Monkey Beach (18 page)

“When A.I.M. occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building?”

“Yeah.” He started to tell me about it, then said he’d explain it to me when I was older. I leaned my head against his shoulder. I closed my eyes, suddenly glad I didn’t know how she died. I didn’t want to hear anything else that ended badly. He gave me a piece of paper. “You did him a lot of good. You ever want to talk, you give me a call, okay?” We went back inside and he left with his friends a few minutes later.

I kept the paper with his address and phone number in my jewellery box. He wrote me once, a short letter with bad handwriting, the words packed tightly together and jittery on the page. He was proud to know Mick. When things got screwy, he wrote, Mick stayed on the path of true human being. I always wanted to know what he meant by screwy. I still have his address kicking around somewhere.

At a family meeting a few days later at our house, Aunt Trudy and Aunt Kate got into a scrap over Mick’s basketball trophies, medals and awards. Dad didn’t want them. Ma-ma-oo wanted them put over his grave, but everyone said they’d just get stolen. Trudy claimed she was closer to Mick than anyone in the family—they had suffered through residential school together, they had the same friends—but Aunt Kate loudly told everyone she was worried Trudy would use some of them as ashtrays or break them in one of her parties. Trudy shouted that she would fucking well
appreciate the trophies better than Kate, who would only put them in a box somewhere and forget them. Dad divided the trophies into two piles for his sisters. They glared venomously at each other.

I knew Mick wouldn’t care as long as he got his cigarettes. I wished he was with us, because he’d make some stupid joke and everyone would forget what they were arguing about and laugh.

That night, we heard an ambulance wailing through the village. I ran downstairs and overheard Mom talking to someone about a fight going on at Aunt Trudy’s. I later learned from Tab that Josh had tried to claim some of Mick’s medals, and Trudy had broken a beer bottle over his head. Josh’s fishing crew fought with Aunt Trudy’s drinking buddies until Josh was thrown down the front steps and broke his leg.

“Holy,” I said.

Tab smiled, looking smug. “I’d say the honeymoon is over.”

Aunt Trudy was evicted. Tab came over the night before she and her mother left, saying they were going to live in Vancouver. I couldn’t imagine school without her. As a going-away present, I gave her my teddy bear, Mr. Booboo. Tab held him by one frayed ear and examined him. He was mostly patches by then.

“He gives good hugs,” I explained.

On Mick’s birthday, Jimmy followed me down to the Octopus Beds. I didn’t want him with me, but he came anyway, even when I told him to go jump off the dock.
I brought a tin of Sago tobacco, a portable stereo and an Elvis tape. I picked up all the dry driftwood that I could carry, and made a fire. I turned on the tape recorder, and Elvis sang “Such a Night.”

The waves surged against the rocks. Down the Douglas Channel, I could see fat, lumbering clouds inching south.

“For Mick,” I said, throwing loose tobacco on the fire.

“What are you doing?” Jimmy said.

“Just shut up,” I said, staring out at the place where Mick used to set the net. My father had pulled Mick’s corpse from the net and wrapped him in a tarp. Mick’s face, right arm and part of his left leg had been eaten off by seals and crabs.

“What did he look like?” Jimmy asked me, greedy for details.

“An ugly fish,” I told him. “A bad catch.”

Two weeks later, Uncle Geordie got eighty-two sockeye. He gave Ma-ma-oo twenty, his wife’s parents twenty and twenty to us. Mom took me over to Ma-ma-oo’s, who insisted that she didn’t need any help, that she wanted to do the smoking herself. Mom said they’d help each other.

Dad set up two sawhorses and put some planks on them to make a table behind Ma-ma-oo’s house. Mom let me chop the heads off the fish. Sockeye are heavy. The easiest way for me to decapitate them was to stick my fingers in their eye sockets to hold them in place
while I cut off their heads. As I got better, Mom let me cut off the tails and fins too. She did the cleaning and deboning, and Ma-ma-oo did the
datla
, carefully slicing the salmon for smoking. Crows flapped in the trees around us, eying the pailful of fish guts. Mom didn’t like to give them food because, she said, what with Jimmy’s feeding them, they’d just keep hanging around the house, lazy buggers, and wait for handouts, shitting on everything in sight.

The sky was cloudy and threatening to rain. Ma-ma-oo was silent, working so fast that she would have to stop and wait for Mom and me. My hands got tired, but I liked having something to do. “Oh, you learn fast,” Mom said to me as I handed her another fish. We went through half the fish, and I helped them put the long slices of red flesh on sticks. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the rafters of the smokehouse, so Mom and Ma-ma-oo put up the racks of fish. Mom went inside to start canning the other half of the sockeye and left me out in the smokehouse to keep Ma-ma-oo company. The smoke was sharp and hurt my eyes. The shack was warm and dim. I instantly started to sweat. I removed my jacket and took it outside so it wouldn’t smell smoky.

Ma-ma-oo was sitting on a block of wood, staring at nothing. Now that she didn’t have anything to do, she sagged. I sat down on the ground beside her, yawning. She covered her eyes with her hand. Her shoulders started to shake. She never made a sound when she cried.

I rested my head against her knee. She put her other hand on my neck. The skin on her fingers was rough; her hand was warm and smelled of fish.

Ma-ma-oo and I were driving down a narrow logging road that went through the bushes on the Kitimat River tidal flats. She stopped the truck when the road was too overgrown to see the gravel. She handed me a shovel then slung her rifle over her shoulder and walked into the bush. From inside the truck, the trees were very pretty. As I followed her, fending off branches and crunching through dry leaves that hid mud puddles, I was less impressed with the brilliant green colours of late summer. Rain soaked through my jeans, my jacket. I was covered in mud up to my ankles and Lord only knew what Mom was going to say about my new running shoes. A long time ago, there had been an old fishing camp here, and before then it had been a winter camp. Some of the houseposts still stood, giant, grey logs leaning heavily into the wild tangle of undergrowth, but now the old camp was being washed away by the river. The people had made nets out of
du’qua
, stinging nettle, and it was growing wild everywhere. The tall, skinny plants with fuzzy leaves stung worse than jellyfish.

We came across bear scat. It was still moist. Ma-ma-oo kicked it around then bent over and stared into it as if she could see her future in the heavy brown shit. She paused, getting her bearings, then wiped the rain off her face.

“Look,” she said. “See the fish bones? It’s really fattening up for winter.”

“Gross,” I said.

“You can tell where the bear’s going to be by its
scat. Berry seeds, it’s up the bush. Fish bones, it’s down by the river.”

“It’s still gross.”

“You kids these days.”

After another half hour of slogging, she stopped in front of a plant as tall as her, with broad, smooth leaves that branched off the stalk like a tulip’s leaves. It was topped with tiny, white flowers.

“Just watch,” she said, handing me the rifle.

She took the shovel and started digging a big hole around the plant. When she hit the root, she started digging with her hands. The root had a small dark bulb, but then it went stringy like a creamy yellow mop. When she’d exposed enough of the root, she began tugging until it came loose. She brushed off the dirt and motioned me to come closer.

“Oxasuli,”
she said. “Powerful medicine. Very dangerous. It can kill you, do you understand? You have to respect it.” She handed me the root and I put it in the bucket. There were some more oxasuli bushes around, but she said to let them be. We slogged some more, found two suitable plants, then Ma-ma-oo declared we had enough. “You put these on your windowsill, and it keeps ghosts away.”

“How?”

“Ghosts hate the smell. It protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine. Here, you break off this much and you burn it on your stove—”

“Like incense?

“What’s incense?”

“Like cedar and sweetgrass bundles.”

“Oh. Yes, yes like that. Smoke your house. Smoke
your corners. When someone dies, you have to be careful.”

“Why?”

She paused again, frowning. “Hard to explain. But don’t eat it, hear? You eat it, and you go to sleep and you don’t wake up. Good for arthritis. Joints. Hard to use, though. You have to do it right or your heart stops. Bad, slow painful way to go.”

“Cool.”

She shook her head. “You kids.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and unwrapped the cellophane.

“Holy. When did you start smoking?”

“Not for me. I’m getting some cedar branches. You leave tobacco here, see?” She broke one of the cigarettes and left the tobacco scattered at the bottom of the cedar trunk. She said some words in Haisla, then she broke off one of the branches. “We’ll get four for you, and four for me.”

“You’re giving tobacco to a tree?”

“The tobacco is for the tree spirits. You take something, you give something. I’m asking for protection. Going to go up in the corners of my house. Put these in your bedroom. Hang them up like this.”

“What do the spirits look like?”

She paused, looking up into the top of the cedar tree. “I don’t know. Never seen one. The chief trees—the biggest, strongest, oldest ones—had a spirit, a little man with red hair. Olden days, they’d lead medicine men to the best trees to make canoes with.”

“Oh,” I said, shaking. All the air left my lungs for a moment and it felt like I couldn’t catch my next breath. “Oh.”

Ma-ma-oo glanced at me curiously, then began walking again. She picked another tree and offered tobacco.

I made my voice very casual. “What would it mean if you saw a little man?”

“Guess you’re going to make canoes.”

I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“No one makes them any more,” she said. “Easier to go out and buy a boat. Old ways don’t matter much now. Just hold you back.”

“What else would it mean if you saw one?”

She touched my hair. “You seen one?”

I nodded.

“Ah, you have the gift, then. Just like your mother. Didn’t she tell you about it?”

“What gift?”

“Your mother’s side of the family has it strong. Do you know the future sometimes? Do you get hunches?”

“Predictions? From the little man. He comes, then something bad happens.”

She eased herself down onto a stump, then patted the space beside her. “Here, sit.” She frowned. “Your mother never said anything?”

“She just said he was a dream.”

“Hmmph,” she grunted. “He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”

“What about Mom?”

“When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on. T.B. Flu. Drinking. Diseases. She used to know who was going to die next. But that kind of gift, she makes people nervous, hey?” She smiled.