Ragged Company (2 page)

Life settled into a flatness after we lost Harley. But all three of us rebelled in our own ways. Me, I retreated into silence. The nuns all thought me slow and backward because of my silence but they had no idea how well I was learning their ways and their language. I did everything they asked of me in a slow, methodical way, uncomplaining and silent. I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear anymore. The coldness inside me was complete after Harley died, and what I had left of my life, of me, I was unwilling to offer up to anyone. I drifted through the next four years as silent as a bank of snow. A February snow.

John and Frank made up for my absence. They were twelve and ten that first year, and when they refused to sit through classes they were sent to the barns and fields. John rejected everything about that school and his rebellion led to strappings that he took with hard-eyed silence. The coldness in me was a furnace in him and he burned with rage and resentment. Every strapping, every punishment only stoked it higher. He fought everyone. By the time he was sixteen and old enough to leave on his own, the farm work had made him strong and tough. It was common knowledge that John One Sky could outwork any of the men. He threw bales of hay effortlessly onto the highest part of the wagons and he forked manure from the stalls so quickly he’d come out robed in sweat, eyes ablaze and ready for whatever else they wanted to throw at him. It was his eyes that everyone came to fear. They threw the heat in his soul outward at everyone. Except for me. In the chapel, he’d look across at me and his eyes would glow just like Irwin’s used to. He’d raise a hand to make the smallest wave and I would wonder how anyone could fear hands that could move so softly through the air. But they did. When he told them he was leaving there was no argument. And when he told them that he would see me before he left there was no argument either.

We met in the front hallway. He was big. Tall and broad and so obviously strong. But the hand he laid against my cheek was tame, loving. “Be strong,” he told me. “I’m going to get you out of here, Amelia. You and Frankie. Just as soon as I can. I promise.” Then he hugged me for a long time, weaving back and forth, and when he looked at me I felt like I was looking into Irwin’s eyes. Then he was gone.

Frank tried to be another John. But he wasn’t built of the same stuff, physically or mentally, and he only succeeded in getting himself into trouble. No one ever feared my brother Frank. In those schools you learned to tell the difference between courage and bravado, toughness and a pose, and no one believed in Frank’s imitation of his brother. That knowledge just made him angrier. Made him act out more. Made him separate from all of
us. He sulked and his surliness made him even more of a caricature and made him try even harder to live up to what he thought a One Sky man should be. He got mean instead of tough and, watching him through those years, I knew that the river, the fire, and the cold ran through him, drove him, sent him searching for a peg to hang his life on. It was a cold, hard peg he chose—vindictive as a nail through the palms.

A year and a half after he left, we heard from John again. Uncle Jack had sobered up, left Big River, and settled into a job and a house in the city. They were waiting for papers to be drawn up that would release us to them. When I held that letter in my hands, they shook and they still shake today when I think of it. I suppose you only get a small number of chances to hold hope in your hands and it’s a memorable weight, one the skin remembers. I allowed myself a little outlet after that. For the first time let them hear me utter complete sentences, talk of books and stories I had read, share my thinking. To say they were amazed is too easy. I was simple Amelia One Sky to them, the quiet one who sewed quilts and cooked. To find that I could quote the Bible was beyond belief to them, and I enjoyed the depth of the surprise.

Uncle Jack and Aunt Elizabeth came and got us a month later. Frank and I walked out of that school with one small duffle bag apiece, all we had of our lives after six years, all they’d given us to prepare us for the world. But it was more than enough, really. The ride into the city was a small glory. Uncle Jack had a good car and Frank and I sat in the back watching the landscape skate by. I felt like I was flying.

“Thank your brother John for this, you kids,” Uncle Jack said. “But don’t expect too much from him when we get there.”

I didn’t know what he meant but found out soon enough. Leaving the missionary school hadn’t changed John at all. In fact, it had made things worse. In the school he’d had targets for his anger but in the outside world he didn’t. So he settled in with a fast downtown crowd of bikers, ex-cons, and drug dealers who were as much like himself as he could find. And he’d earned a reputation as a hellish fighter as well as someone who not only
lived by the code of that world but also fought to defend it, protect it, honour it. Everyone was afraid of him. Everyone but me. For me, he always had those eyes. Bloodshot or not, they always held a smile for me and there was a big rough hand to tousle my hair. I had a hero again.

Life was good. Frank and I got into a school that a lot of other Indian kids attended and our aunt and uncle were pretty free with rules so we got to run around a lot. Frankie still tried to emulate John and he got away with it because he was John One Sky’s brother. Me, I tried to learn to be a little girl but it was hard after all those years. Still, I played the games and ran around like all the rest, content to be with family again.

The year I turned fourteen someone killed John. They shoved a big knife into his back while he was taking a pee in the washroom of the Regal hotel. When they found him he was laying in a pool of blood and piss, one hand behind his back clasping the handle of that knife. He died trying to pull it out. Always the fighter.

I didn’t come out of my room for a week. All I remember of that time is a crack in the ceiling. I lay there and stared at that crack until time was lost to me. I shivered from the return of the coldness and that ceiling became a bottomless pit I felt myself tumbling into. In that crack were voices. Voices of the dead, and I could hear Irwin telling me,
The water’s great, Amelia, come on in.
I heard my parents say,
The fire’s warm, there’s tea, come on, little girl, come.
Harley’s soft little voice told me,
It’s not that far from home, Amelia, all you gotta do is try.
And John, my tough, strong, fearless brother, said,
Don’t let them take you by surprise, little girl.
I heard them all, over and over, and if I slept at all it was the dreamless kind you’re never sure you had. They wanted me. I wanted them. I was tired and the only thing that brought me out of that room alive was Frank.

Three days after John died Frank had disappeared. He was eighteen, and when I tracked him down at the Regal hotel drinking with John’s crowd, he’d changed. Frank One Sky, he told me, stressing the last two words and poking a thumb against his chest.
John’s brother, he said to the nods of a table of new-found friends. I sat with them a while and they made me welcome but wouldn’t let me drink. Frank sat there drinking in the notoriety of being John One Sky’s brother as much as he drank in the beer that came his way from all across that hotel bar. I left him looking like a minor lord, fawned over and protected. As far as I know, he never left the Regal again.

Word had got out that two people were responsible for John’s death. When they showed up at the Regal, Frank walked over to their table with a baseball bat and crushed both their skulls. He was given two life sentences and sent to a prison a few hundred miles away. When I got the letter telling me he had hung himself in his cell soon after, I sat on the back stoop of Uncle Jack’s house late into the night tearing that letter into small pieces, flicking each of them away and watching the breeze take them skittering across the ground and out of the halo of light beyond the stoop. With each torn shred of paper I felt a piece of myself tear away from whatever held it. Each shred ripped away from me too, until finally I sat there alone, surrounded by death in a place far beyond anger or sadness—a cold universe, empty of stars and silent. Then I walked away. Just got up and walked away. Walked to a table at the Regal and a place on the street.

John’s crowd surrounded me like angels. I was fifteen. When I reached for dope or drink, they kept it from me. I was a One Sky and that was all that mattered. There’s a code of loyalty on the street, and no matter what the normal people say, that loyalty is strong and deep. I moved around, stayed with hookers, dealers, bikers, and all the other rounders who’d known my brothers and chose to honour them by sheltering me. The Regal became my home. I witnessed beatings, brawls, stabbings, overdoses, seizures, arrests, releases, people shunned, and people accepted like me. Through it all I was shielded by the burly bodies of bikers and their women, and somewhere in that strange and quirky shelter I learned to live again. Not well, not in the accepted normal way, but I found a place in that world and I stayed there. Until I found love.

Ben Starr was a tall, good-looking Blackfoot from Montana. He’d been on the street for years and when he joined our crowd at the Regal with his long braids and black leather he was accepted as the known rounder that he was. He was twenty-two and I was sixteen. He’d smile at me and nod each time we saw each other and soon we were talking. Ben wanted to be a writer. He wanted to take everything he’d seen and done and turn it into poetry. He’d slip me pieces of paper and I’d run off to the toilet to read them. A lot of it was beyond me, but somehow knowing that it mattered to Ben made it matter to me, and I was in love long before I knew it as love.

I guess it happens that way. That’s why it’s such a mystery, such a force. Because you find yourself in the middle of whatever kind of life you have and suddenly there’s an edge to all of it that wasn’t there before. Expectation. Hope, you’d call it. You find your life surrounded by a quiet kind of light that warms everything you touch and see. At least that’s how it was for me. And for Ben. I know it was that way for him, too. We moved in together after two months and when we finally united ourselves as man and woman the pain was sharp but elevated me somehow. When he entered me I felt opened up, raised to the world, and presented as a whole new being, freed from the cold and numbness, embraced by a bolder fire than I knew existed before or since. We lay there stoking the blaze and he told me stories. Some of them I knew from books but most were his, told spontaneously, magically, like something unfolding.

And so we lived. Not in a way most people would call well, but we got by. Ben took the odd day job, and because I didn’t drink or do dope the Regal hired me as a maid. We had a room on the fifth floor with two large windows right beside the big orange neon sign, so that at night our loving was bathed in the soft orange glow. I can’t see that kind of light anymore without a sense of celebration or loss for Ben. See, he had the monkey. Heroin. Morphine. Needles. I knew, of course. Everybody knew. But what a rounder chooses is what a rounder chooses, and only when that starts to affect other people badly is anything said. Most times
you’d never know. He was careful, knew his limit, and never went overboard. But monkeys climb and Ben’s was more agile and clever than most. He started to get sick in the mornings and if we didn’t find him some more pretty quickly he’d just disappear and return in the early afternoon, strolling into the Regal calm and unaffected. No one asked him what he did for the money, not even me. It’s one of the things you learn on the street—to never ask. Me, I was just glad to see him.

He started doing more. Secretly. But he was still loving me hard and being there for me and I guess I believed then that love itself would keep us above it, keep us floating, raised up, safe. But even love’s power has limits and Ben was soon far beyond the border of ours. They found him in the same washroom where they’d found John, the rig still hanging above his elbow, a thin trickle of blood like a tiny river down the muscle of his arm. I know because I saw. Small as I was, there wasn’t anybody big enough to keep me out of there and no one even really tried. I rocked him back and forth in my arms, cradling him, telling him it was going to be okay, to not be afraid and that my family would take care of him. I said it like a prayer and I believed it. When they took him from me I felt something—a warm thing, pliant, round, and complete—leave with a silent tug, and when I walked back into the Regal lounge all that was left was a hole. No cold, no numbness, no ache, no pain, just a hole. I walked over to the bar and started to fill that hole.

I was drunk for years. Years. Time, when you don’t consider it, has a slipperiness, an elusive quality you feel in the hands but shake off fast like water, and I was in the pit a long, long time. Because I was John One Sky’s sister and Ben Starr’s woman they let me go. At first it was out of sorrow for my loss, my losses, the story I would tell in long garbled sentences as long as the pitchers kept coming. Then, it was out of pity for a drunken young woman. Later, when I became untrustworthy and a pest, they let me go completely. So I wandered from party to party, bottle to bottle, man to man. I sold myself along the way, and that was the cruellest thing, betraying my beloved Ben for enough
money to keep on drinking. But finally, the years, the miles, the parties, the puke, the jails, and abuses broke me down and no one wanted me that way anymore. I stank. I slept in parks, doorways, abandoned buildings, and hobo jungles, stumbling into a world fortified by shaving lotion, mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, or whatever was handy. If there was a God in the world, he’d overlooked me and I became a crier, a weeper, tearfully begging change from passersby. Until the shadowed ones came.

I started seeing them everywhere. At first I’d rub my eyes, shake my head, and gulp down a mouthful of whatever I had to chase away what I thought for sure were DT’s. But they stayed. Not real people, not even what you’d call ghosts, just hints, vague outlines I saw everywhere. Alleys, parks, windows of buildings, on the street, everywhere I looked I saw them—felt them, really—not able to disbelieve fully or convince myself of their presence. Shadowed ones. The ones whose spirits can never leave this earth, the ones tied here by a sorrow, a longing stronger than life and deeper than death. When drinking wouldn’t drive them away and the haunting got too much to handle, I walked into detox one day and quit drinking. Just quit. Suddenly, I was forty-four. I looked eighty. I felt older than a thousand years.