Indian Horse (2 page)

There was a spectre in our camp. We could see the shadow of this dark being in the lines of our mother’s face. She would sometimes sit huddled close to the fire, clenching and unclenching her fists, her eyes dark moons in the firelight. She never spoke at times like that, never could be comforted. I’d walk to her and take her hand but she didn’t notice me. It was as if she was under the influence of a potent medicine no shaman had the power to break. The spectre lived in the other adults too, my father and my aunt and uncle. But its most chilling presence was in my mother.

“The school,” she would whisper then. “The school.”

It was the school that Naomi hid us from. It was the school that had turned my mother so far inward she sometimes ceased to exist in the outside world. Naomi had seen the adults of our camp taken away as children. She’d seen them return bearing a sorrow that could not be reached, and when my grandfather died, she took her family back to the land, hoping that an Ojibway life might heal them, ease their pain.

Besides my brother, I had a sister that I never met. Her name was Rachel, and the year before I was born she disappeared. She was six.

“The Zhaunagush came from across the water,” our grandmother told Benjamin and me one time when we were hidden in the trees. “It was the end of August and we were coming back to the river from the summer camp near One Man Lake. Our canoes were full of berries. We planned to go to Minaki to sell them and buy supplies for the winter. We were tired.

“I never thought they’d come in the dawn. Me, I always thought the Zhaunagush slept late like fat old bears. But they walked into our camp and I pulled my robe up over Benjamin who was so small and hid him from their view. But they found Rachel and they took her away in their boat.

“I stood on the rocks and watched them. Them, they had a boat with a motor, and when they rounded the bend in the river I thought how fast things can vanish from our view. Her screams hung in the air like smoke from a green fire. But even they finally vanished and all that was left was the wake from that boat slapping at the rocks at my feet.

“That’s all I carry of her now—the wet slap of water on the rocks. Every time I hear it I remember the dawn the white men came and stole Rachel from us.”

So we hid from the white men. Benjamin and I developed the quick ears of bush people. When we detected the drone of an engine we knew to run. We’d grab the old lady’s hand and scuttle into the trees and find a place to secret ourselves away until we knew for certain that there was no danger.

I learned English at the same time I learned Ojibway. My father taught me to read from Zhaunagush books, taught me to form the sounds the letters built with the tip of his finger as my guide. They felt hard, those white man words; sharp and pointed on my tongue. Old Naomi fought against it, trying to throw the books in the fire.

“They come in different ways, them, the Zhaunagush,” she said. “Their talk and their stories can sneak you away as quick as their boats.”

So I grew up afraid of the white man. As it turned out, I had reason to be.

In 1957, when I was four, they got my brother, Benjamin. The old lady and I were gathering roots in a glade back of the trees that stood against the river. The men and my brother were at the foot of a rapids setting gill nets. The airplane came out of the west, and we did not hear it soon enough. Naomi and I made it to a cleft in the rocks, but the men and my brother had nowhere to go. The plane cut them off, and we crawled up out of our crevice in the rocks and watched as those men from the plane lowered a canoe and forced my family’s canoe to the opposite shore. They had guns, those Zhaunagush. I think that if they hadn’t, my father and my uncle would have fought them off and we would have run into the back country. But they took my brother at gunpoint and pushed him up into the plane.

My mother collapsed on the long, flat rock that reached out into the river at our camp. No one could move her. She lay there for days, and it was only the chill of the first autumn rains that got her up on her feet and back to the fire. She was lost to me then. I could see that. She was gaunt and drained from days of weeping, a tent of skin over her bones. When Benjamin disappeared he carried a part of her away with him, and there was nothing anyone could do to fill it. My father tried. He never left her side for weeks. But now that she had lost two children, she would not speak anything except “the school,” the words like a bruise in the air. So he left her—and he and my uncle paddled off downriver to sell the berries. When they returned they brought the white man with them in brown bottles. Spirits, Naomi called them. Bad spirits. Those spirits made the grown-ups move in strange, jerky ways and their talk was twisted. I fell asleep to evil laughter. Sometimes my mother lurched to her feet and danced around the fire, and the shadow she threw against the skin of the tent was like the outline of a skeleton. I clutched my robe tight to my throat, lay across the space my brother once filled and waited for sleep to claim me.

On clear nights the old woman and I would sit on the rocks by the edge of the river. The stars pinwheeled above us and we would hear wolves calling to each other. Naomi told me stories of the old days. Told me about my grandfather and the medicine ways he carried. Good medicine. Powerful, Ojibway medicine. The river wound serpentine, radiant in the light of the northern moon. In its curling wash I sometimes thought I could hear songs sung in Ojibway. Honour songs, raising me above the hurt of my brother’s absence. That voice sustained me, as did the firm, warm hand of Naomi on the thin blade of my shoulder.

4

After Benjamin
disappeared my family left the bush and the shores of the river. We canoed out one day and left the camp behind. My grandmother came too though she’d argued against the move. My mother seemed almost weightless by now. I was always surprised that she left footprints. There was nothing to her but air. Her eyes were empty and she walked bent over like an old woman.

My father bore it all in stoic silence. But there was an angry arc when he swung an axe, a more vicious slice of the knife when he skinned out a deer. This energy, so heavy and thick, was the opposite of my mother’s.

Both my parents had taken to the Zhaunagush drink, and we left the bush in pursuit of it. We followed the whiskey to the transient camps of the half-breeds who gathered on the discard lands around sawmill towns, waiting for the bits of work that were sometimes tossed their way. Indian work. That’s what the mill folk called it. Men and boys would plow off into the bush to cut deadfall trees and haul their lengths to cleared stretches where the skidders could get to them. It was their job to clear the bastard trees that made dropping the prime timber more difficult for the white fallers. There were no chainsaws. The breeds and the Indians cut everything by hand with Swede saws and axes. It was brutal work for little pay and what was paid out was drunk off quickly. There weren’t many kids in those camps. Most of them had been spirited away by the government men. The fact that no one ever came for me was more a testament to the invisible nature of our lives than to any good luck. I hauled a wagon around the rutted, muddy roads that led through the tent village and out to the desolate edges of the town where the poor whites lived, to sell firewood we kids broke by hand. Broke-wood breeds. That’s what the Zhaunagush at the mills called us. Broke-wood breeds.

Our lives became the plod from one tent village to another. Sometimes there’d be an abandoned tarpaper shack that we could call home, but for the most part we lived with others as displaced as we were, in canvas tents strung in a circle around a central fire. We’d share the warmth and whatever food we had. I learned to snare rabbits and steal chickens. I grew to hate the stink of sulfur at the same time I learned to endure the stench of roasted dog, the bite of the pine gum tea washing down the lard sandwiches that were our staple. Naomi told me stories, kept me away from the adults when they were in the grips of the drink. She showed me how to skin the squirrels and woodchucks we could sometimes catch in those thin woods.

We settled in at Redditt in the winter of 1960. There was a lot of work for the men there. We managed to buy a wood stove for our tent and passed the deep snow moons in a comfort we’d forgotten could exist. With this infusion of hope, my father drank less. There was more money for food, and I stopped snapping off the ends of the branches that stuck up out of the snow to haul about in my wagon. By spring I’d grown taller, elastic and wiry.

That spring we gathered mushrooms and greens and wild onions. A stream led from a bog lake to the main river, and my grandmother showed me how to lay out a burlap bag and haul in the suckers that ran up the creek to spawn. I learned to clean them with swift swipes of a knife and use the guts for bait on night lines I set out to drift in the current of the big river. We smoked those fish. Sometimes we’d slap thick coats of clay around them and bake them in the fire. My grandmother used the ribs of them for needles to sew buttons on my battered shirts. It began to feel as though we might forge a life for ourselves there on the edges of that rough-hewn town. Summer came. My mother sat with us at the fire most nights, even though she still carried such a deep sadness.

5

Then Benjamin
walked out of the bush. He’d run away from the school in Kenora. People he met told him where we’d gotten to, and he’d followed the rail line north, and then the road. It was sixty miles to Redditt and he’d walked all that way. He was bug-bit and thin, taller than when we’d last seen him. His hair was cropped close to his skin and his ill-fitting clothes were made even looser by the weight he’d lost on his journey. For a moment no one knew who he was.

“Mother,” he said.

My mother burst out of her despair in a gale of tears and laughter.

There was great celebration. My brother sat by the fire and was fed our thin stew and my grandmother mixed up bannock that she baked on a stick over the fire. I stood by his side while he chewed. He was different. Not only in size. There was a wariness in his eyes and a hardness to the set of his chin. His hands shook some when he tore off bits of the bannock. “Saul,” he’d greeted me, nodding firmly. It was odd to see the expressions of a grown man on a boy’s face. Then he coughed.

The cough racked him, and he bent forward. The hump of his back rose and fell with the effort. The grown-ups shrank back a step, fear on their faces. Only my grandmother stepped up to attend to him. She leaned him back against her bosom and cradled his head. His coughs subsided gradually. When they left him finally, his face was red and there were tears in his eyes. I could see how much smaller the spell had made him. He huddled close to my grandmother and put a hand to his mouth and worked at breathing regularly. “The coughing sick,” she said to us. “He got it from the school.”

Over the next few days my brother rested. It would be years before I knew the full name of what he had but the TB my brother carried in his lungs spread anxiety throughout my family. My mother retreated into her woe again. My father drank hard. One evening my grandmother coaxed everyone to the fire and spoke to us.

“There is not much time,” she said. “The coughing sick is in Benjamin hard, and I think that soon the Zhaunagush will come to find him. When they do, they will find Saul and we will lose them both.”

We needed to go where the government men could not find us, my grandmother said. We needed to get back to living in a proper way. We needed to take Benjamin to a place where the air and the land could ease his spirit.

“He is twelve,” she said. “Saul is seven. They are old enough now to dance the
manoomin,
the rice, in the old way. Their grandfather would have wanted this for them. We will go to Gods Lake.”

No one argued. In the firm words of the old woman there was no room for discussion. We began to prepare for the trip. My father used his last paycheque to buy three old freighter canoes that he and my uncle and grandmother patched with spruce gum heated over the fire. The old lady quietly traded my father’s whiskey for a rifle and shells and a pair of heavy metal washtubs. We packed our tents and what food we could and set off to paddle our way to where Gods Lake sat in the thickest part of the bush country. Grandmother knew the country and she guided us through the portages to the Winnipeg River, then north past Minaki, then east again beyond One Man Lake. The journey took us ten days. Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey water that peeled across our bow. The pellets of rain were warm and Benjamin and I caught them on our tongues as our grandmother laughed behind us. Our canoes skimmed along and as I watched the shoreline it seemed the land itself was in motion. The rocks lay lodged like hymns in the breast of it, and the trees bent upward in praise like crooked fingers. It was glorious. Ben felt it too. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I held his look a long time, drinking in the face of my brother. When he coughed I put a hand to his back.

“In the Long Ago Time before the Zhaunagush, a group of hunters set out to find moose late one fall.” My grandmother’s voice carried over the water, and the other two canoes pulled even with us so the adults could hear. “They went the way we go now, and they’d never seen such strength in the country. The rocks seemed to sing to them.

“In those times our people relied on intuition—the great spirit strength of thought—and the hunters found a portage at a flat place not far from where we are now. It led back into country marked with ridges. It was very hard to walk, but they followed a small creek through a cut in the land until they felt the land close off behind them like the flap of a wigwam. They could feel the stillness in their bones, and some of them were afraid. But the need for meat for the coming winter was so strong they pushed on.