Authors: Lee Maracle
This is the first connection she has made with her cousin in a long time.
“Okay,” she says. She scampers, collecting up the laundry as if traipsing off into the fields to pick flowers. She picks each filthy item up like they are small jewels. She finds a washboard and kneels on the floor, scrubbing the shirt-and-skirt until clean. She puts a sheet in the bucket and scrubs it as well, then the other things. She tries to drag the bucket of dirty water outside, but her arms fail her. Ned moves to help her. Jim puts up his hand and says, “She has to climb this mountain on her own. Wait till she asks.”
They wait. Stella wrestles one more time with the bucket. The bucket moves. She walks it toward the door, rocking it and moving it forward, sweating and grunting, finally dumping half of it over the side of the porch. She hauls the bucket farther away before she dumps the rest.
Ned and Jim stand in the doorway in case Stella bolts for freedom.
From the fringe of the overgrown lawn, she looks up and says,
“I don't want the bloody water near my door.” Her standards are changing; she has a principle to hold on to. It takes hours, but finally she has washed and hung every dirty thing in the house. She flops onto the uncovered bed and sleeps.
While she sleeps, the two men plan out the restoration of her house. There is a lot of second-hand wood in various people's yards. Ned will fetch it and bring some tools. When she wakes up to clean out her house, they will build cupboards wherever she wants. Ned still harbours ill will toward this woman, but he swings in behind Jim and feels a little easier about it.
XVII
JACOB REACHES THE TOP
of the mountain as the sun sets on the flatlands in front of her seven peaks. He looks about him. There are mountains to the east, south, and north as far as his eye can see. Before him is the valley floor. He sees the twinkling lights of the white man's towns and identifies them in the growing dark. The moon changes places with the sun shortly after he arrives. He marvels at the view, like everything is right with the world. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a packet of smokes, takes one
from the box, and lowers himself onto a log. Just as he lights up, a voice jumps up from beside him.
“Them is all your relatives.” Jacob turns around to see an old woman sitting on the log with him. She grabs his lit cigarette, helping herself to a good long pull on it before handing it back.
“Who are you?” Jacob asks.
“They called me Alice. I'm your gramma's gramma.” This piece of information makes Jacob dizzy. First he'd seen living people who weren't really there, doing what he saw somewhere at some other time. Now he is seeing dead people who aren't really there. He's climbed the mountain without anything to eat. It took him all day. He had witnessed the worst thing he could imagine happen to his small relative. He'd seen it before it happened. He watched it shape itself into a movie. Now this dead woman is sitting next to him, sucking on his cigarette. This cannot be good. He feels sickness coming up again. She disappears.
“Oh Christ, I am too goddamned sane for this,” he declares. He curls into a tight ball and prepares to sleep. Jacob does not dream. The forest wraps him in its sounds, its smells, its feel; he drifts in its dark cool world until the cold wakes him up. The sound of birds meets his ears and soothes the dark. It will be light soon. He has never seen the sunrise, the mountains have always blocked his view of it from the village. He wonders if from up this high he'll be able to see it. He sees the moon pale and stands up. It worries him to stand. He isn't sure his memory serves him very well in the dark. Where is the edge? He decides not to think about it, just to stay there, not moving, praying he is facing in the direction of the sun.
A golden hue bleeds into the western skyline, painting the edge of the sky with the promise of light. In the growing dawn, Jacob
sees he does not need to stand. He is about to sit when the fireball of the sun meets the valley between the two mountains he is staring at. It seems rude to sit now with the sun entering the territory. He stands. The sun pushes hard against the golden-hued black edges of dwindling night. The pale blue under gold fires the sky. The sun rises to a bright gold, no red, no orange, no other colour to taint its gold. The purity of its light bathes the mountains. Jacob breathes in the sight of the sun fighting with the overwhelming dark of night.
Jacob ponders what his uncle did up here for four days. There does not seem to be much to do. He remembers he hasn't eaten. “Pick the berries; they like it,” he hears his gramma say. He wanders about. There are berries everywhere, different ones on different bushes. Some of the bushes have no thorns and some do. Some of the berries grow on vines, others hang from what look like small trees. There are berries of all sorts of hues and shades from white and blue to red and purple to black. Which ones should he pick?
“Be wary of shiny things,” pops into his mind. He picks the dullest purple berries he can find from a laurel bush. He holds them in his hand, hesitates, then pops one into his mouth. Its sweet flavour bursts, and he waits to see if it is toxic. Nothing happens, so he gathers a handful more and sits down to breakfast.
After he's filled himself up, he sits on his stone again. High above the valley, he sees its size; it stretches between two sets of mountains, in the middle of which the river winds lazily through it. It is sixty miles across, north to south. Jacob remembers the stories old Alice told about how the land was underwater until the Dutch drained it and put up windmills and canals. He wishes he had been around to see the mills chugging excess water. The valley has flooded twice since the mills were removed; it is probably not a good idea to live below the water table without windmills. It doesn't take long for his belly to begin rumbling dangerously. He has to relieve himself. Those berries are doing their duty. He hadn't thought about that. Where? He takes a look around and decides it had better be far from this stone. He walks through the bush to an old log, grabs a stick, and digs himself a small hole. What to do about toilet paper? An old vine maple hangs over his head, the answer to his question.
AGITATED, HE STRIDES ABOUT
for a while, carefully marking where he had just been, which direction he had walked in, trying not to lose sight of his stone. He stands still for a minute, trying to think. Rivers begin as creeks in these mountains. He listens. He hears the sound of water and heads for it. He approaches the creek politely. No one there. Just as he is bending to wash his hands, a doe comes by for a drink. She drinks, sniffs the air, smells him, and bounds off. He is stunned by her grace and closeness. In place of soap he uses sand. It feels good. It satisfies him to know that he could eat, wash and clean himself, and watch the whole of his known world without help from anyone.
He walks back to his stone to study the colour of the world he knows. In the distance, he sees a discoloured chunk of sky heading toward the valley near his home. There is something wrong with it. It is huge. It takes up a good portion of the blue as it floats ominously toward the valley. It is moving steadily and, as it does, he sees that it is picking up clouds and discolouring them too. It must be smog from Vancouver. He sits down on the rock to consider what smog could do to the valley. He lights another cigarette and Alice reappears.
“You must really like smoking,” he teases.
She takes a drag from his smoke. “Before ceremony there was madness. It isn't new, this business of killing children. There was a war. Blood was let. Humans love ritual. They cannot escape from it. They need it just like they need air. Love is a ritual. Hate too. We
are busy loving or killing depending on the direction we choose to move in. Life is an experience, but our movement through it is a ritual.” She crushes out the last of her smoke and walks straight off the edge of the mountain. The image of her fades through an opening in the clouds.
Is that what had happened? The snake had gone to war. He had killed. The ritual of killing, day after day and year after year, became his life's direction. He could not stop killing, destroying his family, raping his own mind and sharing that with his daughters and Madeline. The ritual of inflicting pain, watching men squirm under the bullets he was raining down on them, never went away. The snake killed men for six years, men he did not know, men who were also killing other men, the killing was sanctioned and revered by everyone. It became normal. Jacob searches for the words that these men must have used to justify the ritual killing. Maybe murder was just a direction that men sometimes travelled toward, as old Alice said. Once you start you can't stop, unless somebody turns you around. At some point in all that killing, life itself becomes worthless in the mind of the killer. The devaluing of all those lives gave the snake permission. Maybe choosing that direction is the permission we give or do not give ourselves to value life. No one had known how to turn the snake back in his original direction.
Ceremony must be a conscious use of our natural need for ritual. “Thou shalt not kill,” the Christians say, but the pope himself had blessed that war and the blessing of murder was the ceremony that altered the snake's direction. Too bad they had not given him some ceremony to restore him.
Jacob beds down and animals come, surround his sleeping body, whisper, “You have a ceremony to restore your path,” then are gone. Jacob in his sleep is aware that he is dreaming and determines not to remember his dream when he awakes.
BY THE TIME STACEY
comes home, Jacob has already left and the dark is folding over the house, sweet and comfortable. She does not expect him to be home; since becoming a teenager he has roamed freely from her house to his grandpa's or his cousins, but usually he leaves a note or calls. This time there is no indication of where he is. Still, she is relieved. Guilt twinges her as she wonders when his absence had become a relief. She had loved fussing over him, when he was a small child, playing with him, comforting him; every part of him seemed so enjoyable. Then, as his body stretched, his face changed, and his bones arranged themselves into the shape of the affair with a man she had never meant to keep, she distanced herself from Jacob. During his grade school days she felt crowded by him; he reminded her that she couldn't dress up on Friday and walk into some dimly lit, crowded bar and pick out a little comfort for the weekend. It had nothing to do with her looking old or acquiring morals; it had more to do with her feeling that motherhood felt too dignified to just squander her body on one night stands. Jacob was about twelve when she bumped into Steve in the mall. She told him to call her, he did, and, on a weekend when Jacob was with his grandpa, Steve had come over. The affair seemed easy, but now she realized it had all sorts of
constraints. Jacob should never be an inconvenience. Her freedom was up, left somewhere in the run of diapers and dishes.
She finds herself a candle, lights it, and sits down. In the fire of the candle an old memory burns. She was thirty-five. The tables were full of people. Her attention was drawn to a handsome-looking woman of about fifty. The woman sat with a group of men who all looked like they wanted to be the one who got lucky. She smoked a cigarette, sitting wide open and laughing hard at something one of them had said. There was a hint of crying in the way she laughed. Her movements were subtle and jerky. Some smell of fear pervaded her perfume. She was a little too made-up, a little too dressed-up, a little too everything. Stacey turned around and walked out. She wanted more than another romp. She wanted some piece of that mountain in her life.
When she got home, she turned on all the lights in her house. Then she remembered Steve. He had made a point of telling her he was single again. He kidded her about it being her fault. They both had laughed, but he had had that you-look-yummy-enough-toeat kind of look. She had asked him if he'd like to visit sometime. “I make a nice cup of coffee and a passable piece of fry bread,” she'd said. “You call me when you want to make more than one piece,”
he'd answered, “and I'll bring the coffee.” He'd given her his number. After seeing that woman in the bar, she dialled Steve.
Jacob was thirteen. Steve understood her rule and never violated it. She figured she was safe to invite him over and her son would not be the wiser. She told Steve that she needed him to be discreet. He understood. At first she only rang him when things got trying or something confounded her; but, as Jacob wandered off more frequently, she found herself dialling Steve for no reason at all.
She doesn't, even now, believe she loves him; it's more that she finds him comfortable. She has an easygoing romance with Steve, so comfortable she doesn't feel she can possibly end it. She has never gotten up the passion to get angry and argue and test the relationship; she figures it will never get any better. It will always be comfortable; she isn't sure she can be satisfied with that. And then her phone rings.
“Hello.” It's Steve.
“I was just thinking about you,” she says.
“I was just sniffing around for a nice piece of bannock and a good cup of coffee,” he says. She hears something different in his voice, like the sound is being scraped as it runs by his vocal cords.
“Are you all right, Steve?”
There's a pause. “No. I'd really rather talk about it in person.”
She wants to tell him about the child, about the fight for her life, about the chance they are all taking, but she doesn't think he
would understand. Nervousness sets in. This might be the end of her and Steve and, although she isn't sure she loves him, she's beginning to suspect this is only because she doesn't dare let herself. Loving him brings expectations, and expectations require common ground; she has no common rock for both of them to stand on. He would never understand this family. “Love is not enough,” she whispers to herself. It takes a lot of elbow grease to accept someone else's way of being.
“I would really rather talk about it in person.” She recognizes the intent behind these words. Five years is about to be flushed down the toilet by an ultimatum from him; she has no way to brace herself. Although she has not dared to love him, she has not ever wanted to let him go. She wonders if she could. For some reason this wondering brings her back to her nephew.
She looks up at her kitchen wall where the photographs of family smile down at her. A black and white of two boys, Jacob and Jimmy, blowing bubbles from those little stems with a round hoop at the end. There is a wire fence behind them. She loves that picture of her nephews; there was such beauty in them, confidence and innocence. After the funeral, Jacob went to remove the picture and she had panicked. “No ⦠please ⦠no.” She couldn't let Jimmy
go; he was tied so tight to her memories of Jacob that she couldn't separate them. Taking down the picture would somehow have removed Jacob too, but she hadn't said that to him. They had gone through the rest of the day without talking. Now, she looks up at the wall again and thinks she catches a glimmer of sadness peering through Jimmy's smile. She cringes. Why had she not seen it before?