April Raintree (27 page)

I began looking through them. The last entry she had made was in January 1972. That was the month I had been raped. I looked for a 1970 journal. It was this one that I was most interested in, because that was when I had first lost touch with Cheryl.

The entries for January indicated she had started the search for our parents. February had occasional references to her continued search. There was more in March.

I see more and more of what April sees, broken people with broken houses and broken furniture. The ones I see on Main Street, the ones who give us our public image, the ones I see puking all over public sidewalks, battling it out with each other, their blood smearing up city-owned property, women selling what's left of themselves for a cheap bottle of wine. No wonder April ran. She was horrified that this was her legacy. She disowned it and now she's trapped in that life of glitter and tinsel, still going nowhere. Charitable organizations! What a load of crap. Surrounded by a lot of people, business-wise but empty. Just like the Main Street bums
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The more I see of these streets, the more I wonder if April isn't right. Just maybe. Better to live that empty life than live out on the streets. What if I do find our parents? Sometimes I can't help it, I feel like April does, I despise these people, these gutter-creatures. They are losers. But there is a reason why they are the way they are. Everything they once had has been taken from them. And the white bureaucracy has helped create the image of parasitic natives. But sometimes I do wonder if these people don't accept defeat too easily, like a dog with his tail between his legs, on his back, his throat forever exposed
.

April, 1970
- Happy Birthday, April. What do you give the person who has everything? I can give peace of mind with a few lies
.

May, 1970
- Struck paydirt with a new address on Austin. The place is rented by a woman named Josie Pohequitas. I knock on the door and it is opened by this little, bent, old woman who is stoned out of her mind. But happy as hell. I have figured out by now, it's better to see these people at certain times of the day. You have to be late enough, so they can start getting over last night's drunk and early enough, so they're not whacked out of it yet. I ask if she knows Henry or Alice Raintree
.

“Henri, Henri Raintree?” she says in a French-type accent
.

“Yes, I'm his daughter and I've been looking for him,” I say in a pleasant, polite voice
.

“Ah, yes, mais oui, we're good friends, you know. Come in. Here, sit down, here. He comes to our place when the snows are gone. He goes north for winters. He is welcome here. He stays. Sometimes, we have big party. Sometimes, we have big fight
.
Then he goes. But he always come back, Henri does. He will come back. You come back in couple of weeks. You will see. He will be here then.”

I'm tickled a deeper shade of brown, you might say. I tell the toothless woman with her toothless smile that I will be back
.

June, 1970
- I knock at this door again, having been here a few times with no luck and expecting none this time
.

“Ah, Cheryl, it's you again. Come in, come in,” her face lights up into a big grin, still toothless
.

“Henri, Henri, come out here and see the surprise that is here for you. Hurry up, Henri,” her voice is high-pitched and squeaky. She never pronounces the ‘h's
.

An old, grey-haired man comes walking out of the kitchen. He is trying to keep his balance, curiosity is piercing through his drunken haze. I assume that Josie has told him about me but still it's a few minutes before he realizes it's me
.

My smile disappears but a smile slowly appears on that leathery, unshaven face
.

“No, no, it can't be. Not my little daughter, Cheryl. My little baby. You're all grown up now.”

He chuckles and staggers a little closer to me. He makes a visible effort to draw himself up, but he has drunk too much already and the feat is beyond him. His clothes are worn, dirty and dishevelled. Tears of happiness and perhaps awakened guilt pour from his watery eyes
.

The woman, Josie, is beaming with pride as if this “joyful” reunion were all her doing
.

“It's like a miracle. It is like a miracle,” she cackles over and over again, watching father and daughter facing each other. I am rooted to the very spot, absorbing the true picture of my father, I make no effort to move towards him. This goes unnoticed and the old man approaches me
.

“I cannot believe that we are standing here, face to face, at long last. At long, long last,” the decrepit, old man says
.

I stand quietly, hiding the horror which is boiling inside of me. I hadn't known what to expect. But it wasn't this, this bent, wasted human form in front of me. My father! I am horrified and repulsed; by him; by the cackling, prune-faced woman; by the others who have crawled out of the kitchen to watch all this “happiness,” all of them with stupid grins on their faces; by the surrounding decay; by the hopelessness. The cancer from the houses I've been to has spread into this house, too. To destroy
.

All my dreams to rebuild the spirit of a once proud nation are destroyed in this instant. I study the pitiful creature in front of me. My father! A gutter-creature!

The imagination of my childhood has played a horrible, rotten trick on me. All these years, until this very moment, I envisioned him as a tall, straight, handsome man. In the olden days he would have been a warrior if he had been all Indian. I had made something out of him that he wasn't, never was. Now I just want to turn and run away, pretend this isn't happening, that I had never laid eyes on him. Pretend I was an orphan. I should have listened to April
.

Awkwardly, he hugs me. I smell the foul stink of liquor on him. Hell, he probably sweats liquor out of his pores. I close my eyes so no one will see what's in them. I hold my breath against the gutter smell. Seems like ages before he releases me. When he does, he turns to the others and says, “Don't just stand there, bring her a drink. Now we have something to celebrate. I found my little girl after all these years. Tell me, Cheryl, where is your sister? Where is April? I missed you both so much. Ah, here we are.”

He hands me a beer and wipes his tears and runny nose on the sleeve of his shirt. I don't answer. I just think, “April is far away from you and she'll never know what you are, you, you gutter-creature!”

Gratefully, I swallow some beer. Disgust, hatred, shame…yes, for the first time in my life, I feel shame. How do I describe the feeling? I swallow more beer
.

I stay for the rest of the day in spite of my desire to flee. I stay because I want to know about Mom. But I want Dad sober when I ask him about Mom. Funny, I can still refer to him as Dad. I drink away the hours and pass the dizzy, nauseous sensations, laughing stupidly with them. Josie puts me to bed, just in time, on a battered couch in the living room
.

Next morning. I wait patiently for Dad to get up. It is almost noon. He comes into the kitchen. He looked in rough shape last night but now he looks worse, with his weak, flabby arms showing because he's in a torn, greyish undershirt. His dark-coloured baggy pants are held up by suspenders that are frayed to the breaking point and all twisted. I get coffee for Dad. Josie is busy puttering around the kitchen. No one talks, the only noises come from Dad slurping his coffee
.

Finally, I ask him, “Dad, could we talk?” Sounds like I'm
shouting. I lower my voice. “I want to know about Mom. How is she? Do you see her?”

Dad makes a gesture as if he doesn't want to talk about her right now but I persist. “Please, Dad. Tell me about Mom. Where is she?”

Tears come to his eyes again, He says simply, “She died last July.”

“Died? Mom died?” I ask, not believing. I then figure out that Mom was in poor health when we were kids and that's why she died. I wish I could have seen her. Poor, dear mother. Maybe that's why Dad turned to booze. He misses her so much he can't live without hen I can forgive that, retract all the bad thoughts about him
.

But Dad speaks again. “I may as well tell you everything.” He sighs and lapses into another long silence
.

I try to make it shorter by urging him to continue. “Tell me what, Dad?”

“Your mother took her own life. She killed herself,” he says at last. “She left a letter for me but I had gone up north early that year. I have a nephew in Dauphin. I stop in there sometimes. They sent the letter there. She jumped off the Louise Bridge last July. I took the letter to the RCMP and they checked with the Winnipeg police. They had found a body and everything matched your Mama. She was not happy with her life. Once she lost you girls and Anna died, she knew she would never get you girls back again. Those visits were too hard on her. So she stopped going. She tried to kill herself before, once a long time ago.”

I digest what he says, “…too hard on her?” What about April and me? in those foster homes? Okay, only one was real bad and April suffered most of that one. But I suffered for April. And the other ones? Those people weren't our flesh and blood. They weren't even our race. I remember now, those promises you made us, promises we believed, all the waiting for you to take us back home, all the loyalty we gave you—all for nothing
.

“Who's Anna?” I'm angry but I don't want to fight. I want information
.

Dad looks at me, surprised. “You don't know about Anna? Oh, of course not. You were just a baby yourself when she died. April must remember her. Maybe not. She was just little too, and Anna wasn't with us very long. She was your baby sister
.
But she was a sick baby. They should have kept her in the hospital longer, but, no, they sent her home too early and she died. They blamed your Mama and me. That was their excuse for taking you girls away from us. No, my girl, your Mama was not a happy woman.”

“Why didn't you come to see us when we were kids?” I ask in a soft voice, afraid of an honest answer
.

There is another long pause. “I went up north for a long time. I was never here to visit you again,” he says as if that's a good enough reason. “No, your Mama did not want you girls to see the way she was. She was too ashamed. She couldn't face you again. They shouldn't have taken you away from us. The baby was just sick, that's all.” Dad drifts off into silence again
.

Dad asks me to come back and see him tomorrow. I say I will. I do. Josie says Dad left that morning to see some friends of his for a few days. Here I thought he would be impatiently waiting for me. Ha! What a joke!

I sat on the bed with the journal clutched to me. This was the second mention of Anna. I'd been thinking of Anna after Cheryl had told me about her. Baby Anna. I remembered that's what I had called her. Recollections of my mother rocking a baby had come back, much clearer. I'd always had vague pictures in mind but I'd never realized the baby was our own sister. Baby Anna. She'd been with us for just a fraction of our lives. But she was sick and had to go to the hospital. And now, here, in Cheryl's journal, were Dad's words saying the same thing. Baby Anna. Such a small part of our lives. Yet she had changed our lives the most.

This was exactly how Cheryl felt when she found Dad. After all that he told her, she still went back to see him the next day. She was still loyal to him. How was it she had the natural family instinct? I had instincts only for self-preservation, pushing anyone away from me who might hurt me. I was a loner. Only recently, had I let Roger in. Then Nancy and her mother, hugging me that night, giving me, all that they had felt for Cheryl. Before Roger, who else besides Cheryl had hugged me and meant it? Well, maybe Mrs. Dion. I remembered wishing many times that I could be as affectionate as Cheryl. That meeting with Dad, maybe it destroyed her self-image. Strange, though, since she had seen that side of native life before. I wondered what sort of image she had built up about our parents? Was it that image of long ago that had sustained her, given her hope?

February 18, 1971
- So. A son is born to me. It should have been a very special day for him, A day when his aunt and his grandparents and all his relatives rejoiced. Instead, it's just him and me. What's that joke I read? If he had known what was going to be in store for him, he would have cried a whole lot louder?

February 22, 1971
- Having pondered over what to call you, my dear son, I've decided on Henry Liberty Raintree. May you grow up to be all that your grandfather is not
.

A son? Cheryl had a son? I felt anger and bewilderment. Not at Cheryl or anyone else. The anger was for me. For being the way I was. Because it had caused Cheryl to feel so alienated from me that she couldn't share the most important event in her life with me. Henry Liberty Raintree. Then I smiled. A part of Cheryl still lived. After a while, I continued reading.

March 10, 1971
- Nancy is babysitting and I'm free for a while. Feels great to be let out. Henry Lee's been so cranky lately. On top of that, we've got to move out cause kids aren't allowed. Landlord's just a bigot, always looking down his nose at me when I pay the rent. I thought Henry Lee would change my life for the better but I can see I thought wrong. Must say I do feel good about this watering hole. Don't think Nancy will mind my coming home late. She'll understand
.

April 8, 1971
-Sure am glad Nancy's Mom is letting Henry Lee stay at her place. I'm not so tied down anymore. She sure gives him some good mothering. I don't think motherhood was meant for me. I'd rather be out partying than sitting at home changing dirty diapers
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