A Quality of Light (31 page)

“Damn. You’re
Ojibway!
Don’t you know that the guys who started the Movement were Ojibway?”

“The what?”

“The
Movement!
AIM? The American Indian Movement?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Jesus, Josh! AIM is where it’s at! Didn’t you hear about the way they took over Alcatraz? The protest camp they’re planning at Mount Rushmore? About the Little Red Schoolhouse in Minneapolis? About all the education programs they’re running to
teach their people the true history of North America instead of the bullshit one the government’s been teaching and preaching in schools and books? Man, AIM’s the future, Josh!”

“How do you know all this?’

“How do I know? I know because I
read
, Josh. I read things like
Black Elk Speaks, A Century of Dishonor, The Long Death, Akwesasne Note, The New Indians.
You ever read any of those, Josh?”

“I never even heard of them,” I said, embarrassed.

“Well, now you have. Maybe you should read them. You’ll learn that there’s more to history than what we get in school. Maybe you’ll learn that there’s more to being a righteous warrior than fishing, hunting and telling stories. Maybe you’ll learn that you got responsibilities as a warrior. That there’s a price to be paid for the survival of the people,” he said, almost bitterly.

“A price to be paid? What are you talking about?”

“Security, man. The needs of the many over the needs of the one. Today is a good day to die. The spirit of Crazy Horse. That’s what I mean.”

“What’s a crazy horse?”

“Only the greatest warrior the people had! Leader of the Dog Soldiers, helped kick Custer’s ass at Little Big Horn. They don’t tell you about Crazy Horse and all the warriors up there?”

“No.”

“Man. What kind of Indians they got up there, anyway?”

“Ojibways.”

“Not my kind of Ojibways,” he said and hung up.

W
e grow into ourselves suddenly. One day you awake to find that your feet are too large for your legs. There are sprouts of hair in new places, and the soft swell of muscle in your arms, legs and back seem to say that you could run, lift, play and endure forever. Your eyes become sensitive to light, color, texture and the
bright porcelain nature of girls. Your voice leaves its home in your throat and resides somewhere lower in your physiology, a deeper, more primal place that both excites and confuses you. You find yourself in front of the mirror for hours, staring steadily at the face you thought you’d recognize always, lost in the angular cut of jaw and temple, the sudden cliffs of cheekbone that replace the cool roundnesses of boyhood.

As you begin to move across this new expanse of territory you experience a strange push and pull. A part of you wants to step back into the lush familiarity of childhood as much as another part wants to circumnavigate this bold new world — explore and chart its depths and nether reaches. Life being what it is, of course, means the explorer always wins out. Oh, you’ll step back across that line from time to time as life requires but it will always be as an itinerant traveler, a nomad who comes to gather memory in his arms like kindling, tinder for the fires that burn long into the hollow of solitary nights on the stark plains of memory.

We grew into ourselves in the first part of the new decade. I was as tall as my father, throwing hay bales up into the same wagons I’d ridden on scant summers before, while Johnny too was thicker, wider suddenly. Grades Ten and Eleven passed in a blur and when our worlds stopped whirring as school began in the fall of 1972 we were seniors, seventeen. I drove myself to Cape Croker now. Johnny had bought himself a ’67 Mustang with his earnings from the hardware store, which was prospering unbelievably by then. He picked me up for school, speeding down Highway 9 rocking to the music of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.

Johnny had grown his hair out into a long ponytail and he wore the standard Seventies uniform of jeans, desert boots, T-shirt and jean jacket. He was muscular, and his long hair and arresting blue eyes along with the cherry-red convertible made him a sought-after guy with the females of the senior class. He shrugged it off, paying no heed to the attention he was getting in the hallways. I still favored black cotton dress pants, white shirts and ties. While this didn’t exactly place me at the top of the most-eligible-bachelor
list, I had been dating Mary Ellen Reid since late in our Grade Eleven year, something Johnny couldn’t figure out at all.

“Man, I just can’t see it,” he said one day, the wind whipping his hair around as he drove. “Mary Ellen absolutely trashed you back in Nine. Now she’s like the foxiest piece in school, you’re the same drab-dressing, peace-preaching, Bible-thumping nerd you’ve always been, and you’re the hottest couple in school. What gives?”

I laughed. “People change, Johnny. Mary Ellen joined the church a year after I did. She says that whole episode back in Grade Nine really opened her eyes to what’s necessary in this world. I guess you and I were a pretty strong example of what real friendship is about and she started to look for a God of her own after that. We have a lot in common now. And besides, drab-dressing, peace-preaching, Bible-thumping nerds need love too!”

“Great. Most of us pray to get a girl and you get a girl to pray!” he said with a wicked little grin.

“What about you? I never see you with girls.”

“Yeah, well. I see a few now and then. Nothing serious. We go out, we touch, we feel, I give them what they want and we go our separate ways. Casual, you know? Nothin’ permanent. No strings, no promises, no broken hearts.”

“You’re a playboy!”

He laughed. “Not really. I just don’t want to get tied into anything.”

“They let you be that loose?”

“Loose? It’s not being loose, Josh. It’s being honest. I’m not a stick around forever kind of guy. They know that, I know that, no one gets hurt.”

On the surface he hadn’t really changed. We followed the baseball standings as closely as ever. He’d become a staunch advocate of the National League while I remained a loyal American Leaguer. He had a New York Mets decal on his back bumper and a Tom Seaver autographed baseball fastened to the dashboard. He’d ordered me an aerial photo of Fenway Park and a Red Sox banner, which I hung proudly over my bed. Farm work and his duties at the
store took up much of our time after school but we found opportunities for jaunts to the Harriston drive-in, hanging out at the Walkerton A&W, working out in the school weight room and late-night games of catch with a Day-Glo orange softball Johnny’d spray-painted. Still, protracted silences plagued us. We would find ourselves mired in them and could only clamber out by going our separate ways, reconnecting later.

Where he went when he was alone I never knew, but I spent many solitary hours studying college calendars, travel brochures and my growing collection of Indian paraphernalia. I had my own hand drum now — a present from Jacqueline’s eldest son — a pair of eagle feathers from Jacqueline for learning as much as I had, some carvings, artwork, sweetgrass we’d picked and braided, rocks, a vibrantly colored blanket I’d been given at the annual powwow and a beaded deerskin pouch Jacqueline said I would fill one day with medicines. Each article said something about the self that had lain dormant, undiscovered for fifteen years. I knew now that being Indian was, as Jacqueline had said, an inside truth.

We were eating supper about two weeks before Thanksgiving when Jacqueline called. She said I was old enough and knowledgeable enough to partake in a spiritual ceremony and invited me to come on the Thanksgiving weekend for a special sweat lodge she was leading. She had told me about the sweat lodge ceremony but I had never seen or entered one.

“You gotta fast the four days before, my boy,” she said. “Sweat lodge is for purifying yourself and fasting helps. You fast and pray for the four days before. When you come you bring some tobacco, maybe some colored cloth.”

“What’s all that stuff for, son?” my mother asked when I explained things.

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll do it,” I said.

“And the sweat lodge ceremony is for purifying yourself?’ she asked.

“Yes. Jacqueline says it’s the most respected of all Ojibway rituals. It symbolizes a return to the innocence we’re born with. The
lodge is built in the shape of a womb and we crawl into it humbly, on our hands and knees. We pray and sing while we’re inside using the four elements of life — fire, water, air and earth — to center ourselves. We sit in darkness symbolizing ignorance. The light we emerge into when we crawl out of the lodge at the end of the ceremony represents the gift of awareness, faith and enlightenment. It gets real hot and we sweat out impurities. Physical, mental and spiritual ones, too. The heat reminds us of adversity, and enduring four rounds of prayer and songs teaches us that faith and belief will get us through adversity. It’s a vital thing, really,” I explained, hoping I was getting the essence of it all.

“Not bad for a heathen ritual, eh, Mother?” my father said, clapping me on the back.

“It sounds like a wonderful experience,” she said. “We should all get to be Indians once in a while.”

When I told Johnny about it he was silent for a long time. We were slurping shakes at the A&W after school and he stared out the window with his straw in his mouth. “The Sioux call it
inipi.
Did you know that?” he asked.

“No. I guess there’s an Ojibway word for it too, but I don’t know it,” I replied.

“Never asked?” he said sharply.

“No,” I said, surprised.

“Hmmph. I’da asked. So your parents are okay with this? They don’t figure it’s too pagan for a nice Christian boy?” he said, staring out the window again.

“They’re okay. Ma was so impressed she even said everyone should get to be an Indian. They’re behind me all the way on this.”

“They know what it’s about?”

“Yeah. I told them.”

“You told them? Don’t you know that you gotta be initiated?” he said harshly. “Prepared. Like you were. Learning the basics first, the understanding. If just anybody could do a sweat everybody’d be doing it. That’s how the whiteman’s been able to steal ceremonies. Because loudmouths spill the beans about everything.
Indians gotta protect their ceremonies and rituals, keep them secret, not just share them with any Tom, Dick or Harry who asks!”

“My folks aren’t any Tom, Dick or Harry.”

“Still.”

“Still nothing. I wouldn’t be learning about any of this if it weren’t for their support. And besides, Jacqueline says we’re supposed to share our beliefs with others because you never know who might be lost and need help to find their way to the Creator.”

“She must mean others as in other
Indians.”

“No, others as in anybody.”

“Can’t see that. You ever hear the story about the thousand-eyed worm? See, there was this Cherokee elder a long time ago, before anybody ever knew about white people. He dreams one night that he’s sitting on a high rocky place looking towards the east. As he looks he sees a long shiny line lighting up the eastern horizon. It’s all glittery and shining like a thousand eyes and as he watches it, he sees it moving, getting closer and closer, wiggling across the land like a huge worm. He wakes up and can’t figure out what this dream means but he tells the people about it anyway. For years and years the people keep telling themselves about the thousand-eyed worm that the elder saw, with its thousand glittering eyes. No one ever figured out what it meant until one night a bunch of Cherokee are standing on a high rocky ridge and they see the lights from cities and towns on the eastern seaboard winking and glittering away in the distance just like —”

“Like a thousand-eyed worm!”

“Yeah. Like a thousand-eyed worm. The elder saw the arrival of the whiteman years before they got here. He saw the way they’d worm their way across the land, their cities and towns lighting up the sky like a thousand glittery eyes and the mouths underneath those eyes gobbling everything up, destroying everything. That’s what he saw.”

“So what’s the point?” I asked.

“The point, Josh, is that we never knew what it meant before but now we do. We have to protect ourselves from the worm before
it gobbles up everything. Especially ceremonies,” he said bitterly.

“We?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We, the warriors. Or at least, those brave enough to be warriors.