Born with a Tooth (23 page)

A lot of white people here on the reserve find it easier to blame my drinking on the fact I was buggered in residential school up in Fort Albany when I was a boy. I let them think this is the reason, if it makes their life any easier. But lots of Indians around here were, and most of them don't drink at all. A government commission travelled up here a few years ago to chase down allegations and I was one of the only ones who would speak to them. Made me high-profile. Father Jimmy said that being able to say out loud that I been buggered is part of healing. I told him it made me feel like buggering him. But that was a year ago when he first come up to take over the church from the crazy old priest who called us heathens and swore more than me and went berserk during mass one Sunday.

On this sad morning that Father Jimmy makes fun of me at the Sky Ranch, I leave and head back into the bush to our summer place on the river, away from people. The bad news is already travelling the reserve. Everybody will know by noon. My girlfriend, Cindy, is still sleeping. I can hear her snoring ten metres away from our blue tarp teepee. Bottles and cans
are scattered all around, glittering in the sun. I sit down and stare at the river and think about my niece Linda when she was just a skinny little kid with feet too big for her, slapping around town in rain boots. I can see her round face looking up to me, framed by messy braids, her asking me for a quarter to get a Popsicle at the store. Hard as I try, I can't see her face as an adult. Something inside won't let me. I hum an old song to myself, and bang time on my lap. It is the Death Song, the Funeral Song, sung by Grandfathers long before they ever knew of white men or Cold Duck.

It is an Indian summer this year, but still the mornings are cold when I wake up, and soon it will be time to make winter plans. The last three years running I've mostly been able to do small things like steal food or break windows, so the band constables are forced to keep me in a warm cell and feed me three times a day. Last year all of the Cold Duck Four was in jail at the same time for a solid month, waiting for the Crown attorney and judge to fly up and condemn us.

We'd broken into the Meechim Store late at night and ate potato chips and white bread and drank pop until we threw up. Cindy stayed in the cell next to me and Henry and Silent Sam and I communicated with her by tapping a quarter on the wall. It would have been easier to shout back and forth, but tapping felt good and it was a nice break from her gravelly voice.

The Crown said time served was enough punishment and our lawyer agreed with him, so the next day we were forced by the cold wind to break into the Meechim Store again. We sat there all night, eating and getting bored, waiting for the band cops to show. Finally we fell asleep, and we weren't discovered until the store opened the next morning. That got us through the rest of the winter. But the judge talked a long time about
the three-strikes policy and it makes me think this winter I should be more careful or I'll end up in a maximum security joint down south somewhere, for the winter and summer and next couple of winters and summers too.

When Cindy and Henry and Silent Sam wake up, I tell them about my niece. Cindy begins to cry and holds me to her, wetting the shoulder of my shirt. Linda was one of the few people in my family who still talked to me and Cindy. Henry and Silent Sam sit side by side and look out to the river, not sure what to say. Sam has been a part of my life so long that we are brothers. This is the first time in a long time that I've seen my words actually make it through the thick haze surrounding his brain. He's crying too when he turns around to look at me.

“We got to drum for her at her funeral,” he says. I nod. Me and Sam used to ride together in a motorcycle gang in our youth. There were eleven of us, called the Apostles. Hard as we tried, we could never find that twelfth member. We agreed to be communistic about the whole thing — no general, no lieutenants, no hierarchy. We rode around the north in summertime, drinking a lot and doing acid, having religious visions and helping people out who were in trouble. Stranded motorists, old ladies with flat tires, lost tourists. We put the fear of God into all of them when we pulled up, and left them with the love of Jesus in their hearts when we pulled away.

We were into our own Indian Catholic thing, all of us long-haired like the Man and treating others as we liked to be treated. You never saw so many back rubs and good words and rounds of beer bought without complaint as in our motorcycle club. But our gig didn't last long. We were too nice. Nobody would take the reins. When I think back on those days now, I realize that I was trying to make sense out of the bad part of my
youth — wanting to believe that we should love one another, but not in the way adults I trusted at residential school sometimes loved me. Linda adored those stories of my biker days. They always made her laugh hard.

By the afternoon we're at our picnic table drinking.

“My niece was a good one,” I say. The other three nod solemn. “She didn't need to die.” The other three nod again. “Her mother's heart is broken for good,” I say. “It is a bad day for the Cheechoo family.”

Father Jimmy walks out of the Meechim Store, pretending not to notice us. But then he turns around and walks straight to me.

“There'll be no drums or chanting at Linda's funeral,” he says to me. “This is a Catholic mass.” I turn my head away from him. I can feel the anger like a heat coming from him. He thinks I'm a devil, that we're all devils. “It is hard enough on her mother that she committed suicide. You know what the Church says about suicides,” he whispers, his face close to mine. “For the sake of the living, don't even show up at the church, Joe Cheechoo.” He turns and walks away quickly. Cindy makes a twisted face at his back and sticks her tongue out at him.

I look over to Silent Sam. “He smells like Father McKinley back in Fort Albany,” I say. Sam just looks away. Sam has the same recurring dream. He told me once. The scrapes of Father McKinley's feet as he climbs the stairs to our dormitory room, my eyes wide with the fear he would pick me again that night.

It is night and I'm drunk by the time I decide to go to my sister's house to help her prepare for the wake and the funeral. When I walk in the door, the number of people standing and sitting in the house makes me very nervous. Linda's brothers stand around, their hair out of ponytails. They talk to one
another and sway to some music only they can hear. They are drunk too, which surprises me. But Crow, my youngest nephew, Linda's little brother, is nowhere to be seen. He was sitting in the reserve jail last I heard, charged with one thing or another. Friends and neighbours stand everywhere, most choosing to ignore me, but I get dirty looks from some of the old ladies. The house is so crowded it is like the whole reserve is here. Someone mentions that Linda's funeral won't be for almost a whole week, time for faraway relatives to get to Sharpening Teeth. I hear someone else say that Linda's body is in a freezer down in Timmins, and that they will fly it up in a couple of days.

My grandfather, Linda's great-grandfather, stands in the kitchen by himself. He is an old, old man now who spends much of his time talking to stray dogs and to birds. He sees me and smiles kindly. I'm a little shocked. He is the first person in a long time to do so.

I make my way through the crowd and see my sister sitting on the couch with Father Jimmy. He is holding her hand. He stands up when he sees me.

“You're not welcome here right now,” he says. “You gave up the right to your sister's house when you picked up the bottle.” My sister won't look at me. Everyone knows that Father Jimmy's favourite drink is Scotch on the rocks. His face is red from it now.

“I'm here to talk to my sister, not to you,” I tell him, trying to hold in the shouting that hisses up from my stomach and burns my throat.

“You're here to try and talk your sister into a past that is gone forever,” Father Jimmy says.

“Talk to me, sister,” I say. She doesn't look up. “Talk to me,
sister.” Everyone is quiet, looking down at their feet. My sister won't look at me. I turn and leave.

There is nothing in me for a while, maybe two or three days. My insides are a hot, black cave. I lie in the blue tarp teepee and refuse to talk or eat. I only accept the half-finished bottles of Cold Duck that Cindy brings. I can smell autumn in the air and I know the leaves will change their colour overnight very soon. Whenever my eyes close in this blue teepee and I fall into sleep, I dream my autumn dream. I am on the back of a huge snow goose high over the swampy muskeg. I can feel the power of this goose as it flaps its wings. Below us I see a hunter aim his shotgun. He fires and the snow goose begins to fall to earth like a spinning feather. I hold onto its neck and wait for the impact. I see my frightened face reflected in the snow goose's black eye.

By the third day I know what I must do. I call a meeting. “What we're going to do,” I tell my little gang, “will put us away for the winter, probably longer. You don't have to do it, but I'm going to.” They ask me what, so I tell them. Cindy and Silent Sam agree but Henry is scared.

“I won't join you in this one,” he says. “What about the third strike?” He is afraid for a big white prison. “I left the south and I don't want to go back,” he says. But me, I no longer care.

When I commit a crime, I hear music. It's music I heard in a spy movie once, slinky sounding, with lots of drums and pianos.

Me and Cindy and Sam try to bust the church basement window quietly. There is no moon tonight, and in two days when it begins coming back, all my relations will be here and the funeral will begin and end. The window doesn't want to
give so I kick it as quietly as I can but it smashes, cracking, then tinkling onto the basement floor. The police station is next door and I'm surprised they don't hear it. It's a sign I'm doing right. The three of us slide in, clumsy but safe.

All the excitement gets Cindy going. Soon as Sam makes his way upstairs, she pulls me to her and starts whispering unchurchy thoughts in my ear. She knows this might be our last chance for a very long time. But this church basement brings back memories of another church basement long ago and my throat gets tight. I whisper, “Can't,” and push my way upstairs.

Sam has already found the sacristy and the Halo Vino and we thank the Lord the bottle caps twist off. It's no Cold Duck but it does the trick and within an hour we're talking and laughing. We know this is the party of the season and soon it will be over so we go hard.

I'm pretty drunk when I put on Father Jimmy's vestments. I lead Cindy and Sam to the altar and say a few words. I get rolling into my sermon with a bottle in one hand and it's not long before they're rolling in the aisles and I'm shouting out that they're blast-femurs and devil's spunk and children of the corn. “In the name of your father,” I say, “and the sun, and the holy mackerel, bend over, because this priest is going to drive.”

The more they laugh and the more we drink and carry on, the more hard thinking I do. Maybe it's because we're drinking red wine and I'm not used to it, or maybe it's because I know this is my last night of freedom for a long time, but suddenly I realize that this collar and black robe and the gold chalice and the white Host are like a costume an actor uses in a movie to make himself fit the part. All my life I been told that these things are what gives a priest his power, that they're his medicine. But that's not it at all. What you got, good or bad,
comes from inside. A simple realization, I admit, but it makes me start looking in a new light at what a long-ago priest did to me. He wasn't the Church. He was a bad man acting like he was good. As for Father Jimmy, all I can say for him, standing here looking down from where he normally stands, is that he really believes what he does and says is right.

Oh, drinking the Halo Vino and sermonizing to Cindy and Sam, I really did begin feeling the warmth of that righteous light. Maybe I wasn't ready to forgive the world for all its sins, but I got a glimpse into the understanding, the thinking behind forgiveness. There's these two nuns that live by Father Jimmy, who help him with his work and cook and clean for him besides. A good deal if ever I heard of one. Sister Jane, she can swear like a sailor, and Sister Marie is all fat and smiles. It used to be I'd sit long hours and chat with them, back before Father Jimmy came to the reserve. We'd sit on my picnic table by the Meechim Store and soak up the sun and talk. They're good women. I'm sad we don't see each other much anymore. But it was them who first talked to me about it being impossible to be perfect, to instead try to be like God wants us to be, which is always trying to be better. Suddenly I know how to end my sermon.

“Pass me another bottle, Cindy, and I will sermonize thee further,” I say from the pulpit. Cindy struts up, trying to do a sexy wiggle, flashing me her saggy breasts after she hands me a fresh bottle. She goes to sit back down with Sam.

“There are many things us priests know,” I begin. “There are many secrets of the world we possess, secrets like how to get into boy-sized pairs of underwear.” Cindy and Sam hoot at that one. “We know things you don't know. We got a direct phone line to God.” I take a gulp of wine. “I will keep this
short so we can socialize after mass. As Jesus said, wherever two or three of you Indians gather in my name, get loaded. What I must tell you is that man makes mistakes. He is not perfect. Look at Father Jimmy. Look at you and me. We get drunk, we fall down. We do bad things, we've got to take the fall for doing them. In other words, man is fallible. But God,
Gitchi-Manitou
, the Great Spirit, now there's someone who is perfect, who knows everything, who makes no mistakes. Hey, way up in those clouds, he can't afford to fall, because it's a long way down to earth. So God's gotta keep his balance. In other words, God's pretty much infallible.”