"We're not going through the back door," Jona said, his voice very low. "I don't know who's inside."
We crawled under the fence, climbed the lintels on the outer wall. Norway House was only two stories. We hauled ourselves up onto the flat, dirty roof. Jona took a deep breath, said a quick prayer, and leaned over the roof's edge. He glanced very quickly in the dusty window. He pulled back and held his finger over his lips.
It was six minutes before he got the masking tape out of the bag. He leaned over the roof's side, the box cutter between his teeth, and I held his knees so he wouldn't fall. He stretched tape over the window, and then he sliced through it with the box cutter, and the glass shattered--although I didn't hear it. It didn't make a sound. He slithered out of my grasp and in through the window and I dropped down on the lower lintel. I followed him inside the building.
We were in a concrete corridor, empty, dim, the lights on the ceiling fluorescent and orange. I felt so tired I was afraid I was going to pass out and leave Jona on his own. I forced my eyes open, my legs forward. I thought about Rabbit. Jona put a half-moon clip in his revolver and he threw open the doors on his left, quick and quiet and ready to shoot. I did the same on the right. The first few rooms were empty dormitories. The fourth was a kind of utilities closet.
"I hate going in blind," Jona muttered, pulling his door closed.
"Hey!" someone shouted.
We both turned. We both fired. The shots were silent. The guard jerked and hit the floor, red spreading underneath his body.
"Damn it," Jona said. "Where are these kids?"
I pushed open the door next to me. I froze.
If you'd told me one year ago that I was going to have to storm Buchenwald twice I never would have believed you. But when I looked around the wide, stony room I realized I was in Buchenwald again. There were no beds and no lamps. The only light was the moonlight pouring in through the grimy window. A few of the children wore plasticky green prison uniforms. A few wore nothing at all. All of them were in various stages of starvation. Some were so thin their chests were blown out, their eyes; I could count every rib and every heartbeat. Some lay hunched over, face-first, and if the bruises on their necks were to be trusted, the cold and rotten stench, they were already dead.
I reached for the nearest child, a little girl with skinny arms. Jona grabbed my arm and stopped me.
"We can't," he said, his voice hollow.
The last time we stormed Buchenwald we had an entire army behind us. We had the United States behind us. We didn't have any of that this time around.
My throat convulsed. The walls of my stomach clenched and pressed against my spine. I might have retched if my body weren't already empty.
"We can't," Jona said. "We can't..."
I strode across the room. I climbed across the little bodies, the broken bodies. I hated myself just then. In my family the men grow up to hate themselves.
Rabbit sat hunched against the wall, his dark hair clipped short and his cheeks hollow with hunger. His mouth was white and cracked and his little arm was flecked with bloody needle marks. He looked up at me, and I looked down at him, and I could have burst out crying, and I don't know how I didn't.
"Oh, shit," I heard Jona say.
I heard a body crack to the floor. I heard another. I scooped Rabbit in my arms, careful. He still looked like Rabbit and I thanked God for that. I thanked God he had only been missing a few weeks. His head lolled on my shoulder. I wasn't sure he knew what was going on. I climbed back across the floor and followed Jona out into the corridor. We climbed across the bodies, across the shattered glass, the ribbons of tape.
"You hand him to me," Jona said.
He went out the window, hoisted himself over the roof. He reached down and I gave Rabbit to him and he pulled my son over the side. I lowered myself onto the lintel, shivering in the night air.
And then the bullet hit me.
My shoulder jerked and tore open. I tasted the blood when it hit the air. I lifted my revolver and I fired. I didn't even know what I was firing at. When the chamber ran empty I shoved a half-moon clip into the cylinder. I emptied it all over again. My vision swam white and red and white and the pain in my temples was blinding, pounding, almost rhythmic. My legs gave way underneath me. I felt the lintel slide out from under my feet, felt the cold air cutting my cheeks and the ground slamming into my arm.
At least Buchenwald was only two stories.
Norway House. I forgot. We were calling it Norway House these days.
My eyes snapped closed. It came as a relief.
* * * * *
When they snapped open again I saw a soft orange ceiling carved with gold spirals. My whole arm felt wrapped in pain, a dull ache sitting between my ears. Something must have crawled down my throat and died because I tasted carrion when I breathed in, my tongue like chalk.
The bed underneath me was moving. I tried to sit up and couldn't. I smelled perfume.
"You awake?" Jona asked. I couldn't see him.
"Where's Rabbit?" I asked.
"Right there," Jona said.
I turned my head and Rabbit's head was on the pillow, his little hands curled around a fistful of my shirt. My arm must have been bandaged because it smelled stale, vaguely medicinal. I wanted so badly to touch Rabbit's hair, to feel his belly when he breathed. I started to lift my hand and a splitting pain shot through my arm.
"Don't," Jona said quickly. "The drabani says you broke it."
We were in the vardo. The wagon was moving. I didn't remember getting back to the kumpania. I remembered rotting children, starving children. I swallowed bile, slick and real.
"He's okay," Jona said.
He wasn't okay. Rabbit wasn't okay. He didn't smell like winter magic anymore. His hair was short. His sweet memories were gone.
"He couldn't eat much," Jona went on. "But..."
Whatever Jona meant to say, he never did.
"They're kidnapping our children," I said. "They're starving our children."
I thought it was over. Cowboys and Indians--I thought that was over.
"Now you know why we had to go to war," Jona muttered. "Had to put up a good front. Couldn't let the world know we're doing the same stuff over here."
We'd left children to starve to death. We were soldiers. Soldiers were supposed to fight for the people who didn't know how to defend themselves.
"What are we going to do?" I asked.
I kept my voice down for Rabbit. I didn't want to wake him. I was afraid of what would happen when he woke up.
"What can we really do?" Jona said dismally. He pulled his chair over to the bed and I finally saw his hands, pale gold, his profile, earthy and soft. "We have no power. We have no army. How do you stand up to the world's leading superpower when no one stands behind you?"
"We have to," I said to the ceiling.
"How?" Jona asked me.
I couldn't see how. I couldn't see it. I squeezed my eyes shut so I wouldn't cry. I heard it when Jona breathed, deep and low and sad.
"Yazma was right," Jona said. "Your soul is young."
Yazma was right. Too many hungry children. Not enough hands to feed them.
My son was never going home again.
* * * * *
I sat up against the headboard. Rabbit woke up and Jona fed him chickpea soup. Rabbit only managed two bites before declaring he was full. I thought of the man in Buchenwald with the wooly hair and the grandfatherly smile. Two bites out of his rice candy and he was full.
"Do I have to go back?" Rabbit asked.
I had to strain my ears just to make out what he was saying. He used to talk so loudly. They'd taken his baby voice away. They'd taken my baby away.
"No, tchalai," Jona said. He stirred the spoon in the papery bowl. "You don't have to go back."
"Are they gonna stick me?" Rabbit asked.
"No more," Jona said. "You'll stay with us. It'll be just us men. We’ll protect you."
I wrapped my free arm
around Rabbit. He stiffened and my heart broke. My chest filled with blood, my belly with poison.
"I'm sorry," I said, my voice like gravel. "I'm sorry I let them take you. I'm sorry, Rabbit."
"He didn't," Jona said. I wished he wouldn't. "He looked for you. As soon as they took you away your dad looked for you."
Rabbit had no answer. Little as he was, it terrified me. He'd always had an answer. He was a space man, a detective, a fisherman. He wanted to marry Lisette. His pudgy fists were gone. He was gone. My little baby was gone. I didn't know half the things that had happened to him and I wasn't sure I ever would.
"Can I go to bed?" Rabbit asked.
"Sure you can," Jona said. He was remarkably calm through all this, almost like he didn't have time to panic if somebody else was already panicking. "If you want any water, I've got some."
Rabbit lay down with his head on the pillow. My hands ached to hurt somebody. No one was allowed to touch my son. No country, least of all an illegitimate country that only existed by breaking every treaty it had ever signed.
* * * * *
When the vardo stopped I dragged myself outside to look at our surroundings. The Gypsies had set up camp on abandoned farmland. The owner must have walked away when his lease ran out. The weeds poking out of the hard soil were cracked and green-gray. A mess of vines covered one whole side of a sagging barn, tugging it toward the earth. Overhead a murder of crows cried ravenously, fierce and black on the patchy white sky.
My son was never going home again. He'd never see his friends again, his mother or his grandmother. He'd never dance the Thirst Dance, the Mask Dance, the Rain Dance. He wasn't allowed to grow up Cree. Kill the Indian, Save the Man. I feared for the man he'd grow into.
"You're awake."
I turned around when Yazma came over to me. I was glad to see her wearing shoes and a sweater. It was cold out here.
"I saw your son," Yazma said.
I nodded, because I didn't know what to say.
Yazma sat down in the parched, windy grass. I sat with her, mostly because I felt dead on my feet. I didn't really know how I hadn't died yet. I guess maybe God--whoever he was--liked to drag out the uncertainty, the pain.
"Your boy's going to be alright," Yazma said. "I was a child when I was in Jasenovac. I turned out alright."
She was still a child. She didn't even know it. I didn't think she'd turned out alright at all. Children shouldn't take to the streets at night to feed themselves.
I thought: At least she was eating.
I thought: America was starving our children, and there was nothing we could do except let them die.
"You'll get used to it," Yazma said. "It's not so bad. You'll get used to running all your life. Pretty soon you won't remember what it was like to stay in one place."
"I'm sorry," I told her.
"Why?" she asked.
America was the father that never wanted to be a father. He was the White Whale that took to the icy waters to escape his own shadow. Why he hated his children so much was something I couldn't grasp. Children were made to be loved. It's the one thing they're owed in this life. And we have the nerve to withhold it from them.
"Here," Yazma said suddenly.
She took one of the flowers off of her live headscarf. She offered it to me. It was round and shimmery, with long white petals.
I took it between my fingers. A jolt coursed through me.
"Where did you get this?" I asked.
Yazma gave me a funny look. "It was growing over by the weeds."
She got up and ambled away. I turned the flower in my hand. Distantly I admired its opalescent sheen.
Peyote flowers grow in all kinds of strange climates. Deserts and limestone and rainshadows. They don’t need sunlight. They don’t need water. They're so resilient, so formidable, they'll probably still be here long after the human race is gone. Long after the white whales stop singing their song.
I got up, my bad arm hanging loose at my side. I climbed the ladder back into the vardo. Jona sat by the chest of drawers, scrubbing his hands with sweetgrass. Rabbit lay on his side on the bed, his eyes blinking slowly open.
"Dad?" Rabbit said.
I sat with him. I tucked the peyote flower in his short hair. My heart was breaking and I realized the world was crumbling around us. I realized the world was ending.
My head didn't hurt. My joints didn't hurt. For the first time in weeks I felt like eating something. I wanted honey candy.
"Did you know peyote songs are healing songs?" I asked Rabbit.
He peered at me with his big brown eyes. They weren't as bright as they used to be. At least they were still brown.
Jona dried his hands and sat on the sitting stool. I couldn't read the expression on his face. I tried to imagine what it was like to watch the world end when you were only nineteen years old. I tried to figure out how the hungry monster hadn't swallowed him alive.
I got into bed with Rabbit. He put his little hands on my shirt. He was my baby. They'd killed the baby in him but he was still my baby. No one was allowed to take that from me.
"Omisimaw Pesim, iyana he ne," I sang. I sang beneath my breath. I touched my fingers to Rabbit's hair. The white whales sang the history of the world. As long as they kept singing the world wasn't allowed to end. "Sakastowa, kikisepa, iyana he ne..."
In 1942, 1,300 Native American children were shipped to Norway House on Little Playgreen Lake, where they were starved as a control group in nutritional experiments. By 1947 the experiments had quadrupled, spreading to facilities in Port Alberni, Kenora, Schubenacadie, and Lethbridge.
Experiments of this nature continued until 1954, the same year the US government offered asylum to more than two dozen Nazi officials, including Otto von Bolschwing and Arthur Rudolph, who respectively went on to work for the CIA and NASA.
The US and Canada have subsequently refused to release more than 7,000 sealed documents chronicling the torture and murder of Native American children.
(Timothy Appleby, Globe and Mail, 1997)
(Judy Feigin & Mark M. Richard, The Office of Special Investigations, December 2006)
(Ian Mosby, Histoire Sociale, May 2013)
Rose Christo, White Whale
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