A Quality of Light (39 page)

“Yeah, I do. Acts Chapter Three. He was crippled actually.”

“Whatever,” he said with an aggravated little wave. “Well you should study your own teaching, Preacher, because that blind beggar is you!”

“Me? How do you figure that?”

He grinned maliciously. “Let me paraphrase. The disciples are wandering around spreading the Word and they find this blind man
begging from the people coming out of the temple. In fact, his friends carry him there every day. Right?”

“Not exactly, but I’m with you. Go on.”

“Well, the blind guy figures these people are a good touch. Them being filled with compassion and care, of course. He’s begging there every day. He gets a few coins in his outstretched palm every day and he figures he’s got it made. The only thing he doesn’t know is that he’s at the steps of the temple. I’m on, right?”

“Yes. You’re on.”

“Well, he figures his saving grace is in those few coins. He eats, he drinks, he survives. But what he doesn’t know is that he’s near the gates of the place called Beautiful. The temple where he can find true salvation, a true saving grace. He’s close to the place of beauty but he never knew. Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I’m no theologian but it seems to me that the question this parable is asking is … how close have you been to the gates of salvation and missed it because you were blind? Am I right?’

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re the beggar, Josh. Jacqueline, you own Pastor, your parents, me — we all carried you to the gates! You were on the doorstep of your own salvation and you missed it because you were blind. You could have stepped across into a place of beauty. Your own identity. Your Indianness. Your history, your language, your ceremonies. But you stayed blind and were willing to settle for the coins in your palm. You’re that beggar, Josh. And all I’m asking is how long are you gonna stay blind?”

He slapped a few bills on the table and walked away. I stood there, as alone as I have ever felt, searching for some words to keep him there, searching for the great lost chord of our friendship, to carry it to him so we could rest and replenish ourselves in the hushed note of its security.

But I found nothing.

“Did you have an answer?” Nettles asked suddenly.

“Then? No,” I said, shaken from my recollection. “Now? Yes.
Only the most fortunate or the most desperate of us find an instantaneous salvation. Most of us have to settle for the developing kind. The kind that evolves slowly over the years. The kind of salvation that gets buttressed and supported by life itself, all the ups and downs and wounds. Grace lies within our wounds,” I said quietly.

“Grace?”

“Grace. An unqualified gift. Salvation. Self-knowledge. Being carried across the threshold of a place called Beautiful,” I said.

“And that place would be where, Joshua?” Nettles asked, wheeling into a parking lot I assumed was at the police station.

I heaved a huge sigh, preparing myself for the battle at hand and remembering the battle Johnny and I had fought twelve years ago. “It’s the place your God assigns. Your own essential place in everything. Some of us call it heaven. Others … well, others just call it belonging.”

S
taatz died.

He was only twenty-five and he’s gone. I only knew him for eight of those years and he left me too soon. I still need him. There’s more that he needs to tell me. More that I need to understand.

You should have met him. I know that now but then I was too selfish. You had the old woman and the reserve to turn to to help you find your way, but me? All I had was Staatz. We trucked around together for two years after I split from Mildmay and he showed me everything. We never made it to Kenora that first summer. We wanted to but we got turned away on the Trans-Canada. We hung around trying to figure a way to sneak through the back country but we didn’t know our way around so we headed for Minnesota instead. We went to Red Lake to see a few guys that Staatz and his brothers knew and then we toured around the Minneapolis–St. Paul ghetto where the Movement was born. Everywhere we went people knew who he was. He was so young but he could talk, Josh. He could stand at the front of a room full of angry,
volatile people and he would reach out and cradle all their wounding, all their passion. Take all their energy in his hand, acknowledge it, soothe it and reroute it into something constructive, energizing and strong. He burned with a passion that was incendiary, magnetic, and I loved him. He would talk and I would listen. He told the great and glorious story of the people. Not just the romantic kind about the way things used to be and how we all need to reconnect to that, but the gritty, uncompromising story about all the different kinds of hunger. The hunger for tradition, for culture, for language, for ceremony, for ritual, for a self-determining future, for freedom, for understanding, for a rightful place on our own land and for recognition of that rightfulness. All the various and sundry hungers of a people caught between the jaws of an omnivorous society that digests everything. He was my example of a warrior heart in action, and he was my friend.

Every now and then I’d be challenged by someone because of my whiteness. I’d be put down and accused of spying, of being a plant, of being a wanna-be. Staatz defended me every time. Not that he needed to after a while. I could have handled any rough stuff that came along and even a philosophical dispute. But he waded in and told them about my own warrior heart, my fearlessness, my dedication, my renunciation of my history and my culture, my defense of one of their own and the price I paid for it. He stood by me and he stood for me, and I like to think that I did the same for him.

We went to Movement meetings everywhere. San Francisco, White Mountain, Rapid City, Vancouver, Pueblo, Sabaskong, Maniwaki, Kahnawake and Washington. We met warriors from every tribe and culture. We heard their stories, learned of their ways, their histories, their struggles, their defeats and their victories. We moved among them and we saw that the Great Hoop of the People was strong but still required its warriors to fight for its survival. Everywhere we went he was welcomed like a great general. We were swept into closed meetings and secret discussions. We were included in everything, and it wasn’t long before I was being listened to and respected. Staatz brought me into the circle.

But he died.

He came to my place one night when we were living in Seattle. He was drunk. He never drank. Said that warriors didn’t use the medicine
that destroyed their people, so I was surprised. Shocked, really. He shuffled into my room and sat in the one armchair that I had, cradling a whiskey bottle in his lap. I will always remember how that looked. The bottle engulfed in one huge brown hand, clenched like a hated thing but raised to the mouth like elixir. He sat there for the longest time staring at my wall, but you could tell he was looking far beyond it into an internal landscape I know now he’d carried around forever. Then he cried. Huge, swelling silent tears that rolled down his face and dropped onto that bottle in his lap. He cried and drank and cried and drank until that whiskey was finished and the bottle was slumped to the floor beside him. Not a word. Not a single, solitary word. Then, he wiped the tears away with the back of his hand and stared straight ahead of himself for a few moments and then whispered something so softly I couldn’t make it out. I leaned forward to hear him and he repeated it. A drone-like rolling of syllables, thickened with drink and full of pain.

“They lied.”

That’s all. Just that. I asked him who “they” were and he shrugged and smirked. He lit a smoke and sat back in that chair and started talking in a loose, unpunctuated ramble, eyes unfocused and empty. It was scary. A live haunting. He told me about his life on the Six Nations Reserve when he was a boy. How he and his brothers played among the hills and hollows of that place and felt it grow inside them until it had become sacred ground. He talked about a life filled with the realization of his place with his people, of belonging, of rightness, of balance and how that was disrupted one spring morning with the arrival of a bus that was soon filled with the sobbing bodies of children scooped up for transportation to a residential school far away. How he was one of those children and the fear and terror he felt. He spoke of the nuns and priests who welcomed them. How they were said to be home and how that word felt blasphemed, wrong, like the words
Sister
and
Father
would soon become. They were marched into a small room where they were scrubbed raw with harsh-smelling soap and powders, their clothing torn from their bodies disrespectfully and burned before their eyes. He told of being marshaled into a room with a picture on the wall of the man he would soon know as Jesus surrounded by his disciples. How he was told as they cut off his braids and long hair how it was heathen, evil, uncivilized and unworthy
of God’s heaven. He said he could never understand why the men in the pictures had such long hair. He talked about being beaten for using the language he was born to speak and being tossed into a small, cramped crawlspace for two days because he had dared to stand on the front porch of that school and sing the morning prayer song to the rising sun. And how later he would be forced to memorize prayer songs and sing them in a choir in a crowded church. How he was told Indian things were evil and needed to be cleansed from him and being strapped for asking how they planned to cleanse him of his skin.

And he talked about the hundreds of midnight invasions. How he lay in his bunk with the blankets over his eyes listening to the creak of the floorboards as the good fathers worked their way from bed to bed over those long months. About the hands in the darkness, touching, fondling, groping. About the consummation of their holy crusade and the whispered “God loves you” as the violation was completed. They penetrated more than the bodies of those children those nights. They penetrated the protective sheath of history, culture and dignity. And then they disappeared back into their robes and Bibles, their commandments and their salvation. That was the true invasion of North America, he said. The invasion of spirit, mind and body. And then he walked out. No good-bye, no wave, no ceremony. He just left me.

We found his body in a motel cabin. He’d put a bullet through his heart because that’s where all the pain was. He could fight in the street, he could battle on the frontlines, he could endure the strife of open conflict and he could lead others to discover their hidden sources of strength and survival, but he couldn’t heal himself. He couldn’t undo the effects of those late-night occupations of his soul. He went out the only way he could. Alone and miserable. I hated him for that. Hated him with all the pure invective we human beings reserve for those we love when they leave us. But it faded and in its place was just a hole. A vacant place inside of me that’s never been filled except with the rage I feel for those who killed him. Because they murdered him. They poisoned him. They doused the fire of his spirit and left him to claw away for embers. He could only find them in the hearts of others and he worked at fanning them so that he might find a little warmth in the glow of their rekindling. In the end it wasn’t enough.

And I guess, in a way, I’m looking for embers too.

N
ettles ushered me into a small room, filled to cramped conditions with blackboards, flip charts, reams and reams of paper, and the cast-off plastic and paper of a few dozen suppers on the run. A large blueprint of the building Johnny occupied was spread out on two desks pushed together. The room he’d settled on was outlined harshly in red. Nettles beamed boyishly at a group of men in shirtsleeves and shoulder holsters.

“Mornin’, Cap! Boys! Anything on the go today or should we sign off and golf a few holes?”

I was introduced to Chief Inspector Brian Dodge and Inspectors Ed O’Fallon, Terry Carleton and Art Hager. With Nettles they made up the brain trust behind resolving the occupation. They all regarded me suspiciously, as though the connection between preacher and Indian was an improbable one.