Believing Cedric (7 page)

Cedric turned and started down the hill. He dipped into the draw and climbed up the other side, stepping out of the coulee and onto the road. He was still looking around at the houses and yards as if he'd never seen them before. Then, abruptly, he lost this acute focus and was looking just in front of his feet again, walking like he had been earlier, less self-assured, smaller, limping to join his friends.

Peter found himself staring down into his glass, hazily contemplating what had just happened. But, as it was, he was having a hard enough time focusing on the glass itself, the colour of the whisky blurring into a shapeless froth in his lap, let alone digesting word for word something that hadn't made any sense at all. There was, however, a single allusion that the boy had made that kept rising in his mind; something about J.F.K. getting—stabbed, did he say, shot? Either way, Peter thought, it was laughable. Imagine, someone killing Kennedy. He was sniggering now. “Crizzy kid.”

There was, however, something troubling about the incident, something he felt quite compelled to push away. Resting his head against the back of his chair, he resumed the woozy task of watching the sky, waiting. In the pasture in front of him, one of the horses lifted its head and turned toward the clouds that hovered over the mountains, as if watching too. Its tail swished, an ear cupping to the side. Tuning into something unseen, unknown. Or tuning out.

Peter admired how the clouds above the mountains had fixed themselves onto the glass sky with such serene stillness. A stillness, in fact, thought Peter, sinking farther into his chair, that was perfect. Perfect.

When the first of us got his licence

we stood on the driveway

passing it around like a chalice

our voices still crackling with pubescence

That night we drove beyond the city limits

into the dark where moths struck the windshield

and flashes of green eyes stopped frozen

in the ditch to watch us pass

Inside the dashboard glow pressed at the glass

with the images of our faces sated with freedom

and distorted only as much as the radio swells were

electrified with our wildness and youth and abandon

Outside the fields were strewn with hay bales

like course-haired creatures hunched over

and sleeping, oblivious to the wide-open night

and the infinite promise it held

Somewhere above the car I imagined

a meteorite slicing open a slash of sky

and sealing it up instantly

with the dwindling haze of its tail

All while we raced along at a floating speed

with our headlights opening the gravel road

the white noise of rubber on stones billowing

red dust into the tail lights to close it

Melissa was thinking a lot about poetry. About how it was the oldest art form in existence, and how, despite that, she didn't really—really—know what it was, couldn't define it. And she very much wanted to, wanted an answer of some kind. So she asked the one person she was sure would know. She hadn't expected his response.

“I think,” he'd said, “we all, poets or not, have the
feeling
of what poetry is. We know when something poignant, something song-worthy, passes through our lives, makes one of our days more of a story worth telling than just another empty orbit of the clock. We know what poetry is when we hear it, when we see it, touch it. That much is almost simple. But what poetry is to me, personally, is the larger complex that it produces, that we are imbedded inside.

“If you think of your own life,” he continued, “you might be able to string its narration together using the exotic beads of those few, most singular moments that you've experienced, the big turning points, the poems, until you could look at those glass colours all butted up together, side by side. But what you don't see looking at it—or even stop to consider—is that every human being that your path collides with at those poignant moments also has a string of beads, which is now intersecting with yours, and so is woven into it. And I think that this network of blindness to the poetry of other lives, this reluctance to penetrate such an expansive yet simple code—to admit the verse that is beneath everything, behind everyone, impelling its way through every existence, silently, cloaked and teeming—that we could exist without acknowledging this interplay around us, is, to me, exactly that: poetry. Poetry is being deaf to the extravagant choir that is behind you, below you, above you. But singing anyway. It is the collective and soundless cacophony of our solitary melodies, which is humming, even now, ringing in our ears with its almost perfect silence.”

Melissa considered his take, often. So often that she'd been thinking about it just a few minutes before her father dropped by, unannounced, after a four-year hiatus from her life. Just before she'd closed her book and stood to answer the door, hesitating at the door handle.

The policeman twisted around in his seat to speak to the two girls in the back. “Now you're sure,” he paused, looking at each of them individually, “
real sure
that this is your uncle's house?”

“Oh yeah. I couldn't tell before cuz we drive a different way, but now . . .” Hilda Crowfeathers leaned toward the window, giving the house another thoughtful appraisal, “Yeah, that's it. I'm sure.”

The officer looked them over skeptically, a voice crackling numbers out of the dispatch radio behind him, “That's five-two-five at station, confirm.” He lifted his hat and scratched the line of moisture-matted hair beneath the brim. Then he gave them one last serious glance, got out, walked seriously to the front door, and rapped on it three times with a serious fist.

While his back was turned Hilda let out a stifled giggle and, as always when she smiled, used the tips of her fingers to cover her teeth, which happened to be immaculate—well aligned, large, so white they darkened the russet of her skin.

But her cousin sitting beside her, Brandy, wasn't joining in the amusement. The truth was that, to her, things had stopped being funny ever since they were ushered into the backseat of the police car and the door—with its blank panel that was missing a window lever, ashtray, lock, and handle—was slammed shut. She wondered where this was going to end, when she would be able to return to her normal life. To the red-lined coulees she called home.

Brandy Weaseltail had grown up on the reserve, just off of the Old Agency Road, which snakes north between the river and the delicate ochre lines of the Belly Buttes. For most of her life, she had believed that every hill in the world was striated with red streaks like the ones that layered the land behind her house, and even now, at sixteen, seeing the lacklustre clay running down the ravines in other places just made her that much happier that her home was tucked between the shoulder blades of those colourful buttes.

Her family's house had one room, three windows, and, like most residences on the Blood Indian Reserve, no running water. And because her father usually had jobs for her two older brothers—like cutting wood, hauling building supplies for his carpentry work, and hunting—the job of getting water automatically fell to her. Every morning, and sometimes late in the evening, she would walk with two plastic buckets out to the closest spring, which was a little more than a mile away, and would linger there for a long while, visiting everyone else her age in the area who was doing the same. When she left, she would lift the two buckets, one of them being slightly larger than the other, and walk lopsided back to her house, a scale tipped to one side.

She had gone to school for as long as one could on the reserve, which was until grade six. But it hadn't been an easy time. It was a place with bizarre rules and rituals, where, to start with, they were exposed to English for the first time, and forced to speak it, with every Blackfoot word that was uttered getting them a ruthless mouthwashing, faces held over sinks, having to lick their soapy palate for hours until the tallow and lye was finally gone from their lips. Brandy considered English an ugly language, the tone flat, the words strung together without so much as a hint of lolling melody. And if the priest and nuns weren't speaking English, they were speaking an even stranger tongue, one that had either the letter “M” or “S” droning or whistling at the end of every syllable, a language that not a single one of the students understood or even, for that matter, knew the name of.

Her parents were Catholic, so she had at least some familiarity with the rites and ceremonies at the school, but what she could never get used to was the severity with which they were practised. There were prayers every morning, before lunch, after lunch, at the beginning of classes, of recesses, and after school; they had to constantly rehearse hymns and songs for the masses that observed a list of saints and holy days that Brandy doubted even the priest could keep track of. And they were strict, the nuns seemingly bent on catching you whispering during class or lingering outside after they'd rung the bell. If you were caught, they would stand over you, waiting until you shrank under the weight of their stare, their giant black garments flapping in the wind and framing the unnatural white of their faces. There were times that she suspected there wasn't a single thing you
could
do without getting disciplined for it, and that discipline was increasingly harsh and peculiar. Atonement usually meant some kind of embarrassment, having to act out your punishment in front of the class or the entire school, standing in the corridor facing the wall while the other students scuttled through the hallway behind you. Once, having giggled during prayers, Brandy was sent out to stand in the hall for three full hours, studying the flakes of paint as they peeled away from the walls, even helping to liberate some of the blisters of gesso and letting them fall to the floor where they lay like fish scales gleaming in the flat light. She was there for so long that one of the Sisters—a different woman, a nun who had a quiet kindness to her and even seemed to like Brandy, handing her a pear whenever Brandy showed up without a lunch—touched her on the shoulder and told her she could go back into class, that she had been there long enough. When she opened the door to let Brandy in, the two nuns exchanged a severe look that wasn't broken until the door, swivelling on its well-oiled hinges, closed soundlessly between them.

As soundless, in fact, as the house that the police officer was still standing in front of, now growing impatient. Brandy and Hilda watched him as he bent low, leering into the front windows of the bungalow, looking for movement—a cat, dog, anything. It was apparent he had come across few signs of life. He turned to look once more at the girls in the backseat of his cruiser. Something in Brandy's chest fluttered. She doubted very much he would see the humour in this when he found out. She remembered the only other time that she'd seen the police take someone away. They weren't, if she recalls, known for their levity.

It had been in her final year of schooling, when she was eleven, and there was an incident where the
RCMP
had to be called in. It began when Theron, one of the boys from the south end of the reserve, stole some coins from the priest's jacket while it was hanging in the cloakroom. Unable to make him confess, the priest found the boy playing marbles in the schoolyard one afternoon and calmly asked him to stand and turn around; then he swung wide with a fist and cracked him on the side of the head. When the child fell to the ground the priest continued beating him until one of the nuns ran out to pull him off. The next day Theron's mother came to school in a pickup truck, walked straight into the priest's office, shoved him to the ground, and started kicking. For the second day running, the same nun found herself scurrying to a scene of violence to try to stop it but in the process was punched as well, given a bleeding nose that streamed for several minutes, splashes of red staining the white of her habit. By the time the
RCMP
arrived, Theron's mother had calmed down, even seemed placid as she was escorted out of the school and taken to the police station in Fort Macleod. The priest stayed where he was.

Other than that, the only other connection she had to the police was the fear that they might come and take her away to a special school. After her years of learning on the reserve were over, Brandy had spent the next while helping out at home with her family, like most of the other students. It was law, however, for Indian children to continue on with their studies at residential schools, which were located far off the reserves, often in other provinces that Brandy had never even heard the name of. But at that same time, there was speak of unspeakable things that were surfacing, things that had happened, and were still happening, behind those holy walls. When Brandy's mother received the letter that allotted Brandy into the same residential school she'd gone to herself, she outright refused that Brandy be carted off. And she'd refused more adamantly than Brandy thought she ever had reason to. Which was somewhat strange. Regardless of how inflexible her mother was on this point, Brandy still secretly feared that the police would show up one day and whisk her away. Thankfully, they never did. Only now, she wondered if it was just because she hadn't given them a reason to.

The policeman placed his hands on his belt, which holstered an array of threatening objects in black-leather pouches. Hilda, who seemed bent on making their predicament worse, suddenly gestured to the policeman that the
real
door was in the back. He replied to this gesture with the most unimpressed, world-weary expression he could muster and went around into the backyard. Hilda giggled again. Brandy did not.

Because this really wasn't funny anymore, or fun. She wanted out, out of this car with its faint stains running along the stitches of the upholstery, the material panging with the remnants of urine-soaked pants and bloodied shirts pressing against the fabric, of alcohol-sweat and the hunched-over thoughts of brutal retribution that lingered inside it. She wanted it all to stop, wanted to go back to where people knew her, accepted her, where no one jabbed at her with their hard-judging glances. She wanted the ochre streaks of the Belly Buttes, delineating the soil like contour lines on a map of the way home.