Celia's Song (8 page)

The women gasp, and then halloo the grandfathers. The women shut off the electric lights as they always do in a storm. Momma drops her craftwork in a drawer, opens another and pulls out candles and matches. Each woman grabs a candle and a match and sets them ablaze. The flickers of candlelight sway to the breath of the people in the room, transform the faces into orange-burntbrown haunted cheekbones, almond eyes, and teeth — handsome shadowy works of art.

“How did it happen … the smells … the loss of them?” Jacob asks.

“We ran out of wood,” Momma says flatly.

The candlelight dances on Momma's cheekbones, making them shine smooth reddish brown against her disappearing jawline, her brows, her furrowed age-lines. It catches her eyes in its flicker and
paints her lips. Celia likes the way it burns away the years so she can't see the tired in her mother's eyes or the sad lines around her mouth.

Momma skips to the end of the story without answering Jacob. This annoys him. Celia knows Jacob is annoyed, but she lets the answer set in the glow of the candles, the art of the faces, and the bellowing of the thunder without explaining it to him.

Stacey, too, sees his annoyance. She knows Jacob wants a schoolteacher answer. It annoys her to think that he wants an explanation, as though he can't imagine enough to add a remark to the talk around the table. It's true, Stacey thinks, we ran out of wood to build homes and fires. The chief went to the government, the government came back with a plan, and then the government demanded a vote.

“We ran out of wood and they gave us a vote.” Momma laughs at the absurdity. “Wasn't that some powerful piece of nothing?”

Celia nods. Nothing had ever been solved by the vote. Before the vote families talked to each other through their men, from men to women, from women to women, between children who overheard the women, back to the men, then back to the chief. By the time a decision was made it was clear what needed to be done, because much talk had already occurred, many sides had been seen, much had changed and much value had been added. The decision was obvious. Everyone knew what part they were going to play when the plan was finally unfurled. If every family sent someone to make the decision happen it flew. If there was a missing family, the chief turned over the dirt he stood on, shrugged, and went home. That was it. Momma had hit the nail on the head. The chatter died with the vote.

Celia thinks about the healing circle she belongs to. They talk to each other, but it was limited to disclosing hurt and trauma, or rage. That kind of talk feels narrow and tiring. She knows they need it, but now she wants it peppered between the other kinds of conversations they never seem to have anymore.

I smile. Celia is on her way. She doesn't know she has shifted direction, but there it is, she is on her way home to the old ways.

THE VOTE WAS SILENT
, ominous in its lack of community and collaboration. It stood between them and the ordinary conversations they needed to have to make decisions about their lives. The vote was powerful in its ability to silence the village and isolate each from the other. It was like the white men, all-powerful and silencing, except it was invisible.

“First came the vote, then mortgages. Now they want taxes,” Stacey concludes in silence, not wanting to add more thickness to the air. It was more than just the food, the wood, the smell of their homes. When the tension was thick before, someone would throw a frond of cedar onto the stove and the smoke would gather it up and quickly carry it away. But now the tension increased in a room,
it choked the collective breath of the people in it; it took cedar longer to burn it away.

“Ain't that some shit,” Rena says again. She isn't sure about running out of wood. There are mountains of wood behind them. It wasn't that they ran out of wood. It was the absence of access to the wood in them mountains that was the problem, and now they are facing it. Rena remembers the last time she, her sisters, and Nora had hauled shakes out of those mountains; it must have been the early fifties. Helicopters whirled above, searching for them. Eventually the choppers found them. They were arrested for culling the wood from the forest. Nora spent thirty days in jail and Rena and her sisters were sentenced to three months to a year without their mother or their village. “Someone has to have a licence; stumpage fees have to be paid to someone,” the judge had said. Nora refused to pay the fine. She had money, but she was not going to turn it over to some white man she didn't know, even if it meant jail and giving up her children.

There is enough wood. Rena turns and spits into an old can. She is pissed, pissed that the longer punishment was meted out to her and her sisters, one of whom had left the village bitter and resentful, never to return.

Judy frowns at Rena and shakes her head. Rena shoots an “I dare you to say something” kind of face at Judy, then looks away. They weren't allowed to have the wood and that damned mother of theirs wasn't about to pay them people a licence fee for the prohibition they had no right to visit upon them.

After the prohibition and the vote everything changed. Children grew up but stayed in their parents' homes as young couples with small children. Squeezed into too few rooms, the racket and lack of space made them edgy and desperate.

Decisions made by desperate humans are usually not well thought out.

Jacob stops breathing, he resents that he did not receive an answer. What does wood, the abundance or shortage of it, have to do with the loss of smells in our homes? What has any of that got to do with the vote? He isn't that concerned about the question. He had thrown it out more to keep the conversation going than out of real interest in an answer. He wants to hear the sound of the women's voices. Their voices take the sharp edge off missing his cousin Jimmy. They still his constant wondering about why Jimmy did that to himself. He wants their voices to help remove him from his sorrow, from this cedar branch, from this serious wondering. A chill wind passes through him. He snaps the cedar branch in his hands and tosses it at the table.

Celia slides across the room in the flicker of the uneven candles, one candle shining on her buxom chest, the other lighting part of her chiselled face, bringing out her cheekbone. One of her eyes disappears in shadow, the other comes alive, registers dangerous emotions.

Jacob shrinks back, picks up the cedar branch and hands it to her. She takes it. She looks as though she can see a secret inside him, a secret that even he is aware of. Jacob shudders. She gives him a sweet smile, the sort that goes with a wink. She goes to the stove, flips an element on, sets a cast iron frying pan on it, and burns the branch.

She returns with the pan, her face has changed. The tightness of her skin has loosened. She holds the frying pan steady while she bathes his face, his hair, his chest, and his hands with the smoking cedar. She utters something in their language. Momma stares at Celia; she has no idea that Celia knew about this, nor does she know that she speaks some of the language. Jacob thinks he understands her. He feels cedar's smoke go down his throat. It settles
in his belly and calms him. He gives Celia a half smile when she finishes cleansing him. He decides not to harm cedar again.

By the time Celia finishes they are staring at her, except for Ned. Ned does not understand what she is doing, but he figures that she lived with old Alice so she learned this business from her. Ned does not think of himself as a Sto:lo man. He adapts to whatever is before him, like a Sto:lo man, but would not say that was why he did so. When he lived among white men, he adapted; now he is here with the women of his wife's family, so he adapts.

Ned is in the corner not thinking about Jacob's question; Celia's Jimmy trails through his mind. Jimmy never seemed to be dissatisfied with anything specific, but there was always this tension in him. He came over every Sunday to visit Ned like a lot of the boys, sewed nets, cleaned rifles, and sharpened axes with him. As he grew older he took up smoking, but the tension hovering around him continued. Jimmy was meticulous: he sharpened his axe until he could split a hair with it; he sewed perfectly even stitches into the nets; he cleaned his rifle bore until it shone. Can you care too much for small things? Jimmy was at Ned's that last Sunday. He borrowed the rope that ended his visits. Before he took it home, he had walked over to Ned's rain barrel at the side of the house and cleaned it off. Ned had thought that odd, but then it was in keeping with the other odd quirks Jimmy had, so he had not said a word about it.

Ned thinks about how the villagers do things in clutches. He wonders who's next. He doesn't ponder this for long before he sets to work on the riddle of pushing back this new tide, this wave of suicide he is sure is coming. He looks for the moment, the place that someone's mind would have to come to before it threw them in the direction of killing themselves, but he can't find it. He doesn't spend time wondering what it was that piled up on Jimmy, became
too heavy a load for him to carry. Youth doesn't have to carry anything. Nor does he wonder that a man as young as Jimmy imagined that he had to carry a load. Youth is responsible for one thing: to fill its basket with the taste for life and to experience the world. What is there to carry in that? This is not what he is looking for; he wants to untangle Jimmy's journey enough to see the exact point that took him in the direction of suicide. What direction had Jimmy's mind taken to lead him to that rope and the beam he hung himself from? Ned finds himself wandering around the same circle of words and realizes he is not up to this.

He is old enough to feel responsible, but too naïve to do much about it. Suicide is too complex and too foreign for him to understand. The only other suicide he's heard of is Stacey's friend — that young white girl, what was her name? That was long ago and she was white; in those days he didn't care enough for white youth to wonder about her suicide. Now he is sorry he hadn't been more curious. He looks around at the room full of women and decides that maybe Judy might know. Judy left the law office she worked for the same summer that Stacey left, took some courses in Vancouver, and returned to work for a doctor in town. He had heard her talk about the suicide of psych patients. Now he needs to know what she knows. Ned looks at Judy and purses his lips. He jolts his head slightly, signalling her to come outside. She has lived in the village long enough to know not to holler “What, what is it?” Judy tiptoes around the bodies and through the blaze of candles to join Ned at the door. He heads outside, grabbing a pair of raincoats from their hooks as he leaves. Judy grabs an umbrella.

Outside the rain is coming in heavy, pelting the earth as if des perate to get away from the thunder. Judy pushes up the big umbrella. She and Ned stand under it without speaking for a moment, then he opens the door to his thoughts. Judy walks in.

“I just can't stop wondering about this here suicide business.” He pulls out a cigarette, cups his hands to fire up a match, lights it, and takes a long pull of smoke into his lungs. “I know Jimmy's gone. He's probably rolling around up there right now having a high old time with his gramma and the rest of them, but I don't like the way it sits on the women in this house.”

“It's such a shock,” Judy offers.

He wants to scoff. Shock? Jesus, this village has not lived without shock for a hundred and fifty years. What in the world makes her think he could be shocked into stupidity? He lets it go.

“I've sat through a lot of funerals, seen these women grieve so deep I thought they were going to keel over and die from it. But when Jimmy died the women barely looked at each other. Any other funeral they were leaning on each other, holding hands, holding each other up — not Jimmy's. After the funeral there was no laughter. No storyteller got up to ease us back into the everyday stuff. It was like some different dead breath settled over the whole village. How did we come to this?”

The storm is rolling in their direction. Both watch it while Judy answers.

“I don't know why, but it feels like maybe the women in this village are tired. Maybe we just can't take any more heartache. Maybe we are fed up with disappointment. Maybe we can't cope with the insult of living at the edge of survival.” It surprises Judy
to hear herself say “we.” The village has never made any effort to include her as one of its own; she knows most of them regard her as Rena's white woman. Most of them barely say hello to her and only a few of them nod as she goes to and from work. But there it was, she had used “we,” as though she belongs.

Ned offers her a puff of his cigarette. She takes it. She doesn't smoke but puffs without inhaling much, coughing what she does drag in. She hands the cigarette back to Ned.

“How did we get so tired of living?” A flash of blue light punctuates Ned's question. Under the cover of her big black umbrella, Ned and Judy walk; he itemizes everything he knows about the yard. His grandsons had helped him transform the gravel stretch the house had been plunked on into the kind of yard Momma would love. The gravel was gone and in its place there was a smooth driveway and a lawn that plagued him with its constant crying out to be mowed. Along the edges of the yard were two six-inch columns of river stones set three feet apart; inside them were Momma's flowers, all kinds of them. It had taken him and his son years to collect those stones, but by the time his grandsons were born Momma was ready to make her garden. In spring the flowers burst into pink, purple, red blossoms. Momma's flowers were not just beautiful to look at — they were medicine. She, Stacey, and Rena dug up the roots in summer and Rena dried and took care of them. As small boys, Jimmy and Jacob had found such joy in helping their grandpa and uncle collect the stones, and in helping their gramma plant the flowers, weed the garden, and dig up the roots. On the ground in front of him, Ned's foot kicks a child's wooden shovel. He stares at it.