Indian Horse (17 page)

I never saw the knife. Not until the song was over. She knelt on the fresh-turned earth of her sister’s grave and slipped the knife from her coat and plunged the knife into her belly. As I ran to her, a whole crowd of kids burst from the school. She was dead when we got there, blood everywhere. We stood in a circle gazing down at her. No one said a word. No one could. But when someone began to sing the song Rebecca had sung we all joined in, the outlaw Ojibway rising into the air. When the song was over, we filed back into the school, past the nuns and the priests who’d gathered at the bottom of the stairs. None of us looked at them.

40

It was late
at night when I got back to Manitouwadge. I walked from the bus to the Kelly house, knocked on the door and then waited on the steps with my bag at my feet. After a minute I heard footsteps. The door opened and closed, and Virgil sat down beside me in the dark. He lit a smoke. We sat there staring at the lights of the mill.

“What happened?” he asked.

“It was for shit,” I said.

“Read about you. The Rampaging Redskin.”

“That and more,” I said. “Lots more.”

He snapped the butt away with one finger, and we watched it spin through the night and land in a rut in the road. “You ripped it up, though, didn’t you?” he asked finally. “Twenty two points in nine games.”

“Twenty three,” I said.

“Jesus, Saul. That’s a season for most guys.”

“So were the penalty minutes.”

“You had to fight back. Shit, I know that. Glad you finally learned, actually.”

“You got a spot for me on the Moose?”

“Hell, yeah. But what about the NHL? With stats like that over a full season in Major Junior, you’d be a lock to be drafted.”

“I just want to play the game, Virg. I can’t do it with all that bullshit getting in the way.”

He nodded. “So, what are you gonna do now?”

“Go to work, I guess.”

“Mines or mill. That’s all you got to pick from around here.”

“I know. It’s good enough for you.”

“You were born for more, Saul.”

“Says you.”

We sat in the dark, and there were no more words. The silence was enough. Finally, he reached out to clap me on the back. After he went in I stayed out there a while looking up at the stars. When the chill got to be too much, I picked up my bag and walked into the house to sleep.

41

Fred Kelly got
me on a forestry crew as a deadfall bucker that fall, and I became a working man. When trees fell down or when the wind knocked them over I took a chainsaw and cut them into lengths that the log skidders could haul to the trucks. It was hard, heavy work, but there was something in the strain that I liked. I took to picking up eight-foot lengths of log and bearing them out of the tangle on my shoulders. I became known as a hard worker, industrious, and after a few weeks the company shipped me off to their logging camp on the shores of Nagagami Lake.

It took a float plane to get us in, and I watched the great green carpet of the land roll out below my face pressed to the window. When we landed I could feel it all around me, like the press of a living thing. The view from the bunkhouse was stark and beautiful. Any fear I’d carried about my first venture into the bush as a logger vanished. I’d stand on the rocks in the dim hours before any of the others had woken and feel it enter me like light. I’d close my eyes and feel it. The land was a presence. It had eyes, and I was being scrutinized. But I never felt out of place. Late in the evenings I’d walk into the trees, stride through the bush until I was wrapped in it, cocooned. The stars that pinwheeled above spun a thousand light years away. Time, mystery, departure and union were there all at once. I wondered if this was what it meant to be Indian, Ojibway. A ritual. A ceremony, ancient and simple and personal. If I could have borne it with me into the day-to-day life of the camp, things might have been different.

But they weren’t. These were northern men, Finns, Swedes, Germans, Quebecois and Russians. They were lumberjacks. They were as efficient with the giant two-handed rip saws, axes and horse teams as they were with chainsaws and tractors. They were steeped in the tradition of it. They were huge, brawny men who bellowed and roared and skipped back and forth between languages over the course of a conversation, so I never knew where the gist of it was leading. Drinkers. Hard and deliberate. They spent their evenings in the loquacious flow of liquor, smoking and playing cards. Brawls erupted quickly and ended the same way. Then they’d return to their game, the blood of them cut with the next fresh deal, fists clutching cards like a throat.

They didn’t know what to make of me. There hadn’t been an Indian in their midst before. So I never joined them in their evening distractions. When I came back in from the bush I’d huddle in my bunk and read. When they started calling me “Chief” and “Tonto,” “Geronimo” or “wagon burner,” I’d heard it so often before that I didn’t offer a reaction. That bothered them. I suppose they took my silence for high-mindedness, the books in my hands as a rebuff. They began to take my measure in the only way they knew how.

They’d push me hard in the woods and wait to see if I could keep up. I always could. When they pressed hard with their saws and axes through the trunks of great trees I did the same and I carried heavy lengths of sawn timber through the bush without a complaint. They tried to find a weakness in me, but I was determined that they would not. So they made it personal. They saw to it that I drew the assignment to clean the outhouses. I dumped lime and swept and batted at the flies that congregated in swarming masses. I washed dishes. I mopped the kitchen floor, carted garbage and shovelled up the mess bears and raccoons left scattered about the small gravel pit the camp used as a landfill. I oiled and greased tractors, hosed down trucks and skidders and washed down the bunkhouse each day before my shift started. The more they tried to exhaust me, the harder I worked. I did all of it without saying a word. Then I’d lie in my bunk and read by flashlight after they tumbled into bed and be awake and in motion by the time they rose.

They took to more insulting name-calling and swearing at me. Even when they took to pushing me and tripping me and swiping at me when I passed, I’d just level a blank look at the offender and keep on with the work.

Only on the land did I find calm. There I could relax. I could rest. I could sit looking out across the wide expanse of lake forever. But the time always came to turn back to the bunkhouse. I’d squint hard at the lighted windows of the camp and I’d draw into myself. I’d haul in a lungful of air, hold it, compact all my dark energy until it sat in my gut like a black marble, cold and glassy and hard. Then I’d walk back into their midst and they’d stop their game and challenge me. I’d walk to my bunk and lie down and read long into the night.

Then one night a big Swede named Jorgenson called to me, gestured crudely toward me. I stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then I rolled off the bunk and walked slowly to the table where he sat playing cards. As they laughed, I planted my feet wide. Jorgenson stood up and swung a meaty fist at my face. I blocked his punch with my forearm and reached out with my other hand and latched onto his throat. I squeezed. Hard. I walked forward slowly with the man’s throat in my hand, wordlessly, lifting and pushing and squeezing at the same time. The big Swede clutched and grabbed and swatted at me, but the pressure of my grip was so great he weakened and dropped to his knees, red-faced and gasping with his eyes bugging out. As I let him drop to the floor I punched him in the head with everything I had, and he crumpled onto the floorboards. I turned to face the rest of them. I was frigid blackness inside, like water under a berg. I wanted another one to stand, wanted another one to swing at me, invite me to erupt. But they stayed seated, and nobody spoke as I walked slowly over to the table and picked up Jorgenson’s discarded hand of cards. I studied the cards, then smirked and tossed the hand back on the table.

“Game over,” I said. They never bothered me again.

42

When I came
out, I brought the intensity of the bush camp out with me. I was seventeen. I was still a boy. But this mistreatment made me hard. When I took to the ice with the Moose, the anger funnelled out of me, and my game became a whirling, slashing attack. It didn’t matter who we played. I played as hard against the white town teams as I did against reserve teams. There was no lively banter on the bench. Instead, I glared at the ice until they opened the gate to release me. I still had grace, the flowing speed, but my eyes were feral beneath my helmet. I blazed up the ice with locomotive force, and when anybody hit me, I hit back. When they slashed me I slashed back harder, breaking my stick against shin pads and shoulder pads. When they dropped the gloves with me I punched and pummelled until I had to be torn off by my teammates. There was no joy in the game now, no vision. There was only me in hot pursuit of the next slam, bash and crunch. I poured out a blackness that constantly refuelled itself. The game was me alone with a roaring in my gut and in my ears. I heard nothing else. When the other members of the Moose stopped talking to me, I knew that I was beyond them, the tournament teams and the game, forever.

43

I left Manitouwadge
the year I turned eighteen. I’d saved enough of my wages to buy an older-model pickup truck that was outfitted with a steel box to carry the tools I’d assembled. There was no plan. I was just leaving. I was a working man. Work was everywhere. The highway led west to the prairies, the mountains and the Pacific coast, and I had never seen any of them. But it wasn’t a yearning for new geography that drove me—it was my tiredness of the old. The bush had ceased to be a haven. A vacant feeling sat where the beginnings of my history had once been. That part of myself was a tale long dead, one that held nothing for me. So I was heading out to create whatever history I could with muscle and will and no constraints. I was leaving the bush and the North behind. I didn’t think I needed them anymore. The echoes of those I’d travelled with slid into the trees I was leaving behind.

The Kellys took my departure with worry, though they didn’t try to stop me.

“It will be tough, Saul,” Fred Kelly said. “A working life is made easier by a home. People. Noise. Distraction. They fill you when you’re tired and depleted.”

“Feels like I’ve had enough noise and people for a while,” I said.

“That Toronto business was hard,” he said. I’d never told anyone about the ordeal of the bush camp.

“Yeah.”

“But you can let it go. You can stay here, work, get a life under your feet.”

“I’ve had a life.” It came out blunt, hard, and I could see that it hurt him.

“I know,” he whispered.

Virgil was characteristically blunt. “Feels like you’re fuckin’ running.”

“I’m not.”

“What would you call it?”

“I’m just moving on. Time for a change.”

He levelled a long look at me. “We’re supposed to be teammates. Wingers. You. Me. Nobody wins alone, Saul.”

“I’m used to alone.”

“You’re used to thinking you’re alone. Big difference.”

“I’m not disappearing,” I said.

He shook his head sadly. “Seems to me you already did.”

44

I stood in
the kitchen and looked out to where the boards of the backyard rink sat in the pale spring sun. There wasn’t a way that I could think of to tell them how the rage felt against my ribs, how it tasted at the back of my throat. I had to leave before I collapsed under the weight of it.

I took one last walk through the house, trying to memorize the degrees of light in each room and the sound my footsteps made on the floorboards, the feel of the jamb of the front door against my palms. Then I walked out to my truck and was gone by the time I started the engine.

Medicine Hat. Fort Chipewyan. Wabasca. Skookumchuck. Tagish Lake. I worked in all those places and more. The resonance of those names haunting me with memories. I followed the rumours of work that tumbled from the lips of the men I met and became migratory, a wandering nomad with my eyes on distant hills. I covered long charcoal stretches of highway, the undulating yellow line like a river bearing me somewhere beyond all recollection. Or that’s what I hoped. I would drive unthinkingly. Music was my constant companion. I loved it for its ability to fill space, to occupy the empty passenger side of the cab of the truck, and the rooms I rented in two-bit motels in the mill towns, mining towns and work camps where I landed. I learned about it with the help of books, and once I discovered Dvorak’s cello concerto, I turned to it again and again through my travels to suspend the desperation clutching at my gut. Work and music sustained me for a long time. I could vanish into them and surface at my choosing. I preferred being alone to inquisitive company. I became a carpenter, roofer, miner, lumberjack, highway paver, railroad labourer, dishwasher, hide scraper, ranch hand, tree planter, demolition worker, steel foundry yardman and dock worker. I did not offer to be a buddy to my fellow workers. I did not become chatty. I did not move beyond the safety of the wordless barrier I erected between myself and other people. The rage was still there. It sat square in my chest whenever I heard “Chief,” “Tonto,” “Geronimo,” “dumb Injun” or the hundred other labels men applied to me. But I never reacted. I wouldn’t risk the explosion I knew would follow. The feel of Jorgenson’s throat in my hands. The blackness inside me. Instead, I threw myself harder into the discipline of labour, losing myself in the grunt work I favoured.

A part of me missed the banter of the bench and the dressing room, though; the brash gutter talk and the teasing. So I began eating lunch and supper in beverage rooms and taverns where working men slung jibes back and forth, engaging in verbal arm wrestles that bristled with energy. I would sit and listen. Drink it all in and grin at the wit, the laconic retorts, the garrulous drunken voices rambling on about everything that concerned a man. I’m not sure when I began to drink myself. I only know that when I did the roaring in my belly calmed. In alcohol I found an antidote to exile. I moved out of the background to become a joker, a clown, a raconteur who spun stories about madcap travels and events. None of them had actually happened to me, but I had read enough to make these tales come to life, to be believable and engaging. Amid the slaps and pokes and guffaws that greeted them, I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are. I became drunk with that. Addicted. My new escape sustained me for awhile. Whenever the stories and the invented histories started to unravel, I’d move on to a new crowd in a new tavern, a new place where the Indian in me was forgotten in the face of the ribald, hilarious fictions I spun. Finally, though, the drink had me snared. I spoke less and drank more, and I became the Indian again; drunken and drooling and reeling, a caricature everyone sought to avoid.