Birdie (11 page)

“One night I thought, I could’a sworn I felt you … your presence. I was under the bridge near the Kinsmen and I
smelled
you,” Valene continues, “I looked and looked but all I saw was a mangy old coyote and an
oho.
*
” Chuckling, she remembers that coyote staring at her, panting from the heat, sitting there like she owned the world.

She busies herself tidying, swears those steady staring-straight-ahead eyes – when they are open (which is becoming less and less frequent when Val is around) – on her look just like that mangy old thing, and she also thinks she sees something akin to panic or anxiety in those eyes before they snap shut when she opens the closet. She organizes the shoes and slippers on the floor, hangs up a clean uniform and then comes upon a file folder stashed behind the Aer Lingus bag.

It feels warm, almost hot, to her touch and she does not want to open it. She carries part of the file downstairs with her so she can get her reading glasses from her purse.

*
Owl.

Auntie Val listens for her niece, and turns the page. How had she gotten her medical record from the San? she wonders. Bernice had it rolled up and bunched with her diary and those stupid
Tiger Beat
pictures. She reads it, over and over, holding back her anger and feeling it convert to tears.

“
Kicimakanes,”
*
she whispers.

She has felt this pity before, but never so intensely and certainly not for someone who had done such a
thing.
And, although she has willed them apart for years, the pieces rain down, come together, and she thinks she may fall apart. Because in her heart she now knows. Bernice killed someone. She has always thought of it as an accident because the truth was too painful to even admit to herself. Now, she knows, is the time for truth. She is so engrossed, and feels pitiable herself,
that she is largely unaware of her environment. She knows she is alone, those two skinny soul sisters having taken off for the evening. Some sound breaks through her thoughts and she hears something above her; she can’t be sure, but it sounded like a footstep. She girthily strides upstairs and is shocked when she walks into the bedroom. Bernice is not there. She checks the closet. Nothing. Hears a faucet drip and walks to the bathroom. She hadn’t bothered to take off Bernice’s uniform and was surprised to see that Bernice was nude and sitting in the grey water, with bubbles all around her and her hair washed. She sat still as a rock, but Val isn’t fooled, this stuff didn’t happen by magic.

*
Poor gal, a pitiful person.

“Well, looky, looky,” Val says, mad that her niece was mobile and able while seemingly unwilling to get out of bed. “Someone musta thought she smelled bad enough to want to get out of those clothes!”

Bernice does not respond.

“You’re not foolin’ me, Bernice,” she says forcefully.

Bernice’s left eye twitches.

“If you think I am pulling you out of there, you are crazier than I thought.” Val stands, hands on hips, expectant. When Bernice remains in the water, she turns her back, and says, “I won’t even look, just get up and get dressed. You see? I got your pyjamas set out for you already.”

When she hears no noise, she storms to the living room, grabs the rest of the file folder and nearly races back to the bathroom. “I’m gonna sit down and read all of this – all of your stuff – until you decide to get outta that tub and get dressed,” she threatens.

Bernice remains in the tub.

“Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. Just like your fool father and crazy uncles,” she near-shouts. “Okay. That’s it,” she says menacingly, “I am sitting down and reading these.”

Moving with grace to the little table that Bernice used to eat at, she lights a smoke and waits.

Opens the package and organizes the papers into piles.

And waits.

Restless and not quite ready to fulfill the terms of her threat, she strips the bed, puts the soiled bedclothes in the hamper and re-makes the bed with the new linens that the old bird had brought up yesterday. Freda had come up, noted her auntie’s agitation and gone back down to the bakery to see if Lola needed any help.

A few minutes later, Auntie Val had been surprised to hear Lola on the stairs and was more shocked by the care package she held in her skinny arms. Candles and incense, cheesecake remainders and sandwiches. Table lamp and magazines, a small cassette player and some tape with what sounded like whales humping or something.

“How’s it goin’?” Lola had said in her gruff style, not peeking around or snooping or anything.

“Good, I guess,” Valene had hedged. Was Bernice paid up on her rent? she wondered.

“She up an’ about yet?” Demanding and something else. Val couldn’t put her finger on it, but when she thought about it later she thought the little woman had sounded scared.

“Hmmm. Not yet. I suppose she will get hungry sometime.” Auntie Val wasn’t sure this was true. It had been a full
two weeks since she had gotten there, four since Freda showed up, and no one had actually seen Bernice eat in that time. Still, Val got the sense that The Kid was being fed.

“Well, she loves those radish sandwiches, never seen her pass one up yet. Maybe you could run that under her cakehole a few times.” Lola had laughed and then coughed a deep smoker’s cough.

“Uh, does she owe you for …?” Val began.

“Maybe you get tired of sittin’ up here. Say, you any good at poker?” she had asked.

“Not any good, but I hold my own,” said Auntie Val, an exceptional poker player with a good poker face and the good sense to cover her bets. Growing up in her home, she has no tells. You couldn’t have them.

Lola thought about it for a few seconds. “Maybe you could join us next week, that is if you …”

“Sure. I’m in.”

With that, the inverted mirror images had watched each other slyly as they both turned around.

Auntie Val is listening to that same whale music when she thinks she hears Bernice getting out of the tub. Cocking her ear, she yells, “You’re gonna freeze in there, my girl, come out and talk to your auntie.”

Still nothing.

She keeps reading the hospital file. Tries her hardest not to think of whales humping.

Valene Calliou considers herself the next in a long line of argumentative Cree women. Her
Kohkom
Rose’s people were from Kelly Lake – Kelly Lake where the women hid the men and children when the Treaty Commissioner came through looking for a few more Indians to sign their rights away. That proved to be prescient and the cause of much modern-day distress. On the one hand, her people (and she does not identify with her dad’s family and never will) have not been colonized or “Indian Acted” to death. On the other hand, the Callious and nine other families have no reserve, no treaty rights, no health care. No money. She is third-generation poor. Doesn’t much matter that her family is not part of the Indian Act.
Except on cheque days and when we need a dentist or glasses,
she often laughs to herself.

She was raised by
Kohkom
Rose. Rose lived in the bush, still in Kelly Lake territory (although it looked like an oil company’s territory the last time she was there), until she
passed. One hundred and thirteen years old and still smoking. Because she was raised by her
kohkom,
Valene felt obliged to stay with her as she grew less and less able to take care of herself. If she was honest about that time, and she can’t be yet, she would admit she needed that time more than the old woman did. The hard time.

One of several hard times.

She tries not to think of that when she is sitting and watching her niece … wasting. Val herself had taken to bed at times, but she did that out of avoidance, not what feels to her like cocooning or preparing for a storm. For if Valene were capable of self-reflection, she would note from the healing skin on Bernice’s heels, from the cut marks on her arms – starting just above the too-prominent scarring – she would know that Bernice is the next in a long line of women who not only like to argue, but who would not die. Val would see this because Val
is
this. She sighs heavily, looking at the mess that is Bernice, and realizes with a bit of a start that the girl actually looks better than she has seen her looking in years.

“What adventures have you been having, my girl?” she asks Bernice absent-mindedly. Because she most certainly does not want to know.

Valene starts to rub her own scar, absent-mindedly. Under her shirt and across her generous belly.

She was an old spirit,
Kohkom
told her. She had suffered much and would likely have a hard love. She would love hard and
she would fight hard, Rose had told her. Her fights were plentiful. When she was young, jealousy lived in her like bacteria, flaring up when it wanted and showing up when unwanted. She did a lot of fighting back then. Always the girls. The girls that flocked around whatever man she had fallen for; and she had only fallen for men who wanted girls to flock.

“
Mah,
why you with that guy?”
Kohkom
had asked her more than twice.

The answer was always quite the same: she wanted to be loved, didn’t want to be alone, and wanted to be able to shower someone with affection.

Val was a good lover. She could love someone like no one she had ever met. She loved through booze, infidelity and beatings. She loved poor men, rich men, ugly men and good-looking men. Yep, she figgered she could love just about anyone. Unless. They loved her good. While she loved every one of them, she harboured no love in her heart for any of them. They were just faded pieces of a mélange of men that came and went.

Being a modern bush woman raised by a transforming old woman was rich ground for Val (she had once called the old lady a feminist and she had stomped her toe and yelled, presuming her granddaughter was as deaf as her, “I don’t even know what that is – if you ever say it again, I will put you out on your ear”). While she had never heard the word, she was stronger than anyone Valene had ever met, and that includes the eight husbands she had (three of them at one time, was Val’s understanding). No one would have dared to hit
Kohkom.
She was like sinew. And, she could kick anyone’s ass who crossed her – and some who didn’t.

Val had always admired that, and had often wished that she had that in her as well. Val was made of softer stuff, though. If there was a wounded dog on the road, she would pick it up and take it home. If there was a spider in the lodge, she would lift it out. If there was a damaged man in the room, she would pick him up, lift him up and watch as he walked away, healthier and better for her loving. So often had she done this, for so many men, that someone had compared her to the Red Cross: she comes in during an emergency and in the best-case scenario was forgotten about as the traumatized moved on.

Maggie had that gene, too.
Except she stopped caring. Stopped feeling completely.
She swipes her hand across her forehead, willing the memory to go away, worries that Birdie has heard her. Seeing no sign of life, she continues her handiwork, a beautiful beaded shawl. Each stitch taking her elsewhere.

When Maggie left, left everyone behind her (or in front of her, depends how you look at it), Valene had tried to respect her sister’s decision. She told people her sister was going to look for Birdie – Val reminds herself never to mention that – but Val knew better. When Maggie was done, and she was so completely finished by the time she gave The Kid to Val, she was through. There was no light left in her when she left, and Valene had always wondered how long ago it went out, how long ago Maggie had checked out.

They had shared a boyfriend, years ago. She was sixteen and her sister was seventeen. Maggie had not known, or so Val chose to believe, but Bernice’s louse of a father had been bedding them at the same time. Maggie got pregnant. She often said the better sister won, but that man had begged her
to take him with her, anywhere. Away from the responsibility of being a dad, Val wanted to believe. The truth was actually more awful. He had loved her. She had loved him. Maggie had seen it, she was sure of it.

But Val had a secret, too. She did have love in her heart for that louse. She was able to have a child. She had one child. And. Had given her up for adoption after twenty hours of labour in a grimy little health care unit in Beaverlodge. She told only Maggie and knows that secret is safe now. She thinks about that baby as she looks at Birdie lying in the bed before her. She was born two months before Bernice. Perfect. No blotchy birthmark on her forehead and thigh. No red skin, always inflamed, from birth. She was beautiful. Valene used to imagine that she would see her on the street. They would know each other. Embrace. Cry. Forgive. Be a family.