Kathy Little Bird Read online

  I looked at her hard, trying to see into her. “Why should she worry about me?” I asked. “I’m grown up.”

  She returned my glance speculatively, as though testing the validity of my statement, then said, “Have you talked to your brother?”

  “To Jas? No. I can’t. I can’t talk to him, not about Mum.”

  “You should. More important than giving him dinner, is to set his soul right.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “There’s no one else,” Elk Woman said practically. “Now go in and see does your mother need you.”

  I looked at Mum with Elk Woman’s eyes and saw an emaciated woman, her usually glowing copper skin a faded yellow, her face dominated by eyes. The circles under them were like the frame of a picture setting them apart, making them alive.

  Mum must have heard me come in, because she asked, “Has Elk Woman been talking to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Jas is almost grown. A big boy. Jas will fall on his feet, like a cat. Jas will be all right. And Morrie won’t remember—” The word me trembled her lips, but she didn’t utter it. Her voice faltered like a toy that’s overwound and starts up again. “And you, Kathy, music. Music is what you’re about.” She had tired herself, and signed that she couldn’t talk any more.

  I sat and rocked and waited. After a while her voice came again. “I’ve been saving up, Kathy. A present. Jas has the money for it. It was to be a surprise for your birthday. But I want to see you with it. It’s at the pawnshop, a guitar. Go with Jason into town and get it.”

  A guitar. How thrilled I would have been even yesterday. Now it was an inheritance, like the reading of a will. But Mum was smiling, anticipating my pleasure. I managed a smile too and went to find Jas.

  He was out back checking his polliwogs, waiting for them to become frogs. One thing I liked about Jas, eventually he returned the creatures to where he found them. I think he picked that up from Abram. Not that Abram ever preached to anyone. But Jas noticed the way he did things, and did them that way too.

  “Mum wants us to get the guitar.”

  “Okay.” He disappeared to retrieve the money from some secret place. The bills were pretty dirty, but still legal tender, as they say. “How come you get to have it now?” he asked. “It’s not your birthday yet.”

  “She wants me to have it now.”

  “Because she’s dying, right?”

  “Jas, if you cry I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Who’s crying?”

  I reached out and took his hand. I know I shouldn’t have favorites, but he was my favorite brother. Morrie played tearing-around games and practiced for the minor leagues in the backyard. He’d miss Mum, but she was right, he’d forget.

  Jas made a big effort. “I bet you’re happy about the guitar.”

  “I hate it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He understood.

  When we finally stood before the pawnshop, there it was in the window. In spite of myself, I was excited. A name was scrolled on it in gold print—Martin. I let Jas negotiate the business, and reaching through the back of the window, picked it up and plucked the strings. It wasn’t tuned, but the sound was mellow and sweet. I sat down in a dusty corner and cradled it, working the frets, tightening, plucking again, bending my ear close.

  That was it.

  My guitar and I spoke with one voice, my voice, but enhanced, reverberating, it was like singing in chords.

  I hurried back to sing to Mum, but softly, so as not to wake Jellet. Austrian folk songs, that’s what I sang. The ones my father taught her, and she taught me.

  “You have a knack of carrying a person right into the music,” she said.

  Elk Woman stole in soundlessly to listen. Jason stood in the doorway.

  Mum murmured, “You have a wonderful gift, Kathy.”

  Elk Woman grunted. “See that it doesn’t ruin your life.”

  Mum looked at her reprovingly. “How could anything so lovely do that?”

  “Loki the Trickster sees to it.” She added matter of factly, “It’s his job.”

  MUM lived more and more in the past. She would tell me things about my Austrian father as though they happened yesterday. But more and more it was someone else she talked about. Someone called Crazy Dancer.

  She married Crazy Dancer first, before she fell in love with my father. But it was a Mohawk ceremony, and before they could do it again in church he was shipped off to Europe. The troopship was torpedoed and went down with all hands. Only Crazy Dancer wasn’t on that ship. He came back at the end of the war to find Mum married to my father.

  It was hard for Mum to explain two loves. “The war destroyed so much. What was left, we destroyed. None of us knew how to pick up the pieces.”

  When she told me, “Your father and I were happy,” I believed her. Then in the next breath, “I’d try to wake myself out of dreams, because it was Crazy Dancer standing by the bed, looking at me. Sometimes he would be sitting in a chair, fixing something, he liked to fix things. He especially liked motors, carburetors, housings, and fittings of all kinds. We usually had an old car or motorcycle but no transportation, because it would be in pieces on the sidewalk, and Crazy Dancer would be joyously greasing or filing away at some part. Very few of these parts belonged to the original engine but were swapped, traded, and on rare occasions bought from the owner of another vehicle, never from a store.

  “You were a year old when he came back. The first thing he did, before saying ‘hello’ or ‘I love you,’ was help carry the buggy with you in it up two flights of stairs. He was the old Crazy Dancer, full of high jinks and wild imagination. But, though he tried to conceal it, his health was gone.”

  As a nurse, Mum knew the signs: chronic bronchitis, then emphysema. She saw that he got proper medical attention. It was too late. Too much scarred lung tissue, too few active cilia, too frequent respiratory infections.

  “Double pneumonia,” Mum said, reliving her last desperate effort to save Crazy Dancer. With a paring knife, she performed what she called a “lay tracheotomy.”

  “I didn’t do it as skillfully as a surgeon would, but there’s a place under a man’s Adam’s apple where the membrane is thin. With a paring knife and a drinking straw I was able to keep him alive. I got him in the car, threw you in the backseat, and drove to the hospital. He held the straw in place himself and tried not to pass out. And you know what that crazy Indian did? He patted me on the knee to show he approved of my driving. He’d taught me, you see. And…”

  Her lips still moved, but I could no longer make out the words. I folded the story away with that of the young Austrian officer in Hitler’s navy who had gray eyes. And the one about a girl who married a Mountie and passed her name on to me. These were the tales I recounted to myself. Like the castle in the Austrian Alps, dream and daydream, their fabric was a lost reality in which I could no longer hide.

  Chapter Four

  TWO nights later I had to accept another reality; with Jellet at the pub, Morrie tumbling around in the living room, me singing, Elk Woman sitting unblinkingly beside her, and Jas lolling against the wall, Mum died. She died without a word, without a sound.

  I didn’t know. I was still singing when Elk Woman took crushed rosemary leaves from her pocket and began sprinkling them over the bed.

  I put down the guitar. “What are you doing?” It was a question I didn’t need to ask.

  “She had an easy passing, just slipped the moorings.”

  I stared at my mother, a slight figure who was no longer there.

  “Where is she now, Elk Woman?”

  “There aren’t words, little one. She is weaving herself into the great design.”

  “Then she hasn’t just ended?”

  Elk Woman smiled, “She has just begun.”

  With a great cry Jason threw himself at the bed and, grabbing Mum by the shoulders, tried to shake her alive.

  ELK Woman went to the Eight Bells and told Jellet. He closed the pub and brought a couple of cronies home for moral support: Hubert, who weighed three hundred pounds all muscle but wouldn’t hurt a fly, and Black Douglas, the only cardsharp our little community could support.

  They brought two bottles of Irish whiskey. At the house Hubert made a great fuss about adding it to coffee. Getting out the percolator and putting water on to boil was as far as he got before flopping down at the kitchen table to catch up with the other two.

  Jellet was going on about losing a loving and loyal companion in the prime of life—how disgusting, how maudlin. But as he talked I realized he truly was grieving. He just didn’t know how to do it except with other people’s words. His buddies kept assuring him they would stand by him, ready to help any way they could. Of course they didn’t have specific suggestions. I sat in a corner listening to them.

  I’d put Morrie to bed and left the light on in the hall. This was strictly forbidden. I think Jellet noticed, but he decided not to say anything. Black Douglas laid out a hand of clock solitaire. He was waiting for me to turn in before suggesting poker, and in the meantime probing Jellet as to how he had come to marry an Indian girl, pretty though she was.

  A change came over Jellet’s face. His usual sour expression vanished. I’d seen him happy only a few times in my life, and then when he was roaring drunk. This was a different kind of happiness, simple, faraway. He didn’t smile, but his mouth softened with remembering.

  They’d met in the Italian campaign of World War II. He had been assigned as a replacement driver for the New Zealand general, Tuker. Tuker’s penchant for poking his nose into every corner of the front lines at Monte Cassino sent half a dozen drivers to the hospital. When he ran out of New Zealanders, he borrowed Jellet from the neighboring Canadian corps. Tuker disagreed with the Fifth A
rmy plan to destroy the Monte Cassino fortress monastery by air power. He was convinced he could take it by ground action. He asked General Mark Clark’s headquarters in Naples to supply him with blueprints of the buildings and topographic maps of the environs. Intelligence claimed no such information was available. Tuker blew his top, rousted out Jellet, and set off for Naples, where he intended to research the monastery himself at the public library.

  “He stops a war to go to the library?” Hubert asked.

  “Did he have his library card with him?” Black Douglas, a few sheets to windward, snickered at his witticism.

  Jellet, ignoring this, tried to picture for them the steep rut at the side of the road, and how it was the jeep turned over, breaking his arm. Tuker himself had to drive back to the casualty clearing station, where Mum, a surgical nurse, set Jellet’s arm and gave him a shot of penicillin against infection. Then a shot of morphine. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever set eyes on, and the kindest, and the gentlest—the only person in his life who had treated him with any consideration.

  Here Jellet launched into a bitter tirade against his parents, his family, his father’s administration of justice. Whenever an infraction occurred, his father took out his appointment book, set a date, a time, and an estimate of the requisite number of canings. “Saturday, before breakfast, 6:40 A.M., here in the study, eleven strokes—” The boy had plenty of time to think it over. When World War II broke out, he traded home for the Italian front. You got shot at, but you didn’t have to make an appointment.

  At war’s end Jellet came back to Canada to learn that his parents had died. Most of the estate went to other relatives, but he inherited a small piece of property in a little town near Lesser Slave Lake, which his father had foreclosed on. Formerly an elegant pub, it had rapidly deteriorated into a hangout for bums, Indians, and riffraff in general. The family urged him to sell it and go to work in their law firm.

  “In other words,” Jellet said, folding his hands, “take orders from them. No way. I told them all what they could do, moved here, cleaned up the bar, and hung out a sign, OPEN FOR BUSINESS.”

  It struck him that he’d heard the name of this town in Italy. The beautiful nurse at the Cassino front who’d sat with him, eased his pain, talked to him, smiled—she was from here.

  It was a sign from God. He had his own business free and clear. With a wife and children and a cellar full of beer, he could build a good life. The Eight Bells became a going concern, but the muse he had built his fantasies around now lived in Montreal. He tracked her through the Sisters of Charity Hospital. It was a bit of a shock, however, to find that in the meantime she’d married and had a baby, particularly that the father was German. Also, Mum was quite open about Crazy Dancer.

  Jellet decided to go slow. He wasn’t so sure this was the right woman for him after all, twice married and Indian. The war was over, and people who had gotten used to seeing Indians in uniform or mentioned in the casualty lists reverted to old habits and treated them like the invisible minority they’d always been.

  On her part, Mum was puzzled by the sudden appearance of a ghost from the war, and too wrapped up in her own problems to pay him much attention.

  “Maybe I should have packed it in then and come home,” Jellet said mournfully. Black Douglas performed a cascading shuffle; they polished off the whiskey and started to look for a bottle of vodka Jellet claimed to have hidden on top of some cupboard or other.

  When it was found, Jellet resumed. Yes, it was the war that brought them together. Both had lived through experiences no civilian wanted to hear about. They found things to shudder at, to shed tears at, and they laughed over the fact that it was she who ended up driving General Tuker to the public library in bombed-out Naples. “You missed a fantastic dinner,” and she told him of the meal the general had treated her to. Jellet’s memory was of the shot of morphine and her touch.

  They made a deal. “The baby,” Jellet said, “needed a father. She needed a home. I needed a wife. We were married.”

  Now the vodka was gone. While they were looking under sinks and behind furniture for a replacement, I stole out. I knew the rest. Jellet’s family and friends took one look at Mum and cut them off, socially, economically, permanently. Jellet responded by withdrawing completely from society. He had no truck with anyone from the town. No church, no school, nothing. The Eight Bells and our falling-down house…and a tiny strip of birchbark from Mum’s old life. She planned one day to make it into a toy canoe. That was all. We lived as hermits.

  AS I stood graveside, a spasm went through me to see Mum lowered into the ground, joining all the yesterdays since the world began. It was awful to see dirt shoveled in, until I remembered she liked to sift through the soil with her fingers for earthworms, which she prized. She liked the smell of loam, the good, rich earth smell. Cree songs told of these things and this is what I sang standing there on that desolate, windy plain.

  Afterward I ran off to Abram. He came out of his house and walked with me, and these were his words. “You husk the body off,” he said, “so the soul can be free.”

  I thought about it. It seemed sensible. “Why can’t we know these things?”

  “I guess because we’re human beings.”

  “And sinful?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s just that we can’t comprehend great things yet.”

  “But it’s my Mum, Abram.”

  The tears I couldn’t shed gathered in his eyes. He would have felt better if I’d been able to storm and cry and carry on in my usual fashion. He could have comforted me then. Only, I couldn’t do it. I felt detached from myself and from the world, alienated and alone. For once Abram couldn’t help.

  I RETURNED to the house to find a bouquet of wild flowers and a rabbit left on our porch. There was a note signed by the Mennonite community offering sympathy and prayers. Away to the side was a single wild lobelia. No need to tell me. Abram. Jellet almost stepped on it, but I snatched it up.

  Jellet was watching me; he had things to say. “Now that your mother’s gone you’ll have to step into her place, try to fill it. That will mean being a mother to the boys.”

  “Then they’ll have to go to school,” I snapped. “I can’t teach them.”

  “That’s for me to decide,” he said.

  I ignored this and went on. “I’ll need help in the house too. A Mennonite girl for a few hours a day.”

  “What do you think I am, a bank?”

  “It won’t cost much. I’ll talk to them.”

  “You’ll do no such thing.”

  I was amazed to hear myself stand up to him. “You’re not going to make a workhorse out of me.”

  “Your mother not cold in her grave, and back talk from you already?”

  “I don’t mean it as back talk. There’s a limit to what I can do.”

  “What you’re willing to do,” he blustered.

  “Yes.” I had stood up to him, but had I won concessions? The first test would be Monday.

  I walked the boys to school, talked to the teacher, and got them properly registered. On the way back I hummed to keep up my resolve. Jellet would be furious. But done is done.

  ELK Woman slipped in the back door. She hadn’t been at the funeral. Jellet and his buddies would have run her off and enjoyed it. But she was Mum’s only friend, and she had nursed her to the end. Her herb medicines had soothed Mum’s cough, and her other potions, who knows, perhaps dulled the pain.

  Elk Woman told me that she had known the day Mum would die. Mum had known too. The voices of the Grandmothers always came to a Cree, and that’s what my mother was, a Cree, born of a Cree mother and a Metis father.

  Elk Woman had come to take me to the res. “Your grandfather, Jonathan Forquet, is here. He is an old man, a sick old man, but he walked across Alberta to be here.”

  Mum hardly ever spoke of Jonathan Forquet, and then not as her father but as a wise man who had helped her through a difficult time. I remembered her saying, “I was his daughter, but he was never my parent. He chose to be a parent to the Indian nations from Nunavut to the Yukon.”

  “Why didn’t he come in time…to be with her?”

  “It’s not necessary,” Elk Woman said. “He’ll be with her on the other side. What is necessary is to walk beside her a little way on her journey.”