A Quality of Light (37 page)

“You asked yourself that? And what are you? Red … or white?”

I stared back intently at him. “I’m red. I always have been. I was created to be an Ojibway male. I just happen to believe that I’m also supposed to preach.”

“How can you? You’ve been to the sweat lodge! You’ve smoked the pipe! I haven’t even done those things but at least I respect
them enough not to dishonor them by turning my back on it all and reaching out to the whiteman way! There’s frontlines out there, Josh, and the people need all of us to stand there with them. This generation, we gotta be the defenders of the way. If we don’t fight, it dies, and when it dies, the people die!”

It was like I could see the chasm between us. My understanding was built on the tangible experience of healing myself of shame, confusion and sorrow, the palliative confutation of garbled emotions. Johnny’s was forged in anger, resentment and a need to be anything, anyone other than the spawn of his father, a wounding deep and immeasurable. Maybe it was beginnings of the intuitive therapeutic sense I would develop that told me that this was a gap bridgeable only through a mutual healing. That as long as one of us continued to deny the source of the ache, confront and disarm it, we would be shouting forever across a yawning valley, believing the echoes of our youthful voices, our friendship, would one day call out answers. But they would be just that — mere echoes, dissipated and frail, insistent with the vocabulary of denial. Johnny needed to go and pursue whatever form of invention or creation that he would, and I needed to tell him that I would always be waiting, pacing the far rim of healing.

“You’re right, Johnny,” I said, quietly. “You’re right. There are frontlines. There are battle lines everywhere. Survival means struggle. My father’s battle lines are drawn here, across this soil, and his struggle is to keep it arable, to replenish as well as reap. For a while I thought that my lines were drawn here too. But they aren’t. You say that the frontlines are
out there
somewhere and you want to go find them, stand on them, be a defender, a protector, a warrior. Maybe yours are, Johnny, maybe yours are. But frontlines are everywhere.”

He looked at me, quizzical, keen, and I sensed he was fighting to retain his anger. He placed one foot on the bottom rail and leaned forward, arms folded on the fence.

“I can’t stand on your frontlines and be effective,” I said. “All I know, all I was raised in and all I’ve been taught, by my parents,
Pastor Chuck, Jacqueline, the pipe and the sweat, is that the spiritual solution is the only solution. When everything is said and done, every form of survival depends on spiritual survival. That’s what I believe. And that’s where I can be a warrior. So I’m going to follow through. Just like you are. And when I’m ready, when I’ve learned enough, I’m coming back to Cape Croker. I’m bringing back what I’ve learned and offering it back to the people. I’ll offer back the lessons I’ve learned about finding God, about finding myself, about finding peace.”

He nodded all the time I spoke. When I finished he stood up straight and shook himself briefly. The look he offered was neutral.

“And how will you
offer
your wisdom to the
dead
, preacher? How will you console
them?
You’re right about one thing. This is a war of attrition. We’ve been under siege for generations and our frontlines are everywhere. But you know what? All you’ve done is create your own marketplace to keep on selling out. So, go and learn your whiteman religion and meet your whiteman God. But do the people a favor and don’t come back. The real warriors will protect them. We’ll shelter them. Oh. And when you stand before your Creator
just as you are
, I only hope He’s as color blind as you! What does your Bible say? And I shall make you whiter than snow? Well, it looks like it’s working, doesn’t it? Too bad neither of you can do anything about the skin, though.”

And he walked away.

He neither stopped to speak to my parents, who stood on the back porch, nor slowed in his car to take the turn onto Highway 9. He disappeared over Conroy’s hill with a squeal of tires and the angry whine of engine.

His grandfather called the next day to say he’d disappeared overnight, and I wondered whether he’d bothered looking back at all, whether he’d watched the glimmer of Mildmay recede deeper and deeper into the depths of his rearview mirror until it, his past, his boyhood and me, fell away like a carapace, like the glass itself, settling in slivers within his psyche, the residue of good-bye.

“G
ood-bye wasn’t in his vocabulary, eh?” Nettles said eventually.

“What?” I muttered.

“Good-bye. The G-word. He didn’t know how to say it. Never had to before. The abandoned ones are like that. They get so used to being left they can’t handle being the leaver. They don’t wanna feel like they’re becoming like the abandoners who raised them. So they create a crisis just so they don’t have to use the G-word.”

“Are you saying he knew what my response would be?”

“Maybe not to the letter. But, yeah. He knew. Anger was his out.”

“I’ve never considered that, but you could be right,” I said. Nettles amazed me with the scope of his perception beneath the bumbling charm.

“You wanna know what I think, Joshua?” he asked. “I think he was pissed for a while. I think he got hot the moment you started going to the reserve to visit. What’s her name? Jacqueline? Next thing you know you got a peace pipe in your kisser, takin’ the sweat bath thing, beatin’ on a drum, doin’ the whole noble savage production number. Everything that Gebhardt wanted for himself. Far as he figured, he was supposed to be the Injun. The way he wrote the script, he was gonna ride across the prairie shouting the good news and glad tidings to you, not the other way around,” Nettles said, lounging in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head.

“You may be right,” was all I could counter.

“Think about it. You gave him the only role he ever had. He brought you everything right from the get go. He brought you baseball. He brought you the blood brother thing. Hell, he brought you the whole Injun trip in the first place. Way he figured,
he
was the hunter and the gatherer.”

“So the books and the political knowledge were his compensation?”

“Maybe not so much. Maybe he woulda latched onto that anyway. But I think the books and the warrior guy from the juvie joint were the ways he figured he’d be able to lead you again. He needed you, Joshua. He needed you to need him. You were the whole shebang. A brother. Someone to count on. Someone to share secrets with. Someone to care for. Then you went and grew up on him. Every needy person in the world takes everyone else’s growin’ up as growin’ away. ’cause they only understand one direction. Away. Gone. Finito. He figured you wouldn’t need him any more. That you’d find your way to Injun without him.”

It hurt to think our friendship had been built on emotional insecurity instead of the light and magic I’d always regarded it in. Still, there was credence to what Nettles said, and thinking about the way things had developed I realized that the distancing between us had begun as I edged closer to resolving my cultural quandaries. As Jacqueline had brought me closer to myself, she’d also, unwittingly, taken me further from my friend.

“So, in part, I suppose, I created him. This situation,” I said, flooded with realization.

“Correctamundo. That’s what he figures too. That’s why he wants you here. This is like full circle for him. He’s the warrior he always wanted to be. He wants you to see him in his finery, all the feathers and flash. He wants to tell you that he was right all along. Because you never went back, did you?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. I haven’t felt ready. I’ve always gone back to visit, to maintain the connection to Jacqueline, but no, I haven’t gone back like I said I would.” I suddenly felt very guilty.

“He knows that, obviously.”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“Bingo. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

“Yes. I suppose there is.”

“I figured there had to be. You saw him again and you fought again, didn’t you? He drove the spear in deeper, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, quietly.

“You wanna tell me about it now or do you wanna sleep on it? Your call, but either way you gotta spill the beans, Joshua. I need to know goin’ in tomorrow where the ball’s placed. It’s fourth down here. Kick or try, you know.”

“I’d like to think about it. I need to think about it.”

“Fair enough. You know where your room is. Fridge is open twenty-four hours. And Joshua?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not tryin’ to play the stiff prick here. I’m not tryin’ to rip your memories apart on you. It’s just that we’re dealin’ for life here and I kinda figure life is what’s gonna diffuse this thing. His life. Yours. Shit, maybe even mine.”

“I know, David. No offense taken.”

“Okay. You need me, call me. Just wake me like my wife does.”

“How’s that?”

“Kiss me on the ear and tell me that you love me.”

I laughed. “Sounds like a spiritual awakening to me.”

Nettles chuckled. “Adds a whole different meaning to getting up in the middle of the night, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “and probably in your case being raised from the dead as well!”

“Raised from the dead. That’s a good one. You’re okay, Reverend, you’re okay,” he said from the stairs.

B
en Gebhardt died in the spring I graduated from college. He never left the sofa in those final years. His wife, however, had earned an accounting diploma through correspondence, proudly hung her shingle on the front porch and taken over the books for most of Mildmay’s small businesses. A young couple managed the hardware store now, and Elly Gebhardt ran her office the same way
she ran her life — silently, loyally, primly. Neither Johnny nor I made the funeral. I was knee deep cramming for final exams and Johnny had disappeared.

Shortly after, Elly had moved in with Harold, where she stayed through his passing and until her own in the fall of 1988. Old Man Givens’s place was razed by a mysterious fire, and people still talk about how she stood watching it burn, lingering there long after the firemen and rubberneckers had abandoned it. There’s a small park there now where children play late into the indigoed stretch of summer evenings. Johnny would think that ironic as hell.

My own family prospered. Len Wilton passed away suddenly in the mid-70s and, being the last in the Wilton line, had bequeathed the two hundred and forty acres his family had worked for generations to my father. The Wiltons and the Kanes had arrived in Carrick Township at the same time and I guess Len figured my father was the closest he could get to tilling the line of heredity. The Wilton acres nudged the Walkerton townline. For a while my dad rented out those acres, but as the population swelled the town fathers peeled off more and more cash for expansion into the old Wilton spread. By the time they were ready to retire from farming in the late ’80s my parents were secure. They rented out our acres, traveled and lived comfortably in that old brick house. They never minded that I would not farm the land. They were content to know that it would remain in the Kane family, and it’s still known as the Kane place despite the tenant farmers who bring it to crop each year.

Pastor Chuck married Rebecca Norton after five years of courtship. Rumor has it that he finally popped the question after Rebecca had speculated loudly and vociferously at Hilda’s Hair Heaven that the only missionary position she was ever going to see was the pastor’s head bowed in prayer. I performed the rites of matrimony. A Christian rock and roll band played long into the night, and Pastor Chuck himself took over the drums for a wild set that included his reworkings of “House of the Risin’ ‘Son’,” “I Want to Take You Higher” and “Proud Mary.” They settled into the manse, where they soon had two children, Seth and Holly. He still preaches at St. Giles.

Jacqueline continued working on the reserve. She never liked the term medicine woman, preferring instead the humbler term elder, but she was known anyway as a strong medicine woman. In the early ’80s she initiated a camp where women from every tribe and nation gathered to spend time in ceremony, meditative retreat and rest. It became so popular that they made a permanent site for it on a point on Georgian Bay. It’s called Mindemoya, or Old Woman Lodge, and is filled to capacity year round with native and non-native women. She was a special guest at my ordainment, and she also performed the traditional Ojibway marriage ritual at my wedding and is the spiritual grandmother of my son.