Everyone who had been a significant contributor to my life was still an active and essential part of it. Except Johnny Gebhardt. He had existed through the years since the end of high school as pages of intermittent letters. He never left a forwarding address, never asked to visit, never followed the letters with a phone call. Still, he’d written. I felt like home plate in the baseball game of his life: something he needed to touch, but briefly, vital only in passing.
I believe those letters were his catharsis. His way of justifying his choices. His way of arresting motion, to fix it and hold it. Allowing me to inspect it, to see it, was to give it breath so it could move again, become real. He was like an artist who needed to leave something behind, something immortal. Memory is the only afterlife possible, those letters said. He needed me. I recognized that finally. He needed me because I had been the only permanence he’d ever known. When our blood had mingled in that willow tree as ten-year-olds, we had sealed an eternal pact. For me, such loyalty was as natural as breathing, the very construct of friendship, but for Johnny it had assumed mammoth proportions, a treaty between himself and fate itself, declaring that he would always count, matter and affect. The letters were simply his part of the deal. His conversations in absentia.
I’d been back to the Hockley Valley hundreds of times since that fall of 1973. I’ve gone with Shirley. I’ve gone with my son. I’ve wandered there alone. I’ve walked that ragged little trail through the frolic of nature and emerged upon the lip of that cliff as wide-eyed
as always. I’ve dangled my feet over its vertiginous space and clambered down the fifteen feet to the narrow ledge that sits beneath two sets of names. I have reached up and placed my hand upon them, feeling the serrated bite of granite edges smoothed somewhat by time, and trailed my finger along the indented swirl and lilt of the letters, allowing the skin its memory. I touch everything with the skin of my returnings.
I wondered as I sat in the Nettles’ den whether time had made him a pilgrim too. Whether he’d made the journey back through the valley and stood with his palm pressed against the letters that spelled out the boys and young men we were together. I wondered whether pieces of his heart were buried in significant places or whether his pilgrimages and returnings were limited to the landscape of memories, the sacred and the profound cached in anonymous places. I wondered what a life without monuments must be. How a heart without elegies beats. And I wondered how deep some aches might go when left untended, unspoken, unseen.
He had brought me everything. He’d brought me to the very edge of discovery. Watching me walk towards my self must have seemed like an act of desertion. Hearing me speak of teachings and learnings must have rung as sharply as the denunciations of this father. My statements of being and becoming were the ripping away of the thongs that lashed us together, and when I chose the divergent path of religion over the way of the warrior, the abandoning must have rung like the very trumpets at Jericho.
I hadn’t heard any of it. I heard only ranting. I heard only anger. I realized then that the things we think we hear are only part of the story. That it’s not so much the words themselves we need to strive to hear. It’s the punctuation. Our hearts are buried in the punctuation.
W
ith the beeping of the alarm clock, the Nettles house became a frenzied place. Doors slammed, cryptic conversations were flung upstairs and down, radios blared, dishes clattered, phones rang and feet thumped. I might have preferred an hour or two of meditative time but still, I was grateful to be a part of a domestic hubbub.
Nettles drove one-handed, slurping coffee from an oversized plastic mug in the shape of Sylvester the Cat. While he zig-zagged between lanes I filled in the years. I had graduated in the spring of 1976 and begun my assistant pastorship at a small community gospel church in St. Catharines, Ontario, shortly after. Shirley and I were married in the spring of 1977. We were twenty-two. Jonathan was born in the fall of 1978 and I saw Johnny Gebhardt for the last time. He’d called my father from British Columbia asking for me to appear at his trial after the logging protest. I had flown out right away. We succeeded in getting him an acquittal and he’d emerged from the detention cell with a raised-fist salute and a smile.
“Same old Johnny?” Nettles asked.
“At first, yes,” I said. “It didn’t take long before everything turned ugly, though.”
“Ugly how?”
He’d walked up and grabbed me into a long, enthusiastic hug, and I’d felt grateful and happy in the arms of reunion. We’d driven in his old Mustang to a small diner where he’d voraciously piled into a huge breakfast of sausages, eggs, pancakes, toast, cereal, juice and coffee, all the while denouncing jail food and rating the local police against others he’d dealt with.
“And just how did you acquire all this specific knowledge, Johnny?” I’d asked jokingly.
He’d laid down his cutlery and leaned forward to stare at me across the table. “It’s the life,” he’d said.
“What life?” Nettles asked.
“That’s what I asked. He just smirked at me and shook his head, stuck a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, leaned a little closer and said — Indian life.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Nettles said over the rim of his plastic cup.
“Again, that’s what I asked, and he just smirked at me again in that downcasting way people do when they figure you’re ignorant of the obvious. I’ve never forgotten what he said after that. Because it wasn’t so much conversation as it was a statement, a manifesto a credo. Indian life is the only real life, he said, the only life that lets you see what this country is really all about. Its quaking political guts, he called it. When you press for your rights to equal treatment under law, your right to an education, your right to adequate housing, your right to make a living, your right to your language, then you discover your real rights as an Indian. When you press for your rights you get them read to you. You have the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, the right to a phone call.
Those
are your Aboriginal rights.
“You live the Indian life and you see that. You see that white plus might equals right. When you take a stand, you call attention to the truth and they arrest you. They say you’re obstructing justice. Canada doesn’t care about justice. The law says as long as you’re a good little Indian and stay at home and shut up we’ll protect you, we’ll serve you. Serve you with what? Serve you with a summons, serve you with notice that we’re damming the river you
fish in, that we’re flooding your homeland so we can sell power to the cities, serve you with a letter that says your land claim’s been denied, that you can’t have the house you need, that your kids are being taken away for their own protection, serve you with the one hand that’s reaching out with money while the other hand’s sneaking something away. That’s how the law serves you if you live the Indian life. The Indian life is about seeing all of that every damn day. There is no justice. There’s just them and there’s …
just us.”
I was surprised at how easily it all rolled off my tongue. Nettles too raised his eyebrows.
“Almost sounds like you’re convinced yourself, Joshua.”
“Well, I may have embellished some, but that was the gist of it,” I said. “Fervor’s like that. I’ve heard it from the pulpit and I’ve heard it on the street. It’s all in the delivery. There’s something in us that responds to it when the cause is right, or appears right. It’s always been fervor over logic, or zeal over faith.”
“And rhetoric over truth?” he asked sharply.
“And rhetoric over truth,” I echoed.
Nettles regarded me carefully from the corner of his eye. “And you never considered that maybe what he was saying might have been the truth? That maybe underneath the fervor was reality?”
“Sure. I considered it,” I said.
“And?”
“And he’s right in a lot of ways,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can challenge the fact that injustice is threaded throughout our system. But political truth can’t define you. Those kind of truths can change overnight. It’s only the inside truths we discover and act upon that eventually define us as human beings.”
“You’re pretty good with the rhetoric yourself, Reverend,” Nettles said with a small grin. “But what if you go in there today and you find out that this warrior truth he espouses is genuine for him? How do we disarm that?”
“That’s just it, David. All we should be concerned about here is disarming it. Not discrediting it, not denouncing it, not exorcising it. Heck, we don’t even try to validate it. Johnny, the Warriors
in Oka, the militants, the yellers and the shouters don’t need our validation. They need our recognition. So we disarm it, let those people go and bring Johnny out safely. We’re not politicians and we’re not ultimate judgment. We’re just men,” I said firmly.
“Men with a mission,” he intoned.
“Yes. Joshua and his trumpet,” I said quietly.
“David and his sling,” Nettles said, patting the badge over his pocket.
“And John?” I asked.
“John with is voice crying in the wilderness.” Nettles said almost sadly. “You wanna finish off about how that reunion turned out? We’re almost at the office.”
I sighed. “It was ugly. I was young and still had my pants on fire. It was my evangelical period.”
I told him how the conversation had degenerated. My response had been to say that we were pretty lucky in 1978 to be living in Canada given the unrest and despotism raging in other countries. I’d said it was true that democracy, the parliamentary system and the justice system had their flaws, but they were all we had and it was up to all of us to make them work and make them accountable to the masses. Johnny had fumed through all of it. When I’d finished he looked gravely at me.
“You know,” he’d said finally, “it’s funny because you really
look
like an Indian. And I’d almost believe you are. At least until you open your mouth.
“It’s not too late, though, Josh,” he’d said. “You can still chuck it all. You can come with me and fight for the people. You don’t even have to fight physically. Just tell them how close they came to getting you.”
“I can’t.”
“Why? What is so big and important in their world that you can’t come back to your own?”
“I’m married,” I’d said. “I’ve been married for a year and a half and we’re expecting a baby any time now.”
His face had lit up. “Wow! Right on, Josh! Wow! She’s a Cape Croker girl, right? You married an Ojibway. I knew it!”
“No.”
“No? Well, where’s she from? What band? What tribe, man?”
When I told him I saw the energy recede from his face like it had the very first day I met him. “She’s not from any band. She’s just a woman. A very fine, very loving, very beautiful —”
“Very white woman,” he said bluntly.
“Yes. But I don’t see her as white.”
“You don’t see
anything
as white!” he spat.
“Johnny, this isn’t a color test. It’s about love.”
“And love is blind, right?”
“Yes. Genuine love
is
blind.”
“You’re
fuckin’ blind! And it
is
a color test. Everything is. Right from day one they’re out to get your soul, and now they’ve come and got you with their women. That’s your reward for selling out, Josh. Now you can fuck one of us like we’ve been fuckin’ you! The only difference is, now you get kissed before you get screwed.”
“Johnny, shut up!” I’d said, standing suddenly.
For the first time in my life I thought I would strike another human being. He looked at me as calmly as one who’s faced down hundreds of threats and scratched and fought in a hundred alleys.
“Well, well,” he said. “Is this spiritual backbone, Preacher, or is there really a warrior buried under all that white?”
I swallowed hard before I spoke. “Look, Johnny, you chose to walk out of my life four years ago. You don’t know me now because you wouldn’t stick around. You don’t know what I felt, what I found, what I learned. You don’t know what my motivations are, what my plans are. You don’t know me!”
“Kinda makes us even, then, wouldn’t you say?”
I stared.
“You don’t know you either.”
“I know myself well enough to know that I can’t abandon a friend. That I’ll fly across the country to be there when I’m needed because I took an oath — an
Indian
oath — in a willow tree a long, long time ago that I would always be loyal and good and kind. Being loyal doesn’t mean you walk away for four years. Being good doesn’t mean you disappear into your own life and never reappear
in mine. Being kind doesn’t mean you only reappear when you need something.”
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I pledged to always be good and loyal and kind except in battle because that’s different. Well, welcome to the battle, Josh.” His arm swept the room. “It’s all around you. Find some balls under all the shit you’re carrying around. Admit that they got you and come into the battle.”
“I can’t,” I said quietly.
Johnny sighed. “I know.”
“What do we do now?’ I asked.
He shrugged, gulped some coffee, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked at me with that clear-eyed gaze I knew so well. “I don’t know. At least I don’t know about you. Me, I’m out of here.”
“Where will you go?”
“Wherever I need to go, Josh,” he said cryptically.
“What about me?” I inquired.
“What
about
you, man? At least you’re on the right question. Stay on that question for a while and maybe, just maybe, you’ll start to come around to an answer. Maybe you’ll start to see how hamstrung and hog-tied you are. You’re lookin’ for salvation but you’re lookin’ in the wrong place. Salvation ain’t in no whiteman’s heaven — it’s in an Indian reality. Try it sometime. You might like it,” he said bitterly.
“You tried it Johnny?”
“Yeah. I tried it,” he said angrily. “I tried it. And you know what? I belong there. So do you. You know the story in the Bible about the apostles finding the blind beggar near the gates of the place called Beautiful?” he asked.