The Search for Joyful (22 page)

Then I recalled the tears on my face.

I wonder if the dead know they're dead. Maybe they just keep on, frozen in their bit of time, doing the same things in another reality. I kept to my schedule. If anything, I was more efficient than before. The only thing I had to be careful of was the concern I read in Sister Egg's eyeglasses.

“You're working too hard, Kathy.”

“No, I'm not.”

She shook her head, and I could tell she wasn't satisfied. “Hear anything from Mandy?” she asked.

“No.”

“And what about that young Mohawk, the one who used to pick you up in those odd conveyances?”

“Oh, him. He went away.”

“He was called up?”

“He's dead,” I said. I jammed my hand in my mouth, but it was too late. The word was out.

Egg took both my hands in hers. “Sit down, Kathy. There. Now tell me.”

“He was on his way to the war. He didn't even get there. He was on that troopship.”

“Oh, Kathy. I think you were fond of him?”

“There's a big wad of undigested feeling stuck in me.”

“My poor girl. How difficult it must be.”

“I loved him. I loved him, Sister. But what good was it, our loving each other? No good at all, it didn't mean anything.”

“Of course it did. Love is the dearest feeling there can be. You were fortunate to experience it, and so was he. If he knew your love, you gave him a great gift.”

I fumbled in the pocket of my uniform. “Here. Here he is. We're sitting on the moon.”

She didn't take the picture from my hand but bent over it. “Imagine that,” she said.

I replaced the snapshot carefully.

“He was a fine-looking young man.”

Was, was,
how I hated that word.

“You are right, Kathy. Keep busy.”

She must have passed the word on. The charge nurse kept me hopping. Once I snapped back, “Can't you see I already have two patients to clean up?” Instead of reading me out, she gave me a look of such tender concern it almost broke my heart. “I'll send Adele in to finish up,” she said. “By the way, there's an Indian woman asking for you at the front desk.”

It was Anne Morning Light. She had a telegram.

The telegram should have come to me. But of course the Canadian government didn't know about our marriage, and if it had, would have taken no notice of a couple of dumb Indians under a blanket.

Anne Morning Light soothed me with stories of Crazy Dancer as a boy. He had always been fiercely independent, disappearing into the woods for days at a time. He had a ragged paperback,
101 Ways to Live Off the Land,
and built his own wigwam in the woods behind their house. His father made good money as a structural steel worker on high-rise buildings. “He danced too,” Anne told me, “at the end of a girder, twenty stories up. He died in an accident. Not falling—a Mohawk never falls. And not from the machinery—machines never betray a Mohawk. No, he did something much more dangerous, he joined the union.”

Thinking of that death brought her son's. She broke down, and in that cold, antiseptic, whitewashed waiting room I tried to comfort her. Together, we mourned our loss.

“I don't suppose you're pregnant,” she asked.

“No.”

“A baby, now. Some part of him. That would have been a comfort.”

When she left I went with her. Sister Egg arranged it. It didn't matter much where I was or what I was doing. I moved through empty spaces. Sounds reached me, though, and scenes passed before my eyes. The sun was warm, the sun was good. I registered that. I knew everything that went on around me, yet it was remote, an alien universe.

I took accumulated sick leave and moved in with Anne Morning Light. We didn't so much live together as side by side. We no longer talked or tried to comfort. We knew it was no use.

I went to the stream where I had been bathed and prepared for my marriage. No laughing girls now, no splashing water. The water was still except for a small eddy. I followed it and came to where the ghost rice grew. For a moment I saw his upended canoe, heard his laughter.

I turned away and started back. Here in this forest he had shot partridge, walking softly. If a blade of grass bent, it straightened. And no leaf rustled as they did under my feet. A spring in his step carried him this way where I plodded past the bureau drawer and the rocking chair—those familiar logs and burnt stags and broken boughs. They furnished the world of his growing up.

But looking at them I felt nothing.

“Kathy,” Anne Morning Light said to me that evening, “your healing is not here. My healing lies in a return to my life. I'm going to Quebec. They're holding a protest rally for a Mohawk who is under a sentence of death.”

“What did he do?”

“It was harvest time, he went back home to bring in the crops. He didn't run off, he didn't hide. The military police knew where he was. They picked him up in his fields.”

“Poor thing,” I said. “He didn't understand.”

“No, he didn't.”

“Well, I guess I'll go back to the hospital. It was very good of you to have me—”

Anne shook her head vigorously. “You're not ready to go back to nursing. You need nursing yourself.”

I persuaded her I didn't. I persuaded her I was fine. When she left I sat down and didn't get up for hours. Night came and still I sat there. The dark invaded my mind.

Everything was nothing, and nothing everything. Why had that never been clear to me before? I thought not of what I would do, only what I would not do.

I would not go back to the hospital.

I felt I was treading the obverse side of the moon. Vast, dark, hollow. I wandered it. I walked it. Even when I did ordinary things like buying a train ticket, I was wrapped in it. If someone spoke to me, I replied. If they smiled, I smiled back.

But I kept treading the pockmarked face of the moon's far side. Our feet had dangled over the edge, he'd had his arm around me.

Outside, the world rushed by. In the morning, from the train window, I watched the sun come up. It tinted everything a delicate salmon color like the inside of a seashell.

The sun did not come up in my head. It remained dark there.

They called Montreal . . . I made no move. I wasn't going to Montreal.

The train hurtled along. My dark mind looked at the bright fields. My dark mind reached for him. It was one of those soul-shattering moments when it strikes you again, as hard as the first time—I will never see Crazy Dancer again.

He was dead.

Accept it, his mother had told me.

I didn't want to accept it. We hadn't invented a code that would tell me where he danced now.

The darkness grew and blotted out thought, blotted out possibilities, blotted out hope. I musn't trust hope, or possibilities or thought. The far side of the moon is bleak.

The porter woke me, gently repeating, “We're here, miss. . . . Your stop.”

Why had I bought a ticket for home? Mama Kathy and Connie were in Vancouver. No one would be here.

Yet it was comforting to recognize—a fenced pasture with the fenceposts leaning and the strung wire sagging—a tree with its center closed over an ancient burn. The tree grew around the black, charcoal wound and continued to live. But when you destroy the center of a person, that isn't possible. Besides, the person may not want to go on. Definitely doesn't want to.

I trudged along the road. I was going home.

No one was there.

I walked all morning and most of the afternoon. I'd forgotten to eat. I felt dizzy and the sun also turned black. When I got to my house, the door was open, so I went in.

Elk Girl surveyed me critically. I wasn't surprised to see her. I didn't ask what she was doing here.

“You look terrible,” she said, and put me to bed.

I slept, not through the night, but through several nights. Whenever I opened my eyes Elk Girl was there. She sat beside the bed and did quillwork. “How long have we known each other?” she asked when she saw my eyes open, then answered her own question, “Since we were seven.”

She spooned something that tasted of swamp and cattails into my mouth. “Didn't you ever wonder why I was your friend? Why I singled you out? Why I bothered?”

I knew I was not required to say anything. Besides, I couldn't rouse myself, it was too much effort.

“It's because of who you are,” she went on.

Who was I? I waited to hear.

“Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter, the only child of Jonathan Forquet. He came from the mountains and the forests, from the rushing river and the holy places to bring you your name. And with the name he brought you a special gift. He brought you Gaiwiio, the good messsage.”

Clang went the gates of memory, memories that were not mine. They danced just out of reach and beyond recognition. I closed my eyes and slept.

Minutes passed, perhaps hours. Elk Girl took up where she had left off. “Do you want to begin at the beginning of the world, or in the middle with George Washington?”

She herself made the choice. “The Great Spirit has an evil twin. Whatever the Great Spirit makes is wonderful and perfect, and the Evil Spirit comes along behind him and tries to destroy his creation. But he is not strong enough to undo it completely—only partly. For instance, currents. At the beginning of the world currents flowed in both directions at once. There was the
coming
side of any river, and the
going
side. So that you paddled your canoe either way without effort. Evil Spirit tried to eradicate currents altogether, but he was only able to do it one way. And so on until we come to George Washington.

“The Evil Being Who Lives on the Rim of the World, in January, five days after the new moon following the zenith of the Pleiades, whispered into George Washington's ear. And General George Washington ordered a scorched earth policy against the Iroquois for siding with the British. They fled over the border into Canada, miserable and starving. Among them was a Seneca named Handsome Lake.”

I turned my head away. I didn't want to hear. I had been married according to Gaiwiio, Handsome Lake's “good words.” The trouble was they led to my father. My father who was no part of my life.

But her voice droned on. “Sick and without hope, Handsome Lake turned to drink. And he died.”

I drifted off with the uncomfortable feeling that was not the end of it.

When Elk Girl continued it was in a declamatory chant. “My great-grandmother was a witness to his death. She was there and saw it. And she dreamed it into me as I now do to you.”

The wooden planks under my feet became a dirt floor. Against the wall, bowed figures mourned an incantation. The man stretched on the bed was not Handsome Lake. For one heart-stopping moment I thought the features were those of Crazy Dancer. But when I knelt, I saw it was Jonathan Forquet. His nostrils were stuffed with ground tobacco leaves. It had been a long time since he had breathed.

I walked with others to the dirge of voice and drum and stopped where they stopped, at a desolate knoll. The grave had been dug in preparation and the wrapped body of my father was laid into it. In the distance a wolf howled.

On the third day the Gaiwiio was recited.

The howling wolf came close. It was white. It went to the grave site and began to dig. It dug and dug. Finally it dug down to grave clothes. But my father was not there.

With a single impulse we turned and there on the summit of a nearby hill was Jonathan.

The people gasped and knelt in awe. Their voices broke and they shrank back afraid.

I was afraid.

He raised his hand in blessing.“I have come from the sky road to bring you a new world. Gaiwiio is old, but I bring it new and full of hope. The prophet Handsome Lake has made known Jesus's warning—not to follow the way of the money changers, the white men, but to take from the before times of our people and mix this with the best of the white world, giving thanks to the new moon that will arrive again in January.”

I woke from my vision hardly able to breathe.

“Did you see?” Elk Girl was almost dancing with excitement. “Did you see the death and rebirth of Handsome Lake?”

“It wasn't Handsome Lake. It was my father.”

Elk Girl dug her fingers into my shoulders. “You're sure? It was Jonathan Forquet who came? Your father?”

“It was my father I saw dead. It was my father I saw buried.”

Elk Girl covered her eyes and fell on the floor.

“And when the wolf dug up the grave clothes, it was he who stood on a hill and spoke.”

Elk Girl said from the floor, “Well, that's clear enough.” She got up, straightened her skirt, went to the washbowl, and poured water over her hands, face, and the back of her neck. Then she patted her hair in place. “Finish the soup I brought you, Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter. We must go.”

I pulled back as though I had been scalded. “No! Not to my father.”

“He has sent us his pawakam.”

“No. He abandoned me. I don't care how great a man he is, I can't forget that. I can't forgive it.”

“Kathy, you think he hasn't been where you are now? He had to choose between being your father and being father to the rest of us. People come to him from great distances because he has found the answers that are withheld. He has woven the sayings of Handsome Lake into the wampum of life.”

 
IT WAS A bus journey, and we went in the morning. All day and that night we dozed, conscious when the bus slowed that we were passing through cities. Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay. In Sault Ste. Marie I heard a town clock strike thirteen. On we went, North Bay, Ottawa, Montreal. Quebec I had always thought of as the end of the world. It wasn't. We rode past it into a scruffy countryside, but old-growth forest could be seen in the distance. We got out at a poverty-stricken little town, and had lunch at a place called Ma's. I had two eggs sunny side up. Elk Girl took her breakfast into the kitchen and had a long confab with the Indian who worked there. I had been silent the whole trip and she was put out over this. But I wasn't able to pull myself out of that dark place.