A Short History of Indians in Canada (8 page)

Mason watched the hunter’s face turn pale and translucent. The rock slipped from his hand. The pain in his leg was back. The hunter opened his mouth to say something more, but there was no sound. He stared at Mason for a moment, his mouth fluttering, as though he were on the verge of a great surprise. Then he grabbed his chest and arched backwards, his legs jerking out in front of him as he collapsed against the side of the blind. Mason stood there for a long time, rubbing the leg and looking down at the hunter.

It was Joe’s voice that shook him out of his stupor. “Mason, Mason!” Joe was waving to him from the second blind. Mason nodded and waved back. His leg was aching now, the pain full of brilliant crystals. He moved the chair out of the way of the body and sat down.

From the blind, Mason could see down into the meadow. The fog was gone, and a fresh breeze was moving the grass. It was the same kind of meadow as was in the book. A meadow filled with brown and red and black horses, their shining bodies shimmering in the sun as they raced around and around. One bullet, damn it!

Across the meadow, Mason thought he saw something move in the woods. He strained to see, but the distance was too great. The hunter’s rifle lay on the ground, and Mason picked it up and looked through the scope.

It was Mrs. Winchester. Mason could see her. She was trying to manoeuvre that walker of hers through the undergrowth. The metal leg of the walker appeared to be hooked on a vine, and she was trying to free it. Mason laid his face against the rifle and ran a hand along the stock. Mrs. Winchester was slightly out of focus, and he reached up and adjusted the sight. He could smell the soft gun oil and the stronger and more pungent smell of cordite. The metal trigger guard felt cool.

Mason smiled. Mrs Winchester had worked the leg loose and was shuffling off toward the ravine. Damn, he thought, she is a tough one. He put the crosshairs on her chest, let out half his breath, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught her in the spine, and the force of the shot carried her over the walker and down a slight embankment.

Mason watched her through the scope for a while. She lay face down in the trees, her bright pink dress looking for the world like a patch of wildflowers. Mason
worked the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge and driving in a fresh one. Ben Ingersoll was hiding in a hole under a large tree root, and all you could see was his head. It was a hard shot, Mason concluded, and he laid the rifle on the ledge to steady it. The top of Ben’s head skipped off the root like a stone on a pond.

“Mason! Mason! What’s the matter? What are you doing?”

Joe was halfway to the blind, running, waving his arms. “Canada, Mason, Canada! What the hell are you doing?”

Mason waved back and swung the muzzle of the rifle around and blew Joe’s chest apart with a single shot.

Later that morning, Mason was able to locate Freddy Sharp, Amy Browning, and George Savage, and, for the rest of the day, he sat on the thick cushion, his bad leg stretched out in the green grass, working the bolt on the rifle until all the shells were gone, and the meadow ran with colour, as though the Ruby Hearts had come early.

When Clinton Merasty showed up at Sarah Heavyman’s place with the box, Sarah’s father, Houston, was not particularly impressed.

“Kittens?”

“Kittens,” said Clinton. “I want to marry your daughter.”

“That’s the way we used to do it in the old days, all right,” said Houston.

“Yeah,” said Clinton, “I know.”

“Times change, I suppose,” said Houston. “In the old days, when a man wanted to marry a woman, he’d bring horses.”

When Clinton rang the doorbell on Saturday, he was carrying four boxes of honey-garlic sausages in his arms.

“Happy Canada Day,” Clinton told Houston.

“Holy,” said Houston, when he saw the sausages. “These are my favourite.”

“They’re from Rowe Meats.”

“They’re the best,” said Houston. “You still want to marry my daughter?”

“You bet.”

The following week, Clinton drove up with a brown, Naugahyde recliner. Clinton and Houston set it on the sidewalk in front of the house.

“This looks just like the chair your father has in his den.”

“That’s the one,” said Clinton. “Dad said I could have it, if I thought it would help.”

“What’s your father going to sit on?”

“He bought a leather recliner at the Brick’s half-price sale.”

Houston eased himself into the chair and leaned back so he could catch the sun on his face.

“It’s got this lever,” said Clinton. “When you pull it, a footrest pops out and holds your feet up.”

“It’s comfortable, for sure,” said Houston. “But your father’s right. There’s nothing like leather.”

A few days later, Clinton came by with a snow blower in the back of his truck.

“It’s July,” said Houston. “You know something I don’t?”

“Hard to find a snow blower once winter sets in,” said Clinton.

“Is it new or used?”

“Used,” said Clinton, “but it’s got an eight-horse-power
engine, six forward gears, and a twenty-six-inch clearing path.”

“Eight horses, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s a good cook,” said Houston. “I guess you know that.”

“I do,” said Clinton.

“And she’s got a university degree in biology.” Houston rolled the snow blower back and forth to check the balance. “Those things don’t come cheap.”

“I had the blades sharpened and the spark plug replaced.”

“You love her?”

“Absolutely,” said Clinton.

“You know,” said Houston, “you’ve been by four times now.”

“Yes sir,” said Clinton.

“And four’s an important number to Native people.”

“Like the four directions?” said Clinton.

“That’s right,” said Houston. “A lot of the songs we sing are sung four times through, and a lot of the dances are done four times. Sometimes when we pray for something, we say the prayer four times.”

“So, can I marry Sarah?”

“You should probably ask her.”

“I have.”

“What’d she say?”

“She keeps saying no,” said Clinton. “I thought maybe you could talk to her.”

“Yeah,” said Houston, “that’s what I would have said, too.”

Clinton and Sarah were married in September. Houston would have preferred a traditional wedding on the reserve, but Clinton’s parents were Catholic and insisted that the ceremony be held at the church in town.

Afterwards, Houston took Clinton off to one side. “I’m curious,” he said. “How’d you get my daughter to marry you?”

“It wasn’t easy,” said Clinton. “I can tell you that.”

“She ask about horses?”

“Yes sir.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“I told her that there weren’t enough horses in the world, but that I’d keep trying.”

“Welcome to the family,” said Houston. “You’re smarter than you look.”

That evening Houston relaxed on the recliner in front of the television with a plate of sausages on his lap, while the kittens fought over a twist-tie. He wasn’t sure about the Catholic ceremony. A little too long, perhaps. A little too pretentious. The priest a little too pleased with himself. But all in all, it had been a fine wedding. Enough to eat, enough to drink. Plenty of cameras.

It was too bad about the horses, though. As Houston watched Tiger Woods sink a forty-five-foot putt, he
wondered what it must have been like for his grandfather to stand in front of his lodge and feel the land tremble, as young men, wild for his approval, galloped by, driving strings of ponies through the prairie grass.

A snow blower was a fine thing, to be sure, but where was the romance, where was the tradition? Still, Houston had to admit, it did have an eight-horse motor, six forward gears, and a twenty-six-inch clearing path. And maybe tomorrow, if the weather took a turn for the worse, he’d run it to the backyard and start it up. Just to hear the motor rumble. Just to feel the earth move under his feet.

After Papa and William and Mary died, Mum took me and Luke to live with Granny. She had a squat, white stucco house hedged in by white and pink hydrangea bushes that leaned on the windows and blocked the light. There was a pasture behind the house and a creek, and, beyond the creek, Mr. Noah and the zoo. At night, you could hear the screaming, far away and in the dark.

On weekends, before Granny and Mum got up, Luke and I would slip out of the house and climb the fence into Mr. Thompson’s pasture. There were cows in the field, brown ones with curly hair, and they would watch us, their big, stupid eyes rolled up and white, their heavy bodies leaning, ready to scuttle sideways or lurch off with their tails in the air down into the scrub and willow along the creek. They kept an instinctual distance, these cows. Most of the time, I ignored them.

The creek was brown and thick with oily weeds, and the high bank fell away to the bottom. The only place to cross was at the tree cut down by the spring floods. It lay completely on its side, but it hadn’t died. Its roots were
still buried deep in the earth, and the trunk bristled and twisted with new branches and soft layers of green sticky leaves. The zoo was on the flat above the creek, and we would scramble up to the grove of cottonwoods that stood near the bear pen and hang on the cyclone fence and watch the animals get fed.

Mr. Noah’s red beard crackled and smoked in the morning frost, and his bald head glistened with sweat as he strode up and down between the cages, a metal bucket swinging from each arm. Back and forth between the iron cages and the zookeeper’s house he went, the buckets filled to the top with chunks of bleeding meat or vegetables or grain or the dark, black-brown, foaming sludge that slopped over the lips of the buckets and fell in trailing pools behind him.

In the morning, the zoo was a riot of noise. The bears swayed and growled. The macaques stuck to the wire and then exploded, ricocheting around and around their cages. The geese and the ducks stampeded to the corner of their pen, honking and quacking, their necks craned in anticipation. The gibbons whistled, and the wild pigs howled and banged their teeth together.

“You think he’d kill us if he caught us looking?” Luke wanted to know.

I was older. “No, silly. They don’t kill people for looking.”

“Papa said they killed people in the war for looking.”

“Those were spies.”

“So?”

“We’re not spying. We’re just looking.”

“They could still put you in jail or something,” said Luke.

“Are you scared?”

It was a mysterious place, the zoo. “You know,” I told Luke, “if any of those animals escaped, they would kill you. Every one of them is a dangerous killer. Mr. Noah is lucky to be alive.”

“They like Mr. Noah. He feeds them.”

“The bears would eat him so fast.”

“What about the ducks? What about the monkeys? Monkeys don’t eat people.”

“Some do,” I said.

“You know what Papa said about liars, Caroline.”

“I’m not lying.”

“They go straight to hell and rot.”

Luke liked the cows. “The cows are nice. They don’t eat anyone. They just eat grass.”

“Cows are dumb.”

“I think they are beautiful. They look real soft. Jimmy says if you put salt on your hand, they’ll lick it.”

“The bears would eat those cows in a second.”

Papa was a preacher. He preached for the Nazareens and then he preached for the Baptists. The year before the accident, he went to preach for the Methodists in Loomis. The church gave us an old, two-storey house in the trees near the river. It had been newly painted—sky blue with yellow trim—and the kitchen had shiny pink linoleum squares filled with green and white flowers.
Mum said the cupboards were solid wood. Mary crawled into the stone fireplace in the parlour and said you could see all the way to the sky. We took turns looking up that chimney. It was true. You could see the sky, all right, a small patch of blue surrounded by darkness. Luke said it was like looking down into a magical well, but, if you stayed there long enough and your eyes adjusted, you could begin to see the edges of the bricks and the long streaks of soft, black soot on the walls. William said it smelled like vampire bats to him and that they really liked old chimneys. I didn’t believe him, but he scared Mary and Luke.

After we brought the boxes in, Papa gathered us together, and we stood in the kitchen and held hands. “Thank you, God,” Papa said, “for bringing us through the storm to this safe place. Thank you for this new beginning and for sharing your goodness and mercy with us, Amen.” Luke and Mary found a board and William found a can of paint in the cellar and made a sign, but he spelled it wrong because he was too proud to ask me.

“Mum screams at night, Caroline. Sometimes it wakes me up.”

“That’s the zoo, silly. Whenever it gets dark, all the animals howl at the moon.”

“The ducks don’t howl.”

“The real animals do.”

“Cows don’t howl, either.”

“Cows are dumb.”

“And she cries, too. Sometimes I can hear her crying.” “Animals love to howl at the moon, Luke. It sounds like screaming, but they’re really having a good time.”

Mum didn’t cry when Papa died. Neither did I. Luke was too little to understand anything, so he didn’t cry either. Mr. Bennett called to tell Mum what had happened, and she just sat down. It wasn’t like in the movies at all. She told us to sit down, too, and then she said that there had been an accident and that Papa and William and Mary were with God. That was all that happened. There was the funeral, and we went to live with Granny.

It would be only temporary, Mum said when we got off the bus. We wouldn’t be staying long. We had to walk to Granny’s. Luke got to carry the green suitcase because he was smaller than me. “What if Granny doesn’t want us?” Luke wanted to know. “Does she have a television?”

Mum carried the leather case, and we stopped at the end of each block to let Luke catch his breath. Everything was going to be good this time. Each time we stopped we sat on our suitcases, that’s what Mum would say. We walked miles that day, dragging our bags along Ross Street until we got to Granny’s house and stood on the porch in the shade and rang the bell and waited for her to let us in.

Granny smoked. You could smell it everywhere. And Mum said there was something wrong with her eyes but that we shouldn’t ask her about it. Granny liked to sit in the kitchen and smoke.

“Those cigarettes sure do stink, Granny,” Luke told her.

“You’ll get used to it.”

In the late afternoon especially, Granny would sit in a straight-backed chair in the kitchen, in the dark, and smoke.

“You’re the man of the house, now,” Granny told Luke. The blue smoke would curl off her cigarette and flow over her face and hair.

“I’m older than Luke.”

“It’s just a figure of speech, Caroline.” Every so often, she would blow smoke out her nose, like frosty steam on a cold morning. “Luke’s a boy, and you’re a girl.”

Mum got a job at the auction yards, at first. Then she worked for the Railroad Café across from the fire station.

“Why does Granny sit in the dark and smoke, Caroline?”

“Adults like to smoke.”

“It smells awful.”

“It’s what adults do.”

William hung the board on the fence. You didn’t spell it right, I told him. He didn’t care, he said. Everyone would know what he meant and sometimes there were different ways to spell the same word. Papa said he was going to borrow a camera and take a picture of all of us standing by the fence. But he never did.

That winter, the river flooded and put the fence underwater. We watched the sign slowly disappear, and, when
the water receded, it was gone. As soon as the ground dried to a soft mud, we waded out to the fence. William had to carry Mary on his shoulders. Luke found the sign face down in the mud, and we cleaned if off as best we could and William nailed it back up. Mary thought we should say grace, so we did, and, after, as we trudged back to the house, William held the hammer above his head and sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and we all joined in.

“I don’t believe you about the animals, Caroline.”

“Okay. On Saturday, we can ask Mr. Noah.”

“I don’t like Mr. Noah.”

“You’re afraid of everything.”

“I am not. I’m the man of the house.”

“Boy, are you dopey. It’s just an expression. That’s all it is. It doesn’t mean anything.”

The new calves were in the field. We stood at the fence and watched them perched on their long, thin legs, leaning against their mothers. They had the same crazy eyes as the cows, and their mouths were full of white slobber. Luke sat on the fence and counted them.

“There are fourteen babies, Caroline. You see that brown one over there? Her name is Lucy.”

“It looks like a bull.”

“That one is Mabel. And that one is Mary.”

“Come on,” I said, “let’s go see the bears.”

“See how the mothers watch over them. I’ll bet if we
tried to get close, the mothers would run us over and trample us to death.”

“Come on. We’re going to miss the feeding.”

“Mum was screaming again last night.”

“It’s the animals you hear.”

We had never even so much as said hello to Mr. Noah before. Some of the kids at school said he was real mean and had bad breath. He looked fierce all right, like the animals. Luke stood back a ways and watched the calves in the field, while I knocked on the door.

When Mr. Noah opened the door, he had a white apron tied around his middle and a butcher knife in his hand. He was even scarier up close, and you could smell the sweat. His beard shot out in all directions, and the hair around his mouth was lighter, as though he had sucked all the colour out of it. He was smiling, standing there with that knife. But it was his eyes you saw first. Clear, blue eyes, so bright and blue you could imagine that there were tiny fires burning behind them. He looked at me and then at Luke and then at me again, smiling all the while. Some of his teeth were missing.

“Well, children,” he said. “Come in. I think you’re just in time for some cookies. You children like cookies?”

Luke was behind me. “We like cookies,” he said. And before I could stop him, he just walked into Mr. Noah’s house. The house was light, and there were plants everywhere. The room smelled of apples and oranges and
fresh-cut vegetables. “Come in, come in. What kind of cookies do you children like?” Mr. Noah sat us down at the kitchen table and brought us each four chocolate cookies and a glass of milk.

“I see you, you know,” said Mr. Noah. “Hanging in the fence like little monkeys. You like to watch me feed the animals, do you?”

“I like the bears,” I said.

“I’m glad you came around to say hello.”

“The cookies were good, and the milk was cold. “My brother doesn’t believe that animals howl at the moon.”

Mr. Noah wiped his mouth with the red handkerchief. “Oh, they howl all right. They howl about everything. Just like people. They howl when they’re hungry or when they’re hurt or when they’re scared. They even howl when they’re in love. You children ever hear a bear in heat?

I shook my head.

“You children are old enough to know about this, ain’t you? Your father ever tell you about these things?”

“Our papa was a preacher,” said Luke.

“A preacher, huh? Well, then, you children must know the story of Noah’s Ark.”

“Sure. Our Papa was a Methodist.”

“How the animals came on the Ark two by two?”

“Sure. Everybody knows that.”

“How Noah looked after those animals like they were his own children? How he protected them from harm and fed them and cleaned up after them?”

“Just like you do, Mr. Noah?”

“That’s right, children,” said Mr. Noah. “Noah was the first zookeeper. The very first zookeeper in the world. Your father ever tell you that?”

“Our Papa’s dead,” said Luke. “William and Mary too. He was drunk.”

“Luke!”

Mr. Noah shook his head. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “Animals die too, you know. Just like people. I lost a turkey last year. Old age. Lost a gibbon, too. Somebody shot her with an air pistol. I was real fond of her. Five of those young ones in the cage are hers. Every so often, at night, you can hear one of them crying.”

“See,” I said.

“Is it because they miss her?”

“Could be, child. Who knows why monkeys howl?”

“But animals howl at the moon, don’t they?”

“Some do.”

“Our Mum screams at night,” said Luke.

“Always hard losing loved ones,” said Mr. Noah, “always hard to go on without them.”

“At night, I’ll bet they howl loud enough so that we can hear them all the way to our house,” I said.

“Most of them sleep at night,” said Mr. Noah. “Just like us.”

“We can hear them from our house.”

Mr. Noah went to the cupboard and came back with a handful of raisins. He made two little piles on the table. “You kids know who makes the most noise around here? It’s the cows out in that field. Sounds like a couple hundred tubas.”

“Why do they do that?” asked Luke.

“It’s when they bring in the bull,” said Mr. Noah. “You best ask your mother about that.”

We stopped at the field, so Luke could name some more of the calves. “Look, Caroline. They’re having lunch. The one with the white patch is Cynthia.”

“You shouldn’t tell strangers about Papa, Luke.”

“Mr. Noah is nice.”

“Granny says we should forget the past.”

“I miss Papa, Caroline. And William and Mary, too.”

The sign stayed there until the night Papa came home singing, missed the driveway, and drove through the fence. He wasn’t hurt. He was still singing when Mum and William went out and helped him back to the house. But the sign exploded into a thousand splinters. When you make a new one, I told William, spell it right, C-A-N-A-A-N, three A’s. But he never did. He could see the bad times rising again.

“There are fourteen calves in the field, Mum,” said Luke when we got home. “I’ve named ten of them. You want to see them?”

Mum was sitting in the kitchen, smoking, her eyes all red from the cigarettes. “It’s okay, honey. Maybe tomorrow. “