A Quality of Light (29 page)

My father shook his head slowly before he spoke. “Seems to me it’s like farming. You can’t learn it from a book. You need to live with the soil, the weather and the stock. You need to experience it — see a calf being born, feel the wheat when it’s waist high, smell the way the land smells in every season and feel the big push inside your heart that comes when a crop is in the barn. Then you know how to react to it all. How to make it grow. Fella learns farmin’ from a book is only half a farmer. He knows how to make things grow in his head and maybe on the land but he doesn’t know how to make ’em grow inside himself. It’s the same with Indians. You can’t learn to be one from a book. We’ll go. Of course we’ll go.”

I
missed the Kodak moments, the trippy little Polaroids that document the lives of normal people. I’ve been to other people’s houses and gone through the ritual of thumbing back the years, seeing all the Grampa Earls, the Auntie Mays, the Cousin Its and Frankie What’s-His-Names, the accountant from Dauphin who dated sister until he tried to assess her assets in the back of the Rialto. You know, the flotsam and jetsam that people cling to like lifeguard rings. Details. Cunningly simple little details that don’t add up to much unless you lived them. I grew up without details. And to tell the truth it’s not the absence of the photo album so much as it is the lack of Kodak moments. I always wondered how that felt. The little pop inside when a moment is forever.

I never felt that until we invented baseball. Once I was on my own again I never pressed the shutter. Sometimes I feel like one of those little old men who live in shabby hotel rooms, spending their days swilling cheap wine, telling impossible stories of what a wonderful life they’ve had.
But when you take a careful look you can only find one photograph on their walls. One faded, crinkled little photograph of someone, or someplace, that once existed for them. One three-by-five piece of life that quit being memory a long time ago and now just exists as an addictive kind of pain they can’t live without. That’s how I feel sometimes.

You spent so much time and effort trying to come to terms with your identity. You’re lucky that you could find a history and a heritage. I never could. There’re not a lot of photographs depicting the rise of white trash, their ceremonies and their rituals. And that’s what we were, white trash. We weren’t supposed to be but my father created us in his image. He walked away from everything. From family, from tradition, from history, from community. Everything.

That’s what white trash is — a motley collection existing without the life-enhancing benefits of background. No cultural, historical anchor. No rich emotional homeland. Nomads willing to settle anywhere the grass looks greener or else latching on to some scrabbly semblance of order and squatting there, hoping boards and bricks can heal them, flesh them out, give them detail. Life without detail is life without edges, borders, perspective. I hated it. I heard an elder say one time that in order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve been. History. I never had one. My father kept it all to himself. His story. That’s all I had. Not history, just his story. He mongrelized us, lessened us, defined us by his bleary-eyed vision of the world. Great. Try growing up with a bloodshot sense of yourself.

Did you know that the Gebhardts are descendants of the Teutonic Knights? I found this out a few years after I split from Mildmay. I met this guy named Gebhardt in Seattle and he told me. Seems the Teutonic Knights were a religious order formed in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. They were noblemen. Me, from a lineage of noblemen. By the time I found that out it was too late. By then I wanted to be anything but a whiteman, a Gebhardt. My father could have given me that — could have told me where we came from, the type of history we carried in our veins — and I would have had something to latch on to. Some semblance of roots. But he didn’t. Or maybe he just couldn’t. Anyway, I learned how to live without an anchor. No Kodak moments, no homeland, no history.

Small wonder I’ve lived my life ducking through towns and friendships,
leaving marks like Zorro. I’ve tried on more people than your average hooker, hoping against hope that something will adhere to me, that I can get past the explosion of light that happens when lives and bodies collide and live in the glow of home and history. But I never pressed the shutter. I always believed that the self I was searching for was just beyond that near horizon, in the next situation, the next opportunity, the next person. After a while you start to realize that for people like me, going back and moving on are the same thing. Zorro, in his mask, has dreams of permanence.

F
rom Walkerton you slip through Elmwood, Scone and Hepworth, traveling the pebbled artery of Highway 6 through Wiarton before you ease out of the azure arms of the Bruce Peninsula and into the unfettered shimmer of Georgian Bay. You move out from an agricultural world and spiral slowly into the riparian world of the Cape Croker Ojibway, a world bordered by an impossible blue rolling northeasterly towards Parry Sound and farther, northwesterly, to the antediluvian promise of Manitoulin. We made that journey for the first time on a cloudless, windless summer day. As we wound our way through diverse topographies I had no sense of homecoming, no wild gush of emotion, no tremulous anxiety or psychic recall, merely a heightened sense of expectation like the kind scholars must get easing into a tome for the first time, the answers beckoning, palpable almost. No, it was not the prodigal relief of the refugee I felt but rather the hushed awe of the explorer.

Pastor Chuck sat in the front seat directing my father to the band office where, he said, it was necessary to announce ourselves and our destination. My mother and I sat in the back looking around wordlessly. Only when I stepped out of the car to enter the band office did I feel discomfort. Suddenly, my parents and Pastor Chuck were the remarkable ones, pale in a world gone suddenly
brown, and for the first time I melded into a background of faces. It was discomfiting and alien. I felt as if I’d lost the proper use of my body, not knowing how to stand or walk. I opted for staring at the ground while Pastor Chuck spoke to someone about our visit. I raised my eyes and saw a small crowd of Ojibway people staring at us curiously. When I reached for my mother’s hand they followed it with their eyes. I was glad to leave.

Jacqueline Kakeeway’s house sat at the edge of a marshy area. A narrow trail wound its way through the rushes to a dock where a small knot of children threw stones into the water. I sat in the car a moment or two longer than my parents and Pastor Chuck, who stood patiently waiting for me. A wiry, tail-wagging dog appeared from beneath the front stoop and its obvious benevolence coaxed me into stepping out to join them.

“It’s okay, Joshua. We’re with you,” my mother said. She placed a protective hand on my back as we followed Pastor Chuck to the screened door. He knocked loudly.

The woman who answered was tall and thin, with luminous obsidian eyes above two knots of cheekbone. Her skin was wrinkled and her white hair hung in two thick braids down her chest. Smiling, she opened the door wide in welcome. She wore a simple cotton-print dress and moccasins. A rust-colored shawl spread over her shoulders highlighted an intricate bone and leather choker at her throat. Pastor Chuck introduced himself and my parents, who stepped forward shyly to greet her. As he began to introduce me, the old lady hushed him with a raised palm and stepped towards me slowly.

“You’re Joshua,” she said simply.

“Yes, ma’am,” I croaked.

“I know why you’re here,” she said, shaking my hand solemnly.

“You do?” I asked, surprised at the firmness of her grip.

“Oh, yes. You’re about the right age,” she said and smiled.

“Right age for what, ma’am?”

“For the world to start tappin’ on your shoulder. Tryin’ to get your attention. Askin’ who you are. Tapped kinda hard, eh?”

“Kinda,” I said, liking her and feeling better.

“Yes. It’s like that sometimes, that world. Come. There’s tea,” she said, leading the way into a warm-looking kitchen where she directed us to chairs around a solid, rough-hewn wooden table. We all gazed around the room. It had the air of an old country kitchen, replete with canisters, a rack of pots along one wall, bright tea towels, dried flowers in a wide-mouthed vase on the window sill and children’s art taped and tacked everywhere. It was a family place.

As we drank the thick black tea and nibbled on bannock bread the adults chatted the way adults do. Finally, Pastor Chuck cleared his throat and told Jacqueline about the kind of life my parents and I shared, the circumstances of my introduction to high school, and the beating. All through his explanation her glance moved between my mother, my father and me, those deep glistening eyes probing, giving the impression that they saw everything. She nodded a lot, tsk-tsking as Pastor Chuck described events at school, and sat back in her chair smiling quietly when he described the Christian upbringing I’d had and my decision to join the church. When he finished, she poured more tea all around, helped herself to a piece of the bannock spread with a thick coating of lard.

“Tell me about this boy, Martha,” she said. “Tell me about how he came to you. About how it feels to be his mother.”

My mother set her tea cup primly on the table and sat a little straighter in her chair. She told the story I had heard so often about her inability to conceive, my adoption, how she felt when she held me for the first time, and the joy and gratitude she felt towards God for bringing her a child. She talked about watching me grow, and feeling like a part of her was blossoming and filling out as I did, about the world of our farm and the lessons inherent in that world being so vital for children to understand. Lessons about caring and nurturing, learning that all parts of the world are connected and pulsing with a common life and energy that required my respect and honor, kindness and stewardship, love and commitment. She talked of directing me towards teachings and disciplines but allowing the choosing to be my own, about my choices and the happiness they’d brought her, about my nature and the pride she held
for me. I felt a reaffirmation of the love I had for her rise within me.

Jacqueline nodded slowly, appreciatively. “And you Daddy?” she said. “What do you know about this boy?”

Grinning, my father sat back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest and stared up at the ceiling, rocking slightly. “What do I know about this boy?” he asked rhetorically, and then launched into a litany that lasted a good ten minutes. He spoke of his knowledge in the beginning that I was a gift from the God he knew, and that his role was to help me grow into whatever and whoever God would have me be. He knew my gentleness, my kindness, my loyalty, and the deep and abiding joy I felt for the land and my openness to its lessons. He knew that I believed in and trusted a benevolent and nurturing God. He knew my confusions, my doubts and the subtle signs I gave when I moved through either one of them. He knew if I dreamed as he watched me sleep, my tiredness by the slight, almost nonexistent droop of my left eyelid, my happiness by the lift of my shoulders and the way my eyes smiled an instant before my face creased in laughter. He knew that the longest trek I would ever make in this world was the one between my head and my heart and that already, I was an experienced traveler on that road. He knew the bond that existed between us was one that went beyond mere blood and kinship, race and religion. It was a spiritual union tempered by life itself.

“And there’s one more thing I know,” he said, looking squarely at Jacqueline. “I failed him,” he said, quietly.

“Ahhh,” she said.

“I failed him because I neglected to remember that he was born an Indian, an Ojibway. That God, in His mercy, created my son, sent him out into this world, an Indian,” my father continued. “I spent all my time trying to make him something he’s not. I tried to teach him
our
history, Kane history, and I tried to teach him
our
values,
our
philosophy,
our
belief system, forgetting that he was born to none of that. He’s not a whiteman. He never will be. I can line the edges of his being with all the good things I can, but the core of him will always be Indian. He’s got to learn what that is. How to live that. And I never gave him the chance until now. I tried
to create him in my image and that’s wrong. Only God can do that,” he said, ending with a look at Pastor Chuck.