Grandpère (12 page)

“Not all of them are spaced out, Grandpère. Bertie seemed pretty with it
and nice,” I say to him.

“She is nice, but she’s only lived there
for a year. She’s only seventy-five. They look after them too well; they don’t know when
to die. That old one with the birthday, she’s mostly gone already. She must have known
what was going to happen when she tried to run all those times. It’s awful. Why would
she want to be alive? In the old days people who couldn’t look after themselves died.
I’m not talking about people who got injured or sick; of course we looked after them.
But people who were so old they forgot who they were and how to do the simple things
like getting food into their own mouths — they died. No one would be such a burden. But
these places, they get paid to keep you alive, so they do it. I don’t think it’s good. I
would rather be dead than live in both worlds at once. It would be a kindness to that
old lady if she could take the long sleep.” He is vehement in his displeasure with the
old folks’ home.

“Well, Grandpère, I can’t say I completely
disagree with you. It gave me the creeps looking at those ones who were so vacant. I
don’t ever want to be like that either.” A little shudder runs down my spine. I don’t
know how Rose can work there so happily, but probably it’s like everything else; once
you get used to the way things are, you get more comfortable with them. “I said I would
go there once a week this summer to help them with their garden project.”

“Well, you’ll be going there without me. I am never going there
again.”

“Not even to see the cute little Bertie?” I can’t resist
the urge to tease him a bit.

“Nope. You could bring her out here to
see me once in a while if you want.” He leers at me, and we laugh the rest of the way
home.

True to her word, Angel phones every week. She sounds
happy and tells me what she did every day. She’s teaching her cousins rag rug braiding,
and it sounds as though they’re becoming fast f
riends. Faith
and Darcy have temporary custody granted to them, and they want to know if they can put
Angel in school there to catch up on the last semester that she didn’t finish in her old
school. They are both on the phone, making a hollow echo on the line.

“If that is what she wants to do, by all means do it,” I say, knowing
that means Angel won’t be back till summer holidays. “It is important to me for her to
get her education, and it will be easier for her to go to school with your girls than to
face a strange school alone. Are you sure you want her to live with you that
long?”

“She fits in here like a hand in a glove,” Darcy claims, and
Faith says, “You know how much I adore my girls. Well, three is even better than
two.”

“What about the police?” I want to know.

“We have contacted the police here, and the missing child report is
down.” Darcy sounds pleased with himself. “We filed a restraining order that doesn’t
allow her mother to see her, so she’s quite safe.”

I ask to talk to
Faith privately, and my last worry is laid to rest. Angel has started her monthlies. I
feel as though everything is going right, and when I get off the phone, I am humming a
little tune and dancing around. Grandpère laughs at me, but when I catch him up on the
progress, he’s just as pleased as I am.

“That girl is fine. That
girl is safe.” He does his own little dance.

The
following week I clear the bed out of the bedroom at the end of the hall and set up rows
of bricks standing on end with planks between the rows to make shelving, then hang
florescent tube lights from the planks. This year I make three rows of shelves to
accommodate the extra starts for the home. I use the same set-up every year to start the
plants, so it’s easy to do. The staples are still in the planks to hang the fixtures,
and over the years I’ve replaced all the lights with full-spectrum bulbs to give the
little starts the best conditions to flourish. I plug the lights into a power bar and
plug the power bar into a timer. I give the plants fourteen hours of light each day.
During the winter I save the plastic containers that fresh greens come in. Now I fill
them with soil and sprinkle the seeds over the top. The soil I dig from the greenhouse,
but it’s still a little too cool to put the seeds in, so I put the plastic tub full of
soil over by the heater to warm up for a day or two. I round up three kinds of lettuce
seed, onion, pepper, two kinds of tomato and some flowers for myself. The lettuce and
the flowers can go in the greenhouse when it gets a little warmer, and the other things
will get repotted into plug trays after they germinate. None of the seeds are new, so
germination rates may not be the best, but I find that planting them this way lets me
get the longest possible life out of the seeds.

Grandpère says if I
would like to write them down, he will tell me some of the things his people knew. Once
more I gather up my notebook and pen.

He begins, “This is what my
own grandfather told me about the beginning.

“Once the world was
just one big shining ocean. There was no land anywhere. The only inhabitant of the world
was a mighty bird whose eyes were fire. When he looked about, his glances were
lightning, and when his wings beat the air, thunder sounded. His name is the Immense One
or the Thunderbird. One day the bird flew right into the ocean, and when he rose, he
brought up the land with him, and the land stayed on top of the water. He called forth
all the animals to inhabit his new land, and man was called into being at the same time.
The bird gave the new people a special arrow and warned them to leave it undisturbed.
Some of the people were so crazy as to carry it away, and since that time, the bird can
no longer be seen.

“Sometimes a person can find the bird in the
dreamland. It is a power dream that shows you the bird. In the dreamland, the bird is a
huge grouse. If you find the grouse in the dreamland, you should pay attention.

“Throughout time the bird shows his anger with the people’s ways by
destroying the world and making another world. The people try to survive by going to the
top of the tallest mountain, but the earth catches on fire and burns the mountain. The
people are rescued by the bird, who brings them to his new world.

“The new world is abundant, and all the people live in harmony for many years, but then
once again disharmony comes to the people, and they quarrel. When they fight, the bird
causes the sea to rise into the lands, and he tells a man to build a boat. On his boat
the bird tells him to take the animals, all except for the very large ones. They drift
on the waters for many days, then the man releases a raven to look for new land. The
raven doesn’t come back. He must be feeding on all the dead people and animals, for he
survives, and there are always ravens among us. After this time the people and the
animals can no longer understand each other.

“Soon afterward the
man releases a white grouse, which comes back with a willow shoot in his beak to show
the people he’s found the new world. The boat full of survivors follows the bird back to
the next world. It is once again abundant, and the people and the animals live in peace
for a very long time. The people know to only take some of the animals for survival, and
the animals share freely of themselves to keep the people full and clothed.

“This is the world we live in now. But the people no longer respect the
world, and it will soon be time for the next world to come into being. The Creator is
impatient with the people, who do not respect the balance. The bad things that happen
are the fault of the people, who no longer respect the earth. The world can only go so
far out of balance before it is time to remake it.

“This is the
story as the elders of our people knew it.”

“Grandpère, the flood
is the same story as Noah’s ark,” I say, wondering if this story was adapted out of the
Bible.

“When the elders told us this story, it was before the time
when the people could read or had even heard of the Bible,” he replies. “It is proof of
the flood that other peoples have the same story.” He pauses for a minute. “When I first
heard of Noah’s ark, I thought the Christians had taken our story and used it for
themselves. But now I understand the story is all over the world. It is a true story,
but the world is big, and many different people survived the flood.

“You know, Granddaughter, when I was young, people did not fear death.
They knew their spirit just uses the body to live on this earth. They knew when people’s
bodies wear out, the spirit will leave. When the body dies, the spirit will leave and go
on living. The spirit is meant to move on when the body dies; the body is gone, but
spirits are separate. They have choices. They can live with animals or even with trees
or they can be born again in a new body. When someone dies, their body is destroyed so
the spirit won’t try to stay. After the body is gone, no one speaks the name of the
dead, for to speak the name would hold the spirit from moving on.

“The songs we sang for people who passed over were to encourage them to go on. The
songs told them that the ones they left behind would let them go and promised to join
them when the time was right. Sometimes the grief of the people who were left was too
much, and they would kill themselves so they could journey together. This was not
encouraged, but if it happened, there was respect for that person’s decision, and it was
not considered a criminal thing. It was usually wives who did it, for if a strong man
died and left his wives behind, they were considered slaves of his family for two years
after the death of their husband. Some wives were too proud to be in that
position.”

“I am glad that some of the customs have changed,” I
tell him. “My husband’s family wouldn’t have known what to do with me.”

“Those ways will never come back, but the understanding of those ways is
important. If you imagined your husband coming back to you each time he left, if you
imagined the next year with him, and always pictured your life together, there would be
a good chance you would bring that future toward yourself. We knew there were many paths
available, and if you chose a future without your husband, it was your fault.”

I am slightly indignant. “Do you mean it’s my fault Lorne is gone?”

“No more than it is mine that my Clementine is gone,” he
answers.

We look at each other for a minute. “But it was the wife’s
responsibility to make sure her husband returned,” he says, then with a twinkle in his
eyes, “Back then men and women were equal. Men walked in front to protect, not because
they were more important.”

It is a theme that I’ve always
expressed, that men and women are equal but different. We should walk beside each other;
neither one deserves to lead or follow. He knows full well that I believe this and
offers it as a balm. I accept it, put my notepad aside and go to get supper on.

The next week is very warm. The temperature stays above zero every night
and soars to ten degrees Celsius in the day. The melting snow sends little rivers
through the yard, and we go out every day to direct them where we want the runoff to go,
I with the hoe and Grandpère with his walking stick. The snow has lost its pristine
whiteness and looks dirty and tired.

The dogs are running around,
happy in the warm weather, but my older dog, Duke, has developed a stiffness over the
winter that makes him move with a strange gait. His hips seem to be stiffening up, and
his front end always seems to be waiting for his back end to catch up.

I take some bones out of the freezer and the dogs hide them from each
other in the snowbanks. It is funny to watch them trying to be unobtrusive, affecting an
air of nonchalance to each other, then each burying its bone quickly while the other one
is out of sight.

I put two chairs out in the sun, and we take our
tea sitting in them, both of us shedding our coats in the heat of the late February
sun.