Keeper'n Me (8 page)

“You wanna be here?” Jane asked.

“I don't know. I'm not sure why I even came here.”

“Maybe you're s'posed to stick around and find that out,” Stanley said.

“Maybe. Maybe I am.” I thought for a bit. “You know how sometimes when you get to the end of a jigsaw puzzle and you think you got it licked. Then you find out that someone lost a couple pieces on you. Pisses you off, eh?”

“Yeah, it does,” Stanley agreed, looking at me a little more intensely.

“Well, that's kinda how I felt all my life. Pissed off because someone lost a few pieces of my puzzle—my life. Tried to make other pieces fit but they never did. Pissed me off more. Now I'm here with two pieces of that puzzle right in front of me and I don't even know if I wanna use 'em. Does that make any kind of sense at all?”

“All kinds,” Jane said, putting an arm around my shoulder. “All kinds.”

“So what do I do?”

“Well,” Stanley said, sitting down on a rock, “one of two things, I guess. One, you can split and figger it was never gonna work out anyhow. Or two, you can start all over again at the beginning puttin' it all back together and hope that maybe them pieces'll appear when you get to them. One's easy, other's hard'n takes more time.”

“You split, we'll understand,” Jane said, sitting beside Stanley. “Only, at least write us and let us know where you are and what you're doin'. But we'd rather that you stayed and let us help you put that puzzle back together.”

“You'd do that?”

“Hey, we're always willin' to keep hurlin' them rocks as long as you're willin' to sit there,” Stanley said, looking at me with a hard edge to his face.

“Maybe I will … Can I have some time to think about it?”

“All the time you need man, all the time you need.” Stanley's voice broke a little. “After twenty years we're just happy with any time at all with you.”

“Yeah, bro'. And besides, you haven't really lived till you get some a Ma's hamburger soup and bannock into your belly. Me, I like it a little too much!” Jane slapped her belly and laughed.

“Where is my mother, anyway? I thought she'd be right here when I got here. Did she split?”

“Nope,” Stanley said. “That's her house up on that hill over there, but she ain't home right now. Her'n Jackie are in Winnipeg till tomorrow mornin'.”

I looked up at the house. “She didn't wanna see me?”

Jane sighed and pulled me down beside her on the rock. She held my hands between hers and looked right into my eyes. She didn't say anything for a while and finally looked out over the lake. “Ma's just like you, Garnet. Scared and not knowin' really what to do. She's scared of you. Scared that you hate her for losin' you all those years ago. Scared that you won't like her when you meet her and that you'll turn around and disappear again. Scared that when she lost you she lost the right to be your mother.”

“S'right,” Stanley said. “But you oughta know that she never gave up believin' that you'd make it back to us. Never quit missin' you either. Talked about you all the time all through the years askin' us what we thought you looked like, what you were doin', what kinda stuff you liked when you were a boy. That kinda thing.”

“Yeah, bro',” said Jane. “Us we never knew for sure that you were even alive anymore, but Ma, she just kept right on believin' and when Stanley told her he'd got holda you she cried all night long.”

“Wow,” I said.

“That ain't the biggest part either,” Jane said a little firmer than before. “Ma was with a guy named Joe after our dad died. Went with him a long time, maybe ten years. Anyways, Joe didn't have no Indian status, lost his treaty rights and all and he wanted Ma to marry him. Wanted it real bad. Us we liked him. Wasn't nothin' like our father but we liked him okay. But Ma kept puttin' him off and puttin' him off year after year and Joe finally got pissed off and left her.

“But he showed up here 'bout a year later wantin' to know why. You'da been 'bout sixteen then. Ma told him she couldn't marry him for five more years until she knew that you were twenty-one.”

“What!” I said.

“Twenty-one was legal age back then,” Stanley said. “You'da got your own treaty status. Your own rights. Ma knew that and she also knew that if she married a nonstatus Indian back then before you were legal, you'da lost your treaty rights too.”

Jane said, “Even though Ma really loved this guy, she loved you more, even though she hadn't seen you in years. So she wouldn't marry Joe until she knew you were old enough not to lose your rights. Law's changing now, s'all gonna be diff'rent, but Ma stuck to her guns
back then. Joe, he couldn't understand an' he left, hasn't been back.”

I didn't know for sure what all this treaty rights business was all about but it made me feel proud, like I really meant something to someone all these years, like I was special.

“Ma never gave up and she never forgot,” Stanley said. “Never got sad 'bout Joe leavin' either on accounta she loved you more and she knew you'd be back.”

“But how could she know? I never knew. You never knew. No one knew. Hell, I was gettin' kinda happy livin' where I was livin' and with who I was with. This was never a plan.”

“I don't know either, Garnet. I don't know either,” Stanley said. “Ma just sorta followed the feelin' she had. Stick around, you'll see lotsa stuff'll kinda make you wonder.”

“It still doesn't tell me why she isn't here,” I said. “Hell, I'm scared too.”

“Of what?” Jane asked.

I thought carefully. “I'm scared that she won't like me because I'm not like you guys. Not Indian. I grew up different. Hell, I've been living black for about five years now and I just got outta the penitentiary! How are you supposed to be proud of a son like that? Non-Indian, ex-con, James Brown–lookin' nowhere kinda guy. That's how I feel right now. And shit, if you want to know the truth, more than anything I'm scared that if my own mother doesn't like me where the hell do I go from here?
If I don't fit in here, where can I? I wish you hadn't found me, Stanley.”

They both watched me as all of this tumbled out. Looking at them that day I could see little parts of my face on theirs. My little turned-up grin, squinty kinda eyes, my cheekbones, my chin and a way of holding their heads tilted I first noticed in my mugshot.

“First of all, you've always been an Indian, man,” Stanley said, touching me on the shoulder and smiling. “Always have been and always will be. The Creator's the only one can change that and he ain't likely to. Maybe you learned diff'rent than us, maybe you think diff'rent right now, but that's all just influence, man. You spend some time here you get diff'rent influences and maybe somethin'll wake up inside you again. 'Cause it never disappeared. It's just been put to sleep by other stuff's been workin' on your spirit. But if you leave, man, that thing might never wake up. You might never get handed those missin' pieces of your puzzle.

“Second thing is, Ma's got just as many things runnin' through her head right now as you do. A woman don't go through all the things that Ma went through for twenty years and just up and be prepared to face somethin' like this. You got the easy part, pal. You never hadta live with the memory of a baby in your belly or the feelin' of bein' responsible for losin' it.”

We sat on that rock until the sun went down. We sat there in silence thinking our own thoughts and catching each other peeking at the others every now and then out
of the corner of our eyes. I wanted to cry. Wanted to lay right down on that big flat rock and bawl my eyes out. Wanted to look up into the haunting blue of that evening sky and bawl and bawl and bawl. Wanted to rip the lining off whatever'd been holding my insides in all these years and spill everything.

“Wow,” said Jane finally, when those northern lights started wriggling around above us. “Wow.”

Later on at Stanley's, Jane, who's the family historian on accounta she's the one likes to gab the most, told me more about my family. My brother's always been one of those “early to bed early to rise” guys and he'd retired just after we'd got back to his cabin. A slow wink, a squeeze on the shoulder and he was gone.

I guess my ma and pa were never married. At least not in the usual whiteman way. There were no rings exchanged or papers signed, but because they were traditional Ojibways both of them had to spend time getting coached by elders. The elders explained to them all about the way Ojibway people behaved in marriage. Talked about the roles of men and women as spiritual, mental, emotional and philosophical equals and how that always had to be remembered and respected. Talked about the sacred manner they had to live with each other. About how their union was made by the Creator and how they always had to respect that too. About caring for each other and the role of honor and respect in Ojibway marriage. When they were all
coached they were joined together in simple ceremony by my grampa, Harold Raven, somewhere out on the trapline. It sounded really impressive to me, and my ideas about my own people changed a little right there and then.

Then she told me about the sacred role of children in marriage. How kids represented the spiritual union of male and female spirit and how they were looked on as being on loan from the Creator. Because of that kids were supposed to be treated respectfully and raised to learn the traditional way. They were sacred. She told me how my dad had wanted us kids to have our mother's last name because we came from her body. How he respected women's ability to give life and wanted us to carry the name of the woman who'd brought us into this world. A lot of traditional Ojibway men do that when they've been married in the Indian way instead of the white way. And so we were Ravens.

When we were taken away my parents were devastated. They couldn't believe someone was disrespecting the sacredness of their family circle. They started to think they'd done something wrong along the way and that the Creator was taking us away because of it. They thought they failed and because they didn't understand the system, or even speak English enough to talk to anybody, they didn't know what to do.

Both of them went a little crazy. Both of them started hanging with the drinking crowd in Kenora and Minaki, trying to forget their hurt in the bottle. It was
that way for a couple years before my ma decided she'd had enough and came back here and settled into a regular life again.

It was different for my dad though. His name was John Mukwa and he was a bush Indian through and through. He'd been raised in the bush all his life and there's those around even now who talk about how he knew the land better'n anybody ever had. He was a traditional man and his life was lived on the basis of the Indian way. The wounds carved into him by losing his children were deep and festered a long, long time. No amount of drinking would wash them away or even soften the scars so he could be comfortable. Nothing could have cut so cleanly and deeply as the shedding of my father's family.

He ended up living alone in a small shack across the railway bridge from Minaki. He'd come into town to buy a few bottles and head on back to his aloneness. My ma would try and talk to him but by then even she represented his failure and he always waved her away. “Mukwa” is Ojibway for bear, and my father lived like a wounded bear in his tiny shack across the river. There was no approaching and no helping. He just lived with his wounds and bothered no one. People would see him now and then wandering through the bush or sitting looking out over the reservoir to the place where the old trapline camp used to be. He never talked, just wandered through the bush he knew so well but couldn't seem to touch anymore.

They found him one foggy morning on the shore of the Winnipeg River. Most believe he fell off that railway bridge while walking across in the rain with his bottle. No one really knows. Some believe he just had enough, that when they cut into his family they removed a section of his soul and on that foggy, rainy night alone on that bridge he faced the future the only way he could.

“So you see, little bro',” Jane said after a long silence between us, “you were brought into this old world from a lotta love. An' that love ain't died down even though you been gone so long. Still all around you if you want it.”

She sat there in her chair, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, hands folded together in front of her, looking straight at me the way she always does.

“All you gotta do is want it, bro'. All you gotta do is want it.”

I just stared back, unsure of what to say.

“Guess the thing of it is though,” she said, “even if you decide to take off an' go on back to that other life out there, that love's still gonna be here. We're still gonna be holdin' on to those missin' pieces of your puzzle for whenever you wanna pick 'em up an' use 'em. You should know that.” She rose and smoothed back her hair.

“Jane?”

“Yeah, bro'?”

“Thanks.”

“You're welcome. Only we say meegwetch.”

“Say what?”

“Meegwetch. In English it means thank you, but in our language it means more. Means … I hold what you've given me with honor. Think about it. Now, we gotta be up early to meet the bus in Kenora. You gonna be okay out here?”

“Yeah. Just wanna sit and think about things awhile.”

When she'd gone off to bed I sat there in the darkness of my brother's cabin looking out at the pure velvet of that northern night. I'd remembered nothing of my childhood. It was like blank pages in a photo album. The things I'd seen that day and the things I'd been told about my early life and the lives of my family were new and strange. I felt like someone who'd come back from a coma and had to be reintroduced to his life. The missing years as cold and black as the holes between stars.