Smoke River (12 page)

Ella’s eyes alight on a wineglass on the end table beside the wing chair. “Stephie, what is this?” She grabs the glass, tips its floral liquid towards her chin, and sniffs. “Are you stealing our wine?”

“Dad let me. He said I could have some. He even poured it.”

Ella feels unsteady. The inadvisability of Mitch offering his depressive, overweight, underage daughter a glass of wine when she is alone at night catches in her throat like a fishbone. When it comes to Stephanie, her husband always takes the easy way out.

Steph stares up at her. Is it a beseeching look? Ella wants to reach out to the girl, be the balm to her troubles, but the effort makes her rigid. Daughters are so eager to repel their mothers.

“This” – she points at the glass – “is the last thing somebody like you should be indulging in.”

With shaking hands, Ella quits the room. She doesn’t acknowledge the punctured sound her daughter makes.

Stephanie, collapsed deeper in the chair, hears her phone finally
ping
.

F
’
D UP. SORRY
4
NO REPLY
. @
CRNR CLEARVIEW
&
WILDWOOD
15
MINS?

She stands up and looks at herself in the reproduction baroque mirror over the mantle. Even with puffy eyes and a glaze of sweat, her face is quite pretty. At certain angles she could even be compared to her mother – a darker-haired, more voluptuous version.

Stephanie hears the muffled voices of the television in the basement; her mother has uncharacteristically retreated there. Her father never leaves his office anymore. She goes to her bedroom, puts on a fresh T-shirt, reapplies her makeup, and leaves the house quietly, through the garage.

Nate is waiting for her. He reaches out a hand. She hasn’t expected this, how easily he offers a gentle touch, how it thrills the words right out of her. They walk in silence for a few minutes.

“That was one nice ice cream cone,” he says finally. They laugh and go quiet.

Stephanie thinks hard about what to say, then croaks out, “Brittany’s a piece of work.”

She’s grateful when he laughs again. But more silence follows, and she is conscious now of the lines etching his palm, the warmth of its centre, the pads of his fingers pressing her thumb inwards like a broken wing. So much of just one hand to know and understand.

“I could have been a bit smoother. You know, not just blurt out something in the hallway,” he says.

She wants to cry with relief. “No, no. I was such a bitch about it.” He doesn’t say anything.

She takes a risk. “You know that whole term of biology? I chose what I wore because of you.”

He stops walking and turns towards her. They’re far from her house. He draws a finger along her jawbone. He touches her hair. “I kinda knew that’s what you were doing,” he says.

He wraps his arms around her shoulders and pulls her inwards. She is enclosed, dizzy with sensation. He nuzzles her neck, and for the next fifteen minutes he breathes ever so quietly into her skin, holding on to her as if he’s been waiting, waiting most of his life, just for her. And Stephanie thinks,
Ah, this is what it is to feel alive
.

J
une is coming to a close with a sticky slap; purslane and sorrel spring from the over-chewed mud of the development, thriving in the heat. Even pummelled into hardpack, the
o’tá:ra
is beautiful. Helen reaches into her satchel and pulls out a twist of dried tobacco, kneels in the dust, and lets the flame from her lighter lick the leaf edges before inhaling deeply. From inside her chest she pulls forth gratitude, sends it skyward.

When she was a child, her mother told her their religion began with an illness. The sickness transformed a not-so-great man into a great one, because it brought him a vision. Helen imagined that the man suffered from a cough that blistered his lungs, woke him with chills and vivid, feverish dreams. Her own childish dreams were sharply coloured, but none of her dreams brought messengers drenched in supernatural light, speaking a message that would untether her people from the pale saviour of the priests and ministers who raised their churches, set up
missions. Among them Helen ached for such dreams, such messages. There were so many things her young mind failed to understand: neighbours’ children dressed like white kids, taken to the churches built by men who didn’t live among them, the painted exteriors like bleached bones.

And sometimes those same neighbour children showing up on the back porch, cupping an aching ear or holding a sore stomach until her mother crumpled dried tobacco leaves in a small clay bowl, dropped in a woodstove ember, and blew smoke into the child’s ear or exhaled it over a glass of water for them to drink.
Hard not to stumble
, Lena whispered after them,
with a foot in two worlds
. But even she couldn’t protect her own children from this two-worldedness forever.

Across the road, the commercial tobacco plants in Coulson’s fields are, to her eye, precociously tall and green, more than a week ahead of schedule. Even now, despite earning money from the crop herself, it bothers Helen how a living thing nurtured by resources shared by all – sun, soil, water, air – can confer its blessings on just a few. It’s like storing all the food and gifts at one end of a canoe, and in so doing making the journey perilous for everyone.

As a youngster she smoked wild tobacco – Indian tobacco – that made her head spin, her lungs sore. She learned moderation that way, how strong medicine can heal you or hurt you.
Get sick only once
, her mother told her.
Otherwise you don’t respect it
. The wild plants grew along the edges of Emerson’s Creek, just beyond the shade of the few remaining large maples at the east end of the
o’tá:ra
. It was a rogue crop from centuries earlier, before her ancestors’ tobacco was replaced by the variety favoured by Europeans, a plant that had bent the backs of black slaves and made white Virginia plantation owners rich – and so too the Interlake farmers.

Wild tobacco was cultivated through conscious neglect, the ability to leave something alone. Its blooms were left
untopped, and by July the trumpet-shaped petunias would bend in the breeze, a flutter of yellow prayers lifted to the heavens on two-foot stalks. In the fall the leaves would wither on the stalks and dry, cured by the winter’s freezes and thaws. Her mother would send her out in springtime to pick the black leaves, lay them on the rocky embankments in the sun. Then the older women would smash open the seed pods, sow the wild tobacco anew so the cycle would repeat. Before anyone dared to fill a clay pipe or take their bundles home, leaves were crushed and tossed into the creek, flung into the air, tucked into rocky crannies, and finally burned, acknowledging all the spirits who’d contributed to their good fortune.

This plant marked the seasons for her and she thought it would always be so. Lena kept her daughters – Helen, Ruby, and Bertie – hidden from the Indian Superintendent’s agents without desperate measures; other women gave up their status, married non-natives, in order to keep their children out of the government-mandated residential schools. Helen’s mother would have done that too if it hadn’t seemed like capitulation, another way for the white man to win. Instead she used stealth and imagination to protect her daughters. But Helen was the oldest girl, the surest on her own; she became restless, harder to hide. And one day, just like that, her summers of berry picking, tobacco smoking, and fishing were over. She was grabbed as she turned down the dirt road to her home with an armful of kindling, her pockets stuffed with chestnuts. Her mother was outside, hanging up the wash. Lena looked up to spot the grey government van, and she must have known. From the back window of the retreating vehicle, Helen watched Lena give chase, eyes bulging, open mouth rubbery with panic.

Later she understood how much her mother had given her. In every grade they put her in, Helen was the oldest student – a difference the nuns and priests interpreted as the intransigence
of her ignorance, ungodliness. But she had language the other children didn’t, words for all the ways a river is not just a river but a whole lexicon of different animations – rain-stirred, pollen-clouded, ice-covered, meltwater fresh. She had had eight summers of wild tobacco, whose taste she would conjure to heal her swollen cheeks, beaten with a ruler by the frocked instructors every time she spoke her Mohawk words.

Ruby and Bertie arrived together eighteen months later, with fewer years of Lena’s wisdom and ferocity to hard-coat them, fewer Mohawk words, and no such taste of tobacco to conjure as a salve against the hurts. It was because of this, Helen believes, that Bertie could not resist the nuns’ ideas about salvation, her uncleanliness in the eyes of a punitive god. She came out of that school and kept her crucifix, her prayer book, her rejection of Shonkwaya’tihson, the Creator. When Lena was out of earshot, she announced that she was a Catholic. What Ruby and Helen saw was a casualty.

By the time they all returned to the reserve, their mother had been bent and silenced by too much forfeiture. The stand of maples and the little creek had been expropriated by the government for a four-lane highway that cut a convenient diagonal from the big cities in the northwest to the shoreside cottage district in the south, bisecting the
o’tá:ra
, making it smaller still. One day, as car after car whizzed past, Helen walked among the ditches that diverted the creek under the asphalt, and she searched until she found one plant with a lemony blossom. The next spring she came back, crushed the blackened pod against the rim of a galvanized steel drainage pipe, and sowed wild tobacco seeds all along the culvert, keeping just a few for her mother’s garden. In this way she made change and its inevitability something circular; in this way she reminded herself that not everything of the past can be swept away, that choice and intention are palpable forces of resistance.

The memories lighten the heaviness of the June afternoon
and the niggling worry about the unfamiliar faces at the barricade, the ones that make her chew the inside of her mouth. It’s a large reserve; she doesn’t know everybody. But so many of these new faces belong to men, burly ones. Until now, theirs has been an action of women – small, determined mothers and aunties like herself, supported by a handful of teenaged boys, some grandfathers, and middle-aged men with arthritic knees. And Shayna, who has abandoned an expensive education, the certainty of financial reward, for the pull of history and her own nature. These other men seem like interloping weeds to her, unruly in ways over which she has no control.

Helen finds her niece sitting on a toppled oil barrel, fussing with her phone, staring at a number as if daring herself to call it.

“Shayna. We have visitors, no?”

The late June light feels stiff as starched bedsheets. Helen squints and points to the outer rim of the property. A half-dozen beefy figures, two in camouflage cargo pants, gesture like prospectors over the expanse of graded dirt.

“What do you think?”

Her niece stands and shades her eyes with her palms.

“Advisers.”

“Advisers from where?”

Divisions stripe their people like plaid. There are those who belong to the other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy – Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora – among them some who resent the Mohawks’ pre-eminence, their persistent activism, their nationalism. There are those who follow the old longhouse religion and buy their groceries and play bingo beside all variety of Catholics, Protestants, Pentecostals, evangelicals, and atheists. Within their own faith are those who believe an oral version of the Great Law that prohibits war and violence, and those who follow a written version, which interprets resistance as using whatever means necessary.

“
Rotiskenrahkete
,” says Shayna.

Helen takes a small step back, closes her eyes for a moment. The appearance of these men, from the Warrior societies on the shores of the great river in the east, suggests a shift. She thinks about how, even with a clear sky, the subtlest cooling of the air makes any kind of weather possible. “Who sent for them?”

Shayna shrugs. Helen need not have asked. Land has a way of stirring up competing agendas. It doesn’t matter; they are here. Everything is already different.

Helen looks into the sun, feels the heat on her cheeks, and forces herself to accept. There is nimbleness in certain kinds of acceptance. She has spent a lifetime mastering this nimbleness.