I took accumulated sick leave and moved in with Anne Morning Light. We didn’t so much live together as side by side. We no longer talked or tried to comfort. We knew it was no use.
I went to the stream where I had been bathed and prepared for my marriage. No laughing girls now, no splashing water. The water was still except for a small eddy. I followed it and came to where the ghost rice grew. For a moment I saw his upended canoe, heard his laughter.
I turned away and started back. Here in this forest he had shot partridge, walking softly. If a blade of grass bent, it straightened. And no leaf rustled as they did under my feet. A spring in his step carried him this way where I plodded past the bureau drawer and the rocking chair—those familiar logs and burnt stags and broken boughs. They furnished the world of his growing up.
But looking at them I felt nothing.
“Kathy,” Anne Morning Light said to me that evening, “your healing is not here. My healing lies in a return to my life. I’m going to Quebec. They’re holding a protest rally for a Mohawk who is under a sentence of death.”
“What did he do?”
“It was harvest time, he went back home to bring in the crops. He didn’t run off, he didn’t hide. The military police knew where he was. They picked him up in his fields.”
“Poor thing,” I said. “He didn’t understand.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Well, I guess I’ll go back to the hospital. It was very good of you to have me—”
Anne shook her head vigorously. “You’re not ready to go back to nursing. You need nursing yourself.”
I persuaded her I didn’t. I persuaded her I was fine. When she left I sat down and didn’t get up for hours. Night came and still I sat there. The dark invaded my mind.
Everything was nothing, and nothing everything. Why had that never been clear to me before? I thought not of what I would do, only what I would not do.
I would not go back to the hospital.
I felt I was treading the obverse side of the moon. Vast, dark, hollow. I wandered it. I walked it. Even when I did ordinary things like buying a train ticket, I was wrapped in it. If someone spoke to me, I replied. If they smiled, I smiled back.
But I kept treading the pockmarked face of the moon’s far side. Our feet had dangled over the edge, he’d had his arm around me.
Outside, the world rushed by. In the morning, from the train window, I watched the sun come up. It tinted everything a delicate salmon color like the inside of a seashell.
The sun did not come up in my head. It remained dark there.
They called Montreal . . . I made no move. I wasn’t going to Montreal.
The train hurtled along. My dark mind looked at the bright fields. My dark mind reached for him. It was one of those soul-shattering moments when it strikes you again, as hard as the first time—I will never see Crazy Dancer again.
He was dead.
Accept it, his mother had told me.
I didn’t want to accept it. We hadn’t invented a code that would tell me where he danced now.
The darkness grew and blotted out thought, blotted out possibilities, blotted out hope. I musn’t trust hope, or possibilities or thought. The far side of the moon is bleak.
The porter woke me, gently repeating, “We’re here, miss. . . . Your stop.”
Why had I bought a ticket for home? Mama Kathy and Connie were in Vancouver. No one would be here.
Yet it was comforting to recognize—a fenced pasture with the fenceposts leaning and the strung wire sagging—a tree with its center closed over an ancient burn. The tree grew around the black, charcoal wound and continued to live. But when you destroy the center of a person, that isn’t possible. Besides, the person may not want to go on. Definitely doesn’t want to.
I trudged along the road. I was going home.
No one was there.
I walked all morning and most of the afternoon. I’d forgotten to eat. I felt dizzy and the sun also turned black. When I got to my house, the door was open, so I went in.
Elk Girl surveyed me critically. I wasn’t surprised to see her. I didn’t ask what she was doing here.
“You look terrible,” she said, and put me to bed.
I slept, not through the night, but through several nights. Whenever I opened my eyes Elk Girl was there. She sat beside the bed and did quillwork. “How long have we known each other?” she asked when she saw my eyes open, then answered her own question, “Since we were seven.”
She spooned something that tasted of swamp and cattails into my mouth. “Didn’t you ever wonder why I was your friend? Why I singled you out? Why I bothered?”
I knew I was not required to say anything. Besides, I couldn’t rouse myself, it was too much effort.
“It’s because of who you are,” she went on.
Who was I? I waited to hear.
“Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter, the only child of Jonathan Forquet. He came from the mountains and the forests, from the rushing river and the holy places to bring you your name. And with the name he brought you a special gift. He brought you Gaiwiio, the good messsage.”
Clang went the gates of memory, memories that were not mine. They danced just out of reach and beyond recognition. I closed my eyes and slept.
Minutes passed, perhaps hours. Elk Girl took up where she had left off. “Do you want to begin at the beginning of the world, or in the middle with George Washington?”
She herself made the choice. “The Great Spirit has an evil twin. Whatever the Great Spirit makes is wonderful and perfect, and the Evil Spirit comes along behind him and tries to destroy his creation. But he is not strong enough to undo it completely—only partly. For instance, currents. At the beginning of the world currents flowed in both directions at once. There was the coming side of any river, and the going side. So that you paddled your canoe either way without effort. Evil Spirit tried to eradicate currents altogether, but he was only able to do it one way. And so on until we come to George Washington.
“The Evil Being Who Lives on the Rim of the World, in January, five days after the new moon following the zenith of the Pleiades, whispered into George Washington’s ear. And General George Washington ordered a scorched earth policy against the Iroquois for siding with the British. They fled over the border into Canada, miserable and starving. Among them was a Seneca named Handsome Lake.”
I turned my head away. I didn’t want to hear. I had been married according to Gaiwiio, Handsome Lake’s “good words.” The trouble was they led to my father. My father who was no part of my life.
But her voice droned on. “Sick and without hope, Handsome Lake turned to drink. And he died.”
I drifted off with the uncomfortable feeling that was not the end of it.
When Elk Girl continued it was in a declamatory chant. “My great-grandmother was a witness to his death. She was there and saw it. And she dreamed it into me as I now do to you.”
The wooden planks under my feet became a dirt floor. Against the wall, bowed figures mourned an incantation. The man stretched on the bed was not Handsome Lake. For one heart-stopping moment I thought the features were those of Crazy Dancer. But when I knelt, I saw it was Jonathan Forquet. His nostrils were stuffed with ground tobacco leaves. It had been a long time since he had breathed.
I walked with others to the dirge of voice and drum and stopped where they stopped, at a desolate knoll. The grave had been dug in preparation and the wrapped body of my father was laid into it. In the distance a wolf howled.
On the third day the Gaiwiio was recited.
The howling wolf came close. It was white. It went to the grave site and began to dig. It dug and dug. Finally it dug down to grave clothes. But my father was not there.
With a single impulse we turned and there on the summit of a nearby hill was Jonathan.
The people gasped and knelt in awe. Their voices broke and they shrank back afraid.
I was afraid.
He raised his hand in blessin
g.“I have come from the sky road to bring you a new world. Gaiwiio is old, but I bring it new and full of hope. The prophet Handsome Lake has made known Jesus’s warning—not to follow the way of the money changers, the white men, but to take from the before times of our people and mix this with the best of the white world, giving thanks to the new moon that will arrive again in January.”
I woke from my vision hardly able to breathe.
“Did you see?” Elk Girl was almost dancing with excitement. “Did you see the death and rebirth of Handsome Lake?”
“It wasn’t Handsome Lake. It was my father.”
Elk Girl dug her fingers into my shoulders. “You’re sure? It was Jonathan Forquet who came? Your father?”
“It was my father I saw dead. It was my father I saw buried.”
Elk Girl covered her eyes and fell on the floor.
“And when the wolf dug up the grave clothes, it was he who stood on a hill and spoke.”
Elk Girl said from the floor, “Well, that’s clear enough.” She got up, straightened her skirt, went to the washbowl, and poured water over her hands, face, and the back of her neck. Then she patted her hair in place. “Finish the soup I brought you, Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter. We must go.”
I pulled back as though I had been scalded. “No! Not to my father.”
“He has sent us his pawakam.”
“No. He abandoned me. I don’t care how great a man he is, I can’t forget that. I can’t forgive it.”
“Kathy, you think he hasn’t been where you are now? He had to choose between being your father and being father to the rest of us. People come to him from great distances because he has found the answers that are withheld. He has woven the sayings of Handsome Lake into the wampum of life.”
IT WAS A bus journey, and we went in the morning. All day and that night we dozed, conscious when the bus slowed that we were passing through cities. Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay. In Sault Ste. Marie I heard a town clock strike thirteen. On we went, North Bay, Ottawa, Montreal. Quebec I had always thought of as the end of the world. It wasn’t. We rode past it into a scruffy countryside, but old-growth forest could be seen in the distance. We got out at a poverty-stricken little town, and had lunch at a place called Ma’s. I had two eggs sunny side up. Elk Girl took her breakfast into the kitchen and had a long confab with the Indian who worked there. I had been silent the whole trip and she was put out over this. But I wasn’t able to pull myself out of that dark place.
She returned from the kitchen and said in a businesslike manner, “Jimmy Longbow will take you the rest of the way.”
“You’re going to leave me here?” Somewhere in the world I was sitting on a stool eating eggs, but where?
“You’re the one Jonathan Forquet wants to see,” she retorted.
“Wait,” I said as she turned to go. “Do you think he really did die?”
“Of course.”
I looked after her, no longer sure which was dream and which reality.
Jimmy Longbow handed me a walking stick with a leather thong he had fashioned himself and we started out. Before too long we were in the forest I had seen from a distance. The cool autumn air trapped between pines was pungent. The trees went down to the edge of the river.
My guide melted away. There was no need of him. Jonathan Forquet was at work in a clearing. Before him, lifted on a rack, was a canoe; another was pulled up on the beach.
He put down a tool, and, coming toward me, took my hand and looked deeply into my face. He knew. I could tell that. He knew about Crazy Dancer, and that he was dead.
“I don’t know what to do,” I burst out.
“Sit down here on this stump. First you will have a cup of water.”
He watched me drink with a look of satisfaction. “You did the right thing. You can always come to your”—I thought he was going to say father but he said—“namer.”
I stole glances at him as I drank. He seemed not to have become older but to encompass youth with age. “What are you doing?” I asked, indicating the two canoes.
“This is my workshop. I make canoes.”
“To sell?”
“Of course to sell. How else is a man to live?”
“You’re known as a holy person. In India a holy person collects alms and is fed by the community.”
“Why should I accept charity when I can make canoes?”
He took me to a small pine lean-to whose chinks were padded with moss. “Sleep here,” he said, showing me a pile of furs in the corner, “and tomorrow you will help me and I will try to help you.”
Like a child I obeyed my father.
When I woke I could hear the teeth of a bandsaw. I emerged and came closer, inhaling the aromatic scent of birch bark that had been freshly peeled and rolled in large paperlike layers. Its outermost crust was chalk white, deepening to a buff color.
“Paper birch, cut from high on the tree. I strip it off in a single sheet early in summer.”
“What wood do you use to make the frame?” I could see he was pleased at my question.
“A hard maple or cedar. This is cedar I’m shaping now. This piece in my hands will be a gunwale. But I’ve run out of water. It has to be kept wet.”
I picked up the pail beside him and, going down to the river, filled it.
He nodded thanks without pausing in his movements. “Pour the water into this trough,” he directed.
I did this, wondering if he remembered the way we had parted years ago, and the cruel things I had said. He placed the cedar strips to soak, making them malleable for bending.
“The ribs too,” he said, placing shorter strips to soak. “And lastly, the stem. On other boats that would be a keel, but on a canoe it simply divides the building of it.”
We left the construction pieces of cedar soaking and went in to breakfast. He pulled apart a home-baked hominy loaf, which we ate with honey and berries.
“When he died,” my father said unexpectedly, “it was your death too.”
My eyes filled with tears and I nodded.
We went back to work.
The afternoon was spent fastening the gunwales together in the outline of a canoe. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we will put on the skin.”
Work stopped when the light faded. Jonathan brought out a pipe and sat in the doorway, smoking. He had laid the guest breakfast before me; I saw it was up to me to rustle the other meals. Dinner didn’t look too different from breakfast—berries, a substantial slab of hominy grits, which I essayed on his stove, cooking it with what I thought was bear grease. I topped it off with goat cheese.
We ate in silence, but it was a comfortable silence. Companionable.
“Did you ever die?” I asked.
He nodded over his pipe. “Yes,” he said, considering each word. “The doctors told me that I did, that my heart stopped.”
“And you were really dead?”
“Yes.”
“And the rest, that people say about you?”
“People believe what they need to believe.”
“I see. And that is the stuff of myths and legends.”
He continued to smoke.
By the next morning our framing was pliable and bent easily, assuming a graceful outline. Together we unrolled the birch bark and lashed it to the ribs.
“Do you see the true beauty of birch? How the grain runs around the tree rather than along its length? That enables us to sew the sheets together.” As he spoke, he mixed something with the bear grease brought from the cabin.
“What is that?” I asked.
“For caulking. Pine gum and spruce resin with fat.”
The afternoon was spent raising the gunwales to the proper height and binding them to the stem. “Canoe building goes much faster today. Today I rely on Phillips screwdrivers. Not that there is a single screw in the finished canoe, but for temporary bracing there’s nothing like them. Bandsaws and jigsaws are a lot faster and more accurate than stone implements. The roots of a l
iving thing are in the past, but the buds open in the present and bloom in the future.”
“The present is empty,” I said, “and I can’t even imagine a future.”
He didn’t say anything.
It was a day in which we waited for the wood to dry. My time was spent sewing. My thread was made from the cores of spruce roots by patiently scraping layers of skin away. Jonathan came over, presmably to check my stitches. They were small and even, as though sewn with fine silk thread. I was proud of them.
Looking over my shoulder, Jonathan said, “Your mother was an orphan.”
My regular stitching went awry.
“She was raised in the cold, severe atmosphere of a mission, but her name was a message from dead parents that she was to be joyful, Mamanowatum. So she knew very well the burden she laid on you when in the spirit world she whispered to the Grandmothers—who passed the name to me.”
“My life is in shreds, Father. I can never know joy again.”
“I haven’t finished my story,” my father chided me. “Oh-Be-Joyful grew up behind those repressive stone walls. When small children were punished, she relived her own punishments. She began to break the rules in order to be banished to punishment row. This was a dark storeroom, where children sat on a wood bench and cried. When Oh-Be-Joyful contrived to be shut in with them, she told stories and joked and played finger games. Punishment row became the happiest place in the mission.”
My father’s story was finished, and he went back to work.
What had he been trying to tell me? That even though I could no longer feel joy for myself, I could create it for others? My stories were dried up in me, I had no jokes, I knew no finger games. If anyone still cried in punishment row, I would say, “Move over.”
Another day and another night. My father showed me a collection of miniature canoes in a shed out back. They were six inches long, beautifully made and signed by him.
“White man’s enterprise?” I asked.
“Of course.” A rare smile lit his face. And I realized that the present held an occasional flash where someone else connected with you.
The caulking, when we reached that point, took a great deal of time as it underwent repeated inspections. Jonathan was a scrupulous and careful craftsman. I was reminded of one of Sister Egg’s aphorisms: “What’s worth doing is worth doing well.”