Jas came, sat beside us, and listened too. I could see that he was fascinated by Erich. “How come you married a First Nation girl like Mum?” he wanted to know.
“She was raised, as she often told me, by a woman known as Mrs. Mike. Being raised by whites, she knew very little of her Indian heritage.”
“She may have let go of being Cree,” Elk Woman put in, “but we Cree don’t let go of our own. We went to the same schoolhouse and I gave her a wolf tail so she’d know who she was. And in the end, it was Jonathan Forquet who called the Grandmothers together to guide her canoe on the long last journey.”
“We realized,” Erich continued, “both of us, that we came from widely differing backgrounds. Different worlds, you might say. When I lost my leg I didn’t want to go home. I was afraid of pity. And it seemed to me I could trade my old, hidebound, traditional world, for a new, free one, green and young. A world that didn’t make distinctions based on color or wholeness of limbs, or anything but the individual worth of the person. Kathy agreed with me, or perhaps I persuaded her. I see now that we were young and naive.” He broke off abruptly.
Abram changed the subject with his usual kindness. “I know you are with the trade commission. What is it that you do?”
“I sit in on free-trade talks, representing Austria. As a young man I was trained as an engineer. For a long time I was interested in the nuclear submarines they were developing in the States. Recently I’ve changed my mind. The waste disposal problem is too horrendous.”
“Wind is good,” Elk Woman spoke up. “Wind’s power is endless and forever.”
“You are absolutely right. The form of energy employed should be consonant with the environment. In Austria, geothermal. In California, Florida, and the tropics, India perhaps, solar would be appropriate.”
“The sun?” Elk Woman nodded her approval. “That great one, that life-giver is only strengthened by his giving.”
We sat together in peaceful agreement until I tired. There was a general shuffling as the company broke up and turned in.
IT was inevitable, of course, that they return to their lives. The Grandmothers, in a vision, called Elk Woman to officiate at a naming. Before leaving she replenished the herbs in the little pouch I wore around my neck, and left me fifteen bottles carefully labeled, as to content and purpose. Bear grease and the seeds of the acanthus. Rub on chest for cough, repeat twice in the day and twice in the night. Another unguent was the scrapings of the cherry bark compounded with maggot larvae and roots of ground sassafras. For stomach cramps.
I remembered how she had brought her potions to Mum over the course of her long illness, and how graciously my mother had thanked her. At least that’s what I thought then. But my mother was Cree, and in spite of being a trained nurse, she may have believed, as I tended to, in these exotic preparations.
Jas was the next defection. He absolutely had to get back to his pub. Abram assured him he had seen us through the worst of our emergency and we would be able to manage, now that we were so amply provided for. Big hugs, loud good-byes, and protestations, and my big-little brother was gone. I would miss him. How extraordinary that he had come.
My father and the Wertheimers lingered. It was already November and the weather had turned stormy. Evenings the men placed me in front of the fire and sat around talking. Lucinda bustled in the kitchen and came in to serve hot chocolate and freshly baked nut bread. My father felt so at home that he unscrewed his leg and propped it against the stone hearth. They were friends.
A telephone call from the commission and he too hurried off. On their departure John and Lucinda had a surprise for us.
“You’ll need someone to help you, so we’ve asked our niece to come stay and give you a hand.”
I didn’t like the idea, mostly because Abram was so enthusiastic about having her. He couldn’t praise her enough. “She was here early to help with your care, and again with the other women from the church. You remember her, I’m sure? A quiet, modest girl. Both John and Lucinda are extremely fond of her. She will be pleasant to have in the house—besides which she helped catalogue my books one summer and did a splendid job.”
That finished her in my eyes.
The news that we were to inherit Pam put him in a good mood. He went on and on about it. “With Pam’s help, we’ll have no problem. She dropped everything to come. You must be very pleased.”
Again I employed my new word emphatically. “No.”
“If you’re worried about her being ostracized at church for helping out here, don’t be. They’re withholding judgment.”
A phrase came back to me that seemed appropriate at this moment. I took a deep breath and said, “Dant.”
“What?
“D-damn it!”
Abram smiled, a new off-center smile. “Now I know you’re on the road back.”
LIKE a circle widening in water, my catastrophe didn’t end with me, but reached to Abram. During the Vietnam war they had a term for what happened to those seemingly unscathed—“the walking wounded.”
Being Abram, he turned to books. He didn’t exactly read them. Where once he had argued, now he fought them. At the same time they were his hope. I saw him as wrestling on the edge of a precipice. For his faith. For his reason. With Abram it was the same thing. “God help me,” he called out once. “All this wisdom is inscrutable. It reads like the Book of Revelations.”
I wished I had words to help. I wished I could bring him a hot cup of cocoa.
My father phoned. He and Abram had a long conversation about me, my state of mind, and how to proceed with what they referred to as my rehabilitation. The weekly calls continued. Once they discussed finances. I heard Abram tell him that a trickle of royalties from my albums and a raise from the Wertheimers enabled us to get along. Nevertheless, he appreciated the offer.
My father wouldn’t let it go at this. He sent gifts, a marvelous baby grand that took up a good part of the front room. And to show his belief in my recovery, a car was delivered, a Lincoln sedan fitted out to enable me to drive. That, I thought, was truly having faith in the future.
Abram immediately began to plan the drives he would take me on. “The bridges—you’ll love the bridges. The Jacques Cartier has three connecting spans. It’s an engineering marvel, stretching from Montreal to Montreal South, to Ile Ronde, and from Ile Ronde to St. Helen’s Island. Then there’s the Victoria, and the Canadian Pacific railroad bridge that connects with the United States. Also the Mercer Bridge…”
Yes, I thought my father was very generous—but although Abram invited him repeatedly, he did not come again.
One day when he called, Abram put the phone in my hands. He talked and I listened. I listened to my father’s rich baritone, listened to the forced nuances of good cheer. While the cheerfulness was forced, the love and pain were quite palpable. I would have liked to reassure him, but I hadn’t words.
My father spoke quickly. People in general did. It seemed to me they went at it like Ping-Pong, batting words back and forth. And I had to figure out what it all added up to. The conversation with my father was a ferocious challenge. I didn’t know what he expected from me.
There were long silences while I tried to figure out what the words coming my way meant. Then how to reply? What should I say? How should I say it? I could pronounce words of one syllable and sometimes hook them up to make a sentence. To get them into a line and bring them out in the right order was tough. Sometimes the last word came out first. I tried to tell him I was glad he called. When I got to the second word I’d forgotten the rest. I substituted a noncommittal “Um-hm,” which was not appropriate, and gave up.
Abram took the phone back, saying it had done me a world of good hearing my father’s voice. It did bring back vividly the moment we had rushed into each other’s arms—been father and daughter.
After the conversation I was exhausted and took a nap.
I dreamed I had a daughter. At some level it wasn’t a dream. I knew I had a daug
hter and that I was dead to her. If those facts didn’t destroy me, how could a little thing like being trampled in a riot?
My mind was beginning to take in my situation.
There were two things I wanted to know. I knew that I could ask them, even with my limited vocabulary, but would I be able to disentangle a complicated answer?
The first question was, “Will Pam always be here?” I didn’t know to whom this should be addressed.
I was afraid of the answer. Or it may be that I had answered it myself. I knew Pam’s motive. But I doubt that she did. In fact I was sure she did not. She really was a good person. She had a good and noble reason for being here, as good and noble as herself.
Abram, of course, was a man. Not a typical man, but a man. Men quite uncritically take adoration for granted.
My main motive for getting well was to be rid of kind, obliging, ever-present Pam. While not a high-minded objective, it was perhaps more effective than most. I would get that good, pious, selfless young woman out of my house, and the quicker the better.
So I strained to understand the torrent of words directed at me daily and picked a fight with the unsuspecting Pam, on whom my rancor and frustration had settled. It was over nothing, of course. I dropped my napkin and was about to retrieve it with my picking-up stick, a kind of tongs to grasp dropped items. It was quite efficient, and I was capable of managing, but before I could, Pam gracefully scooped up the napkin.
Did she have to do that? Couldn’t she let me do one of the few things I could do? She wants to show me up, show Abram how helpless I am, and how good she is at picking up napkins. How I hate you, I hate you for standing up and walking around, for being able to talk straight, for picking up things, for doing everything I can’t. God, how I hate you!
In my rage at not being able to communicate this, big tears rolled down my face. Pam knelt solicitously and wiped them away. She knew I had worked myself up, but from the emotional grunts and syllables had no idea that the fury was directed at her, that she was the object of my venom.
She continued soothingly with pious platitudes. “It’s good for you to let off steam once in a while,” she was telling me. “You’ve been so patient, I marvel at you, really I do.”
I made a lunge in her direction, hoping to strangle her. The chair I was in knocked her stool over, and we both went down under splintering wood, spinning metal wheels, and leather cushions. A tablecloth floated on top of us as silverware clattered and a china bowl rolled along the linoleum floor.
Abram, hearing the commotion, left a customer looking for a mid-Victorian mystery novel and, dashing in, lifted the chair off us, and me off Pam.
“What in the world?!”
Pam was breathing hard and looking at me as though she’d never seen me before—and I don’t believe she had.
Then she pulled herself together and said in her demure voice, “Kathy reached for something and the chair tipped over.”
“Kathy, is that what happened?”
I was laughing too hard to set him straight, even if I’d been able to.
Question number two was another matter.
Question number two was better unasked.
As long as I didn’t know the answer there was hope.
REPLACING the shattered wheelchair was not in our budget. Abram hesitated to approach the Wertheimers; they had given us so much. But there didn’t seem to be any other option.
At that point Providence unexpectedly came to our rescue, as if to settle the argument the church elders had debated so strenuously in our parlor—do God’s gifts come by grace or for merit? Abram was opening the semiannual statement from the distributors of my old recordings. He called out from the shop through the connecting door we always kept open.
“They fouled up the accounting again.” He laughed. “This time in our favor. Instead of six hundred dollars, it’s twenty-six thousand.”
He was about to return it with a note correcting their arithmetic, but I hammered violently on my bedpan. Abram rushed in, and I was able to convince him with garbled sounds and signs and pointing to the phone that it was worth a long-distance call before rejecting twenty-six thousand dollars.
The check was good. The company had been taken over by a group that specialized in reissuing old hits with new promotion.
That day Abram bought me a chair. It was the Cadillac of wheelchairs. Electric, of course. With the press of a button it raised or lowered, tilted forward or reclined. Its custom leather back, seat, and arms were not only comfortable but handsome. I had the handsomest wheelchair any girl ever had, the best that money could buy.
Abram explained to me in detail about my money. “Praise the Lord, we’ve got enough now to pay our bills and get you well. But we can’t count on this happening again. We’ve got to stick with the old maxim: Waste not, want not.” He smiled, knowing I hated and despised such prudent sayings.
I smiled back. I had a more important agenda. “Pam,” I managed to articulate, and indicated with a wave of my hand that she was free to go, now that we could afford a practical nurse.
Abram shook his head. “No,” he said. “You need someone who loves you. We’ll make it up to Pam later. Help out with college, maybe.”
A few days later he explained our financial situation to me all over again. He didn’t know how much of what he said I could take in. I didn’t either. Sometimes, when I wasn’t tired, I thought I understood it all. Abram believed our windfall was due to a fluke, a passing craze for my cassettes among teens. That made sense to me most of the time. At other times it was a jumble and all I could do was smile up at him.
Two facts did stay with me. I had the best wheelchair in Quebec, and Pam would be here for the rest of my life.
ONE day a flash of retrograde violence overwhelmed me.
I thought I had put that behind me.
Apparently not.
I squeezed my eyes together in an effort to make the memory go away.
I was able now to take my life right up to the benefit I didn’t finish. People told me what had happened. They didn’t need to tell me about boots and shoes—seen from the perspective of the floor. Looking up, I watched them descend. They blacked out the world.
I didn’t know how to keep out these sudden flashes—What if the episode kept recurring?
I saw I couldn’t handle it by myself. Abram had to help me. I trundled into the bookshop looking for him. He was checking a new catalogue, but he left it.
“The concert…” I managed to get out. “I see it.”
Abram sat down on an unopened crate of books. I could see he took this seriously. “You know what I think, Kathy? I think you buried all that too fast. You didn’t give yourself time to digest what happened. That isn’t always the best way to get rid of something.”
“What?” I asked, implying, “what is the best way?”
You could feel the tumblers drop in his mind. “How much do you know about benefit concerts?”
I shrugged. That was the easiest answer.
Abram was still thinking his way through the problem. “If you understood what your singing might have accomplished, you will see why you were perceived as a threat. To make it all clear to you, tomorrow you’ll accompany me to my favorite hangout, the central library. You know the one, on Sherbrooke Street, East.”
Since I hadn’t been able to banish the flashbacks on my own, Abram’s prescription was worth trying.
It was a big adventure for me, especially as I left Abram in the Philosophy stack and went by myself into the periodical section, where I tried out a new skill: bringing up microfilm articles. I stared at a gray tinged screen and scrolled down to Benefit. I was surprised and pleased to find it.
The modern benefit concert was born in New York City in the summer of 1971, in Madison Square Garden. Two shows were given, at three-thirty and again at eight o’clock. They were gotten together by George Harrison to provide aid to the desparate people of Bangladesh.
I read that in an effo
rt to control its former province, the Pakistani government drove ten million people over the border into India and murdered a million more. Those left were among the poorest people on the planet. Harrison had come to know of the plight of this pathetic remnant through the Indian master of the sitar, Ravi Shankar. Harrison studied sitar with him and the two became friends.
Shankar, recently returned from the area, was devastated by what he saw. He talked about it with different people, some in the UN, but mainly musicians. If only something could be done to focus attention on the distress and need, if only the world did not turn away from Bangladesh.
“Music moves people,” they told each other. “It unifies them. And song speaks directly to the heart; it speaks what words alone cannot.” People, they felt, by and large, have a natural innate desire to help one another, to alleviate want and starvation, especially where it affects children.
If they got together, pooled their talent, performed gratis, they could bring out a large number of people and money could be raised, a great deal of money.
They got to work, contacted Jackson Browne’s scholarship fund for Native American students and Pete Seeger’s sloop plying the Hudson River, a floating classroom in environmental protection.
I looked up. I could see that wherever there was a cause—civil rights, antiwar movements, human rights, antinuclear crusades—there was now a new way to rally people.
Artists from all over answered. Ringo was in Spain making a film. Bob Dylan, who didn’t perform much since his motorcycle accident, performed. Eric Clapton came out of retirement, the entire Badfinger band played, and other musicans, good, professional…and courageous, because gigs were lost and contracts abrogated.
As I read, I realized that the breakup of our own benefit, my subsequent hearing, and the way they had seized on the oversight of not having my green card updated, were some of the consequences those who protest injustice must expect.