Season of Storm (27 page)

"Under that law."

"Then, Johnny, even if you married a status-Indian woman...."

"All I'd do is disinherit her, is that what you're trying to say? Even then my children would forfeit their birthright?"

"Isn't that right?" she asked.

Johnny rolled over onto his back. By the distilled light from the three-quarter moon shining through the gauzy drapes she saw his hawk-like profile, tense and still. In the silence she heard wind in the trees.

"Yes, that's right," he said harshly, but the anger in his voice wasn't directed at her.

"But then...Johnny...."

"But there is some reason to suppose that the federal government can be forced to change that section of the Indian Act in the near future."

"Why that one?" she asked.

"Because it's a way for the government to show they're listening to Indian demands without actually giving up anything. Also because it creates dissension among us—some people don't want this change because they feel that an influx of white men to the tribes and reserves would change the power structure in the bands. So the government can use it to prove that Indians don't know what they want. Fighting for treaty rights or land claims or equal education opportunities is probably a lost cause right now. But this is one change that just might go through."

For some reason she was unbearably saddened by all of this. "But even if it does," she said miserably, "it might take a long time—years, even?"

"It might," he answered. She leaned up over his chest, her long hair spreading out over them both.

"Change takes time," she said. "And it might never be changed." He was silent. "I was reading in one of those books that the federal government might abolish the Indian Act altogether. Wouldn't that mean that nobody would be a status Indian anymore? That Indians would be more or less forced to assimilate?"

"It might," he said again.

She could tell by the tone of his voice that these thoughts weren't new to him. Johnny Winterhawk had been over this ground himself. And if he wanted to torture himself with an impossible dream it was not her business.

"Are your parents still on the reserve?" she asked gently. "Is it for them you want...?"

"My mother is dead. She died when I was still a child, a couple of years after they took me away from her. She always told me she didn't know for sure who my father was, that the tribe would take the place of my father."

"Oh," Smith breathed softly. "And...did they?"

He smiled and brushed back her hair with a gentle hand. "Yes, I guess so. I had a grandfather, too, but he—he was harder to please."

"Like my father," smiled Smith, and that reminded her. "When are you testifying before the Cartier Commission?"

"Tuesday."

"Did you know they're convening a session around my father's bed at the hospital Thursday so he can testify?"

Johnny laughed as though it truly amused him. "I've underestimated them," he said dryly. "I wonder if they would have convened at Oakalla prison for me if it had been necessary?"

"You may still get a chance to find out, Johnny. I've been running into a lot of problems with the police. And my father." As succinctly as she could she told him what had been happening.

Johnny lay in the darkness, swearing softly. "Damn," he said, putting up a hand to stroke her hair. "I'm sorry. Peaceable Woman, I had no idea this was I going on. Why didn't you tell them the truth?"

She felt hugely relieved for having shared her worries with him. She realized dimly that she had carried her troubles alone ever since the day she had asked her father about how to escape from quicksand. The relief was almost physical, as though Johnny had lifted half—more than half—of an actual burden. Shulamith smiled down on him in the faint moonlight.

"Because my father is a powerful man. I don't believe they'd convene at Oakalla prison
for you," she joked lightly. She could hardly say,
because the temporary insanity hasn't worn off yet, and I still sometimes think I'm in love with you.
"What can I do to keep them away?" she asked.
 

Johnny passed a hand over his eyes and forehead. "I'll have to think. Dammit!" he said impatiently. "Dammit! Whenever I try to think about this situation I feel as though I'm up against a brick wall. There doesn't seem to be any solution!"

"Well, I'll tell you one thing," said Shulamith calmly, "unless we admit we're married, we're never going to be able to get a divorce. And that's what we want, isn't it?"

"That's what we want," said Johnny Winterhawk.

***

In the morning he was gone. Smith awoke slowly, languorously, to a clear sunny day, and in every muscle of her body felt the imprint of their lovemaking. But his place in her bed was empty, his clothes were gone. Except for the shape of his head on a pillow, last night might have been a dream.

Smith felt relieved and lost at the same time. She wanted Johnny there with her; she wanted to talk to him, to curl up in his arms, to hear his voice as she had on those golden moments on the boat...but reason told her that the less she saw of him the faster she would get over him.

If only he had wakened her to say goodbye. She wouldn't feel so lost now, abandoned. She could have given him a cup of coffee and smiled when he walked out of her life again...

It was Monday again. She hadn't talked to Rolly much since last Monday. Did he expect her in the office today? She sighed. She was going to have to find the courage to tell them, her father and Rolly, what she had decided. She couldn't go on spending her days in suspended animation. She glanced at her watch. It was too early yet to phone. If her father were well he would have been in the office by this time, but neither Rolly nor Smith's secretary kept such early hours.

When she showered and dressed she walked down to the room that had become her workplace during the past week, where she read and wrote and thought. The table she had converted to a desk was littered with paper and pens and books, signs of her occupation during the long restless hours of trying to come to terms with her changed life.

The debris reminded her that she had to get another housekeeper before her father came home. She had put it off because she had wanted to be totally alone, but she wouldn't have minded finding coffee and breakfast waiting for her right now, she reflected. Or the room dusted.

Something about the sunny kitchen and the scent of coffee as she made it made her think of Johnny's kitchen and Wilfred Tall Tree. Had it all really only happened two weeks ago? It seemed almost impossible that all the changes she had gone through since that night could have been compassed in so short a time. She remembered her irritation that first morning with Wilf's illogicalities and thought with wonder what a very different person she was from that woman who had been so sure she was right about everything.

If Johnny and she had really been in love and she had gone to live in his house, would Wilfred Tall Tree have stayed on the island? She would have wanted him to. She would have liked to get to know Wilf better.

Smith carried her breakfast tray of toast and coffee into the lounge and settled immediately to her writing. There was an urgency in her that she was learning to recognize and take advantage of.

She wrote three short poems very quickly, straight from the pen, with almost no revising. They were neat, tight; they were good. Smith added them to the small but growing pile of her "finished" poems, which she would show to a publisher when she had enough of them, and then, at the top of a fresh sheet of paper she wrote, "Wake Me Up to Say Goodbye."

There was a kind of tuneless music playing somewhere just out of reach in her head, and as she bent to write she knew that this one would be a song, and it would be good.

"Wake me up to say goodbye, 'cause now it's over..." she wrote.

It would be very good.

Twenty-five

"Staff Sergeant Podborski, ma'am," said the tall, lanky man on her doorstep, leaning negligently against the doorframe as he flashed his wallet. He had a thin, lined face and tired blue eyes, and he was chewing on a stalk of foxtail with all the savoir faire of a hayseed.

Smith sighed. "Staff Sergeant, already?" she marvelled. "My goodness, at this rate I'll soon be entertaining the commandant—I'm sorry, do I mean colonel?" He gave her what might have passed for a grin and gnawed once on his bit of greenery.

"No, ma'am," he said easily, "Colonel is a KGB term. We don't use it."

She affected amazement. "Really! How silly of me! Of course, this a
free
country, isn't it? I don't have to be afraid of police methods here! Do come in, Staff Sergeant Podborski!"
 

His eyes were not quite as hard as Sergeant Rice's, as though he had seen more and cared about less. He was older than Sergeant Rice.

He straightened and followed her into the house, where, deliberately keeping him away from her workroom, she led him to the large formal sitting room at the front of the house. He was wearing casual trousers and his shirt sleeves were rolled up, and with his bit of foxtail in his mouth he looked incongruous against the muted, elegant greys of the room.

"Nice," he said appreciatively, looking around. "You do all this?"

"I'm a timber merchant, not an interior designer," she said. "Of course I didn't."

He nodded interestedly, as though you learned something every day, eased his length into the armchair she indicated, and began to ask questions.

They had obviously decided on a return to common politeness, but more than that she couldn't fathom. There seemed to be no trend to Staff Sergeant Podborski's questions, and he never once took a note. He seemed to be totally familiar with her case, if a little bored by it, until he said,

"Do you know if your father has any Nishga Indians working for him?"

Smith blinked. "Goodness, we might have. In fact, we must. In the logging camps up north, at the very least. Why?"

"Maybe one of the employees knew you'd be away and had a grudge against your father— "

"But why the Nishga?"

Staff Sergeant Podborski blinked and switched the straw from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue. "Well, they want him to stop the logging, don't they?"

"The Chopa," she said.

"Pardon me?"

"You're mixing up two cases. The Nishga are fighting Amax Corporation, the Chopa are fighting St. John's Wood, and the Haida are—"

"Oh, sorry. So what exactly is it they want?"

"They want to stop my father exercising the timber rights the government sold him on their land claim area."

Staff Sergeant Podborski had recourse to his notebook at last. "Funny," he mused, "I've got it down here as Chopit."

"There are variant spellings and pronunciations of most Indian tribes, Staff Sergeant. The white man wasn't always accurate or consistent when transcribing Indian tongues. People pronounce it wrong, too. It's not Choppit or Choppah, as you said, it's Choe-pit, and Choe-pah."

Podborski nodded. "How much of their land claim area does your father have timber rights on?"

She told him, detailing how the timber operation would interfere with wildlife in the area. He seemed truly interested, and Shulamith told him all she knew, what she had learned from Johnny and Wilfred and what she had learned from books.

"Do you know what Indians call the reserves?" she asked him at last. "'The land we kept for ourselves,' or 'the land we didn't give the government.' But you see, they never actually got what they were promised in exchange for all that other land they gave up."

"What do you think your father should do about his timber rights in Cat Bite Valley and the region?" he asked her softly.

"I don't know," she said. "But something's got to be done, doesn't it? We haven't got the right just to cut that timber. Indians were guaranteed their traditional hunting and fishing long before my father paid his stump fee!"

She was flushed a little, with excitement and the sense of being right. Her smile at Staff Sergeant Podborski was nearly friendly. And it was just at that moment that he leaned back in his chair, looked up from the notebook he was negligently flipping through and asked, "Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome, Miss St. John?"

She blinked at the sudden change of subject, feeling as if she'd suffered a kind of body blow, knocking her off her bearings.

"Stockholm? What's Stockholm got to do with anything? The timber that comes from Sweden mostly goes..."

"Stockholm Syndrome," he repeated helpfully. He dropped his eyes to his notebook and read. "It's a psychological phenomenon in which a kidnapped person develops a sympathy with her captor's cause."

If he had taken a two-by-four and smacked her head with it she couldn't have been more shaken. Shulamith blinked, blushed and swallowed air.

"I..uh...uh...yes, now you explain it, I think—yes, I think I've heard of it," she stuttered in hopeless confusion. Her cheeks were as hot as a stove. "Wasn't there a case in a prison riot here a couple of years ago, where one of the hostages and a prisoner..."