Motorcycles & Sweetgrass (2 page)

The man wasn’t listening. “There’s supposed to be a thunderstorm tomorrow. A big one.”

“There is? How do you know?”

“I just do. I know how much you love thunderstorms, with the lightning criss-crossing the sky, and the booming thunder shaking the cups in your mother’s cupboard.”

“It’s like the sky is waking everybody up.”

“Well, this one is supposed to be the biggest of the summer.”

“How do you…”

“I just do. I had to call in a few favours, though. There’s that
place up at the top of Bear Hill, where we can sit and watch. The lightning will leave us alone. We have an agreement, the lightning and I.”

“Don’t be silly.”

He took her hand. “I’m not being silly. We can sit there all night, watching it. It will be our storm.”

The girl struggled to answer the man. “I can’t. You know that.”

The man, now silent and brooding, looked away. His eyes were on the far shore, and yet they weren’t. “If you loved me…”

“I do, but…”

Now the girl was getting anxious. This was not how she wanted to spend their final day together. Tomorrow she would be sent away to be educated in one of those big places White people liked to build. Older than most of the local kids sent off, she’d managed to remain hidden from the White man’s so-called education. But her father had died, and her mother had seven other kids to feed, and she worked all the time. So, being the oldest, she was a prime candidate for the school. The local on-Reserve school had taught her to read and speak English. But it could only take kids so far, which is why the Canadian government had built these other schools where their welfare would be better maintained than on a Reserve.

Manifest Destiny, as the White people to the south believed, dictated that this little Anishnawbe girl be removed from her home and sent away to be taught about the Battle of Hastings, dangling participles, and how to draw a pie chart. For a year or two anyway. Starting tomorrow. And this man, who’d come into her life a few months ago, was about to be left behind.

“It’s your new boyfriend, isn’t it. What do women see in him?” the man asked.

“He’s not my new boyfriend. He’s just some guy. Don’t be angry. With me or him.”

The man was silent. Then he hauled himself out of the water and sat on the log running perpendicular to the shore. He looked troubled, and frustrated.

The girl continued. “Everybody says he’s great, and really smart. He can do all sorts of fancy tricks and things.”

“So can I.”

Slowly, the girl swam toward the man. She reached out and caressed his leg, trying to restore his playful mood. “I know. But this guy has lots and lots of friends in high places, all over the world. He’s one of the reasons we’re being sent off to this place. Everybody talks about him.”

Growing glummer, the man moved his leg away from the young girl’s caresses.

“Everybody used to talk about me. Now they talk about him. I don’t understand. What’s he got that I don’t. He’s so depressing. What’s his name again?”

“… Jesus.”

“What kind of name is that?” The man shook his head.

“He comes from far away and he’s very nice. You should meet him.”

The man had been hearing of this guy for quite some time. He kept getting more and more popular, and the man couldn’t figure out why.

“I don’t play well with other children,” he countered.

“Don’t be like that—”

“I thought you’d stay here. With me. But you don’t care. Nobody cares. Choose that guy then. I don’t care.”

Once again, the man dove deep into the water, a fair distance
from the girl. Far beneath the surface, the sunfish saw him disappear into the weeds, swimming like he’d been born under water.

“Don’t go!” cried the girl as she swam to the spot where the man had disappeared.

This time, he didn’t reappear. The girl dove under the water, her eyes frantically searching for him. Finally, her lungs bursting, she crawled ashore.

“Come back! Don’t leave!” The girl cried out and her voice bounced across the lake, only to echo back. “I don’t want to go…” She wiped her eyes.

The next day the girl went to school.

And the man… now that’s an interesting story too. But later.

ONE

The first day she arrived she knew she wouldn’t like it. The place was cold and drafty. The clothes they made her wear were hot and itchy. They didn’t fit well at all, and all the girls had to wear the exact same thing. The boys, situated at the opposite end of the building, were not allowed to talk to the girls. Brothers weren’t allowed to interact with sisters, cousins and so on. Only the People in Black, otherwise known as the Nuns and the Priests, were allowed to talk to each other. To the young girl, these people had nothing interesting to say. And what they did say was usually not very nice. And what they did was sometimes even worse.

Those with darker skin who were not yet adults and free of this mandatory education called it the Angry Place. Still, she put up with it. It had taken a long time to get here and she instinctively knew it would take her a much longer time to get home. Wherever that was—she had no idea if it was north, south, east or west. It was just far away. As soon as she arrived, she was told stories of one of the girls trying to run away. She wasn’t the type to break the rules like that. Instead, she decided to deal with the present by concentrating on the past and the future: remembering the family she had just left, and imagining the family that she would someday have.

Sister Agnes had christened the girl Lillian. As soon as she had arrived, they told her that her Anishnawbe name was not to be uttered anymore. Her old name became her secret that she kept close to her—so close, she would seldom speak it aloud. Her grandmother had given it to her a decade and a half ago. In this place, words other than English or Latin were unchristian and those who used them were punished severely. So, she became Lillian.

The girl worked hard to learn their language better. She was an average student, but critical, often wondering to herself why she should care about a train leaving Toronto, travelling at eighty kilometres an hour. She outwardly learned to respect this place— but was suspicious of it. An incident just before bed on her second day there had planted that seed. In fact, it made her doubt the whole enterprise. She and Betty, a newly made friend, had discovered that their mothers had the same name—and they had found this hilarious, falling into an uncontrollable fit of the giggles. Out of nowhere, Sister Agnes appeared. She scolded, “Stop that this second.”

The girls looked at each other, uncertain. Betty, who had always kept on the sister’s good side, asked meekly, “What is it, Sister?”

“Stop that laughing—it is rude and not acceptable in a house of God such as this.”

This, of course, made the girls laugh all the harder. What kind of a place was this? Not a day, or more like it, an hour went by at home when Lillian didn’t hear her mother break into loud guffaws. It was what Lillian loved best about her. Oftentimes (more often than not) these White people made no sense at all.

“Did you hear about Sam?” whispered Rose, one night, about a year after Lillian had arrived. Rose was the only one of them who had managed to pick up a smattering of Latin during the many church services they were forced to attend. As a result, most considered her the People in Black’s pet. All the girls were kneeling by their cots saying their prayers. In an attempt to curry favour with her fellow inmates—though she maintained that she didn’t know that much Latin—Rose would often tell them what was going on.

“No,” said Lillian. “What about Sam?” Sam Aandeg was from her community, one of the only familiar faces here, though they spoke only about once a month. She was related to Sam through her mother’s first cousin—and he had a rebellious streak. When he arrived he’d bitten a Nun attempting to shave his head. That was seven years ago, and time and repeated punishments had not managed to subdue him.

“He’s in trouble again!”

“Why?” Lillian asked, kneeling by the cot next to Rose’s.

The girl whispered, “The usual. Being mouthy. He’s in the shed. And Father McKenzie won’t let him leave until he can memorize all the monologues in that stupid play. He’ll probably be there overnight.”

“Again!” she said. Lillian had taken to caring for her way ward cousin, knowing his nature was instinctively to wade against the current of any river. But one did not wade against the current of the Angry Place. “Well, it’s a good thing the mosquitoes are gone,” she told Rose. “Like sitting in that shed is going to change anything. He should know better.” Secretly, though, she admired his resistance. Indian boys and girls who misbehaved spent a lot of time in the shed, Sam more than most. Some people might not see the connection between placing defenceless children in
confined spaces for prolonged periods of time and any particular passages in the Bible. Perhaps the People in Black reasoned that Christ had spent those couple of weeks in the desert, trying to figure things out and come up with a life plan. It had worked for Him. It should, in theory, work for these savages too. It was, they believed, a win-win situation.

So there sat Sam, a copy of a four-hundred-year-old play, which he struggled to read, on his lap. For most of the day in October, the shed was way too dark to read in. Still, boredom made unwitting readers of the most stubborn students. On clear nights when the moon was waxing, a narrow diagonal strip of light fell across the dirt floor. If the resourceful penitent placed the book just right, he could sometimes make out passages in the moonlight.

Memorizing sections of this play was no problem. He came by it naturally. Though consensus in the big brick building was that Sam was unintelligent and a problem student/child/Indian, he was actually very smart. And he wilfully refused to give Father McKenzie and the rest the satisfaction of knowing this. “To be or not to be, that is the question,” he read aloud.

Sam liked this question. He, and practically every student in the building, could understand the quandary. Many wrestled with it every day. Some won. Some lost—but there were always more arriving to fill their places.

It was too cold to sleep, and the growling from his stomach kept him awake. Gradually he dragged the book across the dirt floor, struggling to read in the shifting patterns of moonlight.

His lone voice broke the silence. One line, after the monologue in Act 1, Scene iv, caught his eye. “‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’”

Boy, he thought, I don’t know what or where the hell this
Denmark is but it can’t smell nearly as bad as this place. Denmark would have to be an improvement.

“Sam! Wake up! Sam Aandeg! Hurry and wake up!”

Amazingly, Sam had managed to fall asleep sometime before dawn, worn down by the cold and strain of trying to read in the darkness. The book had been his pillow. It was a few moments before he could manage a response to his cousin’s tense knocking on the shed’s splintered wall.

“What!” he snapped groggily. He tried to unroll from a fetal position, but couldn’t. Waking up in this place was painful. He longed for his bed back home.

“It’s me, Lillian. You okay?”

All he could make out was one brown eye peering through a gap, and a bit of the plain grey dress she, like all the girls, wore.

“I hate that name. You’re not Lillian.”

By now, he had managed to move to his hands and knees, and he stretched like a cat.

“Don’t be like that. I can’t stay long. Here, I brought you something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.” They both knew that was a lie. “What… what did you bring?”

Near the bottom of the rear wall of the shed, about a foot of one plank was missing, broken off when a shovel had once been carelessly tossed into the back. Through it, she passed a wrapped-up packet, and Sam groaned in pain as he reached for it.

“It’s just some toast and jam. That’s all I could sneak out.”

Trying not to look ungrateful, he took the offering and slowly opened it. He was an angry boy, and life was unfair, and a large
part of him wanted to piss off the entire world. But there was still enough of the little boy from the Otter Lake Reserve to know right from wrong. And to be gracious when someone was being kind.