Abram sat beside me and took my hands. I think he wanted to talk about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, but Pam came in with the roast on a platter.
It was a lovely dinner. I particularly enjoyed the cucumber salad.
Perhaps the simplest method would be to take the Lincoln for a spin. But what if I survived? I had a surer way. In my medicine cabinet were forty yellow-jacketed sleeping pills. Knowing they were there had made it possible to go on.
No more. Today it was over.
Why today?
Because it was like every other day—that’s why.
After dinner I drifted off into a kind of dream state, in which I took off my clothes, discarding them one by one. Indians believe that disrobing in a dream is a sign of approaching death, a shucking off of the body.
A careful assessment would leave no doubt.
I’ll begin with Mum. I ran out on her when I ran out on my brothers.
I went off with the first man who promised to take me to the bright lights.
But I wasn’t good even for Jack. He was getting by just fine selling ponies and winning bar bets. I dragged him into showbiz, where he was outclassed. Gambler and drinker he was, but he had a wonderful gift for enjoying life. Until I came along.
I didn’t treat Mac much better. It must have taken a lot for a man of his pride to keep begging me to marry him. I considered it a joke. But he thought of it as a fitting climax to a successful partnership, with me in the spotlight and him pulling the strings. The denouement was the appearance of Abram. He figured I’d marry Abram and he’d be left in the lurch, so he took another way. He figured he’d earned it. Consequently, instead of the wheeling and dealing he thrived on, he’s stuck in some Caribbean hideout, shacked up with a local belle, paying off the policia, and bored, bored, bored to death—thanks to Kathy Little Bird.
Jim’s case was next. I really let him down. Jim Gentle. A perfect name for him. A gentle, sweet person in this rough, uncaring, dog-eat-dog world. I let him teach me music and songwriting, I let him teach me lovemaking. Then, the moment I learned he had problems, I was gone. That it finally turned around, that he’d made it, in no way absolves me. It was one of those lucky breaks that happen.
Abram I saved for last. I’m ruining Abram’s life by my dependence on him. He seemed ready, willing, and able to shoulder all the grief I brought with me. But what of the night he broke down and cried? It’s not right to load it all on him. Mum used to say, “The weak eat up the strong.” I hadn’t known what that meant then, but I am doing that to Abram. Besides, how long can I go on playing the part of a housewife who doesn’t keep her own house? Of a lover unable to feel or respond to sex?
Anything else?
Oh yes. Kathy Little Bird as mother. Leaving the main indictment out of the list was signficant. I can’t bear thinking of my redhaired daughter.
So what does it add up to? I’m not a mother, not a lover, not a wife. I’ll never walk again. I’ll never sing again. The answer is forty gelatin capsules.
PAM was humming as she stacked the dishwasher, and Abram, complaining that he’d been doing too much reading, went to check on a new shipment. I wheeled myself into the bathroom and poured out the yellow-jacketed pills. I knew how many there were. Forty. I counted them to make sure. I didn’t want to do things halfway, make a mess for Abram.
I put all forty into an empty aspirin bottle, which I took to my bedside table. It wouldn’t look suspicious there if anyone should see it. I had decided on tonight. I would go to sleep and not be a bother or make trouble, or stand in the way of Abram having a wife. Or anything, anymore.
I wandered out into the living room and, going to the piano, picked out my Cree Shadow Song with one finger. I thought Abram was still in the shop, but he came in through the house. I was struck by the way he stood there in the doorway looking at me.
“What would you think,” he asked, “of a world of becoming?” I waited, knowing he had more to tell me. “You, me, the earth, the universe, God himself, all in the process of evolving.” He advanced farther into the room. “And what would you think of a God that needed our help as much as we need his?”
“Hmm,” I said.
If this solution lifted the burden he lived with, I liked it. I was glad that God, after years of banishment, was back in his life. I knew Abram would be happier with God.
“Thomas Aquinas says that God gave human beings two paths to understanding: the way of faith and the way of reason. But since there is only one truth, the two paths must arrive at the same conclusion.”
“Are you there yet, Abram?”
“No. And I may never be. But it’s enough to know that even though the two paths diverge sharply at the outset, they will join at the end, resolving all theological dissension, and produce pure thanksgiving.”
He knelt beside my chair. “Once again you have brought light to my life.”
“How?” I asked, because I really couldn’t see how.
“By sitting there patiently listening to me even when you couldn’t talk. By every once in a while wheeling yourself into the kitchen and fixing me a cup of hot chocolate. Kathy, I feel now what I was unable to as a boy—a call. Remember, you asked once how the call was heard. And I said it was felt through your entire body. That was right, Kathy. That’s how it is.”
I was glad for Abram, glad that the agony of doubt was lifted from him. It had been good for him to reason it all out with John. I was glad too that I had a part in it. But in case he would think I wasn’t acting normally, I told him he was hopeless, the same dreamer he had always been.
He cheerfully agreed. “You’re absolutely right, Kathy. But everything in the world got here by way of an idea—in God’s mind or ours.”
I laughed and threw the rest of the evening paper at him. He divided it, keeping the sports pages, carefully avoiding the entertainment section, and tossing me the editorials. I scanned it. Nothing of interest. I don’t ordinarily read letters to the editor, but something caught my attention—a signature.
One of the letters was signed Kathy Mason.
A sharp quiver ran through me. Partly it was pain, but with it an inordinate alertness. I read with a concentration I hadn’t been able to summon till that moment.
Kathy Mason wrote on behalf of a young man, a First Nation person. Lone Walker. That name had been in the papers recently. Wasn’t that the Indian they were looking for in the murder of a Mountie?
The letter from Kathy Mason was written to say she was with Lone Walker at the time of the shooting. She asked for amnesty so he could come in and give himself up. He was, she wrote, an innocent man….
The print blurred.
Kathy. It was my Kathy. And it seemed she was in love with Sam Lone Walker, wanted for murder. Jas hadn’t said a thing about this, and Elk Woman, if she knew, decided I was in no condition to handle it.
If I had put this together correctly, then this was a girl in trouble.
This was a girl who needed her mother.
“When she needs you,” Abram had said.
I remembered asking, “How will I know?” And his reply, typical Abram: “Have faith, you’ll know.”
I read the letter through again.
My poor child, what had she gotten herself mixed up with, and who? Why hadn’t the Masons taken better care of her? Why had she been traipsing around Alberta on her own?
“Abram,” I said, handing him the section. “Read this.”
He ran his finger down to URANIUM STRIKE.
“No, no. Letters to the editor. The first one.”
He read carefully and looked at me with a troubled expression. “You think it’s her?”
“It’s got to be.”
“Call Jas before you jump to conclusions.”
My fingers were trembling so that Abram took the phone and dialed for me.
“Look, Kathy,” Jas said when he heard my voice, “I know I should have called you, but I didn’t realize at first that she was involved with Lone Walker,
who at best is a maverick and at worst a killer. How was I supposed to break something like this to you?”
“Oh my God.”
“I guess I was wrong not to call, and I’m sorry, but…”
“I’m not angry, Jas. I can see how you felt. But what do we do now? That’s my question.”
“Well, she’s determined to clear Lone Walker.”
“And he won’t give himself up?”
“No, they’ve thrown a bunch of new charges at him. He’s convinced he’ll be railroaded.”
“And will he be?”
“In my opinion, he’ll get a fair trial and then they’ll hang him.”
“If things change, Jas, phone me immediately. And this time do it.” I hung up and looked at Abram.
“What next?” he asked. “Will you write her?”
“Write her and see her.”
“Not without a plan. We need a plan if we’re really going to help.”
I clutched his arm. “Oh Abram, she needs me, just as you said she would. For the first time in my life Kathy needs me.”
“What will you do?” Abram asked again.
“Spend the money my records are making. I’ll write Kathy that I’m interested in the cause of indigenous people.” I laughed shakily. “I’ll say I read her letter in the Standard, her account of Lone Walker. I was touched by it and am offering financial support. They’ll need a good lawyer.”
“Go slow, Kathy. I don’t want you hurt.”
“It’s Kathy Mason we’ve got to be thinking of. Can I count on you, Abram?”
He smiled at the question. I squeezed his hand.
Immediately my schizoid mind veered to the forty sleeping pills in the aspirin bottle. How could I have ever contemplated such a thing? Who would have been here for Kathy?
I wheeled myself into my room to retrieve them….
They weren’t there. I looked frantically on the floor, and felt behind the table in case the bottle had fallen down. This was one of those cases where you know before you look that it’s not there, but you look anyway.
Frantically I opened the drawer in the table. My fingers searched to the very end of it. Of course there was no aspirin bottle; I had never put it there. Storm burst around me, while I at the center was untouched, able to think calmly.
Abram had found the pills. That was the only explanation. I thought back to my decision, back to the cucumber salad. He mentioned that he’d been doing too much reading, implying that he had a headache. He worked in the shop a short time, then must have gone to get an aspirin from the medicine cabinet. Finding them gone, he thought of my bedside table.
Instead of aspirin he found forty sleeping pills.
What had his reaction been? To talk to me of his return of faith. Knowing what I intended, he told me I had been a light to him. In Abramese that meant—I love you, I need you…Why couldn’t Abram say things directly? Why was it so hard sometimes to figure him out?
I went back to the living room.
“I’m going to write her this minute,” I said, and asked him to hand my stationery down to me. When he bent to place it in my lap, my arms went around him.
I wrote Kathy Mason care of the Standard, going over the letter several times to keep it businesslike.
I enclosed our number, and for days wouldn’t answer the phone for fear I couldn’t handle hearing my daughter’s voice.
Finally she called.
Abram picked up, and motioned that it was Kathy.
I was at his elbow in a moment; the next the phone was in my hand and I heard her as though she were in the room. Voices are important to me. Hers was low, resonant, a good voice. She spoke decisively, asking if we could set up a meeting. “Of course,” I agreed, I hope not too eagerly. Keep it businesslike, I reminded myself.
While thinking this, I was making the offer Abram and I had agreed on, of sending her a round-trip ticket to Montreal to initiate a Justice for Lone Walker campaign.
I could tell she was amazed, but she managed a casual tone, and we arranged to meet at the Mirabel airport.
Friday afternoon, two o’clock, at the baggage claim, I would see my daughter.
Abram wrote it all down and handed me the slip of paper.
I lifted my face to his. “She has a wonderfully warm voice.”
Smiling, Abram completed the litany. “And beautiful red hair.”
It was one of the few things I had known about her. Now I was to see for myself. Kathy Mason and I would know each other. The named and the namer.
Chapter Nineteen
NO performance had ever put me on edge as the thought of the coming meeting. I couldn’t settle to anything and was so nervous I was almost ill.
On the drive to the airport I reminded Abram once again that Kathy wasn’t to know who I was. “I’m a wealthy eccentric, interested in—in causes. That’s all she needs to know.”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”
I had to laugh at his dry comment. “I guess it is at that. Oh Abram, do you think she’ll like me?”
“I think you will get on very well…. Some time in the future I think you should tell her.”
“Yes. Some time. If this goes well. Imagine, Abram, we’ll be face to face. I never had the courage before. Who do you think she takes after? Me? Jack? My mum? I hope it’s my mum. She was a wonderful woman, a strong woman.”
“Well, Kathy Mason has certainly gone all out for that young man.”
“She has, hasn’t she? Lone Walker. Accused of murder.” My laugh was a bit tremulous. “…You don’t think he did it, do you?”
TWO hundred yards away I recognized her, trim figure and glorious red hair that cascaded to her shoulders. She gave the impression of being beautiful, except for the von Kerll nose, which is slightly crooked. If this was a defect, it added to her charm.
She came toward us holding out a slim hand.
I took it in mine and couldn’t say a word.
“Mrs. Willems. I knew it had to be you.”
It was Abram who answered, introducing himself and inquiring about her trip. I was content just taking her in. Eyes like Mum’s, and that meant like mine too…black on black.
Abram drove us to a busy restaurant off the main thoroughfare. This quiet man, bless him, did most of the talking. We were lucky to find a table. I sat down across from my daughter.
I liked this girl. I liked everything about her.
I loved this girl! I loved everything about her!
It was Abram who drew out the story of Sam Lone Walker. His father had been an activist for self-rule by First Nation people, whose dream had been to lay the case before the UN. But he had died as a result of the confrontation with U.S. marshals at Wounded Knee. His twelve-year-old son had witnessed it.
Kathy Mason’s glance compelled us to see what this would mean for a boy of that age. When she went on she had herself under control. “He took on his father’s crusade. He’s in hiding now because there was an oil strike on Cree property. That’s what this is all about. The oil companies on one side trying to buy up Indian land, and the Cree on the other, protesting. It’s a holy site, where they hold their vision quests. Sam Lone Walker organized a demonstration. That’s when the Mountie was killed. But I was there. I was with him—just as I said in my open letter. He didn’t do it. He didn’t even have a gun. I can testify to this.”
Abram ordered for us. Neither Kathy Mason or I had looked at the menu.
Abram waited for the waitress to leave, leaned across the table, and asked, “Why did he run?”
“He knew they’d blame him. They consider him a troublemaker. This was their chance. There’s unbelievable money at stake for the oil companies, billions of dollars, Mr. Willems.”
I barely heard “oil companies, environmental damage, vision site”—I heard my daughter saying, I love this man. Saying, help me save him.
I saw my daughter’s pain, felt her anxiety. I don’t think she was as certain as she said that he would give himself up. B
ut the conviction with which she spoke made it plain that her life was vested in him.
Abram was explaining the business end of our proposal to her. “What’s needed is first-class legal help. Mrs. Willems has authorized me to write a check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars as a retainer.”
Kathy Mason looked stunned. “I guess I don’t quite understand. You represent a foundation that is concerned with aboriginal rights?”
She didn’t pause for an answer. She was peering at me intently. “I know you,” she exclaimed, interrupting herself and almost upsetting her water glass. “Aren’t you—? Why, you’re that famous singer. You’re Kathy Little Bird.”
“Shh,” I said nervously, and glanced around at nearby tables. But the din was such that no one heard.
“I’m sorry,” she said, realizing that the woman in the wheelchair might not want to be identified. “It came over me all at once who you are. I had the feeling from the beginning that you were someone I knew, or should know. No wonder—I have your albums. I’m a big fan. I think you’re wonderful.”
“Well,” I said, to stem the tide, “that was a long time ago.”
“Not really. Was it two or three years ago that you—?” She broke off, confused and embarrassed. How sweet, that she was embarrassed. It showed what a nice person she was, sensitive to another’s misfortune.
“Yes.” I spoke casually, trying to put her at ease. “It was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I remember…it was a concert some place…a riot. You were injured. It was in all the papers. But you’re well now.”
“Praise the Lord,” Abram said, “that’s the truth.”
If she recalled the vituperative press, the hearing and deportation, she didn’t let on. “Do you sing any more?” she asked. “Professionally, I mean?”
I tried to keep it light, and at the same time dismiss the subject. But Kathy Mason was on a crusade. She had a gleam in her eye. “Kathy Little Bird!” she said. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here having lunch with you.”