Wake The Stone Man Read online

  Mrs. Kouie loved words, metaphors and allegories. She loved poets. But most of all Mrs. Kouie loved Leonard. Mrs. Kouie let us borrow her poetry books, and on our lunch break Nakina and I would find an empty classroom and read Leonard. Then we wrote the poems in chalk on the board to see the shape of the words of Leonard Cohen.

  Nakina discovered The Spice-Box of the Earth and began to read aloud “For you I will be a Dachau Jew and lie down in lime with twisted limbs...”

  “That’s me,” she said.

  “He’s writing about Jews. Are you a Jew?”

  “He’s writing about the holocaust.”

  “Are you a holocaust Jew?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Get out.”

  “I am.”

  “Get out.”

  “He means Jews metaphorically.”

  “You’re a metaphorical Jew?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Molly.”

  “Seriously, I don’t get how you are metaphorically a Jew.”

  “I’m Indian. Anishinaabe.”

  “So.”

  “So we’re like the Jews. The Jews of Canada.”

  “You’re a Canadian, Indian Jew. OK, so what about the holocaust?”

  “Do you even know what a holocaust is?”

  “Sure, what happened to the Jews in the war.”

  “No. The word. Do you know what the word means?”

  I shrugged.

  “Genocide. The slaughter of a race. What they did to me.”

  “Come on. Who slaughtered you?”

  “The residential school.”

  “I don’t get it. How?”

  “Red kids in — white kids out. Genocide.”

  I got quiet after that. Didn’t know what to say. Just got up and went back to class. Couldn’t concentrate on anything all afternoon.

  Red kids in — white kids out. I kept thinking about the first time I saw Nakina, climbing the chain link fence trying to escape with the belt coming down on her back. Leather belt coming down to whack the Indian right out of her.

  ***

  Nakina started coming home with me. Don’t remember if I invited her or if she just came home with me one day and kept on coming. She was living with a foster family in Rosslyn Village then. The Dekkers. Dutch family who ran a milk farm. When she came home with me for dinner she usually stayed overnight, which was fine by me.

  Nakina loved cards and cribbage, which I hated, so she was a hit with Mom and Dad. They would sit around the table all night drinking pots of tea and yapping away, playing cards. Dad would sit there with a cigarette on the go and Mom would have her hair up in curlers and Nakina would have a bowl of popcorn in front of her.

  Me, I’d curl up on the couch with a book. Books were how I got my kicks. Mrs. Comusi across the street drank. She’d sit out on the steps in the summer with her magazines and gin, and by the time the street lights came on she’d be dancing like a rag doll across the lawn shouting at the neighbour men to come and join her. She was happy as a pig in shit and everyone knew it was the gin. But hey, what the hell. Gin did it for her, books did it for me. By high school I had a four-book-a-week habit.

  It was nice having one more warm body in the family. With just me around it got boring. I bored myself. Too quiet, too shy, too scared of my own shadow. Nakina was a kick in the ass.

  Our family sure needed it. When I was ten my mom got pregnant. I was excited about having another kid in the family, but when she came back from the hospital there was no baby. Nobody told me what happened. No one ever spoke about it and somehow I knew I couldn’t ask. She got quiet after that and it got harder to talk to her. People kept telling my mom how sorry they were, but they forgot she wasn’t the only one in the family who lost that baby.

  When Nakina started coming home with me things got better. She was funny and said stuff I could never get away with. Like one time at dinner my dad was asking if she helped out on the Dekkers’ farm.

  “Yeah. Last week they let me help band the calves.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. Big mistake.

  “You lay the calf down on the ground, tie its legs together, then grab the balls in one hand and this metal thing with an elastic band in the other. Then you put the elastic band over their balls and zap them right off.”

  I thought that was hilarious. I mean, seriously, she said “zap their balls off” at the dinner table, which cracked me up so I kept laughing, and guess who got into trouble.

  Nakina would sit at the table when mom was cooking, peeling potatoes for her and asking questions. Like she was doing research on families. On my family. I listened. It looked like I was reading but I was listening. Listening to my mom talk about how she could see the grain boats out the window of her bedroom at the top of Grandma’s house in North Fort when she was a little girl; how they made Spitfires at the Auto Works during the war; how she met my dad at a dance at the officers club. She told Nakina about how she and my dad moved to a cabin north of Nipigon after they were married and how my dad and his friend caught sturgeon and sold caviar to a store in New York. People paid a lot of money to eat fish eggs. Gross! My mom talked about her friend Martha, who was Ojibwe and had a trapline with her family near our cabin. I don’t know why my mom never told me any of this stuff. Guess I never asked.

  I looked at Mom and Nakina standing together at the sink and I thought they looked more like mother and daughter than my mom and me. Nakina was the same height as Mom, and they both had long black hair pulled into a loose ponytail. And they were both — I don’t know — round, and curvy. I looked down at my stick legs and flat chest. Lucky me, I inherited my father’s chest.

  That night when Nakina was playing cards with Dad I helped Mom wash the dishes.

  “How old was I when we moved back here from the cabin?” I asked.

  “Oh, you were going on five. You started school that fall.”

  “Is that why you moved back?” I asked.

  “Partly. Dad’s business wasn’t going too well, and I missed the city.”

  “I remember my bed at the cabin — it was like a princess bed with a frame covered in white lace.”

  “Not lace, mosquito netting.”

  “It felt like a princess bed to me. ”

  “When you were a baby my friend Martha showed me how to string a hammock between the beams of the cabin. It kept you up high where it was warmer, and away from the mice.”

  “Did you like living there?” I asked.

  “Sometimes. It was hard, but we were happy.” Her voice trailed off and she seemed to be getting sad so I didn’t ask anything else.

  That night when Nakina and I were in bed reading I turned to her and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “What?” She looked over the top of her book at me.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked again.

  “When?”

  “When you get out of here?”

  “Out of where?” she said.

  “Here.”

  “This room?” she said.

  “No, idiot.”

  “Out of where?”

  “Fort McKay.”

  “Trying to get rid of me?”

  “Come on. Seriously.” I put down my book on the French Impressionists and looked across at Nakina.

  “Dunno. Haven’t thought about it,” she said.

  “Want to know where I’m going?”

  “No.”

  “Paris. I’m going to go to the Moulin Rouge, where Toulouse-Lautrec hung out, and to the Louvre to see the Cezannes.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. And I’m going to live in an attic in the Latin Quarter with my French lover and paint all day.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “What’s th
e point of making plans. You’ll never get out of Fort McKay.”

  “I will.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I will.”

  “You never will.”

  “Shut up.” I closed my book.

  “Hey Nakina.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know that first day I saw you.”

  “In the principal’s office?”

  “No, that day you were trying to get over the fence at the residential school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “Home,” she said.

  “Where’s home?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Oh.” I put my book down and turned off the light. “Hey Nakina.”

  “What.”

  “Well, if you didn’t know where home was…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, how were you going to find it?”

  “God, Molly.”

  “No, really. What were you going to do when you hit the ground on the other side of the fence?”

  Nakina rolled over and sat up on one arm. “Find the tracks.”

  “The tracks?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Tracks.”

  “What tracks?”

  “Train tracks, genius.”

  “Fuck off!” I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep but I couldn’t stop thinking. “Hey Nakina?”

  “What?”

  “Why were you going to find the train tracks?”

  “Because that’s all I remember. A train.”

  “What train?”

  “I remember a train that came through the bush stealing kids. Taking us away.”

  “Away where?’

  “Here, I guess.”

  “And that’s why you were going to find the tracks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But I still don’t get it. How would that help you get home?”

  “Tracks run both ways.”

  “Oh. Hey Nakina?”

  “What.”

  “Good thinking.”

  ***

  I was sitting on the front steps with Nakina playing cat’s cradle. She held her hands up in front of her and I looped a long circle of string in and out of her fingers to make a star shape. It was cold. Winter was in the air and the grass crunched when you walked on it.

  Bernie Olfson, the cop who lived a few houses down from us, drove into his driveway and I could see antlers sticking out from the back of his truck. There’s something about a guy driving up the street with a moose in the back of his truck that sets off a silent alarm. One minute there was no one on the street except Nakina and me, the next all the dads were at their doors. They didn’t go over right away. First they stood on their steps, arms crossed, like they’d just stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air. Then they looked over at Mr. Olfson casually and gave him the Fort McKay how-ya-doing-eh nod. Then after a bit they strolled over to his place and said “Hey, so you got yer moose.”

  Before long my dad and six other guys were helping Mr. Olfson lift the moose out of the truck. They set it down on the middle of his lawn and then stood around, waiting.

  After a while Nakina and I walked over and joined some other kids on the sidewalk. I’d seen my dad skin rabbits when we lived up north, but I was curious about how they’d skin something as big as a moose. It was lying on its side, head tilted back and its big grey tongue hanging out. It looked gross.

  “So what do you say Bernie, he’s about, what … a thousand pounds?” my dad asked.

  “Bit more I’d say. Maybe fifteen hundred.”

  Mr. Olfson had two knives. One was about twelve inches long and the other not much bigger than a pocket knife. Looked pretty small to skin such a big thing.

  The men stepped back and watched Mr. Olfson make the first cut. First he took the long knife and sliced off the head. Blood gushed out all over his boots. A few guys lifted the severed head and tossed it towards where we were standing. Steam was rising from the head as the hot blood hit the cold air. Some boys turned to look at me and Nakina. I think they thought we were going to scream or puke or something, but we just kept watching.

  Mr. Olfson took the smaller knife and cut just above the tail and slid the knife under the hide and started peeling back the skin. At that point a few of the men knelt down around the moose and helped fold the skin back as he cut. When they had exposed one side they rolled the moose over and skinned the other side. Then one of the guys picked up the skin in a heap and dropped it beside the head.

  My dad went into Mr. Olfson’s garage and came back with some rope and they rolled the moose onto its back. My dad wrapped the rope around one of the front feet just above the hoof and tied a knot. He tied the other end to the tree. One of the other guys tied up the other front leg to the back of the truck. The moose was lying headless on its back, front feet splayed between the tree and the back of the truck. With the skin pulled off you could see every red sinewy muscle.

  Mr. Olfson cut down its throat and pulled up the trachea. Then he cut into the belly, careful not to go too deep, and a few of the guys rolled up their sleeves, stuck their arms into the belly and pulled out a long twisted tube of intestines. They laid the intestines beside the carcass and white steam rose from the hot belly.

  Mr. Olfson went into his garage, and with bloody hands he carried out a small chainsaw. He pulled the starter chord and when the engine kicked in he made a cut through the ribs.

  I guess Donny must have heard the chainsaw start up because he came out of his house and walked towards Mr. Olfson’s. My dad was helping them pull the ribs apart. Mr. Olfson grabbed the throat and pulled down slowly, bringing all the internal organs out — lungs, heart and stomach.

  Donny came up beside me, and when he saw all the blood he started rocking back and forth and moaning. I turned him around and put his head on my shoulder so he wouldn’t see. Nakina said we should take him home, so we walked him back to his house and hung out with him for a while.

  It was getting dark when we went home but Mr. Olfson’s garage door was open and the light was on. You could see the headless moose carcass, back legs tied together, hanging from the ceiling of the garage.

  chapter three

  The Beatles were coming. A Hard Day’s Night finally hit the boonies and Nakina and I went to Woolworths to buy make-up. Had to look good.

  Nakina picked out pink lipstick. I wasn’t into lipstick so I stood there wondering why Woolworths smelled like old men’s socks. I saw the salesclerk watching us. It happened every time I went shopping with Nakina.

  First there were the raised eyebrows that said she knew there was an Indian kid in the store. Then the eyebrows would lower and she’d look like she just sucked on a lemon. Then she’d cross her arms across her chest, and I would start counting to myself … one, two, three … and over she comes. This clerk came up to us and said, “Can I help you?” and I said, “No, just looking,” and she said, “Well, you have to leave the store if you’re not going to buy anything.” Nakina held up a lipstick and said, “I’m buying this.”

  The woman followed us to the cashier and waited until Nakina paid for the lipstick. They wanted her out but not before they got their money. You gotta love this town.

  On the big day we walked into town. Nakina wore the new pink lipstick. It looked good on her.

  There was one good thing about South Fort, they had not one, but two — count ’em — two movie theatres — the Odeon and the Capital. North Fort only had one — ha.

  We sang all the way into town with arms linked, shouting at the top of our lungs: “When I saw her staan-ding there.” We swung our heads as we sang so our hair would flip around. Nakina’s hair was straight so it really flew but mine was like a frizzy pot scrubber so it just wiggled. We were still singing when we got to the theatre.r />
  It was dark when we went in but I remember thinking something was weird. I expected to see a lot of kids from school but the theatre was almost empty. The maroon velvet curtain opened. And the first thing I saw were the credits: Histoire … nuit et Brouillard. What the hell. French? That was the first clue.

  After the credits rolled there was this big green field. Nice. And nothing happened. I waited for four guys in black suits to pop up on the horizon and run across the field. Then the camera moved back, and farther back, and I was looking at the field from behind a barbed wire fence. Then music, flutes and violins, and a man’s deep voice speaking in French and there were subtitles across the bottom: “The blood has dried, the tongues have fallen silent.”

  The camera panned back farther behind the fence and I saw rows of buildings with tall brick chimneys. The man was speaking again — names like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I didn’t know what it meant, but I was pretty sure that Paul, John, George and Ringo weren’t going to come running across that green field.

  The next shot was a crowd of people and some little guy in a uniform was shouting at them, and as his arm shot up into the air Nakina punched me in the shoulder. “What the hell, Molly!”

  I looked at her with raised eyebrows because I really didn’t know what to say, and she hissed, “The Capital you idiot, the Capital Theatre.”

  She punched me again “Get up. Now!”

  Nakina stood and pushed past me, grabbing my sweater as she went, but I didn’t move. At the end of the aisle she pushed past an old man and woman and they grumbled at her. I saw her shadow move up the aisle towards the door. I didn’t move. Couldn’t. It was too late.

  I looked back up at the screen and saw long low buildings behind barbed wire. At the end was a big brick building. I tried to read the subtitles but they went by too fast. They were like weird poems.

  I saw crowds of people standing at a train station. A row of children, alone. I wondered where their parents were. Maybe it was a school trip? But they looked scared and I knew it wasn’t a school trip. Maybe they were being sent away because of the war? I had heard about kids from England being sent to Canada during the war. Maybe these kids were being sent away to keep them safe.