Nobody stared as I walked through the
wemistikoshiw
part of Moose Factory. The grandmother had been wise about my clothing. All of these people seemed too busy themselves with talk or movement. Most of them seemed late for something, rushing about with heads down. No one paid me any attention, and this made me more
confident. I walked down the dirt road of the big street, staring into the trading post, the livery, the butcher shop, the pub.
It was in this last place that I spied him, eating his dinner with another man at a table near the window. A long day had passed, and I realized how hungry I was suddenly. I stood a ways from the window and waited, willing the other man to leave. Seeing my trapper again brought back the feeling in my stomach, made that place low in my belly ache. To my delight, the man sitting with him picked up his hat, stood and left. I waited as long as I could, then walked in.
At first he looked at me like he did not recognize me. He thought I was another young Cree woman, and in that second I saw that everything the old woman had said about him was true. But when he smiled at me with his white teeth, his whiskers pointed like a wolf’s, I didn’t care. I would take him back to the bush and keep him there, change him so that he no longer desired this place of humans.
“Niska,” he whispered, smiling at me. He stood, walked to me, hugged me.
I felt all of the eyes of this place on me and I pushed myself from him. A flash of anger sparked in his eyes for only a second, then something else that I could not read.
He made a motion for me to sit with him, called to a man who worked there and spoke to him in French that I did not understand. Then he looked at me, his hands on the table, one crossed over the other. He began to speak slowly in his tongue, staring into my eyes. “I missed you,” he said, putting one hand closer to mine. I just stared back. “I miss you here,” he said, “and here.” He moved his hand to his heart, then to his crotch just below the table’s lip. He smiled at this, and I did everything in my power not to smile back. The man he’d spoken to returned and placed two glasses filled with yellow liquid before us, then left.
He held his glass up to me and smiled again, waiting for me to raise my glass too. I knew what it was he offered, but I didn’t care. I
could no longer bear the weight of the last days, and in that first sip realized that this might be a way to let them sit someplace else for a little while. The drink tasted bitter, like bannock gone bad, and the taste did not leave my mouth quickly enough. I watched him raise his glass to his lips and drink deeply so that the bump in his throat bobbed. He put his mostly empty glass down and ran the back of his hand across his mouth, staring at me. I took it as a challenge and picked my glass up, choked it down fast as I could. I almost gagged, then smiled back at him. He made a motion with his arm to the man who’d bring more.
Outside the window of this place the night came. At first I watched the sky’s colours change with a child’s awe, but as we drank more, a sadness came to me just as the last of the bright light left and the serving man brought candles to all the tables.
“No more,” I said to him, standing up and walking out suddenly, so suddenly that I surprised even myself. My legs felt like a new calf’s, loose and long under me so that I had to grab the door frame as I passed through it. I walked down the dirt road, trying to figure out if I was going in the right direction or not, the night sky beginning to spin above me. I did not know or care if he followed me at this point. The cool air on my face felt good.
I was not sure if it was me or some other force that carried me back to that school and the tall peak of the church, but I found myself standing in the same place I’d been in the morning, looking for Rabbit. I called out her name, softly at first, but when nothing came back but the sounds of the crickets, I cried out louder. Over and over I called out her name, willing her to find me, to comfort me, to bring me back to our mother, to our father. I felt hands on my shoulders and spun around, but it was him instead. He hushed me with a finger to his lips, whispering warnings as he looked around him with wild eyes.
“Ashtum,”
he said to me in my language. “Come with me.”
He took my hand and led me toward the church. When I realized he wanted to take me inside, I struggled against him.
“Mo-na,”
I said. “Don’t take me in there.”
“It is safe here,” he said. “It is a holy place. A place to talk to the Father.”
I followed him as he pushed open the big door, then shut it behind him. The smell was everywhere in here, like cedar, but too strong. He walked straight down the aisle, and I could do nothing but follow, running a hand down one row of benches as I went, letting them steady me. He stopped by the table in front of all the benches. It stood on a small rise of wood.
“This is where a man takes a woman to be his forever,” he said to me, pulling me to him and kissing me.
I began to wonder how well I felt as he kissed me, but pushed the thought aside and let my tongue touch his.
“This is a good place, a holy place,” he whispered, biting at my ear. “You are a holy Indian, no?” he whispered. “The other Indians say you are very holy, very strong.”
His lean body pushed against me. I could feel his hardness. I did not answer him but kissed him back instead. “You want me for you?” I asked as best I could in his tongue. He smiled and nodded. “Here is the place?” I asked, looking at him. He smiled and nodded again. I kissed him. “Us?” I asked.
He smiled and picked me up, sat me on the table. He pulled my cotton dress up so that I was exposed to him, then lowered his head and kissed me there with his tongue. I held his hair in my hands, and when I could not take it any longer I pulled his mouth up to mine and kissed him deep. His hands struggled with his belt, and then I felt him thrust in me until I called out. He panted and we rocked and then I felt him tense inside of me too fast, too soon. I wrapped my legs around him so that he would stay inside a little longer. Finally he pulled out of me, and I stretched out on the table, looking up at him, my head spinning.
He laughed. “I fucked you in a church,” he said, and smiled. I smiled back at him. “I fucked the heathen Indian out of you in this church,” he said, but this time the smile was not happy. “I took your
ahcahk,
” he said to me, the smile gone now. “Do you understand? I fucked your
ahcahk,
your spirit. Do you understand that?”
He stared down at me, his eyes wide with a look that made my stomach feel ill. I pushed him away with my legs and covered myself up.
“It’s too late,” he said. “You are nothing special, just another squaw whore. I took your power away in this place and sent it to burn in hell where it belongs.”
Suddenly I felt my guts churn and only knew that I needed to be out of this place. The too-strong smell of cedar made my head pound so that I needed to throw up. I jumped up and on shaky legs ran toward the door. It felt like forever, but finally I reached it and flung it open, the contents of my stomach rushing up and spewing onto the steps below me. I fell to my knees, but heard his boots approaching from behind. I reached for my knife on my belt but realized that I did not wear it with these white clothes. Pushing myself to my knees, I ran fast as I could toward the river, expecting any moment to hear his footsteps catching up with me, to feel his hands grabbing at me.
I made it down to the river, my head pounding, my mouth dry and sour, the world around me spinning. I looked back to see if he followed, but all I could make out in the darkness was the blunt block of the school on the ridge overlooking the river and the tall arm of the church stretching up into the night sky. I crouched and sobbed, afraid that his magic had killed my family’s fire inside of me, and it was only then that I realized he was a spell-caster of some kind and he’d stolen my strength.
The stink of their tobacco and drink and especially of him wafted up from the clothes that I wore so that I thought my head would split. I stood and tore them from me, ripped every stitch from my
skin and flung the material into the river and finally I stood naked under the moon, my head back and mouth open, the howling of a hurt animal constricting my throat.
Falling on all fours, I drank deeply from the river to ease the burning in my throat and my pounding head. Then I stood shakily and began to run. I ran along the riverbank, not caring about the sting of bushes on my naked thighs, about the sharp rocks under my feet or the branches of the trees that hung low. I ran until I closed in on my little camp and my canoe. I ran fast enough to try to catch up with what I’d lost back there.
I did not wait till morning but began to paddle my canoe immediately, and I did not stop paddling until I reached my home, keeping up my strength by vowing a thousand times never to return to that place. The fear that he really had taken my power from me chased me all the way down that river.
I slept long and deep as soon as my head touched the floor of my lodge. When I awoke I knew what to do. Choosing the stones carefully from the riverbank, I heated them up in a fire for a full day as I carefully constructed a lodge according to my father’s directions. Round after round I opened the flap to that small place and crawled inside, poured water on the rocks so that the steam became a living, burning thing, and prayed to the four directions and to the earth, the sky, the water and the air, pouring more water onto the rocks until I thought that my lungs would catch fire. I prayed harder for purification until the pain became ecstasy, and when I completed the last round I crawled out of the lodge and collapsed on the cool ground, the world around me a fresh and clean place again.
When I heard the Frenchman’s voice in my head, my fear and anger came back to me so that I needed to prove to myself that I still had power. I constructed my shaking tent and went inside to pray. It did not take long for the spirits to come to me. My tent filled with a light as if a thousand fireflies had entered it. And then the spirit
animals began to arrive, the spirit of the bear, the moose, the fox, the wolf, the sturgeon, rallying around my hurt in that tent like night insects to a fire. It was the lynx that came to me most strongly, his growl puffing out the walls of my tent like a great wind trying to escape. And I asked the lynx a favour that would change me forever. I asked him to go out and find the source of my hurt and extinguish it. As soon as I whispered my request, the tent went silent and the light of the spirit animals left it, so that I lay on my back in the dark of night, alone and shivering.
I tried not to think of that night again. A sense of peace came over me as I prepared for another winter alone in the bush.
It was just shortly after the first hard freeze that my old mother travelled out to see me. I was surprised at her visit, had thought her days of travel were behind her. But I was happy to see her. I heated up water for tea and warmed moosemeat over a fire and we sat comfortably with one another for a time. We ate and talked of small things, and as the evening grew dark she told me that word had come to her that the Frenchman had gone mad in that town and taken to running up and down the streets trying to escape pursuing demons. She watched me for a reaction, and when I did not give her one, she finished her story by saying that no matter what he did he could not escape them and so he ran to the top storey of the hotel on the main street and flung himself through the window. The same priest who had taken me away to residential school years ago deemed the death of the Frenchman a suicide and refused to give him a Christian burial.
I stared into the fire for a long time after that story, not able to look at her.
MISTATIMWAK
Horses
I
F I AM TO TAKE ALL
of it at once and in this way end my pain for good, I will have to do it soon. Only a few needlefuls are left, and I do not know what I will do when it is gone. All morning Auntie paddles me further north in even strokes, sometimes humming songs to herself, sometimes speaking directly into my muffled world with stories of her youth. My body cries out for the medicine so loudly that I decide not to even try to hide what I do.
Right there in the canoe, I extract the needle and the rawhide from my pack, prepare my bruised arm and inject some directly into a vein, just enough to take the knife’s edge of pain away. I can feel Auntie’s eyes on my actions, and I feel like a pathetic criminal under her gaze even though I know she does not judge me. I want to talk to her about all of this and know that soon I must, but for now I allow myself to drift back to the comfort of old friends.
On the day before we are to move up into the trenches once more, Sergeant McCaan comes to Elijah and tells him that it will be at the very least a couple of months before Thompson returns and that he would like Elijah to be acting corporal until then.
Elijah barks out, “I’d be delighted, Sergeant,” and as he walks back with this news swelling inside him he begins to count the freedoms that come with the rank. But it still doesn’t help him to take a shit, he tells me. He’s been bunged up from the moment Driscoll gave
him the morphine. At least his arm is out of its sling.
Me, I’m clearly invisible to the officers. How is it that Breech refuses to recognize that it isn’t only Elijah out there killing Fritz? We are a team. If nobody will recognize this, maybe I will force them to.
Our battalion is sent to a village named Albert, close enough to the front that Hun artillery reaches it easily and constantly. The Allies hold the town, but with a good view of the surrounding countryside I can see it is clearly a prize that Fritz would like. Not much left of the one side of this town except for rubble. But on the morning that we move up to the front of the town, Elijah and I see the most amazing thing since our arrival in France. The Virgin Mary, golden and thirty feet tall, rises up from the ruins of a great church. She leans at such an angle that we wonder how she’s not tumbled to the ground. She holds a cherubic baby Jesus in her arms, and his chubby weight seems to threaten to topple her further. Elijah tells me he thinks he sees a look of serene disapproval on her face as she stares down at the fighting below.