Smoke River (18 page)

When Elijah Barton’s mother realized she could not get land on the reserve, she moved with her son into an abandoned vinyl-sided cottage on the edge of the
o’tá:ra
. It had an arabesque of carbon on the wall behind the kitchen’s wood-fired cookstove. She nailed sheets of plywood to rebuild the floor’s sag; she sewed curtains from frayed bedsheets; she knit long tubes and stuffed them with newspapers to shove against winter’s drafty door jambs. They turned a toolshed into their outhouse, snuck water from the wells on nearby properties or boiled creek water. His mother believed she was returning to a life she remembered from her childhood, where a large kitchen garden, generosity, and the dexterity of her skills – the ability to sew, bead, weave, cook, can, cure, grow, gather, barter – were enough for a good existence. But her people were gone, others were mistrustful of a woman who’d lived so long in town, lying next to a white man, and what she knew
how to do could not cushion her against their new privations. Still, she never wavered; she bore the hardships as if they were a change in the weather.

But Elijah felt trammelled. For the first six months he’d go to bed, turn his face to the thin wall, and sob without making a sound. Then one day, from the stoop outside his mother’s shack, he heard a distant singing: a female voice for sure, but an alto with a soprano’s soar. He wandered across the creek and into the forested southern tongue of the reserve in search of its source, imagining a broad girl with a large chest and a throat like a hollowed tree stump, enough body to cradle such big notes. What he found, at the edge of the Smoke River, was Rita, thin-limbed and lanky in her cut-off jean shorts and bathing suit top, shiny hair reaching to her hips, lungs holding up the sky. She had pulled together long willow vines and was braiding them into a swing while she sang.

He stepped back, watched her, until she swung around in mid-refrain and pointed in his direction.
You! If you’re gonna stare, you might as well help me
. She continued to sing, and though he hovered closer, Elijah was unsure what to do. Finally Rita drew the braided vines to the river’s edge, threaded her leg through the loop, grabbed up high, and kicked off with her free leg, then cinched it tightly against the other one. She swooped down, pendulum fast, as the vines strained to their full length over the water, where she let go, her foot slipping free of the willow noose like a princess casting off a slipper, her whole body outstretched towards the sun. He opened his mouth to call out as she fell into the water and held his breath until she broke the surface, throwing her head back so her wet hair slapped her shoulders. Her laugh was full-throated and reckless, huge, like her singing.

Elijah wasn’t one for big words. But later in his life, whenever he heard someone say they had been enchanted, he
remembered that first encounter with Rita, and thought,
Yeah, I know what that’s all about
.

Driving home early from the cigarette factory, Elijah notices Joe Montagne pull into the council office driveway. He slows down, cranes his neck just as a woman walks away from Joe’s shambolic truck. Something about her is familiar. On an impulse, Elijah pulls his red pickup into the same driveway, tucks it between two
SUVS
so he faces away from Joe. His hand shakes as he adjusts the rear-view mirror.
Rita
, he whispers. Could it be?

At the door, the woman turns and waves in Joe’s direction. Facing outwards, her pretty face is lined with worry, every ligament of her petite frame clenched, determined. Elijah slumps. Never before has he mistaken Shayna for her older sister.

Joe backs up his truck, tears away from the council building. Feeling sheepish, a bit foolish, Elijah is about to do the same, when he hesitates.
There’s a reason for everything
, his mother would assure him when he was a miserable young man. She refused to leave the old cottage on the
o’tá:ra
, even as its bones sank into the ground. She died before he turned twenty. To the outside world, she was poor and friendless when her work-weary heart misfired and her soft body crumpled into the folded faded linens under the clothesline. By then Elijah was making enough money to ensure that she was never cold, never hungry, and that there were plenty of beads and broadcloth for her clever hands, seeds for her garden, and just enough ease that she could sprinkle suet on the kitchen window ledge to coax the crossbills and vireos from their branches on a crisp October evening. She was as happy as she could be for a woman who understood happiness as a kind of frill, an invention foisted upon her quietude by an unquiet world. Or so she led him to believe.
Possibility is more interesting to me than happiness, Elijah
, she said once.

Shayna leaving the barricade for a late-afternoon visit to the
council offices presents all sorts of interesting possibilities. He has nothing to lose by hanging around for a bit.

Chief Jonah White may have convinced other folks that his ability to break even running a Stop ’n’ Go is tantamount to business acumen, that his adeptness at retelling a joke or funny story is the same as negotiating moxie, but Shayna has little patience for men like him. Her people believed in the traditional council – the one where women such as her grandmother were enfranchised and powerful – and resisted the federally imposed idea of governance, its trickle-down of undeserved payoffs and goodies accruing to opportunists such as White and his cronies. Still, she is nervous. As a point of honour, she has rarely ventured into the new band council building since its cost overruns became a heated controversy. The automatic door’s pneumatic
whoosh
, the lobby’s bright, antiseptic gleam unnerves her. From behind a polished marble barricade, a receptionist’s head bobs up.

“Can I help you?” She eyes Shayna’s grime-stained jeans.

“My name is Shayna Fallingbrook. The chief asked to see me.”

“Oh.” The girl drags a polished red fingernail along her computer screen and then taps the keyboard. She throws a clipboard on the counter.

“Conference room 22B. First right, then left, then left, then right. Can’t miss it. Please sign in, and don’t forget to initial when you leave. They’re waiting for you.”

“They?” Shayna says, and scratches her name on the sheet.

The girl shrugs and offers a conciliatory smile. “Yup. Looks like you’re a popular gal.”

Shayna slips into the closest washroom and fumbles for the cellphone in her purse, only to find it uncharged. She scrubs her hands, rinses her face, runs her fingers through her hair. The
bottom of her pant cuff has a weird blue stain and a crust of dirt. The last two buttons of her shirt are missing. “Shit!” she says. Helen would counsel her to stay cool, stay strong.
Even if it is an ambush
, she’d say,
what have you got worth stealing?

The conference room’s shades are drawn and it smells of new carpet. As her eyes adjust to the low light, Shayna makes out the silhouettes of four figures, all large-shouldered, facing her from one side of an immense round conference table.

“Come in, come in,” says Chief White, and he draws himself up out of his seat, holding out his hand. “We have coffee, tea.”

Shayna sits opposite the men so the table obscures her pant leg, the scruffy half of her shirt. She puts her palms out flat, places the dead phone beside them to suggest a time limit, looks up. The first set of eyes she meets are those of her ex-husband.

Clarence is smiling at her. “Hello, Shay,” he says, and it is the voice she remembers, the voice of a man who never yelled but who expressed his belligerence with greasy fingerprints on the remote, the noises he made eating an orange, the always empty gas tank.

“We asked Clarence to join this meeting because he’s got some expertise, you know, on the legal stuff regarding land.”

Shayna nods her head slowly. She met Clarence at law school. He was a Mohawk from Big River, his father a sometimes friend of Rick’s. She was the better student. She got multiple offers after passing her bar examinations; he got one. But it was Clarence who thrived among the city towers, the press of people in the subways, the traffic that drowned birdsong and breezes. She walked out of her office tower one day, late for a lunch appointment, saw her passing reflection with her expensive leather boots and tight skirt, clutching a mobile phone, looking as if she’d mow down anyone who delayed her, and suddenly she couldn’t reconcile her reflection with the women who’d come before her, or the woman she wanted to become.

“Sooo,” says Chief White, “we wanted to talk to you about this barricade business. Perhaps you could fill us in on your strategy.”

Shayna takes a long breath. “I’m a little confused about how this concerns you at all. Hasn’t the band council formally distanced itself from the barricade?”

“Well, that situation is … you know, fluid,” says the chief. He folds and unfolds his hands, then his eyes dart to Clarence.

“Shayna, the thing is, at this point you really need a focused message,” Clarence begins. She’s irritated by his tone, the effort he is taking to explain things to her. “When you’re dealing with the media,” he continues, clearing his throat for emphasis, “and especially the government.”

Chief White nods eagerly, as if Clarence’s words were edged in gold leaf.

“We have a message: the land doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us,” she says. “And we filed claims and considerations and followed the rules and somehow that didn’t work. So now we are being a bit more, y’know, proactive, as they say.”

“Yeah, but …” Clarence says, and she remembers that but. He said it exactly the same way every time she muttered about more and more blonde baby mamas showing up on the reserve pushing strollers with blue-eyed natives, hanging dream catchers in their bedroom windows, sporting Turtle Island tattoos.
But we’re all hybrids, Shay
, he’d say.

If everybody is native, no one is native
, she’d spit back,
and surely that must be the plan. First missionaries and churches, then residential schools. And now legislation that defines a race by giving it no definition worth having. Hand out the funds and rights. Water down the cultural and blood ties. Keep everybody just poor enough. It’s the politest genocide on the planet
. This was the kind of stuff she’d offer for every
but
he supplied. Finally he’d wonder aloud if she were paranoid. Shay’d call him a sheep.
Baa, siksik, baa
.

“But you need to be precise, Shayna.” And what she hears is an old exasperation, his implying that she’s given to fuzzy theories and overreaction. “For instance, you should have a figure in mind.”

“A figure?”

“For compensation. Surely you’ve reviewed the title history on this property,” he says. “You’ll have to argue that the band was improperly compensated for the land, rather than trying to prove it was taken from them in a series of complicated boondoggles. The evidentiary through-line is so much clearer.”

Shayna gives a little laugh, shakes her head. Farmers are selling their acreages and new houses are rising up from graded mud flats. Her people – his people too – are being surrounded by Walmarts and Japanese maples, Montessori schools and discarded Frappuccino cups. Meanwhile their treaty claims cram banker’s boxes, gather dust in the offices of lawyers and overpaid consultants. The reserve population is growing, the land base shrinking. And what does the band council do? Burns sweetgrass for every visiting politician. Hires show-me-the-money Mohawks such as Clarence who say
evidentiary
and – always –
easier
.

“So, let me guess. The band council has a figure in mind. And you’re offering to distribute this compensation.”

The chief shifts uncomfortably, whispers to the two men on either side of him.

“Shay, you have to be realistic,” Clarence says. It hurts her to smile. “Elected council has a good track record with the right people in government. You and your troop have no credibility. The feds’ negotiators will run circles around you.”

A funny way to exact revenge
, she thinks,
but effective
. Perhaps she has it coming. In the last six months of their marriage, Clarence would push her off him at night, saying,
Stop!
She would grope at him with her fingertips, with her tongue, her
teeth. Nothing registered – not the salt of his sweat, the tang of his ear, not the stubble of his chin, the soft flesh of his ass. She’d begin to scratch, scratch, scratch at him as if she were trapped in a box of his flesh. He’d pin her to the bedsheets.
Stop!
When he moved into Pete-Pete’s old room, she’d slip into the house’s dark hush to destroy something he loved, ripping each page of the first book his mother had bought him, running a nail across the ridges of his mint-condition Hank Williams seventy-eight. She mined a talent for hurting him. And every time he came back to her, wearing long sleeves and pants to hide what she’d inflicted upon him, she only wanted to do something worse.

“We want the land, not compensation. The land itself,” she says finally. “The tiniest fraction of what was originally promised to our people.”