Given (22 page)

I don't know why I was surprised to find the hearse where I'd parked it less than an hour ago, but when I was with Hooker, time, as I had known it, even in my years on the Row, ceased to exist. Hooker's presence allowed me to reset my mind and my body to a time that had nothing to do with clocks and everything to do with a dreamlike sense of events flowing together.

He climbed into the hearse; Toop jumped over him and sat up straight behind the wheel on the driver's seat.

“He got a valid license?” I asked.

Hooker chuckled and said good thing there were no cops on the island, as he bundled Toop in his arms and set him on the floor at his feet.

He directed me past the church then left up the hill, filling in Toop on the protocol as we drove. “No scratching, no begging,” he said, wagging a finger in his dog's face. “No humping, not even any sniffing butt. Stay close to me or you'll get us all kicked out. Got it?”

The wingtips of Toop's ears dipped in agreement, and he stayed at Hooker's heels as we elbowed through the crowd outside the Community Hall. I didn't recognize anyone, at first, except Agnes, who greeted us at the door. She addressed Hooker as Stloos, and said Gracie had arrived earlier on.

“Alone?” Hooker asked, and she nodded.

Hooker asked me to keep an eye on Toop, said “right back,” and disappeared through the doors, back the way we came. Toop sat at my feet with a long-suffering expression on his face, his ears somewhere between half-mast and the ground.

Agnes told me to take a plate, and motioned for me to join her in the line. “Fill your canoe,” she said, “don't hold back. You're eating for my sister, too, so she doesn't leave this world on an empty belly.” I stood next to her as we filed past the tables heaped with platters of smoked sea lion, halibut cheeks, braided seal organs, slabs of venison meat, herring roe on dried seaweed, and chicken salad sandwiches. It felt strange to be at such a lavish going-away party for someone I'd never met.

Ahead of us in line the Uncle held court in a wheelchair, trying to goose every woman who stopped to offer condolences. “Happy New Year,” he called out — his voice sounding even more tenuous than it had a few short hours ago — when he swivelled in his chair and saw me standing with his sister. “If your right leg is Christmas and your left leg is New Year's, can I come between the holidays?”

Agnes raised her eyebrows, and shook her head. “He never forgets a pretty face.”

Grace Moon — I saw the hair first, the thick red corkscrews, red like the heroin-blood mix — stood behind him. Grace was even thinner than the last time I'd seen her, outside the liquor store, her tawny eyes full of the same fear I'd seen frozen in them since the day we met. She wasn't wearing her bracelets, either. They would have slid right off her popsicle-stick arms.

Agnes stuck out her bottom lip. Her voice never seemed far from weeping. “She'd be doing better if they would mind their own businesses. Leave her alone to have Baby. A few years ago these people came to the village saying God sent them to adopt our kids. In their religion a man can have many wives; my brother wanted to get adopted, too, when he heard that. After they left the island, a new bunch, a bunch of social workers came. Everyone thinking they know best about how other people should live.”

When Toop spotted Grace he bounded across the room to try and knock her over. I chased after him but he ducked between the Uncle's legs and I decided he could stay there.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” I said, when Grace reached to hug me. Her body felt empty, despite being big with child. “It has to be a shock . . . ”

Grace finished my sentence for me, “ . . . when your
naha
dies. You're right, I wasn't expecting it. I didn't think she was the type.”

We both tried to laugh, a little nervously. Grace parked the Uncle's wheelchair beside the dessert table, and poured a drink from a paper bag into his cup. “He keeps his bottle in a bag so he won't have to see how much he's got left,” Grace said.

At that moment I spied a vat of what looked like my favourite dessert, chocolate mousse. I took an extra scoop; Grace nodded approvingly as she spooned rancid-smelling oolichan grease over the mousse that turned out to be whipped seal meat. Some traditional food was an acquired taste, she said, and she was glad to see I wasn't picky like some of the visitors on the film crew who'd been invited to a potlatch and ate nothing but white bread sandwiches. Grace had loaded a plate for the Uncle — I noticed she took nothing for herself — and wheeled him to his place at the head table in front of a plywood altar, with two candlesticks, a bouquet of silk calla lilies and a devotional print of Jesus with rouged lips and soap opera eyes, — a concession, I assumed, to Father Tunney's faith. She asked why Vernal hadn't come to the feast with me and I told her about the accident in the grave, how I worried about him.

“You worry too much,” Gracie said, her voice full of teasing. “You got too much eagle in you. You need more raven.”

I looked around the room, saw Agnes at the front door again, but couldn't find Hooker. “He said he'd be right back,” I told Grace. She shot me a smile, half-dressed as a look of concern, but with a warning tossed in. Hooker's idea of “right back” could mean anything from five minutes to forever, she reminded me. You never knew where you stood with him.

I asked what Al was up to tonight knowing, before I asked the question, I shouldn't have. Her smile collapsed. Grace said he had gone into hiding after Hooker ordered him out of the house because Al had taken a splitting axe to Baby-Think-It-Over. “My brother thinks we'll have to buy a replacement doll for Social Services.”

She lifted her chin and I could see the scars across her throat, the emptiness in her eyes growing even darker. “Hooker doesn't trust anyone who tries to get close to me. Anyone who loves me, he tries to drive them away.” Her voice had become hollow and suddenly frail. “It gets lonely around here. I thought Al would help, but he didn't.”

I tried to change the subject and asked Grace if she had picked out a name for her baby, then regretted that question, too. One of the first things I was told, after Angel died and I wanted to take him home, was that I needed to give him a name. He had to be issued a
Partida de defunción
if I wanted to take him out of the country, to be buried in a place closer to home.

Burying my child in the ground, anywhere on this earth, felt far from home. “You must give him a name,” an official scolded me. “We cannot issue a
certificado
without a name. There can be no death, otherwise. ¿
Entiendes?”

I only remember leaving his office that day, looking around me as if seeing, for the first time, the earth's needless beauty. I felt the kind of brokenness wild grass must feel after a scythe has passed through it.

Grace said the name didn't matter, as long as he was alive — and every day she could feel his heartbeat inside her like a tiny moth's. “My
naha
told me, ‘If you don't suffer with your pain, then you haven't learned anything about yourself. Only by suffering can you learn to forgive.'” Grace had even been able to forgive her “fly-by-night” rapist who had given her a gift, though this baby had been a difficult gift to accept.

He was due on Christmas Day, and Grace was planning on doing her drying out at the same time, in hospital. “Hooker doesn't think I can quit. He doesn't think I know how to be a good mother.” She blew her nose into a handkerchief embroidered with tiny knots of flowers. I looked away so she wouldn't have to pretend she wasn't crying.

I wanted to say who among us is good enough to be anybody's mother? The official in the City of Orchids said that a baby with no name was like a motherless child, that right from the start my baby never stood a chance. When you didn't name a baby, have him baptised before he was six weeks old, other women — women who had no children of their own — would try to steal his soul. The official, I could tell, believed this is what had happened to my baby. In his delusive way he held me responsible for my baby's death, and I'd been afraid, ever since, the blame would find a way to stick to me. That's what blame did.

When Lavinia had been fed, so much so that she would never feel hunger in the spirit world, and all her relations had risen, one by one, to stand in front of the altar and tell stories about her life, The Uncle said the Lord's Prayer in his language. Grace translated for me.

Nesika papa klaksta mitlite kopa saghalie,

“Our Father who dwells on high . . . ”

Potlatch konaway sun nesika muckamuck,

“Give us all days our food . . . ”

Pe kopet-kumtux konaway nesika mesachie.

“And stop remembering all our sins . . . ”

At this point she stopped, took my hand and placed it on her belly, a gesture that made me feel bound to her, the way a mother is bound to her child, by things she cannot know.

“He's got something going for him. He's an old spirit, this baby,” she said.

Kloshe kahkwa,
the Uncle said, and everyone else repeated.
Amen
.

The Uncle asked that we remember Lavinia in silence, and while I sat with my head bowed I thought of my Angel, how he had had something going for him, too. It made people reach for him, as if they hoped his way of being in this world would rub off on them. I pictured Angel watching me with round eyes that seemed to say
don't ever stop believing in the goodness of this world
. I had felt, even as I had stood holding him in my arms, that he was the one holding me.

Kloshe kahkwa. Amen.
As we said the words over again Hooker slipped into the empty chair next to me, a doggy bag of leftovers for Toop in his hands.
Kloshe kahkwa,
he said, as if he had been there all along.

After the speeches most of the men disappeared to drink the Uncle's whiskey and play Texas Hold'em while the women stayed behind and finished the last of the coffee, washed dishes, and reminisced about Lavinia's life. Hooker spoke briefly to Agnes, in their language, as we left. There seemed to be no question in his mind that I would go home with him — nobody in their right mind went round the Bend in the middle of the night, he said — but he was distracted and edgy as we walked out to the parking lot and drove back down Dead End Road.

We started across the graveyard, the moon casting a peckled shimmer on the headstones. Toop stayed close to me, so close I kept tripping over him. Hooker said it was “just
lumaloos
” in the shadows, that dogs were more in touch with the spirit world, more sensitive than humans when it came to contact with ghosts.

As if he could sense my own restless spirit Hooker stopped when we came to the place, slightly off the path, where I'd found the newborn's grave. He told me the baby had been born the same day his auntie's
kloshe
— her beloved's — fishing boat sank in a storm. “She went loopy after that. She couldn't feed her baby, and then he got sick. When he died she carried his body, everywhere, on her back. She got sent off-island. They only let her come home a couple of years ago.”

Hooker's voice seemed to come from a well of loneliness, as he talked about how when you think you have lost something it is usually still with you. Baby Born and Died. And Agnes Moon, gone loopy from grief.

Not even the moon's light was powerful enough to penetrate the dense forest on the far side of the graveyard. “Think about it. There's nowhere as black as inside your own body,” Hooker said, stopping on the trail for me to catch up. When we got to the cabin Hooker couldn't find his flashlight or the candles. He must have felt me shivering again. “You go ahead and jump under the covers. Toop will warm you up. You roll around, try to catch the fleas that jump off him, it'll get you hot.”

Hooker had a way of putting things. I groped for the mattress and crawled under the sleeping bag that doubled as a quilt, and felt Toop burrow down beside me. I heard the sound of newspaper being crumpled, and the snap of kindling, and Hooker striking a match. The match flared and the room, for a moment, filled with promising light.