Through Black Spruce (5 page)

Carrying a few bags of groceries and some new baby clothes for the boy, I walk Eva down to the water-taxi docks. We chat with a few of the old ones who sit patient in the sterns of their freighters for a fare over to Moose Factory. It’s still early enough in the year that they haven’t gotten rid of the wooden cabins on their boats that keep customers protected from the wind. I help Eva into one, and the water taxi tips dangerously with her weight. The grandpa who’s driving leans to the far side to balance it.

“We’ll talk soon,” I say. “Call me before you leave for Toronto. I’m going to head back out to the bay in a couple of days to finish up work.”

Eva nods and smiles, cradling Hugh in her lap, back to sleep already. “I’ll call,” she says.

And so this is the way my world once went, Uncle, me always ready to pack up and head into the bush, trying to leave this place that is home, trying to make my way up or down the river, in whichever direction seemed the best one to take me. This was my life.

My legs cramp from leaning to him, and so I let go of his hand and stand up to do some more pacing. Mum’s going to be arriving soon and I’ll have to finish today’s story quick. Instead of sitting again, I lean over my uncle. He looks pretty tough with this new buzz cut. The hair must be soft as a baby chicken’s, but when I touch it, it is as wiry as steel wool. “Tough old nut,” I say. I lean closer to finish what I’ve started.

I got ready to head back out to my camp again, a new bag of flour and salt and fresh tins of Klik packed into my boat. But then Eva calls. She’s crying. “I caught Junior looking at the internet porn again,” she sobs. “Caught him with his pants down around his ankles and his little chub in his hand.” I don’t say anything. “On top of it, he left the computer on last night, and I looked. He’s been on a chat line and posted a picture of himself that is like from ten years ago when he was skinny and you should see who he’s talking to and what he’s saying.” Eva breaks down more, and I wait. “I told him our trip to Toronto is off.” She’s so strong when she’s a nurse, but the girl is lost when it comes to men.

“You can always come stay with me, Eva,” I say. I look out the window and down to the shore where my boat waits.

“Screw him,” she says. “I’m still going down to Toronto. I already booked off time at work. I want you to come with me.” Her voice is a sniffle now. “Let’s go down together, Annie. I’ll leave Hugh with my mum. She agreed already. We’ll have a girls’ week and go find a Chippendales.” I laugh at this, and she laughs, too.

“Can you imagine me in a place like Toronto?” I ask. “I’d be dead in two days.”

“Please,” Eva begs.

“I can’t, Eva. But someone will go with you. Come up to my camp with me instead. It’ll be good for you.”

“I’m going to Toronto. I want you to come with me.”

I want to tell her I need to take care of my camp, that the door was left open, that I badly need to do a sweat so the geese will come back to me. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

When she’s calmed enough, we get off the phone, and I kiss my mother goodbye and head down to the shore. I climb into my freighter and pull the cord on my outboard. It roars to life. I sit and let it idle. I lean over to untie the rope, but my hand stops. I just stare at it, shaking a little. I must still be sick from the food poisoning. My hand reaches back and turns the motor off. I step out of my boat and head back up the bank, into my house. I pick up the phone and dial Eva’s number. “I’ll come with you,” I tell her. I tell her, Uncle, that I’ll go just for a week.

7
FLIGHT

Chief Joe always said that the sure sign of an alcoholic is someone ready to climb right back on that horse after getting thrown off the night before. Many mornings I lay in my bed and stared out the window to the river, trying to imagine going to the fridge and pouring myself a rye and ginger. More than not, the thought of the taste of it made me gag. A good sign, no?

From my kitchen I could see the dirt road and then the stretch of tall grass that leads to the bush. My favourite summer mornings were when the sun had begun to push through the black spruce ahead of me, pure thin threads of light heating the ground, the limbs of trees, the cold dissolving into mist. A new day. A better day for me. I liked to stare at spiderwebs beaded with dew. Ahepik, the spider, huddled to one side of the web, the web glittering as the sun slowly heated it up, too.

A smoke or two and a cup of coffee. I’d shiver and watch the world brighten a bit at a time. Mosquitoes not ready for bed yet, blackflies beginning to stir, hungry. A part of life here I’ve been through more than fifty times.

When I began trying to get back in shape, the cramps would start in my side so that I’d slow my pace to an almost walk and rub them, making them worse. My head would pound bad if I drank too much the night before, spasms making my right leg shake every few steps. I’d look ahead and see the road to the dump and tell myself:
You can do it, you can do it
. But I couldn’t. I’d stop and bend over, my legs shaking so much that I’d almost fall over. I’d hork spit, and instead of snot sometimes I’d throw up a little. Getting out of shape is so easy, nieces. But getting back in?

I learned a trick. If I went far enough, I’d still have to make it all the way back. That or just lie down and wait for the crows to peck my eyes out. I’d push myself to walk and stumble-run as far down the road as I could. Then I’d have to get back.

One morning, up ahead near the dump, I saw what I thought was a big black dog sniffing around in the ditch. Not so long ago in this town, we did an annual culling, a bounty on strays, ten bucks a tail when a few of them attacked a kid on Sesame Street. But that practice is gone now. Goddamn environmentalists is what Joe said, but that made no sense to me. Me, I think it was bad for the little bit of tourism we get up here. So when I saw that black dog, I picked up a rock. It was big. I was upwind.

When I got closer, I saw it wasn’t a dog. It was a black bear. I hurled the rock hard as I could to scare it off before I surprised it. Good throw. The rock bounced off the road and hit the bear’s back. But instead of running, it raised its head.

It lifted its snout in my direction and sniffed short breaths. The beady eyes tried to make me out. It was blinder than me. I’d needed glasses for a while, but I’d been putting it off despite Lisette’s hounding. The bear’s sense of smell worked very well, though. And it seemed to like what I had to offer, my pheromones, I think.

Stop
, I told myself.
Stay still
. That bear began to walk up out of the ditch toward me. I backed up slow. The bear kept coming. I raised my arms and shouted at it, but this only made it more interested in me. Hungry after a long hibernation. Keeping my eyes on it, I crouched down and picked up another rock. This was the tricky part. If I threw the rock now, I’d either send it off or make it angry. The bear continued to approach, slow and steady, more curious than mad. No hackles raised, no deep grunts. I shouted again. “Get away, you! Beat it!” No help. Maybe it was deaf. I cocked my arm and threw the rock hard. It flew three feet over the bear’s head.

I turned and ran. No half jog, or full jog, for that matter. Full-out sprint like I was a teen again, going for the gold, the healing lodge two or three hundred yards ahead. I read somewhere black bears can run faster than horses. I also read they rarely attack people, especially Indians. This one must have been crazy. Just my luck to run into a crazy bear.

Was it following me? I wanted to look, but I was too focused on pumping my legs. I could feel the hot breath on my back, and I tensed for the sink of claws into the fat of my ass. The wind whistled in my ears now, and my feet weren’t touching the ground anymore. I swear I was flying. Like in that movie I saw with the Asian guys flying across water and along bamboo.

My heart was about to explode. The lodge still lay a hundred yards away. Not flying anymore, breath wheezing, legs burning, arms flailing. My legs seized up then, just stopped moving, and I really was flying, parallel to the ground, a plane out of fuel, watching the gravel pass high speed below me. Maybe it was my hockey reflexes, or maybe it was just my desire not to smash my head into the ground, but I began to roll as I started touching down, rolled so that I took the impact on my side, then my back, then eventually my stomach. I ground to a stop and wrapped my arms around my head, waited for the crunch of sharp teeth on my skull. The gravel popped. I was going to pee myself. The growl sounded like a poorly tuned motor. I screamed.

A rusty door squeaked. I heard the approach of feet. “Me, I don’t think jogging’s for you. But you sure can run fast when you want to. Real awkward, but fast.” I opened my eyes and saw Joe’s boots, ran my eyes up his legs to the big belly.

“Bear,” I croaked, trying to suck in air.

“Yeah,” Joe said. “I saw signs of it the last few days. Want a drive back?”

The drive to my place felt pathetically short. I didn’t say a thing. At least I didn’t cut myself up in the fall. Joe drove slow, and we looked for the bear. We saw its footprints, saw mine, noticed that as soon as I started running, the bear did, too, but in the other direction.

“Must have been all your screaming that scared it off,” Joe said.

“I didn’t scream.”

“I could hear you over my motor and still a half mile down the road. Saw your mouth wide open. Screaming like a girl.”

When I became a bush pilot, my father was more upset than I’d ever seen him. He was never one to tell me that I shouldn’t do something. He was old school. He’d watch careful, but from a distance, as I tried something new. Making an
askihkan
for shelter in winter. Chopping wood. Setting a snare for rabbits. I’d always watched him when we were in the bush. He only gave his advice if I asked. My memories of me and my father are like watching those old movies before people talked. Silence, but one that wrapped around me like a blanket.

Lots of times growing up, I’d just try to do something myself because I believed that being a boy, and being Indian, I should just know how to do things. My father understood that my pride would take its course and I’d end up learning two lessons at once. The less painful road was always to just ask him how to do something when I could stomach it, but more important, that to fail at doing something, whether it was surviving a snowstorm or trying to catch fish, meant that pride can kill you, or at the very least make you so hungry you could cry. Learn from your elders. Yes.

I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to leave this place, this ground, this earth, and just soar. My mother was sick with brain cancer, just like three other women within a mile of us. The government called it coincidence, but the army had left piles of oozing barrels when NORAD decided the Russians weren’t going to attack through Moosonee. And most any Indian within a hundred miles knew that “coincidence” is just a white phrase for bummer. Shit happens. Sorry without saying sorry. Don’t blame me.

And so I did something I’d never done before. After residential school and five years of trapping and hunting, I went back to the white man, if only for a little while, to learn how to fly.

I got my wings the day my mother died. I asked my father if we could cremate her and take her up in a plane and sprinkle her ashes across the tundra and the bay, watch her body float like snowflakes onto the ground below. My father wanted to wrap her tight in blankets and place her in a tree. The Ojibwe blood in him wanted it, I guess. But when we ran into obstacles with the town about doing that, we buried her in the cemetery by the healing lodge with the rest of the
Anishnabe
, making sure her feet pointed east, to the rising sun, and her head pointed west to where it set.

When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.

The day I was to take my first real paying job, flying a couple of fishermen in to an interior lake, my father beckoned me to his room. On his bed lay something long and thin, wrapped in an old blanket.

When I unwrapped it, there the thing lay that I’d coveted since I was a boy, my father’s old sniper rifle, stolen from a German so long ago in the Great War. It was a rifle he’d lost but that had come back and found him like a pet dog or now, when I think of it, like an illness. I looked to him but he didn’t smile.

The gun, its heavy stock crosshatched with old knife cuts, felt warm, like it had just been fired. I held it and smiled.

He shook his head. “Me,” he said, “I shouldn’t be giving this to you. It is a burden, not a gift.”

At the time, I couldn’t have imagined a better present.

My father was one of the last men not to speak the white language, and every time I took off from the ground, I felt like I’d never see him again. I hated the idea of leaving him alone to try to deal with rude girls working cash registers at the Northern Store, white policemen straight out of cop school and sent here to cut their teeth, not knowing or caring that he was one of the last real live decorated World War I veterans. But whenever I landed my plane and walked back in his door, my father smiled his funny smile—the big ears on his head going red at the tips—and sat down with me at the kitchen table where we could just sit silent for hours and enjoy the energy coming off the other. It took me a long time to recognize that my father was celebrating the fact his son had survived another experience flying. I wasn’t going to disappear on him, and this made him happy.

I tried to explain to him in Cree that airplanes were solid things these days. That they were reliable. He just shook his head and said, “Men aren’t supposed to fly.” I imagine he’d had a bad experience on a plane back in that war, but when I asked him about it, all he’d say was he had a friend once who wanted to fly, and when he tried, his friend, him, he fell to earth.

Old men speak in riddles, nieces, but if you listen carefully, they might have something important to tell you.