Scattered Bones (9 page)

On the community dock, Father Bonnald, Bob Taylor, and Russell Smith are crouched down, their eyes riveted on the finish line.

The canoes streak past, then jerk to a stop.

As Joe and Moses sit panting, and the crowd collectively holds its breath, the three judges argue among themselves. Finally the announcement is made: Moses Rabbitskin has won by a quarter inch. A cheer explodes from the crowd.

Russell Smith, on behalf of the HBC, presents the prize, a crisp five dollar bill. A grinning Moses graciously accepts it, shaking hands with the officials, blowing a kiss to his sweetheart, Agnes Highway. Adoring fans crowd around him, patting, slapping, mauling, until Izzy thinks he must hurt all over. Joe is standing alone. Only a couple of people have come over to offer condolences. It’s something she’s noticed before. He seems to be as ill at ease in this company as she is. As much an outsider. When she thinks back, this was obvious the first time they met – which may be why she was so attracted to him.

Chapter Twelve

When Izzy was in her last year
at Bishop Strachan,
her grandfather urged her to enrol at Trinity College. “Study sports if you have to. If nothing else, you’ll catch a suitable husband.” Her parents had wanted her to attend Normal School. “You’d make a fine teacher,” her father said. “And who knows, the Lord might whisper in your ear, and you’ll follow in my footsteps. Marry a missionary, or maybe even become one yourself.”

Izzy had choked at this suggestion, but promised she’d think about it.

That spring, the Bishop Strachan graduating class was invited to an exhibition of Canadian painters at Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club. When her grandfather heard about it, he scoffed, “Not that bunch! Infantile mishmash. Give me a lovely Dutch riverside landscape or mellow, sheep-clad hills in Surrey, not some rock in the desolate north. I want calm and order, not chaos”

Certainly she’d been perplexed by the jangle of colour and swirling shapes. But there were two paintings that caught her attention – ‘Autumn’s Garland’ by Tom Thomson and ‘Winter Woods’ by Lawren Harris. Izzy had experienced the shield country during those summers she was allowed to travel to Pelican Narrows, but here were tantalizing glimpses of how glorious it would be at other times of the year. Months later she would discover how savage the winter was. How the cold could bite and sting your eyes. But that May nothing could have stopped her. To her family’s chagrin, she announced that she wanted to spend an entire year at Pelican Narrows. “Then I’ll make a decision about my future.”

September
was
glorious, and so different from the red-brown autumn in the east. The bright yellow elms and birches prancing in front of the stolid, dark spruce reminded Izzy of sassy girls out on a date with handsome, dignified young men. A wind one night sent the leaves spinning, laying down a carpet of gold so beautiful she walked around with tears in her eyes. The landscape teased her, enchanted her, and, finally, the forbidding night seduced her.

It was a thick, frightening dark, and, at first, she went no further than the outhouse. But the white birch, lit up by the moon, turned into sign posts along the trails which crisscrossed Pelican Narrows. She ventured further and further, jack pine, balsam fir, and white spruce looming above her like centurions. There was the pleasure of overcoming her fear – even as a child she enjoyed being reckless – but more it was the intoxicating combination of a dread that made her heart thump and a joy that made her laugh out loud.

One night, an astonishing aurora borealis flashed in the sky. Huge sheets of gauze in shades of blue, pink and mauve roiled in the heavens. Around them white, shimmering crystals, triangular and circular in shape, pranced like high-spirited demons. As she sat on a tree stump mesmerized by the spectacle, lines from her favourite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, came to her:

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God

It will flame out, shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.”

At that moment there came to her an epiphany so potent, so irresistible, that it instantly transformed her. Her Creator was no longer the God worshipped by Hopkins or the other poets or painters or philosophers she had studied. Nor was it her father’s, nor the Anglican Church’s. The divine lay deep in this severe, punishing, yet mystical ancient landscape, in its lakes and streams, its marshes and rocky outcrops.

And, in Izzy’s mind, this perplexing place, this other godliness, came to be personified by a Cree boy with strange eyes.

Izzy met Joe six months ago at a meeting of St. Bartholomew’s bible study club. Ernst had decided that “touching the heart of the savage youth” was his most important mission, and he had painstakingly taught himself a kind of pidgin Cree hoping to communicate with his young parishioners. Lucretia, in one of her more practical turns, understood that plates of bully beef and beaver stew served up after the lesson were bees-to-honey attractions. The bible club turned out to be a surprising success.

On this freezing cold Epiphany, the young Anglicans were gathered in the front pews of the church. A marker had been placed in the Cree translation of their bibles at Luke 2:39-52, the story of Boy Jesus at the Temple. A rotogravure print of William Holman Hunt’s rendition of the event had been pinned on a wall. This was a painting Izzy had always loved, the delicate young Christ, his worried but adoring parents, the rabbis so colourful, the temple so exotic. The Indian teenagers gawked at it, but remained expressionless.

Reverend Wentworth spoke Cree as though he were chopping cabbage, words spewing out in rapid succession. “Jesus was twelve years old. His parents came to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover. Then Mary and Joseph left to go home. In a caravan with ...” He had no idea what the Cree word for camel was, or even if there was such a word, so he substituted horses. “They discovered that Jesus wasn’t with them. They rushed back to the city. After three days of searching, they found him in the Temple. There he was, many years younger than you youngsters here, debating with the rabbis as though he was a scholar.”

At this point, Reverend Wentworth stretched up his arms, his palms raised towards Heaven, his eyes shining. In English he proclaimed: “And all who heard him were amazed at His understanding and His answers.” The Biblical scholars stared at him mesmerized. He could have been a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat.

During the lesson that followed, Izzy spotted Joe Sewap sitting by himself near the back of the church, seemingly engrossed in every word uttered by her father. That he had come to the Anglican Church was a surprise, because first, he had been baptized a Roman Catholic, and second, he had an unusually close connection to St. Gertrude’s – his mother, Sally Sewap, was the priest’s housekeeper.

After the lesson, Izzy’s father made a point of going over to him. “You’re Joe Sewap, aren’t you? I’m Reverend Wentworth and this is my daughter, Izzy.”

Joe nodded to Izzy, but said not a word. In fact he turned his back on her. Cornering the clergyman, he proceeded to lay out his interpretation of the scripture.

“Okay, so Jesus impressed the rabbis. But what about his parents? They must have been worried sick, him disappearing like that for days. What kind of true Christian boy would do that?”

Ernst was taken aback – no Indian had ever challenged his theological interpretations before – and proclaimed with the unctuous condescension his daughter hated, “I’m sure He was torn between obeying his heavenly Father and minding his earthly father. But, after all, He was going about God’s work, so any thoughtlessness towards his parents can be excused.”

Interjecting before the scriptural debate could continue, Izzy asked Joe, “How come you know so much about bible stories?”

“Made to listen to them before I could talk. But actually I’ve always liked them,” he replied.

“Come back and visit our little group any time you feel like it,” Ernst urged.

But he never did. Izzy was sorry about this because already she was intrigued by him. For one thing, he was so peculiar looking. His complexion was light for a Cree – Izzy thought of honey – his cheek bones sculpted and high, his hair the usual brown-black. But it was his eyes that were so odd – the colour of orange marmalade with gold streaks riddling the iris. Over the next months she spotted him at different places around Pelican Narrows, in the fish-gutting shed cleaning turbot, along the trail cutting kindling, at the lake carving out chunks of ice which he would then bury deep in the ground for summertime use in Father Bonnald’s icebox. He’d nod at her, but never spoke.

Finally, they ran into each other at Gertie Linklater’s cabin. While her family was away trapping, the old woman had contracted bronchitis, and it was obvious that she was fading. Since she had professed both Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism as her one true religion, Izzy and Joe had both been sent to her cabin with bowls of soup and Christian messages.

“She seems a little better. She has a bit of colour in her cheeks,” Izzy said pleasantly.

“You think so? Looks like death warmed over to me,” he replied.

How could you help but fall in love with someone that bluntly honest?

During her years at her private, girls-only school, Izzy hadn’t had much to do with the opposite sex. Her doctor and dentist were male, of course, but, since she was so healthy, encounters with them were infrequent. Her father was part of her life, but for only a couple of months each year. Her grandfather, at whose home she resided, spent most of his time in his study, and when he did emerge, he’d ask, “And the lessons today. How did they go?”

“Bellum, the Latin word for war,” Izzy would recite. “Bellum, bellum, belli, bello, bello, bella, bella, bella, bellorum, bellis, bellis.”

“Wonderful! And today’s translation?”

She would shout out, Horace,
Satires
1.6.65-92; or Cicero,
In Defense of Marcus Caelius Rufus
; or one of
Catullus’
poems.

He would nod his head in approval and disappear into his den once again.

At school there were a few male teachers. Mr. Klein, “a Jew” as one of the girls had sniggered, taught history, and Mr. Davey’s speciality was mathematics, but Izzy couldn’t remember ever having spoken a word to them outside the classroom. Mostly she daydreamed during their lectures – a spectacular basket she had scored in the last game between Bishop Strachan and St. Mildred’s; the smell of bacon in the morning – Mrs. Aitkins, her grandfather’s house-keeper made only porridge, not something Izzy relished – and, most often, the coming summer at Pelican Narrows.

So the adult males in her life, as far as Izzy could perceive, had had no influence on her at all. And the young men she met, well, they were a pathetic bunch.

Tea dances were held in the Bishop Strachan auditorium so that the senior girls could become acquainted with the opposite sex, but these were painful affairs – pimply-faced boys from one private school or another, smiling stupidly and holding out their sweaty hands, their eyes pleading not to be rejected, not to be humiliated.

Izzy was pretty enough to escape being relegated to the unhappy wallflowers clustered in the corner, but, after the chitchat which went on during the breaks between the foxtrot, the Charleston and the tango, Izzy’s partner would most often fade into the crowd. There was nothing cute or coy or silly about her – she made it a point of
not
going out of her way to please – so she was hardly the belle of the ball.

In her last semester she did acquire a beau of sorts. Beefy, blond, slow-moving Timothy Clark was the scion of a wealthy family that owned an
automobile brake factory. What she found most attractive about him was his new Chevrolet, a birthday present from his father. When he called on her at her grandfather’s place, the old man would look dubious – was this proper behaviour for a young lady? He wasn’t sure. But, oh well. “Have a nice evening,” he’d say, as he shuffled into his study.

Sometimes Timothy took her out for dinner at Luigi’s Spaghetti House, and that was certainly a welcome change from Mrs. Aitkins’ cooking. He’d mumble all through the meal, mostly about horse racing
to which he seemed addicted. Whenever she ventured an opinion or introduced a topic of interest to her, he’d yawn, his eye lids beginning to droop.

Sitting side by side in the front seat of the Chevy, they would buss lips in what Izzy supposed was a kiss, and fumble at each other’s private parts, until he would suddenly announce that he had to get up early the next day. Was Izzy ready to be driven home?

Once, he began to unbutton her blouse and she thought, “At last, the real thing,” but half way through, his head slid onto her shoulder. “So sorry, exhausted,” he said, and fell asleep. A hard day at the track, Izzy assumed. Since graduation, they hadn’t exchanged a word.

But now Izzy is truly in love, a mad, divine, all-consuming love.

She never stopped imaging what he was doing – feeding his dogs, hunting spruce grouse, gutting fish. On her night wanderings she connived to run into him on some dark path where she would dramatically declare her love. And was both annoyed and relieved when this never happened. During the day, she would hide in the bush behind the cabin he shared with his mother. She wanted only to catch a glimpse of him, nothing more. At least that’s what she told herself.