The Search for Joyful (23 page)

She returned from the kitchen and said in a businesslike manner, “Jimmy Longbow will take you the rest of the way.”

“You're going to leave me here?” Somewhere in the world I was sitting on a stool eating eggs, but where?

“You're the one Jonathan Forquet wants to see,” she retorted.

“Wait,” I said as she turned to go. “Do you think he really did die?”

“Of course.”

I looked after her, no longer sure which was dream and which reality.

Jimmy Longbow handed me a walking stick with a leather thong he had fashioned himself and we started out. Before too long we were in the forest I had seen from a distance. The cool autumn air trapped between pines was pungent. The trees went down to the edge of the river.

My guide melted away. There was no need of him. Jonathan Forquet was at work in a clearing. Before him, lifted on a rack, was a canoe; another was pulled up on the beach.

He put down a tool, and, coming toward me, took my hand and looked deeply into my face. He knew. I could tell that. He knew about Crazy Dancer, and that he was dead.

“I don't know what to do,” I burst out.

“Sit down here on this stump. First you will have a cup of water.”

He watched me drink with a look of satisfaction. “You did the right thing. You can always come to your”—I thought he was going to say father but he said—“namer.”

I stole glances at him as I drank. He seemed not to have become older but to encompass youth with age. “What are you doing?” I asked, indicating the two canoes.

“This is my workshop. I make canoes.”

“To sell?”

“Of course to sell. How else is a man to live?”

“You're known as a holy person. In India a holy person collects alms and is fed by the community.”

“Why should I accept charity when I can make canoes?”

He took me to a small pine lean-to whose chinks were padded with moss. “Sleep here,” he said, showing me a pile of furs in the corner, “and tomorrow you will help me and I will try to help you.”

Like a child I obeyed my father.

When I woke I could hear the teeth of a bandsaw. I emerged and came closer, inhaling the aromatic scent of birch bark that had been freshly peeled and rolled in large paperlike layers. Its outermost crust was chalk white, deepening to a buff color.

“Paper birch, cut from high on the tree. I strip it off in a single sheet early in summer.”

“What wood do you use to make the frame?” I could see he was pleased at my question.

“A hard maple or cedar. This is cedar I'm shaping now. This piece in my hands will be a gunwale. But I've run out of water. It has to be kept wet.”

I picked up the pail beside him and, going down to the river, filled it.

He nodded thanks without pausing in his movements. “Pour the water into this trough,” he directed.

I did this, wondering if he remembered the way we had parted years ago, and the cruel things I had said. He placed the cedar strips to soak, making them malleable for bending.

“The ribs too,” he said, placing shorter strips to soak. “And lastly, the stem. On other boats that would be a keel, but on a canoe it simply divides the building of it.”

We left the construction pieces of cedar soaking and went in to breakfast. He pulled apart a home-baked hominy loaf, which we ate with honey and berries.

“When he died,” my father said unexpectedly, “it was your death too.”

My eyes filled with tears and I nodded.

We went back to work.

The afternoon was spent fastening the gunwales together in the outline of a canoe. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we will put on the skin.”

Work stopped when the light faded. Jonathan brought out a pipe and sat in the doorway, smoking. He had laid the guest breakfast before me; I saw it was up to me to rustle the other meals. Dinner didn't look too different from breakfast—berries, a substantial slab of hominy grits, which I essayed on his stove, cooking it with what I thought was bear grease. I topped it off with goat cheese.

We ate in silence, but it was a comfortable silence. Companionable.

“Did you ever die?” I asked.

He nodded over his pipe. “Yes,” he said, considering each word. “The doctors told me that I did, that my heart stopped.”

“And you were really dead?”

“Yes.”

“And the rest, that people say about you?”

“People believe what they need to believe.”

“I see. And that is the stuff of myths and legends.”

He continued to smoke.

By the next morning our framing was pliable and bent easily, assuming a graceful outline. Together we unrolled the birch bark and lashed it to the ribs.

“Do you see the true beauty of birch? How the grain runs around the tree rather than along its length? That enables us to sew the sheets together.” As he spoke, he mixed something with the bear grease brought from the cabin.

“What is that?” I asked.

“For caulking. Pine gum and spruce resin with fat.”

The afternoon was spent raising the gunwales to the proper height and binding them to the stem. “Canoe building goes much faster today. Today I rely on Phillips screwdrivers. Not that there is a single screw in the finished canoe, but for temporary bracing there's nothing like them. Bandsaws and jigsaws are a lot faster and more accurate than stone implements. The roots of a living thing are in the past, but the buds open in the present and bloom in the future.”

“The present is empty,” I said, “and I can't even imagine a future.”

He didn't say anything.

It was a day in which we waited for the wood to dry. My time was spent sewing. My thread was made from the cores of spruce roots by patiently scraping layers of skin away. Jonathan came over, presmably to check my stitches. They were small and even, as though sewn with fine silk thread. I was proud of them.

Looking over my shoulder, Jonathan said, “Your mother was an orphan.”

My regular stitching went awry.

“She was raised in the cold, severe atmosphere of a mission, but her name was a message from dead parents that she was to be joyful, Mamanowatum. So she knew very well the burden she laid on you when in the spirit world she whispered to the Grandmothers—who passed the name to me.”

“My life is in shreds, Father. I can never know joy again.”

“I haven't finished my story,” my father chided me. “Oh-Be-Joyful grew up behind those repressive stone walls. When small children were punished, she relived her own punishments. She began to break the rules in order to be banished to punishment row. This was a dark storeroom, where children sat on a wood bench and cried. When Oh-Be-Joyful contrived to be shut in with them, she told stories and joked and played finger games. Punishment row became the happiest place in the mission.”

My father's story was finished, and he went back to work.

What had he been trying to tell me? That even though I could no longer feel joy for myself, I could create it for others? My stories were dried up in me, I had no jokes, I knew no finger games. If anyone still cried in punishment row, I would say, “Move over.”

Another day and another night. My father showed me a collection of miniature canoes in a shed out back. They were six inches long, beautifully made and signed by him.

“White man's enterprise?” I asked.

“Of course.” A rare smile lit his face. And I realized that the present held an occasional flash where someone else connected with you.

The caulking, when we reached that point, took a great deal of time as it underwent repeated inspections. Jonathan was a scrupulous and careful craftsman. I was reminded of one of Sister Egg's aphorisms: “What's worth doing is worth doing well.”

“The ribs,” Jonathan said, “give it strength and make it seaworthy.”

Prebent and wedged tightly against the birch bark, they formed the hull of the canoe.

Two weeks from the day I arrived we stood back and looked at a lithe and capable boat.

Without saying anything my father took me to the edge of the river. It was as though he felt I had earned a vacation, and this was it. We stood looking at bright pebbles which the water magnified. The current was slow, but in the shallows a runnel had formed, quick moving, rushing on.

Jonathan picked up a small piece of bark. He tossed it into the fast-flowing channel. Our eyes followed its course as it breasted ripples and was carried along. “That was you when you came here,” my father said.

“But where will I wind up?” I was concerned for the small piece of bark. I hadn't been concerned about the world at war or the protesters Anne joined—but I was worried about the fate of that tiny piece of bark.

“It doesn't matter where you wind up,” my father said, “as long as you are in control. Do not let yourself be carried like that bit of wood, who has no say in the matter, and gives no direction, but allows itself to be swept along, it doesn't know where or how.”

“But what can it do?”

“Why, dip a paddle in the water, steer a good course.”

“And what is a good course?”

“It is different for each of us.” And with that he returned to the canoe. I thought it was finished. But it seemed there was more caulking, and ornamenting and invocations. I made myself comfortable on a tree stump, pulled my sweater more closely about me, and watched. With the completion of the canoe my visit was at an end. I wanted to leave him something, so I picked a bouquet of wildflowers. Vines and vivid poppies and the season's last white columbine.

When several hours had gone by, he took a rest and sat down beside me. I handed him the flowers. “I don't know what this coarse yellow one is, I'm afraid it's a weed.”

“There's nothing wrong with weeds. Weeds are generally tougher and stronger than flowers. Take you, you are tough and you are strong.”

“Then I am still Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter?”

“I call you that. And someday you will grow into that name.”

“Because I am a weed?”

“Yes. Because you are a free-growing, strong weed.”

He had a parting gift for me as well, a couple of the miniature canoes. “Give them to your friends.”

“You don't want me to keep them?”

“No.” He handed me a scroll of birch bark, plain and unmarked. “This is for you. Make it into anything you like.”

E
leven

I RETURNED TO Montreal and the Sisters of Charity a whole person. I missed Crazy Dancer. I missed loving him and being loved by him. I missed the life we never had. But the wasteland inside my heart was gone.

 
I PUT IN for overseas duty and went through a three-week equivalent of boot camp, during which I got my knuckles rapped by a forceps for being slow to hand the operating doctor a scissors and practiced battlefront hospital sterile precautions, including Lane's technique of two gowns, two caps, and two pairs of gloves. When the site was prepared, you stripped off the outer layer of clothing to immediately begin the delicate work in a sterile environment.

There was also strenuous physical training: chin-ups, push-ups, hiking with twenty-pound backpacks, map reading, revolver practice, setting up and dismantling tents, how to wriggle under barbed wire and set fuses. Other hardening activities included firing .303s, with a ferocious recoil that banged you on the shoulder. A brief course in prevention and treatment of malaria and other tropical diseases, and we were posted.

The weather that a month ago still held traces of summer had become a Montreal winter. But my life, which had teetered at the world's rim, was given back. Like Oh-Be-Joyful in punishment row, I would try to snatch other lives from the brink if I could. For this I needed to be in the thick of things, although with the German conquest stretching from the west coast of France to the east coast of Greece, it was difficult to judge just where that might be. Presumably, however, the Royal Canadian Army would know, and I left it to them.

When I said goodbye to Sister Egg, I had no idea where I was headed. She took the crucifix from her neck and with a mumbled blessing placed it lingeringly in my hands. “If you get the chance, Kathy, ask His Holiness the Pope to bless it.”

That was her way of telling me she thought it was Italy. This seemed a good judgment call. Our new class of Liberator fighters had given us air superiority in the Mediterranean and the 4th and 16th German Panzers along with an Italian division had withdrawn from Sicily, while Palermo was taken by Pat-ton's forces. This amount of activity made it more than likely that I would be handing Sister Egg's crucifix to the Holy Father.

An old World War I tramp steamer had slipped into harbor under cover of dark. It listed crazily to port and rode low in the water. I sent up a small prayer, “Not that one.”

But it was that one, and at 0300 hours, still in the dark, with a light snow falling, embarkation began. Reinforcements were marched aboard, supplies loaded, heavy equipment stowed, and last, as my cold teeth testified, nine nurses, recruited from several hospitals in several cities.

“I'm going to the war you never got to, Crazy Dancer.”

The companionways were narrow, and the ship listed so badly we could hardly keep our footing. The steep metal ladderlike stairs which we climbed down resembled the entrance to hell, as the further into the bowels of the ship, the hotter it became. Three stories down we reached our quarters, bunks crammed in so tight you couldn't sit up without banging your head.

The ten-day crossing was not to be a picnic. We had started to unpack our few belongings when an explosion rocketed through our quarters, throwing us against our bunks. Were we under attack before we'd left the harbor?