She Felt No Pain (12 page)

Coming back in touch with her mother’s side of the family brought the deep ache back to the surface, where it asked for attention. All the time Holly had been learning her trade at her first postings, she’d thought about applying her new talents and resources to finding out what had happened that terrible week. Since returning last year, she’d made slim progress. There had been contact with an old social worker boyfriend of Bonnie’s, the stunning news, confirmed in a letter, that she had been ready to leave Norman once Holly was in university. A silver amulet of Raven which had turned up at a nearby thrift shop might have been her mother’s, yet it had surfaced long after her disappearance. Holly had been given a chance to read the case records in Sooke a few months ago, but when she tried to talk to an inspector in West Shore, he’d told her that the case was very cold. All the leads had been traced years ago, and he disputed the ownership of the amulet. “You’re too personally involved, a bad mix. Doctors shouldn’t operate on their own families,” he had said to her, rudely checking his watch and picking up another file. “Give it a rest. People often wait years to come out of the woodwork.” Was that supposed to be a consolation?

She had stuck out her jaw and announced that any personal time she had would be dedicated to solving the mystery. “If you think I’m waiting for a deathbed confession, think again,” she had said, turning on her heel. “What if it had involved
your
mother?”

Lately the
Times Colonist
had been running a cold case series. She’d called the journalist in charge, but the series was full for the time being. “Call me in six months,” he’d said. “We’re getting a lot of good press.”

After dinner, Holly cleaned up. Norman came from the video room, rubbing his hands. “How about a game of Pong? I can set it up on the computer. Then the next
Godfather?
Or did you bring home work for tonight?”

“Crime themes are too close to home.” When she saw his surprised look, she added, “Close to my job, that is. Let’s do
The
Odd Couple
. I need a laugh.” Though Bonnie was never far from their thoughts, discussing her on a regular basis would have been too painful. She would have wanted life to go on. But how could it without any resolution?

Just before she turned in at eleven, Holly went to her deck off the master suite to find Venus rising across the strait. No streetlights clouded the view, no fortifications obscured the sky. The glow flickering over the eastern hills was the lights of Sooke, but ahead the firmament was black as her mother’s eyes. From her childhood Holly recalled the storms those eyes held when her mother’s work brought frustration, when Norman persisted in his chatter about his latest period toy or recipe, or when Holly had put her life in peril and nearly drowned at Mystic Beach trying out a surfboard. How she missed the warmth they held when Bonnie had embraced her daughter and planted butterfly kisses on her cheek. When had she grown too old for that, eleven?

“Your love of the natural world of plants and animals came from my side, your academic pursuits came from your father. I suppose you’re going to teach in a university like he does or do research.” She chucked her teenaged daughter under the chin.

“Come on, Mom. That’s so boring. I want to be a ranger and work in a park. Maybe on the mainland. Anyway, you went into law,” Holly would say, setting aside her insect collection for Grade Ten biology. She’d just mounted a stunning sheep moth and had been admiring the black Hebraic markings on its delicate pink and ochre wings. “You could have been defending the innocent. Making the big bucks, too. Like on television.”

A brief smile flickered across her mother’s face, revealing her wry sense of humour. “You’re very dramatic, my dear. Like me. It’s the devil’s profession, but I found a good use for it. Fight evil with its own methods and cut it no slack. Turning the other cheek only encourages bullies. Now I have a mission, not only for women but for my own people. And for yours, little freckle pelt.”

Holly took a quail feather and marked a page in the
Trees
and Plants of Coastal British Columbia
that her mother had given her for her birthday. “Are you saying that you want
me
to be an activist? An environmentalist?” Her parents had never pressured her. Their trust in her to make the right decisions was precious.

“Use your gifts. I expect you to set and achieve your goals on your own, wherever they lead. But what an impetuous girl. Not patient, but a watcher like the deer. A creature of instinct and grace, not a predator.” Bonnie shook her head in mock frustration, retying her shining ebony hair in a ponytail.

Now Holly looked to the wall at the deer mask her “Uncle” Silas Seaweed, Bonnie’s childhood friend, had sent her when she was ten. “No deer were harmed...” he had told her when she worried about the animal’s fate. “The buck left us his antlers one spring so that he could grow newer, stronger ones.” The mask had a human face, black painted hair with cedar bark strips falling down on each side. Shiny golden brows stood over an eye mask of red, streaks falling like tears of flame and a broad red mouth. In a curious feature, it looked behind her as if “watching her back”.

“Where are you, Mom? Why didn’t your totem protect you? The cougar is strong,” she whispered again as she had many nights. But even bears and cougars were powerless over some evils. Her mother would never have abandoned her. A tear sneaked down her hot cheek. “I’m not crying. I...am...not.” She blinked away the traitorous moisture and flicked off the light as she heard her father’s door close.

S
IX

Y
ou have grown tall, girl. You are a woman now,” said the venerable Stella Rice, her black-olive eyes creasing in joy as she enveloped Holly in a powerful hug that scooped her up. She packed power into her five feet. “You have been such a stranger. Children must not stay away so long. Were you good, or should I get my applewood switch?” Stella had threatened, but she’d never applied the rod. One hot glance of her eyes stung more than a thousand words or a hundred blows.

“Sorry,Auntie Stella. I was in university, and then posted across the country. But I’m back now.” With the cool morning and a fog rising, Holly had worn the sweater. “Thank you for this gift. What beautiful patterns. This wool is so soft. Is it a different breed of goat?” Sometimes the weavers worked in feathers, bark, or other natural sources for colour and interest. A hundred and fifty years before, the arrival of the Hudson Bay blankets had eclipsed the weaving industry, and drab grey machine product had replaced the works of art. Now artisans were reviving their craft.

Stella let a wisp of a smile crack her broad mahogany face. Large, square red glasses magnified her eyes. Her totem, the owl, had been well chosen. “You have heard of the Salish wool dog? They are very small, like coyote.”

“My mother told me. But I thought they were extinct by World War II.” Holly felt the warmth of family love. How quickly they returned to the familiar comfort. It was as if they had never parted, and yet Stella moved a bit slower than last time.

“A new secret for you. My cousin’s cousin on Tzartus Island had a pack his family had kept separate for generations to protect the line. I took the ferry from Port Alberni for a clan gathering there this year. Because of my knitting, I was allowed to take a pup. So that she doesn’t mate with our local dogs, she will soon be spayed. I call her Puq, which means white.” Stella formed the words with the trademark glottal sounds that Holly couldn’t reproduce.

“Maybe when I’m in the Cowichan Valley, I can see her.”

“
Maybe
is not a strong promise word. I expect you very soon.” Stella tapped her temple. “This I know.”

They sat in rocking chairs on the porch of Mary Wren’s small cedar-shake cabin on the T’souke reserve. In mid June’s cool mornings, a cedar fire in the wood stove kept off the chill. A grassy expanse merged with the pebble beach, now at low tide, the flats dark grey and murky with the sea tang. Across the Sooke basin were the majestic, smoky hills of East Sooke, where the Martins had once lived deep in the great dark woods. Holly sipped aromatic camomile tea and nibbled on bannock heaped with purple salal jam. As usual, Stella’s strong and talented hands worked her knitting. “I tried to visit you my first summer in university, but you were in Northern Alberta staying with your grandson. Wasn’t he working on the tar sands project?”

“His first job, and his first baby. The young need the wisdom of the old. Thus it has been and shall be.” Stella’s eyes crinkled, every wrinkle earned in a hard-working time on earth. She must be closing in on seventy-five, nearly as round as she was tall. Her thick silver hair was gathered in two great braids down her back, tied in red ribbons, her signature colour. The cotton dress was plain as a nun’s habit but had complex embroidery depicting a thunderbird. On a side table lay the conical reed hat of the Salish. Mary quietly sat at her loom inside, glancing up now and then with a friendly smile. A small yellow bird trilled from a gilded cage on the table. The cage was open, yet it never emerged.

“You used to come sit on the sheepskin with me by the fire, and I told you the old stories, like I told your mother.” Stella took Holly’s head in her hands and pursed her lips with the cool assessment that had made her a leading elder. “You look some like your father. That blond man. Your hair is lighter than your mother’s. But the nose and mouth are hers. As for what lies inside you, I wonder if your heart remembers the first and most important legend.” The test had arrived.

Holly grinned and pointed to the ceiling, letting her fingers flutter down. “We are the people who fell from the sky.” Their culture was oral. Though little remained for long in the wet climate, continuous settlement dated from at least five thousand years earlier, and middens from two millennia demonstrated a fondness for shellfish, especially littleneck and butter clams. Weirs were established on the major rivers, and deer traps woven from cedar bark. Of all the places in North America, the coast was one of the richest for foodstuffs due to the mild climate and marine location. No roaming Anasazi these, ravaged by droughts, but a people whose meat came easily to the table. When the government had banned the potlatch in 1870, a feasting tradition involving much gift-giving, Salish culture had gone underground for more than two generations. Now legalized since World War Two, it was returning with renewed pride.

The rocker creaked as Stella continued her questions. “Do you remember the twelve names?” Long before the Great Flood, a dozen separate human beings had fallen from the heavens, bringing different gifts.

Holly took a deep breath. Stella always asked her that. The names were difficult, but she retained their phonetic memory if not the spelling in the Hul’q’umi’num language, with its disconcerting apostrophes, a dictionary created in the last century. The Warmlands, or Quw’utsun, was the alternate spelling for Cowichan. The land bore the history inscribed upon it. The huge boulder left on top of Mt. Prevost, aka Swugus, had saved people in the Great Flood. A giant boulder near modern Mt. Roberts had been flung by a chosen warrior to kill a monster octopus.

The Salish occupied a territory that stretched from Washington State to Alaska. It contained seven peoples, including the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Northern and Southern Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Nootka, and the farthest south, the Coast Salish. Bonnie Martin, nee Rice, had belonged to the Cowichan band around the big lake. She had won scholarships to university, where she’d met Norman in Toronto as she was finishing a law degree at Osgoode Hall. An odd couple, they had connected in the first blush of their twenties before their personalities were firm and while they still bathed in romantic ideals.

“I thought you would become our medicine woman,” Stella said with a mock pout, her tangled steely eyebrows warring. “You were so interested in our plants, learning all the time from those books your mother gave you. Every time you came, I took you into the woods to gather the sacred herbs, roots and flowers. Teas and tonics for stomach, eyes and arthritis. How to tell the death camus from the nourishing blue camus.” Patches particular to families were as close as these people came to owning property. They hadn’t understood why the white man wanted to cut down the riches of the land to plant his demanding crops in their stead, when hunting and gathering filled the belly.

Holly put an arm around her. “And you taught me how to make a horizontal cut and pull the red bark from the Tree of Life to make baskets and mats. Or reap the yellow cedar with its waterproof pitch for robes and hats.”

“The cedar is our mother. It gives us everything. Wood for warmth and building. Bark for cloth and baskets. Women used to chew the green cones as a contraceptive.”

“Maybe it worked. I don’t imagine cedar breath is attractive.”

Stella paused and settled her hands in her lap. How knobbed from arthritis her knuckles had become, but they would never rest until her last heartbeat. She pointed at the flames licking at a driftwood fire some boys had made on the beach. “Cedar warms us, too, even now when our hydro goes down in storms.

And when the white man came and saw our huge, fine houses, he could not believe that we had hewn wooden planks with only stone tools. Cedar is soft but durable. It can be split easily, a willing wood.”

Then Stella grew silent and seemed to be thinking. Her creased lids fluttered shut, and she began humming a melody as old as her people. The “Slug Song” was Holly’s favourite. “
Imush
q’uyatl’un,”
it began. “Walk, slug.” Then “What is wrong, slug? Smile, slug. Speak, slug.” By that time Holly would have fallen asleep, slow as the invertebrate.

The venerable old woman gave a deep groan and let her knitting drop onto her lap. “Your mother. It is not good. She doesn’t rest.”

There it was. The reproach Holly had known was coming. Did she mean this literally? That without a body, the soul wandered? “You believe she’s dead? You said that about Mimi, too.” Her mother’s rowdy older sister had left the island at eighteen, stealing her auntie’s purse and going east with a drifter. To their increasing shame, word of her felonies and scams had reached the family, but no one had mentioned her for years.