Grandpère (6 page)

Patty hands Kristen the new baby, only he isn’t such a baby now. He is like a little butterball. We put him on the floor sitting up with pillows all around in case he crashes. The boys lie around him for a while, trying to make him laugh, which he does. He seems to think his brothers and cousins are the funniest things he has ever seen. He sits there and laughs and smiles and slobbers, leans over too far and crashes into the pillows. The older boys think this is hilarious, and they’re all giggling, so the baby thinks it’s funny and he laughs more. We laugh at the boys laughing, and the world feels good.

Soon they tire of playing with the baby and want to go outside. Jesse, Parker and Clint want to get their dad’s old snow machine running, so they bundle up all the older boys — even Aaron and Pierre — in their snowsuits, toques, mitts and winter boots. Cameron complains that his boots are cold, so Parker feels them. The felt pack is sopping wet; he must have filled them with snow yesterday. Grandpère tells Cameron to bring him the insoles, and he will get them dried over the stove. I go and get two pair of woollen socks and put them on over Cameron’s. “We’ll pretend it’s a double insole,” I tell him. He looks skeptical but shoves his foot in his boot, wiggles around a bit and nods.

“Thanks, guys,” he says and races out after the others.

“I’m a guy too,” Kristen says in answer to my raised eyebrows. “It’s an honour, so get used to it. At least he remembered to thank us.” We laugh.

The day passes quickly. Grandpère and my sons have the heater going in the shop and the kids want to roast hot dogs in it. I don’t have wieners but I have lots of moose sausage given to us by Lorne’s hunting partner. He knows how we love moose meat and brings us some every year.

I give the boys a big coil of sausage, some dinner buns, ketchup, mustard and a jug of juice. They take it out to the shop for a picnic. “Don’t forget to make some for your dads,” I yell after them. Jessica takes some soup out for Aaron, who can have the sausage but not the bun.

A couple of hours later I hear the high-pitched whine of the snow machine, and Jesse pushes Aaron and Pierre, both crying, into the house. They are scared of the noise, he says. I take their outside clothes off and give them cookies.

“It’s just like the four-wheeler. It’s fun to ride and it goes fast,” I tell Pierre, thinking of how much he loves the four-wheel bike.

“Too loud,” he says, putting his little hands over his ears.

We watch through the window. The men have piled all five kids on the car hood that Lorne called his sleigh, and Parker and his brothers are taking turns pulling them around. Lorne used it to get firewood in the winter, but it seems to work fairly well as a sled bus too. We watch Parker take Grandpère for a gentle circle around the yard, sitting behind him on the snowmobile, then he brings him right up to the door, where he crawls off and doffs his hat. He reaches out and shakes Parker’s hand.

Jessica comes over to look out and realizes that Aaron has a cookie. She snatches it away, ready to rant at him or me, so I tell her I made the cookies with buckwheat flour; Aaron can have it. He gives me a grateful look, and I am almost not sorry I lied about the flour. How can a tablespoon of wheat flour hurt a kid one way or the other? Then I realize it has milk in it too. Two sins in one cookie. I warn myself to keep an eye on him for a couple of hours to make sure he doesn’t swell up or get sick. It’s a good thing I keep allergy medicine in the cupboard.

After the busy day we all have a fairly early night, letting all seven boys line up their sleeping bags by the tree. When Aaron sees where the boys are sleeping, he wants to sleep there too. Jessica puts diaper underwear under his pajamas. I ask her if he still wets the bed. She says he doesn’t, it’s just a precaution. Poor kid; he’s going to have issues with trust.

Christmas Day is one of those perfect winter days when the sun is bright and the reflection on the snow sets a million sparkles to shining. It’s just below freezing with no wind. After the gift unwrapping mayhem in the morning, we take everyone outside. Even Seth rides in a backpack on Clint’s shoulders.

Grandpère thinks this is especially funny and calls him Papoose Man. I asked him if he never packed his own kids, for he had my four uncles and my mother.

“Never. Never. If a man packed a papoose like that, he might get called a papoose man. You can put down the baby, but maybe you have to carry that name forever. Your grandmother carried our babies.”

We look at each other. So many people are gone from our world, yet here out in this yard are all these new people, exuberant and excited, growing toward their own futures. I feel so much love for all of them, and a contentment with life overwhelms me. I say a silent thank you to the universe for this life of ease and luxury.

Boxing Day brings Darcy and Faith with their girls Sarah and Tammy. I don’t see them so much now because they live up in Dawson Creek, but when the girls were young, they lived with us for three years after the car crash. Time has lifted the sting out of my daughter’s death, but there is still a grief pang in my heart that misses her so much. Sarah and Tammy help fill that hole; Tammy is so like her mom in looks, and Sarah is so like her in nature. They call me Anzel. I taught them to do that when they were young, for I couldn’t bear it when they called me Mom. When Darcy told us he was going to marry Faith, all I could think was that I was losing my girls, but when I met her and grew to love her gentle nature, I was glad for them all.

The girls rush in, hugging everyone and passing out gifts all around. They’ve brought Grandpère a pair of moccasins; the tops are beaded solid with seed beads, and the toes have concentric rows of circles in a beautiful design. They explain that they went to the museum and saw ones like them, but they had to buy slippers and sew the tops on, or else they might have been the ugliest moccasins ever. And, they point out, the slippers have a nice grippy sole.

Grandpère puts them on and does a few fancy, but slow, jig steps. He grins at everyone and sits down. “Still remember the old steps, but I can’t make this old body do them.”

I think he is pretty tickled that he can still do any of them.

Darcy says they drove halfway last night so they can spend the whole day here. The man is a workaholic. He has his laptop with him, and after visiting with us for a short time, he disappears into the office to “just do a couple of things that I should have done before I left.” His brothers-in-law tell him to do it fast, as the sled team is about to saddle up.

The women all decide to stay in the house, and we sit around the living room, playing with the baby. Faith says he is the cutest baby she has ever seen. Darcy had a vasectomy after Sarah was born, so there’s no hope for Faith to have a baby by the time-honoured method. She claims not to care, that Tammy and Sarah are her girls, but she always seems to have a soft spot for the babies. I think she has called each successive nephew the cutest one ever.

It is colder out today, and soon the sledders troop back in, letting clouds of cold air billow through the doorway.

“You can use that sled any time now, Mom,” Jesse tells me. “We got the electric start working. Dad had a brand new battery on the bench, so we just added the acid and charged it. You should take it out in the spring and recharge it next fall.”

Jesse is under the impression that I can do anything. I probably can take the battery out of the snowmobile in the spring, but I probably won’t. Parker tells me not to bother anyway, since he’ll do it when he’s out at breakup.

We make an early meal, mostly of leftovers from yesterday’s feast remade into turkey soup, vegetable pie and four big casseroles. I bake the biggest moose roast from the freezer, which must be twelve pounds with no bone in it. Everyone loves it and laments that they never get moose meat anymore. When Lorne was alive, we always had moose meat and other wild game, but the boys have not gone hunting since.

Ryan, however, is just itching to get old enough to go hunting. Clint says Ryan’s going to get his firearms licence and hunting licence in the spring. They’re two separate courses, but only a couple of days each. Grandpère snorts at this and says it takes at least ten years to train a hunter, not two days. Clint holds his ground, though, and tells Grandpère it’s not as though he’s completely green, since he’s gone hunting with his dad.

After supper Clint grabs Lorne’s fiddle, and Darcy pulls out his. We pull all the furniture to the wall and take turns doing the jig. There are over thirty different steps in the jig, but we don’t know them all, so our dances are usually a couple of steps each. Then we bow in front of another person, who gets up and does his own piece. It’s fun, and some of our dance steps must be originals, but nobody cares if they’re right or not. When it’s Parker’s turn, he holds his arms totally rigid at his sides, and uses a crossover step that tilts his upper body back and forth sideways. This is one of the traditional steps, and the young boys are impressed. Each one in his turn tries to emulate him, with Grandpère tapping out the beat on the floor with the butt of his stick, the two fiddlers working their way through “Liza Jane” and “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” then into “The Woodchopper’s Reel,” and the rest of us clapping out the rhythm. What a great way to end Boxing Day.

The girls sleep in the office with me, and we whisper to each other far into the night. They have boyfriends and cellphones and talk to each other sometimes about things that I know nothing about. Their cellphones connect to the internet and have hundreds of hours of music stored in little computer chips. They let me listen to their best song ever, but to me it just sounds raucous and tinny through the little earbuds. We have a great night.

In the morning everyone leaves right after breakfast except Clint and Patty, who have taken an extra day off. I pack them huge lunches and give them all bags of produce from the root cellar. We wave goodbye from the living room window, and suddenly four kids and four adults seems quiet.

It’s warm again today. Grandpère falls asleep in the sun, and so does the baby. Patty goes outside with the three older boys, and Clint and I sit down to a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

He nods at the old man. “Feeling his age this winter, eh, Mom?”

I tell him quietly about Grandpère’s little stroke but am quick to add that he hasn’t had any more.

“You know you can call me whenever you need me,” he says.

I know he’s talking about when death comes calling. I’d planned to tell him what Grandpère wants me to do when he dies, but for some reason I don’t.

“If he gets too much for you to handle, maybe Rose can get him into the home,” he says.

“That’s the reason he’s here, so he doesn’t have to go to the home,” I reply.

“Mom, you’re not getting any younger, and he is so old. All I’m saying is that maybe he will get harder to look after, and if that happens, we’ll help pay for him to live there.”

“That’s very generous of you, Clint, and I thank you for the offer, but right now we’re doing fine.”

I give him a big hug, but he’s not much of a hugger — usually a tenth-of-a-second squeeze and a couple of shoulder pats — but today he returns my hug generously and kisses my cheek. It makes tears come to my eyes, and I am surprised to see his eyes full too. I pat him some more and tell him not to worry about us, we’re fine.

The next morning Clint’s family leaves, too, and suddenly it’s really quiet. It’s still warm, so Grandpère and I put on our jackets to go outside. At least we try, but the sleeves of both our jackets are sewn shut. It sends us into giggles and much speculation about who did it. My bet is on Sarah, but Grandpère thinks maybe Parker.

The kids have brought us wire grippers to go around our boots, and we stretch them on. Wow! You could walk over glare ice with these on. I show Grandpère how I can run on the ice.

“I think maybe I will walk,” he says, “but if you want, you can run circles around me.”

I decline.

I haven’t tended to the chickens for days, since the kids have done the chores. The chickens haven’t laid well, and I think the commotion has put them off, but now I find the reason. One old hen likes to sit on the eggs in her nest and stay there while her friends crowd in beside her and lay theirs. Today she’s sitting on twelve eggs, and I guess that none of the boys was brave enough to stick his hands in the nest for fear of getting pecked — and not willing to admit it to anyone either. I tell Grandpère we are having a lot of eggs tomorrow, and we laugh about the kids being scared of chickens.

Chapter Four

New Year’s Day is bright and sunny but cold. The thermometer dips to minus thirty, and we decide to stay home. We’ve been invited to Rose’s for dinner, but I phone to cancel, and she understands. We promise to get together soon.

Grandpère says his New Year’s resolution is to tell me more about his life so I can write it down for him, if I’m still willing. “I better get to it before I’m too old to remember it or too dead to tell it.” He grins to show me neither death nor age is weighing on him very heavily. “There was always work to do at the Fort. I worked most of the time in the bush, but many of the people moved in from the bush. Louisa’s sister, Francine, and her husband, my cousin Tsa’a’lax — that means Angry Eyes — moved in and built a place beside us. In town they called him Alex. Francine did not like to live in the bush, and Alex said it was getting harder and harder to find the animals that we always lived with in the woods.

“Many trappers who were not our people were taking all of them, he said. He said these people took all the animals they could find and didn’t even leave any to make new animals for the next season. They would even steal from our traps, and did not respect our territories. We didn’t feel safe in our lands. Alex and Francine had been hungry in the winter before they came in to town, and they didn’t have many furs to trade.

“We made them welcome, and we all helped them build a home. Louisa and Francine’s father was happy. We were all working. Sometimes we traded for goods in the store, and sometimes we were paid in coin. Always the store tried to trade rum or brandy to us, but we knew better. Some of our people traded everything for booze and did not have anything left for food when they sobered up. It was very bad. When the people drink rum, they lose all their sense. They work all the time to get furs to trade and then have nothing to show for it but a two-week drunk, and then they go hungry. Gradually our people moved in, family by family. Pretty soon no one traded.

“Some moved into town so their children could go to the school. If you didn’t put the children in school, government men came and took them away, and you only got to see them in summer. My Uncle Tree had eleven children, all younger than me. He said the government was not going to get his children and moved far into the bush. But they found him anyway and took his children far away where he could not even find them. The four oldest died in the schools. They only left the babies, and when they got older, they took them too. It was very hard on Uncle Tree’s woman, and when the last child was taken, she went out in the bush and hanged herself from a tree. She died, I think, of a broken heart.

“The children, who were very happy in the bush, did not do very well in school except for my one cousin who they called Joan. I don’t remember what her real name was. She forgot our language and did not want to go to the bush even in the summer. She stayed with our family the first few years when the rest went home. When she was grown, she helped at the Catholic school. She married a white man who was very mean, then she caught TB and died before she had any children. TB was a bad disease in those days — we called it consumption — and people would get thin and weak and cough up blood till they died.

“Uncle Tree moved in to the town and took up with a woman who drank all the time, and so did Uncle Tree. When the children came home there was not enough food or space. They would not build a house, because every year when he got the children back, he said they were going back to the bush. We did what we could to make it better for them. Louisa, Francine and Clementine had made the garden very big, and we always had more than we could eat. Many a time our little house had so many children in it that we were glad when the school started again. Our own children went to the tiny school in town, and they all went up to grade eight. They grew up in town, but the boys wanted to hunt and trap, and we always spent the early winters on the traplines. It was true that there were not very many animals left in the woods, and I would not have liked to try to live the way we always had, because we would have starved.

“The white people called us all Indians and half-breeds and did not pay us as much as they paid white men, but we always had enough. The English people called us savages, but the English were far more savage than any of our people, especially when they were drinking.

“I spent a lot of time logging with my horses in the winter. I had traded for two big mares that were quiet and gentle. I worked with a white man named George who had a wild team. We had a contract to bring in firewood for the winter, and we always had orders for square timbers for building. It was easy to do the firewood, which other men sawed to length in the town, but it was a lot of work to square off the building trees. We did it all with axes, and we could sometimes do four in one day. The boys could help us when they were done school. We would bring the trees to the landing in the morning and in the afternoons we would square them.

“One day George’s team ran away when he was hooking up and ran over him with the log. He broke both his legs and was screaming. We came to him, and one leg had the bone sticking right out through his clothes. We put him in the wagon and pulled him to town, but he passed out when we moved him. There was a doctor at the town who set his legs. One leg got better, but the bad one never did, and the doctor cut it off right at the top. He could never work in the bush after that, and I finished the winter by myself.

“Alex came and worked with me, but he didn’t like the horses, and George’s team was too crazy for anyone else to use. We traded them to a guy down south, and they turned out to be good horses after he had them for a while. I think they were wild because George was wild. He was loud and mean with the animals, but he was very good with his axe. His timbers were always good. Alex was not so good at making the timbers, but he was very nice to work with. We finished the contract, but after that I only did logs for firewood. When the boys got bigger, they sawed the wood into lengths. We had a long saw with handles at both ends that two people pulled back and forth between them. It was a very fast way to saw, not as fast as a power saw, but almost.

“We had a barn for the horses, and they had colts almost every year. The colts would be left in the barn when we worked the team, and by spring every year they would be gentle. None of them grew as big as their mothers because the stud was a saddle horse who was out with the herd in the summers. The people who travelled out in the bush always wanted them for packhorses because they were bigger than an ordinary saddle horse, and almost all of them had a quiet nature from being handled when they were colts.

“One year I kept two and gelded them for use on the sleigh. They almost looked the same, big red horses with white faces. Clementine used to harness them up and bring your mother and the boys out to the bush. In the summer we would use that team when we travelled out. We had a meadow just north of the town. The railway goes through it now. Every year we would cut that meadow and bring the hay in for the winter. We stacked it behind the barn and covered it. If we didn’t have enough in the spring, we had to struggle to find food for them. No one liked doing that, and it would just be hard to keep them alive, since they can’t do well on willow like the moose can. So we made sure we had enough.

“No one had equipment to do haying, so we cut it by hand. No tractor could have hayed that meadow anyway — it was soft muskeg — but the wild grasses grew as high as my head. We cut the grass and made loose piles, then when it dried we hauled it home in the wagon and made a stack. It wasn’t hard work; it was kind of fun. We would pick berries lots of the times when we were haying.

“Things changed very fast as our old way of life disappeared, but the new ways made life easier for us. Many of the old people did not like the changes and tried to keep their traditions, but new laws and new ways made it hard for them. Many of our traditions became against the law. The Mounties had four men in the town and made a jail where many of our people spent a lot of their time.

“There was work building the railway, and the road south changed from a trail to a highway.”

His voice fades out here, and I look up at him. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. He’s silent for a long time, then he leans forward and tells me that’s all for now.

He asks me to bring in a couple of the sticks he’d put in the shed in the summertime, as he thinks he will make some more walking sticks. I’m going out anyway to make sure the chickens’ heat lamp is still on, for the bitter cold of the day is sure to be followed by an even colder night. I take the scraps out to them, and since their water dish is frozen, I scoop up a pail of snow. The chickens don’t really need water in the winter if they have snow. There are only two eggs, frozen almost solid. I give one to each dog, and they pack the eggs in their mouths back into the doghouse.

In the shop there are about a dozen pine sticks. On spring days Grandpère wanders through the woods and ties the tops of young pine trees in a knot. Then the following year he cuts them. The top where he has tied them grows into a loop that makes a handle. They are all different shapes, so I pick out two with the nicest tops and take them in to him. He sets them by the stove to thaw out, and I get him a cardboard box to shave the bark into. I also bring in an armload of dry slabs to keep the fire going. He’s moved his chair close to the fire, which crackles pleasantly and sends heat all through the living room and kitchen. We have the electric heat on too, and the house stays warm even in the far bedroom. When it is warmer, we turn the electric heat off, but in this cold we need both.

I go off to type up this last bit from him, but before I get started, I hear the dogs barking and go to the window to see what the commotion is about. It is Rose in her Jeep. Now she’s walking toward the house, carrying a large picnic basket with handles. I greet her at the door with a big hug. She is one of my closest friends, and today she’s supposed to be having a New Year’s party and dinner.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Everyone who was supposed to come phoned and cancelled because of the cold, so I decided to come here,” she explains. “I only have two days off, and damned if I’m going to spend them by myself.”

She has brought supper with Grandpère’s favourite dessert, berry pie. She goes over to the stove and gives Grandpère a hug too.

“Well, you old reprobate, I hope you’re keeping busy.”

“I don’t do much anymore, Rose. Anzel waits on me hand and foot,” he tells her.

“There’s nothing to do for him,” I laugh. “He is so darned independent that I need to tie him in the chair so I can look after him.”

She laughs and says to him, “Somehow I can’t see you letting her tie you in your chair. You would probably cut your way out and hit her with a stick for being so bold.”

We all laugh. She is the same age as me and could have taken early retirement when I did, but she is so good at the home that they asked her to stay on. She loves her job and is more than happy to keep working. She is tall and thin, with long grey hair that is wound up on her head in a bun and held with clips. She dresses and moves with style and energy. Today she has on a long skirt, and when I comment on the skirt being cold for the weather, she shows us that she has on two skirts, one overtop of the other, and a pair of woollen long johns underneath.

“I put these under my clothes in September and take them off in May. If it gets any colder, I’m going to double them up.” She asks, “Grandpère, how did you live in the bush when it was this cold?”

“I don’t think we felt the cold the way we do now. We had warm clothes made out of fur, and we didn’t bathe so much. It was considered unhealthy to get wet in the winter, and we always had a fire. A fire heats a small space a lot better than it heats a big house like this. We had flat rocks that warmed up by the fire, and we rotated them around to keep everybody warm. All us children slept together, and when my father was trapping, my mother slept with us too. All winter we didn’t let the fire go out, because it was too hard to get it going again.”

“Oh yeah, no matches,” Rose says.

“We made fire with a dry stick. You wrapped a thong around it and pulled it back and forth in a small hollow in another dry stick till you saw smoke. Then you held it to a small pile of dry shavings mixed with pitch. Then you blew very gently on it till you had a small blaze. Sometimes it would take a long time, so it was better if we made sure it never went out. You could heap the ashes on the coals of the fire, and it would still be hot even if you were gone for several days. But when it was cold like this, we always kept it going. My father had a flint that struck sparks to start fires, but more often we used a fire stick. I can remember the first time I saw a match. I thought it was so clever.”

“That must have been a hard life.”

“No, it wasn’t hard. It was just the way it was, and we were happy to go and find firewood, it was just one of the things that people did to live. Although it would be hard to go back to that way after having matches and paper. Maybe I am just getting soft.”

“No,” Rose says. “You don’t even know what soft is. Some of the people in the home are soft. They can’t dress themselves or even walk. They need people to help them do every little thing. We need to spoon the food into them. They give up on even trying. That’s soft.”

“I wonder why they don’t die, if they are that far gone?” he says.

“Actually, I think they are already mostly gone. Their bodies are still alive, but the essence of who they were is missing,” Rose says. “Their spirit is gone, but their bodies continue to live, because the body has its own will to live, even when their soul has called the spirit home.” She sounds positive about this.

Grandpère nods. “In the old times, when the Great Spirit called them home, sometimes the old people would disappear in the bush. Sometimes we found them and other times not. We would sing for them and burn their possessions to help them find their way.”

“I think it was a better way,” says Rose. “It’s not very dignified to continue living when your body is alive but unoccupied.”