Celia's Song (12 page)

X

CELIA HEARS A STRANGE
hum. It comes up on her, sudden and sure of itself.

She lets it come and watches the tall ship that arrives in the wake of the scold her mother has handed out to the people in the room.

CELIA IS SMALL AGAIN
, her tiny little body crouches behind the woodshed as she watches the ship. Men gather logs for the newcomers. They trade them for the ill-fated blanket death that will follow. As these men lie dying they scream and moan, unable to urinate. Some of them take to the mountains and never come back; others take to the sea to try and quiet the fire coming from their manhood; others waste away, screaming as they exit. Two men find the hill runners, their bodies decayed beyond recognition. One of the men is washed ashore, bloated and unrecognizable but for the amulet he wears around his neck. Those who die at home harry
their families with their screaming. Their hysteria sparks the kind of helplessness that goes with watching a fire burn down your house and knowing there is nothing to be done.

The black robe comes, offering medicine in exchange for baptism. The old men refuse. With every scream, the women are worn nearer to insanity. With every death, their resolve to begin again is sandpapered down. Finally, the village's governor relents and they go in droves to the black robe. The black robe has a tornado of his own buzzing around in his head. Inside its vortex are shame, fear, and repentance. It has not been holy water he has bathed the people in. It has been the words of the devil. The incessant
mea culpa
poured like water on the fire that moved them to speak, to play, to rock their babies, to enjoy their lives.

“The worst part was it did not help us to live.” Celia ends her dream-walk out loud, wringing her skirt in her tense little fingers.

“What?” Momma, Stacey, and Rena blurt out at the same time.

“The epidemics, the conversions, the medicine. They didn't stop us from dying.”

“That's enough,” Ned says. “This is too long a story to be told here tonight. Maybe we do need to start again. Anyone who is up to continuing this conversation can come on over next Friday and we'll have another go at it.” He turns on the lights and blows out the candles, one at a time. The cloying smoke of dying wax that still wants to be fire bites their noses. It bites them in the same way that the smouldering breath of humans fighting to fire up the soul bites the lungs. It stills their hearts.

The humming inside Celia stops. Celia's body has gained weight. She feels it. It isn't from her overeating, and it isn't the sort of heaviness she feels when the load she is carrying is too dense; this weight gain comes from her breath failing to get inside her bones. Her breath has been used up. Her brain cells are dragging the air from her muscles. The tightness makes her feel like her muscles are being strangled. Her muscles panic at not having enough air to push her body around. Her bones chill from want of fire.

Jacob sees this strange fatigue wash over his aunt Celia. He saunters over and offers up his arm. Celia acquiesces.

Night settles on Momma's house uneasily, jumping from dark to light and light to dark as though confused about the direction
time is moving. Momma settles into Ned's arms and wonders about the village, her children, and her family. Ned murmurs words of comfort and rests his hand on her forehead. Her eyes fog up enough to erase the night with its horrific sack of alone. She settles into sleep, leaving night to pout alone in the sky.

The fragments drift away and settle into a corner of her mind. She awakes. She is curled up in a ball on the floor. She wonders where everyone has gone, then she remembers. It's Saturday night. They were at a ball tournament after shopping. She hadn't been feeling well, so she had not gone. She had fallen into a fitful sleep. Now she is awake, Ned is still sleeping. Embarrassed, she jumps back into bed, careful not to disturb Ned.

“MEN ARE ANCHORS,” CELIA
tells Jacob on the way home from the ball game. “Sometimes a woman feels rootless, like she is some crazy maple leaf shifting in the wind, looking for a place to land, but all the other leaves have eaten up the space on the ground and she just keeps getting caught in the updraft, unable to find a place. Sometimes, though, the drifting, the updraft play is full of magic, of seeing, of pending clarity, so eagle-like that you really don't want to settle anywhere. A man comes round, and plunk: you land.”

Jacob murmurs assent as if he understands. “You are so courteous,” Celia chuckles. She slips her arm through his and points at the moon. It is dropping out of sight behind new clouds — a huge yellow balloon sliding behind a barely visible cloud. The moon doesn't seem to want to share its brilliant hue. It slides its way
behind the cloud without letting any halo of light brighten the mood.

“I love you, Auntie,” Jacob says, the way men say it when they have a feeling that their woman is standing on the edge of something dangerous they don't understand and they want them to walk away from it. It was a “don't jump” kind of “I love you.”

Sometimes to really know something you have to dive deep.

This time Celia hears my whisper. Celia needs to know something. This is an old edge. She has been do-si-do-ing back and forth before it for a long time. She breathes slow and deep, puffs up her lungs, pumps her blood, shores up her muscles and kicks up her agility. She understands Jacob's “I love you,” but she means to leap anyway.

The weight leaves. All that remains is a faint feeling of trepi dation. Celia knows this trepidation and doesn't really mind it. It is the sort of fear she felt the first time she was asked to prepare someone's feast food. She wondered, “Do I know these plump berries well enough to turn them to feast soup? Am I familiar enough with salmon to urge him to rise to the feast house all still and dead
like that? Do I really remember how to dig the roots, season everything with the sort of medicine that will open the throats of every human and inspire them to dig inside their spirit for words, for song, for the sacred?” It is not unlike the hesitation she felt the first time her body responded to a lover's looks, the skin, the touch; she had no words with which to speak to herself about it. She just wanted to be next to that skin, that body.

The trepidation anchors itself to the kind of confidence she has acquired from knowing she's crossed this bridge before. She is up to the journey, up to the flight, up to the silk-soft landing, up to the unfamiliar, because she has mastered the unknown before. Her people swallowed the serpent generations ago — one head was courage, the other fear. They had found a way to anchor the fear to courage; the courage underpinned and softened fear. Fear helps her to look twice before leaping, to exercise caution. Fear does not stand alone inside her body, so it can never consume her.

“Let me pop by Alice's place,” she says to Jacob. “She was something else at Nora's funeral.”

“It's late, Auntie.”

“Alice writes poetry. She doesn't sleep on nights like this.”

The word “poetry” scrapes its way down Jacob's throat, sharp and full of the ridiculous smells of musty odour and sterile-coloured classrooms. The sound of boys and girls mimicking rhymed couplets carefully memorized for no reason at all returns to him. Why anyone in this village would drag that old dead cat home and participate in its foolishness is beyond him, but he swings alongside his aunt into his cousin's drive. Her living room light shouts out a welcome to visitors.

“Ha-ay,” Alice sings out. “I was just heating up some water for tea. Come on in.”

While the ginseng steeps, the women cluck on about the storm, the dark, the gathering at Momma's house. Momma's stunning fine rage, the way she shut everyone but Madeline up. Neither woman mentions that Madeline is part of their healing circle because Jacob is there, but it clearly cheers the women the way they are cheered when female blackberry vines droop low with the weight of children and the male vines are stiff, jutting out straight and strong, disconnected from the females, making the picking so easy. Alice pours the tea.

“Read me some of them words, Alice. The kind that make a body feel big and strong.” Celia nestles into a chair, half-leaning forward. Jacob looks for something to distract his mind. There are photos on the wall: photos of Alice, of her small children by themselves, and some of her with her children. He focuses on Alice's son, Mike. In this photo he is hardly older than Jacob is now. There he is with a pair of toddlers and a woman Jacob does not really know. He thinks this must be Mike's wife.

“I swear, Celia, with this one I must be losing my mind. I have no idea what got into me, but here it is …”

Jacob barely hears over his musing about Mike marrying and having children so young. He couldn't have been but eighteen …

“
I want to walk along with eyes/Wide open and see the world.”

Alice's voice grabs Jacob. It is lyrical and soft, with that slight accent and wee rasp that Salish men find sexy in their women. Alice is his cousin, so he tries not to think about that. But it is the words; the words hold him.
Me too, me too
runs through his mind. The poem settles into the room. Jacob imagines it breathing life into the candle that burns in the centre of the table. It creeps under his skin and smokes its way to his bones, his flesh, his mind, and opens doors to sky, to being, to home and sound. He follows Alice's words as they play about the room. The words land easily on the flickering candle-tip, jump onto his skin and somersault their way through his chest, filling his lungs with purposeful breath. Alice's words engage his thighs and set his feet to tapping the rhythm of the song which hums beneath their meaning.

“I want to see,” Celia moans at the end of Alice's recitation. She swallows the last bit of her tea, and bids Alice goodbye. Jacob cannot be so casual about what he has just heard. He rises in stunned silence. He wants to say something, to engage Celia in some kind of discourse. Celia has been as familiar as an old shoe and now she is as a stranger. He nearly trips going out the door, stubbing his sock feet on the carpet where his shoes lie waiting for him.

Outside the clouds have disappeared and the moon brightens Celia and Jacob's path. It sprinkles bits of light among the trees lining the road and makes it easy for them to find their way. The
stars wink an old hello and Jacob slips his arm in Celia's, more to anchor himself than to help her find her way.

“That's poetry?” he says with some surprise.

“That's what she calls it. To me, those words are personal power songs. Jewels. Carved word-paintings and woven rugs all rolled into one.”

“She do that often?”

“No. No woman gets to do anything fun very often. Not here, anyway. No. Sometimes I go there and she has a new one. Most times I just get her to read some of my favourite old ones.”

“She has more?”

“Oh yeah, Alice has been writing poetries since she first learned to read. You know, to read in a serious way.”

Jacob restrains his desire to correct his aunt's reference to “poetries,” and instead asks, “Anyone else know she does this?”

“I don't know. I don't talk to anyone about it. I don't know if she ever does. I just remember her sitting there, candle burning, light on late one night. I was turning in and asked her what she was doing so late with a single small lamp going and a candle on the table burning when she clearly had electricity. She offered me tea. Told me that the candle lit a fire inside and the words came from that fire. ‘What words?' I asked. ‘Poetry,' she said. ‘Read some,' I said, and she did.”

A stone from the gravel road jumps into Celia's shoe. She wiggles her foot, sends it off to one side, leans over, removes it, and carries on without stopping.

Don't throw that stone away. I am tripping along in the bush next to the road, following Celia home. Truth be known, going to
Alice's to hear poetry is my favourite part of being a witness. Then
Celia picks up the stone and stuffs it in her pocket. We are getting
along now. I have to stop myself from laughing.

“Do you visit her much?”

Celia doesn't want to talk just yet. She wants Alice's words to roll around in her mind for a while. Talking stops this from happening.

“Jacob, you quit skirting and jumping around like a square dance team and get to your real point or I will get over the feeling Alice just filled me with.”

“I just want to hear more.”

“Next time I go, I will swing by and get you.”

“You could phone ahead.”

“No,” she says. “Feels better if I don't touch anything electrical before I go.”

XI

SALMON DON'T DANCE ON
their way upstream. Their dancing is done in their ocean playground with its infinite breast of salt water, coloured green, slate grey, silver, white, and blue, depending on the mood of the sun. Sometimes the ocean's water is warm, sometimes it is chilly, but the fish play, discover, dance, and flirt their way to strength, to knowing, to preparing for the journey upstream. In this place of dance and play their language is born. This language has reference posts that head them up the right stream to the river the fish-women know well. The men dance themselves to a mating pair
and learn the language of these women who are the only ones who
know where the spawning grounds are. The dance and the play get them ready for their silent war with the current. This swim will carry them to death whether or not they experience the ecstasy of procreation.

It was winter. After the blankets. After smallpox tore through the village. After the forest had been set ablaze. After the vicious hunger that followed the fires. After the foreigners settled on the lands that grew their precious camas. After the sod had been rolled over and the original food had been buried deep under the soil.

It was before cars, before radio, before gramophones, before television, before English swallowed their tongue. It was just before the songs and dances of the village became lawless things.

The first Alice lined up with the children of her family and stood ready to enter the smokehouse. They were going to come out with their own song, the one that would be their personal road to power. Alice's gramma was dead, but her mother had done her best in the
language to prepare her for this moment. Alice sensed her mother's wavering commitment to this ceremony; it was in the hesitation she heard in her voice and the nervous movement of her body. This wavering pushed itself onto the words her mother spoke and it wrapped a thin wire of fear around Alice. Alice quietly prayed that her song would melt this wire of fear.

Language needs a post, like dogs need stumps to piss on, or wolves need to turn around and look at the tracks they have made. It needs a reference marker to remind, to tell the rememberer they are hooked to some moment, some familiar place where bearings can be found. The rememberer need only clear the underbrush
with old familiar tools and locate the starting point. All people have to do is identify who is the one that can remember. Alice stood in her kitchen musing over these her last words as her spirit left. She
tried hard to say them to someone as she slid down the wall of her kitchen, but there was no one there. She died but she could not really leave. She floated about the space between the stars and earth, hoping to find someone to say it to.

No one hears, but Jacob feels something. This is a different kind
of see. I smile; he will get it eventually. I set to witnessing again.

JACOB FEELS AS IF
he does not have reference posts to understand Rena, Momma, Stacey, or any of the women. He doesn't know there is any other life but the one that they live; he sometimes thinks they are mean. He imagines them throwing dirt on his tracks, stopping him from pissing and marking his own territory. Celia eases the scrape somewhat, but even the cloth of her voice seems to dampen his sense of belonging. At times it stops him from being part of her. He needs to know he is part of something. It rankles. It rankles the way blackberry vines can rankle a run down the hill along the edge of a forest, a forest so young it makes you want to run, seduces you into it, and then sends up these vines to shred your skin and betray your very desire.

Rena shreds Jacob. He is convinced that she sets out to shred him. After Rena starts in on him, each woman by turns shreds his perception. They shred his linguistic markers, rendering useless as slugs the words he so carefully learned at school at their behest. These women, who paid such close attention to the marks the instructors handed out to him at the end of each term, speak in a language that contravenes everything those marks stood for. Damn, he thinks. Damn. And he vows he will never again ask why his
cousin killed himself. The trouble with ending the question is that Jacob stops looking for answers. He closes his own door to wondering, but he has no way of knowing this. He decides he wants to hear more of the “poetries” his aunt loves. He laughs secretly at his aunt Celia, who behaves as though she can make this language behave, moving subjects into objects, making them plural by adding an
s
to them.

“Plump berries sometimes fall where the ground has not been stirred by light-stepping feet; these babies then wither and die before they sink root. Sometimes children hear them weeping, fighting to be born, to be fed, to be. Pick the berries; they like it.” The first Alice says this to him, but Jacob doesn't hear her. Jacob doesn't wander through the bush much anymore. He doesn't like it. He doesn't wonder about why he doesn't like the bush. He just knows he doesn't like it.

THERE IS AN OLD
shack in the common, down past the end of the village. Folks tell the boys some old snake used to live there, but no one can remember his name. It isn't that they've forgotten. The “can” in this case is about permission: no one is allowed to think of the dead man's name. He is what the old folks called “forever dead” — meaning dead to memory, dead to speakers, dead to storytellers, and dead to mythmakers. The boys who used to hang about with him and might have talked about him have never said a word about him. Most of them left and drifted their way to death in broken-down hotel rooms, or drowned in their own vomit in some place called “Blood Alley” in Vancouver. Rumour has it one of them was crushed in a dumpster. It doesn't matter; the mythmakers have had a fine time drumming out tales about the three young men
who used to hang at the snake's because they were not dead and they were fascinating in the terrible cruelty they had inherited from the one who was dead.

THIS MORNING GRINDS OUT
sunshine in fits and starts, clouds jerk back and forth across the sun. Jacob finds it annoying. In the west the mountains and the ocean's gentle wind-warmed water don't spark much more heat than a sweet taste of sun on the skin, quickly followed by a breeze to cool it. Summer days like this make Jacob's body restless. He is still a teenager; the natural restlessness of adolescence on days like this turn his youthful restlessness into a cat's claw of anxiety.

The ball tournament has been neither exciting nor emotionally satisfying. He is antsy all day. After leaving Celia at her door, he takes to wandering around his village.

Don't go there, I warned, but I was too late.

Jacob is on his way to the old snake's cabin.

My timing does not matter. Jacob cannot communicate with animals; he cannot hear me.

Jacob has always been curious about the old snake's cabin.
Momma and Stacey warned him against going there in case he swallowed whatever poison the snake ate to make him so evil. Jacob does not believe this, and it perplexes him that Stacey does because as a teacher she ought to know better. None of the teachers at his school believe a person can swallow what has poisoned someone else's mind. They refer to the beliefs of the old people in this village as superstitions or old wives' tales. Until his cousin killed himself it hadn't crossed his mind to go down to the old snake's, but now the desire to peel back on the taboo is burning him up. His foot taps senselessly and the tapping unnerves Stacey who tells him to get on outside and do something besides wear a hole in the floor and tear at her mind. It is just the kind of scolding he needs to abrogate the caution not to go to the old snake's cabin.

The road ends before the patch of dirt in front of the old snake's cabin that once served as a yard. The villagers had built the road to bypass the snake's place. The patch between the road and the cabin is overgrown with dense brush and small trees. It is creepy, this thick little stretch to the snake's. The brush scrapes at Jacob's arms; Jacob whacks himself, thinking he is being bitten by some bug. It is cold inside the brush; there shouldn't be any bugs out. Still, he feels like he is being bitten steadily. He is beginning to feel like turning back when he hears voices. The sound of a little girl whimpering and begging nips at Jacob's ear and freezes his feet. A man's voice punctuates the pauses between her whimpers and the pleading phrases.

“No. Please. No.”

The interplay of snarling and wicked laughter behind the pleas and whimpers weakens Jacob's legs. He stops, steps, stops, then steps
again; each time he stops he listens to make sure the man hasn't heard him. Before taking another step Jacob hesitates for a second, and then carries on. It can't be the old snake.
Who then? Who would dare to live here in this place of the forever dead? Jacob listens as the sun sets.

How can Jacob listen to this and not curse? And then my very soul grows terrified. Jacob should be a lot more offended than he is. I roll from side to side, praying this boy will be horrified by what
he is witnessing.

The moon comes out and the clouds drift away. The stars paint the sky cold cobalt blue, but their light does not make it through the brush. He barely sees who's there, but he figures it must be the
old snake. But how can it be? He's banned. Who is it then? Even in this barely lit underbrush, Jacob makes out the body of a man and a child, but it is too dark to identify them. It must be the old snake; who else could it be? Jacob decides it is him. No one knows the old snake is back now except him. He shudders to think he is the only one who knows the snake is here, up to his old tricks again. The child looks like she is tied up. He thinks he can see the man poking her with something.

The shack is a shambles. The yard is worse. On the right side of the house a hide is stretched out, covered with maggots. At first the hide doesn't interest Jacob; but, as he watches the man torment the girl, he is drawn to it again and again. He decides to have a closer look. He inches his way forward. Then he sees it.

He vomits.

This relieves me; whatever he swallowed is up and out.

His belly heaves. He looks up between heaves to make sure the snake hasn't seen him. No one in the house seems to hear his heaving guts. The hide was a dog. He knows it. He has no idea how he knows
it. He has never seen a skinned animal, but he is as sure of it as if he had seen hundreds of skinned animals of all shapes and sizes. This was a dog. He can't get the image of the dog out of his mind, even as he hears the whimpers from the little girl, and wonders what the man tormenting her is doing. Then he sees clearly what the old snake is doing to the child and he gets sick all over again.

His stomach has already been emptied, but he can't stop heaving. He sidles closer to the shack.

There are two men with the child. Each holds a bottle. It looks like cheap wine. They take turns torturing the child. They poke her with a rod, heat it up in the fire they have going, then poke her again. She stops whimpering. Her eyes roll back. Her body goes limp. Jacob can see that they have shoved the poker up between her legs. He very nearly screams. He wants to run, but can't tear his eyes from the grisly scene.

I want to heave up my food too, but dare not. Jacob cannot see me here with him.

Someone is passed out on the floor. It looks like a woman, but Jacob cannot tell who she is. Her soiled dress is up over her hips; she has no underwear on. After the child faints or dies — Jacob cannot be sure which — both men help themselves first to the child's vagina and then they help themselves to the woman's.

Jacob heaves. Some bile rolls into his mouth and burns his throat. He is too close. One of the men hears him and comes charging at the brush. Jacob swallows his bile and breaks into a run. The man sees him running. As Jacob's distance increases, the man decides
not to give chase. He shrugs and returns to the cabin, where he grabs his things. Both he and the other man leave.

With each pounding step, Jacob persuades himself that he could not possibly have seen what he knows he saw. He tells himself he imagined it, and he grows terrified of his imagination. He stops running near his gramma's house. Panting, he leans up against a stump and wonders if he had seen the old snake. “I couldn't have seen him,” he argues. “He must be dead by now. Those kids are grownups. Maybe it is one of those young guys. I saw a man. I saw a child. I know what I saw. I just don't know who I saw.” He needs to talk to someone, but he cannot see telling his grandmother. She does not deserve to hear this story. He has no idea who else he can talk to. Not any of the women or the men who told him not to go to the snake's shack. They had made so sure he knew their caution was meant to be honoured. “I have to tell. Maybe Aunt Celia will listen.”

He finds his way home and straddles the bed, but he cannot sleep. He fights hard to focus on Alice's poetry, but to no avail. In the end, he lets the pictures come and go. He replays the sound of
the child until his ears hurt.