I walked along the shore of my lake, ice at its edges. I’d left geese out in the open and worried about foxes and wolves. But the idea of seeing the family one more time pushed me forward. My trail was so much easier to walk on, the muddy patches partially frozen. My leg didn’t bother me much today. I made good time to their camp and was relieved enough that I stopped and rolled a cigarette when I spotted the smoke from their stove sharp and white in the lightening air of morning.
Koosis sat by his partially loaded freighter canoe. He’d chosen a good day to travel on the bay. It promised to be a calm one. He’d have enough worries on a calm day anyways with the wicked currents that form between here and the mainland. Shallow most of the way across for such huge water. So many have drowned between here and there when the wind whips up and causes the waves. We sat silent for a while and he smoked my offered cigarette.
“Good day you chose to travel,” I said.
He nodded.
“You’ll be travelling low on the water with your load. Get in trouble, throw the geese first, then the women.”
He laughed.
“I brought you something,” I said. I handed him my father’s rifle, wrapped in its blanket. “It’s a special gift.”
He took it, untied the knots of rope, and unwrapped the blanket. The thin scope of my father’s rifle captured the light of morning.
Moshum turned the rifle in his hands, admiring it. “Old,” he said in English. “Ever old. Does it still work?”
I nodded.
“I won’t find rounds for this one anywhere,” he said.
I pulled out the Mauser’s clip and box of shells. “It still shoots straight. More something to talk about than to use, though.”
The old man looked at me. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and peered over at me. I could smell his pleasure. He put his right eye to the scope and drew the rifle across the bay. He stopped suddenly as if he’d spotted something. His smile turned to a frown, and he dropped the rifle to his side.
“I can’t take it,” he said to me.
I looked at him.
“This gift, I can’t take it.” He stood and held the rifle out to me. He looked smaller than he was as the light grew behind him. Without wanting it to, my hand reached out for the gun.
“What?” I asked. Koosis didn’t answer. Instead, he busied himself with lifting packs into the freighter canoe. I didn’t know what else to do. I wrapped the rifle back in its old blanket and placed it by a boulder. I helped Koosis load his boat.
“Some gifts can’t be given,” he said after a while. “Some things don’t want to be taken away.”
“What did you see through the scope?” I asked him. He didn’t look at me. “Tell me, what did you see?”
“Just the visions of an old man. A crazy old man with a crazier wife waiting for him up the bank.”
“So I’m not crazy?” I said.
He stopped his work and stared out at the water. “No. Not crazy. A lot of pain in you. Like a fester.” He still wouldn’t look at me. “You know,” he said, “the old ones told a story when I was growing up. I don’t know if it is true.”
“Tell it to me anyways,” I said.
“The old ones said your father had a best friend who died in the first war.”
“I know that story,” I said.
“The old ones say that before your father’s best friend left for the war, he got a young woman, a Netmaker woman, pregnant.”
I could feel Ahepik the spider crawling up my spine. “Is that true?” I asked.
“It’s a story I heard,” he said.“The story I know is that the boy who was born was raised a Netmaker, not a Whiskyjack.”
The possibilities raced through my head. If this was true, my father’s best friend’s son grew up to have sons who had sons who were now the ones who wanted to see our family dead or gone from here. Funny how that worked. Two best friends, and their grandchildren wishing the other dead.
“My wife, she knows this secret, too,” old Koosis said, his eyes still on the horizon. “But my wife, she can’t keep secrets anymore. She doesn’t mean harm. Her mind has weakened, and she will speak about seeing you.”
I sat on the bow of his boat and rolled another cigarette. I thought hard about what he’d just admitted to me. I needed to keep my hands busy. He’d just told me he knew why I was here. That I was no longer safe in my hiding when he and his wife returned home. The old man was smart.
Why, I don’t really know, but I decided that it was time to finally confess what I had done. That I was a murderer now. Maybe a release lay in this. “I did do something back in Moosonee,” I began. “And that is why I am here now on this island.” I kept my fingers rolling the cigarette. He listened. “I flew my plane here after I did something in Moosonee. I did something I can’t ever take back.” I looked to him. He was listening. “I crashed my plane, me. I crashed it three times and promised myself after the third I’d never fly again.”
The words came out of my mouth now like sparrows, taking direction where I couldn’t control. “It’s a long story, I think.” I looked up at him quick as I lit my cigarette. He watched the bay, waiting. I wanted to tell him the story straight but couldn’t see it in a straight line. Stories never are. “The second time I crashed my plane was in your community. Attawapiskat.”
He nodded. “I remember, me.”
“I was flying in a young mother and her two kids. It was a bad thunderstorm. I got around it but crashed on the landing.” I was telling him a story now that I didn’t even mean to. Fucking stories. Twisted things that come out no matter how we want them.
“A few months after, I took a flight I didn’t need to do. Up to Attawapiskat. Pop-and-chip run. My wife, she didn’t want me to go. My two boys, both were sick. She was exhausted. I was doing work on the house. Frost heaves had damaged the foundation. I didn’t know the electrical box was about to short. I didn’t finish the work, flew up to Attawapiskat instead. I was exhausted, too.” Why was I telling him this story? This wasn’t the one, was it? “But I took the flight.”
I looked over at Koosis. He was listening. I’d tell him, then. Tell him something I’d never told anyone. Chief Joe. Gregor. Lisette. “I took the flight. That young woman from your community? She had called me on the sly. Wanted to see me again. See me when I wasn’t just flying. She wanted me …” I reached for my tobacco pouch, rolled another cigarette even though I didn’t want one. “So I took that flight that I didn’t need to. And guess what?” I looked at Koosis. He sat still on the stern, listening.
“We both wanted something, I think. Neither of us found it, I don’t think.”
I could hear the two young children’s voices, still full of sleep, waking in the tent. I had to be quick. Finish this story best I could. “I turned around and flew back home, left later than I should, dusk coming on. Worst time for flying. I flew in over Moosonee, flew over my home like always to let her know I was back safe and sound.”
The sound of choking. A cough. It was me. “Everything was fine. My wife, she never suspected anything. Me, I got busy with flights and didn’t get back to working on the foundation. I never thought to check on that box. Who would?”
This was not the story I wanted to tell. “I thought about going back to visit that woman from your community for the next couple of weeks. But I fought it. I kept myself busy as I could. I logged more flight hours in those weeks after than I ever had in my life. I thought that what I did might be erased somehow if I kept myself busy. It would just go away.” I stopped. I was crying now.
“Another night two weeks later, I was flying back from up the coast. Bone tired. My head tried to tell me that the light of it in the dusk was a dump fire. But I knew long before I flew over. When I flew over my home, my home was a smoking pit. I knew then, I knew as sure as anything I’ve ever known. My family was dead. Gone.”
I looked up at Koosis, and his eyes met mine for a moment. No judgment.
“I flew in over the river
beside my house, people screaming voiceless over the roar of my engine, frantic, crying. I turned around and came in too fast on purpose, dropped my flaps on purpose and pointed the nose down when I saw nothing was left of my life anymore. All dead. I wrecked my plane on the river.”
I smiled through my tears now. “Me, I tried to end it.”
Cold air on my gums where my front teeth should have been. “I tried. Fucking volunteer fire department showed up just in time to pull me from my plane as it sank into the river. Not fast enough to save my wife and two boys. But fast enough to save me. I smashed my head good on the steering wheel.” The scars, the missing teeth, told my story. Why did I need to?
We sat for a long time and looked out at the bay. The tide was good for their leaving, for their getting off the mudflats. His wife emerged from the tent. I waved. She ignored us as she walked out to the bush behind. She walked stiffly with her age, and I knew she grinned that very moment at her slight to me. “Ki shawenihtakoson,” I said to Koosis. You are a blessed man.
“Ever lucky,” I said in English. “I lived and swore to myself I’d never fly a plane again. Funny thing, though. The community got together and raised the funds and had my plane rebuilt.”
“It’s come to some good for you, then,” Koosis said. “It’s allowed you to get up here.”
I looked at him. “Did you already know I flew myself up here?”
“Me, I’m old enough to know a lot of things, Sasquatch with Boots On.”
I looked down.
“Me,” old Koosis said. He changed to English. “All I know, all I learned is wherever you go, there you are.”
Not too helpful, old man. I looked to him for more.
“I once walked from Attawapiskat to Moosonee long ago, in winter,” he continued. That was a hundred-and-sixty-mile walk. I thought of my half-brother Antoine suddenly. Koosis would know him. “I’d got drunk, me, beat up a man so bad I thought I killed him. So I went home, packed a bag, and walked.” He smiled at the memory. “I left at night. Took me five days. I almost froze to death each night. Almost starved. But eventually I made it to Moosonee. The cops were waiting for me. I spent a week in jail, but at least I was warm. Turns out the one I beat, he lived. Didn’t press charges against me. So I walked back home.”
He asked me for a cigarette. I rolled two.
“Me. I nearly died for what I done. Nearly froze and starved. I did what I did without knowing I was doing it.” He lit the cigarette and went back to organizing his freighter.
The next couple of hours I helped them drop their tent and fold and roll it, helped them carry the small wood stove into the boat. They’d packed the boat well, left nothing of their presence on shore but a fire circle and some cut wood and feathers.
Koosis worked the tiller, and his wife sat in the bow, their two grandchildren on the seat between them. I sat on a rock beside my father’s Mauser, fighting the urge to roll another smoke, knowing my supply was lower than it should be. The children waved to me. Their grandparents sat straight-backed, peering forward, still as stone in the boat.
When they disappeared on the horizon, I walked up to their camp circle and kicked through the dead ashes. Nothing better to do. A pair of moosehide mitts, beaded and well sewn, lay on a rock where the entrance of their tent stood a couple of hours ago. Smiling, I pulled them on. Perfect. My hands glowed with the warmth. Prettiest mitts I ever saw. The beadwork was intricate. It must have taken her dozens of hours. A goose on one. On the other a polar bear head. Usually, the kookums make matching beadwork. But this old one. I forgave her. I’d wear them with thanks in the coming months.
I had nothing left to do but head back to my camp. The thought of being alone again crushed my chest. I picked up my pack and stuffed the mitts inside, turned to the rifle, and decided I should just leave it there in its blanket. But walking away, I knew I couldn’t. This was part of me resting on a rock, the bay ready to one day claim it. I went back and picked it up, carried it under my arm down the shore, up the creek, and eventually into the bush to my lake. I didn’t tell old Koosis what came after the fire, before the funeral. The worst of it all.
The town mourned for me, but I was so wrecked I didn’t know it. I didn’t know the time, what hour, what day. The hospital stitched me up and sent me home with sedatives. I took them with bottles of rye when my parents left me alone long enough. It took a week before I was ready for the funeral of my three.
That morning, despite my mother telling me not to, I showed up to the funeral parlour early. Not much of a parlour at all. An old home near the church, the basement used for preparing the dead. In the days since the death of my two boys and my wife, I could no longer see their faces no matter how hard I tried. I’d left to fly out early enough in the morning that the boys still slept in their beds. I kissed her, my Helen, on the forehead, and she muttered see you tonight in her sleep. Still dark in the house. Only shadows on their faces. And this was what I was left with. Shadows on faces.
I went to the parlour a few hours before the funeral and asked the undertaker to see my family. He told me it was not a good thing, that I would regret it. I grew angrier each time I asked and he said no. But it was my family. I pushed past and down to the basement. The caskets, two small and a larger one beside it, sat there in the fluorescent light. They were sealed. I stood by them, by you, my family, and felt your presence for the first time since you were alive. But something was missing. Something gone that can’t ever come back.
For the first time I felt what finality means.
I began to shake, not wanting to believe what lay inside. A horrible joke was being played on me. I could stop the world and turn it back to the morning before I left. You were not dead, just angry at me, and had taken our boys down to Timmins because you found out. You talked all the others into playing along. You wanted to teach me a lesson.
I went to your casket first. My hands moved without me asking them to. I watched them. Watched them push up on the lid that wouldn’t give. The hands searched for a lock. I pushed up harder and the top gave to it. The stink of talcum and of burnt wood. The hands lifted up so that my eyes saw what they did. Not you. Not you, my darling. I dropped the lid. Not you in there.
I went to the other two caskets, wanting to prove again that this wasn’t you. Again the shock of what I saw, again the disbelief that my beautiful ones could ever come to look like this. I crawled from that basement, headed for the river so that I could drown myself, but the mortician, he called my mother and father. They were waiting for me outside.
I would begin packing up my camp and leave no sign that I was here. It would take two days. I’d have to prepare my plane again, drain the oil and heat it on the stove, and hand start the prop since the battery was long dead. I’d collect all of the food that I had left and finish plucking the geese. I knew a place inland from Fort Albany, an old meeting place near the big Albany River on a smaller one that was once a trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Cree but that no one really knew about anymore. I could find shelter there, and hopefully a moose or two. They were now ending their rut and travelling inland, but maybe I’d spot a straggler.
Breaking out of the bush, I saw the ice on the edges of my lake was melting in the sunshine. A nice afternoon waited. I’d eat some goose and fight the drinking of another bottle of rye. I’d gone through half my case. Still worse, I was well past halfway through my tobacco. It was time to tighten the belt. Winter was coming, and it would be hard.
Three hundred yards or so from my camp, I heard the tearing of fabric, the smashing of glass. Fuck. People? Something big. Something with uncaring hands. I began to run toward it then stopped. Christ. More smashing. Too big to be wolves. Something big. Black bear? I dropped my pack and untied the blanket from around my father’s rifle, found the clip and the rounds in my jacket pocket, struggled to slip five shells into the clip and smack it into the belly.
Running now, then slowing as I came closer, I dropped and crawled throu
gh the last of the bush. The crack of wood splintering, and then the huff and snot-filled draw of breath, forced me to stand. A bear. A huge white one. A polar bear. She’d chewed through my askihkan roof and had collapsed the whole thing. My goose rack was no longer, just shreds of bone and broken boughs on the ground.
I slipped the bolt of my rifle back, then forward, lifted it to my shoulder, and aimed through the scope. The glass lens was fogged. Goddamn it. I’d been careless in my keeping of it out here. I raised the rifle above the bear. Maybe the noise would scare it off. I pulled the trigger, hoping it still worked. The rifle barked when I fired it into the air. I swear I heard the rifle sigh. The bear took no notice.
I slid the bolt back and ejected the old cartridge, then slipped another into the barrel. This time, as the bear began ripping through my packs of winter clothes, I took aim just behind the shoulder, the white mass of it filling the misty eyepiece. I tensed my finger on the trigger and stared into a winter kaleidoscope.
28
PICK UP, MUM
When I take the elevator up today, I peek into Moshum and Kookum’s room, and I see that his bed is empty. The old woman is awake, I think. She moans out like she’s lost him. Sylvina walks by in her scrubs and says hello to me. Eva’s still off till tomorrow. I’m not used to being here in broad daylight. The deep freeze has finally broken, and the grey clouds that announce a coming snow throw a pallor through the hospital’s windows.