In Calamity's Wake (10 page)

One evening when I was inconsolable over being forced into some promise of better behaviour, Zita held me and rocked me. She hummed and sang and I smelled her warm skin, the tan and the berry and the clean water of her arms. I squeezed her hand and followed the veins of her arm with my finger. I felt love
opening like cherry blossoms along the branches of my nervous system. Life drawn so sweet.

Zita, I said, why do I have to keep my promises?

Zita, who was great as a snowy hill, cuddled me and said, Shh, you keep your promises because you are a good girl. I'll tell you a story about a bad girl. This is the story of a bad girl and a wonderful bird.

There was a young girl who, one day, was walking about among the trees, collecting berries and being happy in the summer heat. She saw something that seemed very strange to her. A little bird, all blue and red, was sitting on the branch of a pine tree. The bird danced back and forth on the branch. Every little while it would make a strange noise, like a whistle, and every time it made this noise its eyes flew out of its head and fastened on a branch of the tree. Then the bird made another sort of noise, like an inhalation, and its eyes flew back to its head. The young girl called out to the bird, Brother, teach me how to do that!

The bird considered her. If I show you how, the bird answered, you must not send your eyes out of your head more than four times in a day. No matter how much you want to see something you must keep this promise to me. If you break your promise and send your eyes out more than four times, you will be sorry.

Brother, whatever you say I will do. It shall be exactly as you say, Little Brother. It is for you to give, and I will listen to what you say.

The young girl knew to respect the bird and she was pleased by his generosity so she intended to keep her promise. The bird taught her how to send her eyes out and she was so excited that she did it four times immediately. She danced back and forth with pleasure. The bird's gift allowed her to see around trees and watch the bear fishing with its cub. She was able to see over the forest, to follow the bald eagle in flight. She saw the cougar crouch to attack a doe. She saw the worms churn the earth underfoot. Why did that bird tell me to do this only four times? she lamented. He is only a bird; he has no sense. I will do it again. So once more she made her eyes go out, hoping to see the whole earth from the heavens, but now when she called to them they would not come back.

She shouted out to the bird, Brother, help me! Come here, and help me to get back my eyes!

The little bird did not answer; it had flown away. The young girl felt all over the branches of the tree, all over the ground, all over stones and bushes with her hands, but she could not find her eyes. She walked through the rivers letting the water stream between her fingers. She felt along the riverbed, the water filling
her mouth and washing her face. But she could not find her eyes. So she went away and wandered over the prairie for a long time, weeping and calling to the animals to help her. Because she was blind, she could only rarely find something to eat, and she began to be very hungry. Her stomach roared and her limbs shook. A wolf came by and teased her, brushing up against her legs and pushing her forward with his nose and holding her hand in his wet mouth. The wolf found this teasing great fun. The wolf brought a piece of buffalo meat close to the young girl's face.

She said, I smell something dead. I wish I could find it. I am almost starved.

She felt all around for it, felt the wolf's head and neck. But he had already dropped the meat into the dirt and she could not find it. Finally, when the wolf was doing this, the young girl caught him, and said, Give me your eyes.

The wolf pulled away but he looked at her and when he saw her in pain with hunger he consented and the young girl plucked out one of the wolf's eyes. She put it in her own head. Then she could see and was able to find her own eyes, but never again could she do the trick the little bird had taught her.

Zita, I said.

Yes.

Can you stay with me? Can you stay all night?

No, little Miette. I have to sleep by my children.

T
HE NEXT
day when Zita came she was so excited she chattered in a mixture of Siksika, English, French and hand gestures, trying to impress upon me the importance of a chief named Crowfoot and Treaty 7.

Crowfoot was the Blackfoot chief and her uncle and he was spending time with her family.

Zita?

Yes, Miette.

Who are those men? I said, gesturing with my elbow towards the window.

Two men in black shirts and dirty pants with ragged hats and sweating dark faces walked towards our house carrying carbines. They walked slowly, with the guns raised and trained on us through the window. Zita grabbed my shoulder and pushed me into the pantry, shushing me as she closed the door. The smell of flour and sugar and dried herbs filled my nose and the dark filled my eyes. After a few minutes I could see shallow lines of light through the boards of the door but I could hear nothing of what was happening outside. I trembled and gulped shallow breaths. The men were dressed in furs and rags. I had seen men like them before and I knew they didn't like Indians. Once I overheard a fur
trader in confession saying that he had spiked homemade liquor with strychnine to kill the Indians he traded with. Zita, I knew, would not hide from them.

I sat on the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees. We didn't have anything to give them. Around me were cans of beans and jars of chokecherry jam, pickled onions and carrots. My throat ached. I stood and carefully, quietly, opened the pantry door.

When I arrived at the window and peeked out, I saw the men with guns pointed at Zita and I saw my father standing between them with hands raised in apparent surrender. He fell to his knees and Zita stepped in front of him and held out her hands, palms up. I knew we had nothing to give them.

And then the sound of many hooves working the ground made me look beyond the terrible scene. Five Blackfoot warriors arrived and encircled the men, Zita and my father. They sat high on enormous, restless horses in saddles made of wood, sinew and bone. They were armed with guns uncannily similar to those toted by the white men. Their clothing was made of white buckskin and it reflected the sunlight. One man wore a necklace of claws. This man drew closer to Zita on his horse and they spoke together.

You should go, she said to the white men in a strong, calm voice. Leave your guns.

She turned to my father and offered him a hand to help him stand.

T
HAT NIGHT
we sat with Crowfoot and the warriors outside around a fire that smoked heavily because the wood was green. As the moon rose Zita ushered me to bed and tucked me in.

They were going to rob us? I asked her at last.

Yes, she said, but they were seen.

Are we safe now?

Your father will keep you safe. I need to go back to my children. There will be trouble because of what happened today, she said. White men don't like Indians to fight back. Crowfoot protects us. He knows the white man's ways and he knows the white man's intentions. He met with the white men in the beginning, when they started talking about the reservations. The chief white man spread many one-dollar bills on the ground and he told Crowfoot, This is what the white man trades with; this is his buffalo robe. We trade with these pieces of paper.

The white chief laid all his money on the ground and it made a large circle. This was to show how much he would give if the Indians would sign a treaty.

Crowfoot took a handful of clay, made a ball and put it on the fire and cooked it. It did not crack. Then
he said to the white man, Now put your money on the fire and see if it will last as long as the clay.

The white man said, No, my money will burn because it is made of paper.

Zita smiled and patted my chest under the blankets.

Crowfoot said, Oh, your money is not as good as our land. The wind will blow it away; the fire will burn it; water will rot it. Nothing will destroy our land. You don't make a very good trade.

But you wanted the treaty, I whispered. I wasn't sure I knew what she wanted.

Crowfoot was brave and he would fight but he wanted peace; he wanted to save our people. The buffalo were gone; we were starving. The white man had killed them to starve us but we could see that what had happened to the buffalo would happen to us. The old chief could see the future but he still had hope. Crowfoot said, we can fight them and they will kill us all. Or we can go onto the reservations. Our spirits will be dead but we will be alive and one day our spirits will come back.

Will the buffalo come back?

Yes. Sleep, she said. And then she left me. She left us.

And there was no one, no one at all to embrace me fully and rock me in their arms anymore.

A
RE YOU THERE
? I
S THIS WHAT YOU ARE
looking for?

(One dime and I'm yours.)

T
HE ROAD AND THE TREES, EVEN THE CIR
cling buzzards, and the clouds were all part of a panoramic painting rolling around me as I walked in place in the centre of a cyclorama. I walked along the trail tracking the hours by the sun that moved in a bright arc overhead. When at last I came to a river I washed my face and neck and took off my boots and socks and immersed my tender feet in the cool waters. The boil was smaller but the balls of my feet were alternately numb and painful. Stopping was a great relief.

It seemed like weeks since I had slipped into a warm bath and scrubbed my skin clean and dressed in fresh clothes. I chewed on some clover and rested. I had no sense of how far the next house or town might be. I could build a lean-to and a fire here and try my hand with a sharp stick at spearing one of the fat brown fish swimming in the shallows at my feet. Little bushes
loaded with strawberries lined the shore. I reached a few and ate them. They were sun-warmed and sweet. On the opposite bank of the river I saw the crumbled remnants of an abandoned firepit. Horse hooves had left a pattern of clefts in the sandy earth along the bank. I sighed and dressed my feet and went back to hiking towards the next haven or hole.

I stumbled along the trail until I came to a strange little town called Star. It looked like it was picked up from someplace it made sense to have a town and then later, when dropped from the sky, it just didn't break. I did not really need to stop but I guess I was looking for someone to listen to. I followed a highly dressed woman inside the building. Her skirts swept all the dust from the floors. Her collar was buttoned almost to her forehead. I followed her so close she might have feared me but instead of running she led the way to the bar.

Now I had never had a drink of anything but wine and then only to take communion. So I truly did not know its effects. I knew that whisky drinkers sometimes beat their wives and horses and each other. I knew that hard liquor led to the Devil making women lose their minds and lie with strangers. I knew that sometimes you could die from drinking those liquids that burnt your nose from smelling them. But I did
not know that anything bad could ever follow drinking wine. I wanted to be welcome and I wanted to say the right thing. I wanted to have a full glass and not one sip with a piece of bread that was His Body. I felt nostalgic, I felt greedy, I felt thirsty, I felt like I really wanted wine. So I stood at the bar.

The man behind the bar was also very well dressed. He was a big man with a big moustache curled tightly at each end. The woman drifted up the stairs and I never saw anything of her face but only the dark hair coiled at the back of her head, tucked in with a shell comb. It was like she didn't have a face with eyes and lips and teeth. But I had a face and I filled it with wine.

T
HE LAMPS
stuttered, unable to hold the whole room in light. I closed my eyes and savoured the heat in my cheeks. Behind and around me I heard yelling and the crash of furniture. A wooden chair wheeled overhead in an awkward arc. But I was so warm and smiley and the pretty bottles were lined up nicely in the cabinets behind the man who filled my glass, which glistened when I laid my head on the bar. Someone started to speak to me. I thought it was only one man but frankly he might have been twins.

You're the one looking for Calam, he said. You look just like her.

Who are you?

He had round little glasses. They both did. And he wore a shirt that was so far gone I had no idea if it had seen better days. He had curly brown hair as long in the chops as it was on his forehead and a voice that sounded womanly.

Can I tell you something? they whispered. I hate the poor.

They leaned in to me so that I crossed my eyes and almost fell off my chair. I blinked; they made no sense.

I get nothing from the poor. They don't move me. They don't even entertain me. But your mother, she loved the poor. Oh, lady of enlightenment! Give me your wretched of the earth, your tired, your diseased, your alcoholic-no-good-lost souls. Give me every body, rejected and hated, lost and lonely—give me all of them. She is the real monument to humanity—your humanity, not mine.

After that, what they said about the poor got scary, like a crackle in your ears that hurts your mind. I shook my head.

How do you know my mother?

All my fault. I betrayed the only one who loved me. Prayers don't work. Prayers don't make the dying not die. Prayers don't make anyone lucky. Prayers don't
stop an infection or seal up a bullet hole. Prayers don't bring on the rain or hold it back or make the ground good or the next man kinder than the one before. Prayers are just a way of telling yourself that all that extra thinking will come to something when there's no action left to take.

I don't know what you are talking about. How do you know my mother?

He threw back another shot and gestured to the bartender.

I fell over. He picked me up and put me in a chair and pulled the chair over to the bar.

You want some toast?

Toast?

It will take the edge off your drunk to have some food in your stomach.

No, thank you.

I was a doctor in Gomorrah.

Deadwood.

Joke. That's how I know your mother.

Did you treat my mother?

No, no. I knew her. She was a friend to everyone in town. When the smallpox epidemic came she volunteered. There were so many sick we set up a tent settlement outside of town. She sat the night shift with patients so I could sleep.

Do you know what it looks like? It's thousands of big hard fluid-filled blisters all over the face and limbs, in the mouth and throat; it's as if the body is boiling from the inside out. You can't even see the person's features anymore. They can't speak; even lying still they hurt. Sometimes they walk around with their arms held out from their bodies to ease their skin and I'd see their zombie shadows through the white tent walls when I walked up in the morning and it was still dark outside but the lamps in the tents rendered the walls practically transparent. The tents start to feel hot and close and the whole air stinks of illness and you know you are breathing it in over and over. I was there because I swore an oath but she was staying sober to help strangers.

How long could she stay sober?

I saw her do it once for six weeks. Calamity thought of how to protect herself and I thought she was crazy. She ate the scabs of a patient who had recovered. Later I read that the first written account of variolation describes a Buddhist nun practising around AD 1022. That nun would grind scabs taken from a person infected with smallpox into a powder, and then blow it into the nostrils of a non-immune person. The cells in the scab are dead so the infection doesn't get passed on but the body produces antibodies. Christ, she was doubled over gagging from the taste, but she did it. Then
when it was all over she drank her weight. I think she was trying to sterilize her stomach.

Behind us a weird silence gathered. I turned and saw that the crowd of scrapping bullies had parted and they were standing in a wide circle around a woman and a man. She paced in a tight pattern, her body braced, her head lowered, her gaze hard. Her face was bleeding. She had been hit in the eye and mouth. There was blood in her long pale hair. In her hand she held an unbelievably tiny gun. The man was fat. He held out his large hands to calm her. There was blood on the knuckles of one hand. She paced again and then walked to him and raised her arm and shot him between the eyes. The sound was like a frozen branch snapping. He fell backwards like a tree.

Ah shit, said the doctor. He put down his drink and picked up a black doctor's bag from the floor. He went to the man, knelt at his side.

Go home, Trixie, he said to the woman.

He opened his bag and drew out a long metal probe from the mysteries within.

Leaning over the unconscious giant he inserted the probe into the hole and checked several narrow angles.

There's no brain here. He'll be fine, he said.

A strange music like wheels murmuring over rough terrain, or an idiot humming in a cemetery,
broke through the human din. A man walked through the crowd playing the hurdy-gurdy and swung himself up on the little half-moon of a stage.

Ah-rum-ba-da-da-rrump-rrum-ba-da-darrhum-ba chanted the queer little violin-beast in his arms. He had a face that was round as a penny and dark as a burnt log. He wore a white silk hat, white vest and wool shirt with diamond studs and a straight-standing celluloid bon-ton collarette. On his high boots there were silver spurs and a red scarf hung from his belt, pulled through a poker ring.

Be not disturbed! Be not disturbed! he cried. This man who lies on the floor has been killed here every Friday for a month! Poor old Trimpy got to learn not to hit on Trix. Why she shot him in the eye just last week but not to worry, she ain't shot nothing else since then. She's as good as your own mother's angel, dear girl, dear, dear Trixie. Now, who, he said, gesturing dramatically to himself, is this man, so knobby and swell who stands before you? I am the Dutch Nigger Minstrel! First to record the old favourite “There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and one-time husband of the darling Mollie Johnson, Queen of the Blondes! I know, no one could believe it when I married the fairest white woman in Deadwood; my friends thought I'd never settle down! Not me, Lew Spencer!
Blackest man outside of Africa, the proprietor of this dream palace and your host tonight in the resurrected Bella Union Theater! Tonight we have for you: myself!

The crowd laughed and applauded and stomped, sending small plumes of dust up from the floor to hang in the air and render the scene smoky under the gaslamps. As if cued by the dust, cigars appeared between the lips of half the audience, men and women alike. The smoke grew into haloes around the heads of the patrons.

I know what you've heard but it ain't true—I only ever shot one of my wives and it still didn't keep the others from finding out I was triply married! Women are my weakness, and I'm hoping they are yours, because we have for you a human statuary made up of the most astounding array of beautiful ladies. We have a contortionist duo from Paris—Ontario, but still! We have Hottentots, clog-and-jig comic dancers, seriocomic singers and Ethiopian-Dutch-Irish comedians, acrobats, and double trapeze acts, sketch artists and some who'll perform feats of marksmanship, and the Deadwood brass band. Ladies and gentleman, this is a first-class vaudeville experience we offer! No burnt cork and tambourines! No half-drunk trollops in raggy pantaloons pretending to know ballet! What I offer you is entertainment without the ordinary vulgarities of show.
I'll have you know New York has written us a letter full of envy! Stand back! Stand back because the awesome virtuoso that is none other than myself is here to open a show that will transport you!

Sing “Topsy”! yelled someone in the crowd.

Lew Spencer grimaced and shook his head and then smiled. No sir, I have nothing but the newest, most illuminating music for you here tonight!

Sing “Topsy”!

“Topsy”!

Sing “Old Topsy”!

“Little Topsy”!

Lew Spencer bared his teeth. You are living in the last century, my friends. But for nostalgia's sake, and as I want your money, he sneered, I will sing to you that old favourite about the most soulless, most downtroddenest, most imaginary nigger that ever got set to music. But after this, dear people, I ask that you mature some and give my show your thoughtful attention.

Lew turned his back on the crowd, put down the hurdy-gurdy and did a quick softshoe with arms akimbo. Then he picked up the instrument and turned back to the masses, eyes glittering, a sharkish grin on his lips, and he spat out a vicious version of the old-time favourite.

Finishing, he threw back his head and cackled. Half the crowd looked appalled, threatened, while the other half cheered.

All right then, you happy fools! Drink my liquor and don't break my chairs! You're all sinners! he yelled, just as the pianola began to accompany the unfolding living statuary. Blondes, brunettes, redheads—women draped in transparent fabrics painted to emphasize the nipples and just barely covering the nether regions, drifted or rolled onto the stage and began assembling with their bodies some abstraction meant to convey a scene from classical literature.