on the warpath. It’s the body language. Dink’s not gone into hiding.

  We can see his car a hundred metres away, in the parking lot of the Northern Store. Raymond and Michael point to it at the same time. We get there and wait by his car for maybe five minutes before he appears from the store with a bag of groceries under his arm. He’s close, maybe ten metres from us, before he even looks up. He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t try to run.

  “Wachay,” he says in greeting. “What’s up?”

  “You know what’s up,” Raymond says, walking to him.

  “And you definitely know it has to do with Gloria,” Michael says, following close and to the left. I circle around to the other side, shaking my head.

  “What were you thinking? We treated you like family for years,” I say to him. He seems resigned to what’s coming. He places his groceries on the ground.

  “If you’re going to shape-shift, you’d better do it now,” Raymond says, reaching out and grabbing Dink’s arm. When I grab his other arm, it’s cold. Not just scared cold, but cold as a fish or a bottle of beer from the fridge. We start swinging, doing what we have to do.

  We leave him conscious but with swelled eyes that will blacken by nightfall and bruised ribs that won’t let him sleep tonight so he can think about what he did. We could have been much worse, but I think my brothers felt the same bond beginning to break that I did.

  As I walk back home, I think about how Francis was, how he didn’t utter a word the whole time, how when his eyes were open, he just stared at the sky. As we left him he uttered some words I couldn’t make out. They didn’t sound English or Cree.

  “Don’t curse me with your bearwalker bullshit,” Michael said, acting like he was going to go back and hit Dink some more.

  “It’s not bullshit” is all Dink had to say, lying on his back. We got out of there before the police showed up.

  Long after I’d gotten back home, what I’d done was still bothering me, so I went out to my old friend Antoine Hookimaw. Antoine is known for hundreds of kilometres around as a healer, a medicine man. It was him who first noticed something special in me. When I was just a kid he went to my mother and said, “You know, there’s something not right about your boy.” My mother agreed. He offered her and my father his help in the form of taking me out in the bush, teaching me to watch and learn patie
nce, to do sweat lodges and other old-school Indian things. He kept at it as I got older because I had the desire to learn. I became his student.

  I walked down the railway tracks a couple of kilometres and into the bush to Antoine’s house. I guess he’s the closest thing I got to a moshom. Both my parents’ fathers are dead a long time. Antoine Hookimaw. Antoine the Boss. He’s not the boss of anyone but himself, that’s just how his name translates from the Cree. Antoine once told me about how names were given to the Indians by Hudson’s Bay Company traders when they first came around.

  “Those traders, they couldn’t pronounce any of our names,” Antoine said. “Those traders, lots of Scottish, they treated us like we were awasheeshuk with dirty diapers, but they had a sense of humour, some of them. So when they asked my grandfather to give himself a name they could pronounce, he told them Hookimaw. Everyone on the reserve got a good laugh out of these Scottish calling the little Indian who brought them furs ‘boss.’”

  Antoine’s at home, cooking bannock on his wood-stove and talking to himself. He’s ancient-looking and smells of smoke and his eyebrows are bushy enough to nest whisky-jacks. Whenever I visit him, he tells me about last night’s dreams as he boils us water for tea.

  His parents and his wife and two of his sons who are dead now come talk to him all the time when he is sleeping. They tell him how their day was and scold him for not eating right or for his rare habit of going on a bender for a couple of days, drinking bottle after bottle of Cold Duck. Antoine’s father retells stories of how he and Antoine’s grandfather used to live in the bush for weeks at a time, trapping beaver and lynx and hare. His father talks to Antoine only in Cree and his sons talk to him only in English, so there are many times I have to explain expressions his sons have used the night before, the best I can translate them into Cree.

  There was a time years ago when Antoine experienced a bad sickness. He doesn’t talk about it much, only told me about it once. He got sick so that he didn’t want to get out of bed. Kids came at night and threw pebbles at his window or scratched tree boughs across it so that he might be fooled into thinking it was a bear. Drunks would show up in the early hours and talk to one another outside his door. Antoine bolted his door by jamming knives into the crack between the door and frame. He didn’t want kids or drunks seeing him when he was sick like that. He lay on his couch for a week, sipping only water and sleeping bad.

  At the end of that week, the Lord came with two helpers. They were all dressed in black suits with white button shirts. The Lord sat by Antoine for a long time, holding his hand and talking to him in Cree about scripture. The Lord talked and Antoine listened while the helpers boiled tea and swept the place out and fixed a couple of broken chairs and taught themselves to make tamarack birds using one of his as a model.

  “I want you to believe in me,” the Lord told Antoine. “My name has been used to pit Indian against Indian, and I don’t like that. You can help me make a difference here.” Antoine thought about that for a long time, and finally nodded his head OK. “I’m going to give you a special gift,” the Lord told Antoine. “I guess you could call it that. You can see into people, see what is bothering them. It might be physical sickness. It might be something in their thoughts. I want you to believe in me.”

  Antoine nodded. The Lord and his helpers left. Antoine felt better not long after that and got up. The knives were still in the exact place he’d left them.

  That was a long time ago and, even though he never talks of that incident, Antoine’s reputation as a medicine man has grown. He’s one of the few people with the respect of both the Christian and the old-school Indians around here. As he hands me a blue tin mug of tea, I know he knows something is up with me. He’s good at that. I used to try and mask what I felt in the past, acting happy and silly when I was sad, quiet when I had good news to share. He always knows, though.

  “He’s back, eh?” Antoine says, sitting down in his chair by the stove.

  “Yeah,” I answer. “Me and Raymond and Michael beat him up today, too.”

  “I know,” Antoine says. I look at him. His powers are getting strong in his old age. “My nephew came by and told me,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a secret on this reserve. Only old news.”

  “He hit Gloria,” I say. “I had no other choice but to do what I did. Dink knows that.” Antoine looks at me with that look on his face, the one that says, “You’re still just a novice.”

  “He’s not the same Dink you helped to raise,” Antoine says. “He started out different from what you wanted him to be, a long time before his papanoowin down south.” He stops talking for a while, gets up and refills his mug.

  “What do I do?” I ask.

  “You avoid him, Xavier Bird,” Antoine says, giving me a rare look straight in the eyes.

  “What? You believe in this bearwalker thing?” I ask.

  “You can’t see electricity, and you might not know much about why it works, but it’s there. It lights up your house. And if you aren’t careful with it, it can kill you.”

  Now I get up and refill my tea. It’s my turn to wait for him to talk.

  “Nature’s full of things that aren’t good or bad. They just are. Storms, sun, lightning, animals. There are a lot of forces that are neutral, but when they fall into certain hands they can become good or bad. It depends on how the user wants to use them. You can train a dog to be friendly or mean.”

  “But do you believe in this bearwalking?” I ask again. “When I shot a bear for the first time, I cried when my father and me skinned it. When you remove a bear’s fur, when you take its clothes off, it looks just like a man. The old people believed in a bear spirit that was related to us.” I look at Antoine in frustration. He begins to talk of hockey after a while and I know it’s impossible to get him to tell me any more.

  When I’m walking back along the railway tracks, I think about what Antoine said. It’s hard to picture Dink harming me. The world just doesn’t work that way. There’s a hierarchy to things, and Dink was born lower on the food chain than most of us.

  I don’t feel like going home so I go by Christine’s house to see what the gang’s up to.

  “You beat up Dink good, eh?” Elijah says. “I can’t believe he hit Gloria.”

  “We didn’t raise him to do something like that,” Jeremy says. Christine shakes her head at the thought of such a thing.

  “What do you think came over him?” she asks. “All that talk about magic, and his car!”

  “I think it looks cool,” Jeremy speaks up. “Every time I see it, it makes me think we should get a casino on the reserve and get with the times.”

  “Hey!” Christine shouts. “That reminds me. Let’s go to the arena tonight. Big bingo.”

  I’m not much for bingo, but everyone else seems excited so I go along. The arena’s crowded. The concrete surface where the ice is in winter is filled with tables. At centre ice the calling booth sits up on a square stage. People cluster in little groups and talk, waiting for the night’s entertainment to begin. We get ourselves a table back to the left of the visiting team’s goalie crease. I didn’t realize the bingo was such a big deal tonight. The jackpot’s for five grand, which is a lot bigger than usual.

  Christine’s got a dauber in each of her hands. We’ve had to arrange two chairs for Jeremy to hold his immense weight, one for each cheek. He leans over his card, his breath loud and raspy. Elijah, on the other hand, can’t keep still. He’s the one who’s like a mink, thin and long and always jittery. He flicks his daubers like drumsticks as the caller calls out the first game.

  Shortly into the game, a familiar voice calls out, “Bingo,” and me only needing an I and one O to win. I look across the smoky arena and see that it’s none other than Dink himself, wearing dark sunglasses. He’s got his hair all slicked back with some sort of grease, looking like an Indian Elvis impersonator. Christine lets out a loud squeak when she sees it’s Dink who’s won. When Elijah and Jeremy see who it is, th
ey both say, “Holy Wah!” at the same time. The caller has his runner verify the card, and when it’s called good bingo there’s some polite applause that’s quickly drowned out by the chatter of the gossip. To my surprise, Dink actually gets up and bows. I’ve never seen such a hairdo in real life before.

  Dink wins the third, fifth and sixth game and people are really talking now. I can see some of the old Catholic women crossing themselves when they look in his direction. Nobody seems too surprised when, ten minutes into the big jackpot game of the evening, Dink calls bingo again, getting up to take his little bow. I work out quickly that he’s won almost seven thousand dollars. There’s grumbling from one half about some kind of cheating going on, and the other half mumbles about some strong, bad medicine on reserve. I write it off to luck and consequence. After all, didn’t a similar thing happen to Barb Blueboy a couple years ago?

  Regardless of what other people have decided, no one is talking to Dink. It’s as if he gives off some bad but barely noticeable scent, like the smell of sickness coming on, that nobody wants to be around. He leaves by himself, climbing into that orange Pinto, his pockets bulging with hundreds.

  The days pass and things quiet down. Last I heard, Dink’s gone off to the bush. No one’s seen him, and I know he can stay out there long as he wants before he decides to come in.

  Gloria stays at my house because it’s the quietest. She’s climbed into some dark corner I’ve never seen her in before. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone or see her friends. Mother says a wounded heart needs time alone. I’m worried there’s more to it than that.

  I spend some time out fishing with Antoine. We talk of plans for the summer now that it’s upon us. Antoine’s got it in his head that he wants to go down to Toronto, see a big city for the first time. “I’m not going to be around forever, Xavier,” he says. “There’s things I’ve seen in pictures or on a TV that I want to see in real life. I would like to go up on that tower they got down there, stand on its balcony and look out at the sky. Pretend I’m an eagle.”