Celia's Song (17 page)

“Wake me as soon as the drugstore opens. We will need some more things.” Stacey goes into the living room, where she falls asleep on the couch fully dressed. Rena and Judy crawl into bed in Stacey's old room. No one will wake them until they are needed. Jacob still sits on the chair. Celia cannot sleep. Momma can't, either.

DAWN COMES FUNNILY OUT
here in front of the mountains that face
the sea. The mountains look like they are a skirt shaking the sun
loose from its mooring until it reshapes itself into a smooth blanket
lighting up the day. The day wakes up the same way a photo develops. It kind of wobbles its way from dark, to shades of almost clarity, until everything comes into focus.

Celia and Momma watch the blurry image of their village outside come to light without speaking.

“I really think we should kill the man who did this,” Momma offers with such calm sincerity that it startles Celia. Celia is not
upset by the words; Momma might just as well have said, “Pick the berries; they like it.” She is more surprised her momma is able to say anything.

“Yeah,” Celia agrees. This, too, comes out easily. The icy blood that pumped cold into their veins all night has warmed. It flushes both women's cheeks a sweet, deep red-brown to say that they want him dead. The flush relaxes them.

Momma stares at the mountains and, as she does, she flips through page after page of memory searching for a word in her language to describe this man's behaviour. If she could say it in her language, the word for it would lead her to name the kind of death she should make sure he gets. She would know how to kill him. White people would arrest him. They would charge him. They would find him guilty only if Stella helped. They would stick him in a small room and feed, house, and clothe him. It irks her that they would give him good food, a warm house, and a clean room after what he has done. Taking care of him after what he did is unthinkable.

White people's laws are crazy; they starve the innocent and feed the guilty. She knows the law functions to help you know what to do in a moral crisis, so she doesn't hold it against them. She just wants to know the law of her grandmothers, the law that will tell her what to do. She has never tried to cross the two languages in her mind before. They don't fit. She accepts the lack of a fit as a child would and keeps them separate. She needs them now to come together in some way that will tell her what obligation she has to
undertake in order to kill him and still be able to return home to her spirit world.

“Do they hang people for killing someone like that?” Celia asks.

“No. They put him in a nice warm room, in a nice jail, with clean sheets. They feed him and take care no one hurts him for the rest of his life.” She laughs at the absurdity of it.

“I could handle that,” Celia says, because she can think of no reason to fear jail. Her son is gone.

“Celia. There is no word to describe this in our language — at least none I know. There is a word for a man who takes his daughter as his wife, but the word implies the daughter is a grown woman and this father loves her in a perverse way. When that happens he is branded and ostracized, and this kills him. There is a word for battering a wife. When that happens, the husband is ostracized and taken to the mountains and left there to die. He dies of starvation or some grizzly or cougar gets him. There is a word for battering a child, and the women take the culprit into the bush and kill him. But there is no word for what that man did to this child.”

Celia wonders what Momma is trying to get at.

“Either I don't know what I believe I knew, or we need a new
word, a new law, a new response,” Momma says.

“Well, if a man batters or rapes some woman, he destroys her life and so he is destroyed by those who cherish her. If a man tortures some child, he should face torture.”

“Mm,” Momma responds. “That's the word. Torture. There is no word for torture.” She accepts Celia's words. It makes sense, torture for torture. She is quiet for a moment, then says, “Do you think we could actually do that?”

“And get away with it? No.”

“I just mean could we?”

“I think I could.” Celia lights up a cigarette, feeling satisfied that she thinks she could.

JACOB SITS IN THE
hall, watching the clock's hands tick by the hours as he listens to the child. He hears the women talk and sees pictures of a parched man so fatigued he can hardly stand. The men he does not recognize sing songs he has never heard. In the background there is the sound of the child struggling for even, slow breaths. The parched man is dragging himself through a crazy dance, surrounded by clacking deer hooves that seem to be driving him to
dance to his last, waterless breath. The hooves seem not to be attached to anything.

Loyal breathes inside the house, hoping his breath reaches Jacob. Jacob looks as though he feels something; he straightens up, like he has had a renewal of energy. He no longer feels sleepy.

THE CHILD STOPS CONVULSING
after sunrise. Momma checks her; she breathes still. Her little pulse is weak, but her steady breath is relief for Momma. She leaves the room to tell Jacob to go to bed.
He shakes his head. She decides something is up with that boy, but this is not a good time to go sniffing around in someone else's backyard; this yard here has trouble enough to keep her busy.

When the clock strikes seven, Jacob awakes and phones Jim.
Thank God; Jim answers and not his wife. Jacob doesn't want to tell Jim's wife what he's calling about.

“Whassup?” Jim asks his nephew, who has never phoned him before.

“Remember what I told you I saw?”

“Yeah.”

“It happened. It was Martha's girl, Stella, her daughter, Shelley, that I saw. Grandpa is asleep, Uncle. You better come. We have to find
the guy.” Jacob hears the half whistle that escapes his uncle's mouth.

Jacob must have seen. Does Aunt Celia know that he saw this happen? Jim decides she would have to know. He prays that she cares enough to still want to help him, because she is the only one who can help Jacob sort out what he saw from what he imagined and keep the two pathways clear. Jim and Ned had already talked about it, now here it is. Ned's just too tired to deal with it. “I'll be right there,” Jim says, and hangs up.

Jim's wife wants to go to church. He tells her she can go on ahead if she wants, but he's going to his mother's. She complains that it is impious and unvirtuous to miss the Sunday sermon, and she begins to get the children ready to go to their gramma's. “No. You had better go to your church and pray for my sorry-ass village, because the kids can't come to Mom's today.”

“What happened?” she asks. He tells her that he will tell her tonight, out of earshot of the children. She shudders, makes the sign of the cross, and says, “God bless” as he walks out the door. He holds the door a moment before shutting it. He loves this woman, but some days her Catholic devotion annoys him. When
it does, he holds her and reminds himself of how much he loves her otherwise.

XV

SUICIDE IS A FIRE
underneath a peat bog burning airless and slow.
It needs a fissure to open up the bog and oxidize the fire. Suicide's
fire is a beast. It has its own character, a sense of determination; its hunger rips open the soil that it feeds from.

Jimmy's suicide is not the only one Stella has endured. After her husband threw her out and kept those first two babies, she took to wandering the streets, hopping from bar to bar, looking for any kind of love — lowlife sex, accompanied with meanness and disease — it didn't matter, just so she didn't have to go home and sleep alone. She discovered that men paid for sex, and took to making her living this way. She holed up in a hotel room on the seedier side of Vancouver, selling herself to any trash that would come along. Sometime after, she got friendly with the guy next door to
her hotel room and they made a mating pair.

He flipped out when he discovered how she made her living. He said he would get work. He did. She quit turning tricks. He got fired. She went back to turning tricks and everything was fine until someone offered her a lot of money for an all-nighter and she accepted. She came home the next morning and there was Frank, hanging in her room. There was crap everywhere.

She called the cops. They came and took him away, but not before harassing her about how it had happened. They searched the tiny room for a note, some indication of his unhappiness, some reason for his choking the life from his own throat — all the time carefully avoiding Frank's crap. Every now and then they glanced at Stella as if she was a beast that had jumped off the moon and landed in their midst, and they couldn't for the life of them figure out what to call her. It had taken hours for Frank to die, they said, because his neck wasn't broken. Later that night, over a few drinks
with a trick, Stella pictured him squirming, shitting his pants, trying to die or get off the noose. She laughed and the trick laughed with her. They staggered back to her room, thinking the cops must have cleaned it up by now. They would have cleaned it up, she was sure. When she came down the hallway, the night clerk hollered at her.

“Man says you have to clean up that mess Frank made or move on out.”

“The cops didn't clean it up?”

“It ain't their room, honey.”

“Shit.”

“That be what it is all right,” the john cracked up.

“Well, honey. Unless you're into cleaning up crap, you best be moseying on home,” she said to him. He beat her, helped himself to her womanhood, and left. After, she cleaned Frank's mess. Whatever dignity she had left skipped down the hallway without her chasing the john. It went out to the street and disappeared into the city.

Whatever caring she had in her flipped from one head of the serpent and was swallowed by the terrible hunger of the other.

Her dignity took with it her ambition, her inspiration to dream of a different life. The serpent's restless head crawled around the room, pouring his hunger down her throat. The hunger consumed every good feeling she was capable of and she slid through life
trying to feed that hunger — but the hunger was insatiable. As long as she was awake it gnawed at her insides. She swallowed violence; she swallowed pills, alcohol, her own blood, semen, the dirt of every man who crossed her path. The hunger was a sign, glowing blood red on her forehead, saying, “I eat shit.” Every piece of trash that came her way saw the sign and conjured new ways to demean and humiliate her. They left unsatisfied. She swallowed what they gave her. She sometimes swallowed pieces of them. She sometimes scared them she was beaten so low. Nothing seemed too terrible for her. She only felt alive when she was in pain.

Sometime between one crazed man and the next, she became pregnant. She sat alone in the dark, praying for the blood between her legs to come. It didn't. She could not take care of this child and she couldn't get up enough concern to consider an abortion or enough effort to adopt it out. She sat in the dark trying hard to have some kind of thought, some kind of something, a response to the blood that refused to come. She wanted something sensible to happen to her.

An inkling of a memory of some other life came to her in the fifth month of her pregnant state. Blurred images of purple berries hanging from hard-leafed vines, smooth salal bushes on hillsides just made for climbing. Sun kisses, cool winds, and the golden glow of lamplight on stormy nights danced about her beat-up face. She wanted to go home. The memory left. She stayed. The baby came one night after some man had left her.

For a while, the baby amused her. Between bouts of alcohol consumption and turning tricks she would clean and feed her. Sometimes she came close to playing with her. She talked to her
all the time. Her brain didn't seem to be connected to real thoughts, so she drivelled out her day-to-day speaking words that were disconnected from any kind of deep meaning. “I'm going to the bathroom now. Stella needs to pee. Let's turn on the light. I am making soup now. Stella is hungry. Let's eat. Stella feels so lonely and she's nearly broke. I've got to find a john, baby.”

Stella didn't let the baby cry. She held a hand over her mouth every time she tried. The baby got the idea pretty quickly. She was quiet, strangely so. The hotel manager didn't like Stella having a baby there, but the kid seemed to be a quiet one, so he never bothered them. None of the johns paid attention to the child lying on the floor in a cupboard drawer not far from the bed. She never seemed to awaken when they were busy getting what they wanted from Stella. The little girl learned to walk and talk, but soon discovered that Stella only liked to hear the sound of her own voice. She wasn't interested in the prattle of the small being; every time the child tried to invade the space with her own sound a few backhands quieted her chatter.

Rob picked Stella up from a bar. He was weary of the city, weary of his life, but did not have the courage to hang himself. He latched on to Stella. For a while he worked, but he resented his money going to feed a child that Stella did not have the good sense to care for or give away. All the child did was stare at him. He would stare back at her, but she didn't answer him when he spoke. It annoyed him. He kept telling Stella there was something wrong with that girl. She never talked. He would try playing with her, but the child went limp in his grasp. He couldn't figure it out. Stella began to hate the way he attended to the child. She hated hearing him say he wanted to leave the city, go home, back to the rez. She wanted to go back to her tricks, to her johns, but he wouldn't let her. She started sneaking out during the day, while he was at work, until he left his job and nagged Stella until she agreed to go home to his village. They were to leave on Tuesday. On Monday night, Stella packed up a garbage bag and headed home to her reservation without him. She hitchhiked.

The man who picked her up was the man who did this to her daughter.

She never meant to stay. There was no place for her on this reserve except this broken-down old shack. She took it. She had no ambition to clean it up and start over. But the guy who brought her here kept coming back. He liked her being here in this old shack whenever he returned from hauling a load. He didn't give her money like the others. She might take off; he wasn't stupid. Without money she couldn't leave, but he left her enough food and booze. She decided to wait until he let his guard down, then she would steal his money, drop the child off at Martha's, and head out on the road again.

In the meantime, she floated from one drunken moment to the next. If she ran out of booze before the man returned, she would try to remember what women did all day. The effort made her head hurt. She sat on the broken porch for hours, waiting for her truck driver and another load of booze. Sometimes she ate food, the kind that takes no real effort to prepare. Days flipped into nights and she sat, rarely leaving her porch. Her mother came by every now and then and would tell her she should help her clean this place up. Stella stared dumbly at her until Martha started to clean and Stella would join her. She frustrated Martha with her “What for?” attitude. She knew it was just going to get dirty again. The child would help. She took to talking to her gramma. There was something different about her gramma that made her want to talk. She would say things in her soft voice to Gramma and Gramma would always answer.

The man was mean. He subjected Stella and the child to all sorts of indignities. But Stella always got excited when he returned. It
wasn't love or lust or loneliness that propelled her to invite him in. It was more that his face broke the monotony of the ugly landscape of her home, her life, and the future that yawned before her. He always brought groceries and beer. The child took to crying when he came. She was such a noisemaker. Stella couldn't remember hearing such a racket coming from one of them things. Her mother had had so many. She complained to her mom who gave stupid advice to stop the child from crying. Pack her, her mom said; like I got nothing better to do but pack this thing and feed her, like strength and money falls from the sky or grows on trees, Stella said. Soon she quit saying anything to Martha. The useless man brought food for her, not this child. Feed her what? She tried packing her; put her on her back in a blanket. The child still cried. She was five years old and cried like a baby.

The man built a hammock on the porch and she put the child in it. That seemed to settle her. He brought food enough for all of them and she fed her and that seemed to work some too. He almost seemed nice in some vague way, but it never quite registered anywhere inside Stella. Martha was frustrated with her daughter. Stella took to bringing the child to Martha's on weekends. Martha wanted to keep her. She was too small, too obedient, and altogether too quiet, and that place of Stella's was no place to raise a child. But Martha could not keep her. She was Stella's after all, and Martha worked.

Pretty soon the little girl was walking about, naming things as they were, and getting cheekier by the day. “This place needs a good
clean,” she would say and Stella would beat her. That intrigued the man. He joined her. Eventually, the child became a source of entertainment for the man. This almost woke the woman up. A crazy kind of fascination was sparked inside as she watched the man diddle the child. The little girl seemed to like the tickle game and the sex with the man afterward was great for Stella. His appetite increased over time. Not satisfied with Stella he made a wife of the child. Stella got jealous. It was the first emotion Stella had felt in a long time. Her jealousy made her meaner.

Stella tormented the child. She and the man would get drunk, so drunk, and before Stella would pass out she would beat the girl. In their drunken stupor they would sleep, leaving the child out in the cold, whimpering. Soon he began to participate in tormenting the child to see if she would still respond with her little giggles. She didn't, but he started to like the little whimpers from the girl better than
her giggles. Stella would wake up and reach for the beer he always brought, drink herself into a stupor, pass out, and begin drinking again before either of them was fully awake. The process repeated itself.

He used them for his entertainment, then he left. He was sometimes back soon, sometimes he was back later. While he was gone, Stella's memories fought to be heard. She took to blanking out — staring off into space, emptying her mind of all thought so the memories sank to the bottom of some well of self-induced stupidity, impotent and unheard. He had been gone for a particularly long time this time — months. The little girl seemed almost happy at her mother's deprivation. This chilled whatever feeling Stella had left for this child. When the man returned, he was terrible to Stella's little girl. Even in her blurred state, she knew he was doing terrible things to her. She finally said something about how he was going
to kill her and she would have to clean up the mess; he beat her, beat her unconscious.

Suicide is a permit; a licence to kill that hangs in the air like a stench. This stench covers everything. It calls up the murderous spirit
in everyone who sniffs the scent of it.

He could smell it. He smelled her too. What difference does it make if you murder yourself or someone else? Only fools kill themselves. If you're going to check out, take someone with you. She watched him burning the life from the child and planned his murder, then her own.

Memory has its own journey. It possesses a strange insistence. It will not be ignored. Quiet, it freezes the spirit. Alive, it binds us to
time, to eternity, in strange ways.

Stella was fascinated by the slow murderous dance between the man and the child. Some image stubbornly appeared through the fog of her dying mind. She was rolling down the hill and laughing with another girl child. The laughter ended quickly. The old snake appeared and took both girls. There was a dense silence that started in her feet and rolled its way up through her legs, her hips, her belly, her chest, and finally settled in her mind. That's when the words
dropped: “You going to kill her, you keep that up. Don't expect me to clean up your fuckin' mess.” That's when the beating came with that hot poker. That's all she remembered. Someone woke her up. At first she thought it was her mother, but it wasn't. Someone else woke her up. Who was it?