Kathy Little Bird (37 page)

L
IKE
the ladies of the congregation, Abram gave and gave and asked for nothing, which was lucky because I had nothing to give.

He, on the other hand, invented a world for me. I was broken and he put me together. I couldn’t think, and he unscrambled my brain and made a life for me.

This one.

With infinite patience he taught me to drive the car my father had bought me, the Lincoln with leather seats. The car was a soft blue-gray, and I loved the way it smelled. Still, it was difficult for me to drive. It took concentrated effort because the controls were managed from the steering wheel. Mostly it was Pam who took it for spins.

Abram had the kitchen remodeled with new cabinets and easy-glide drawers. I began somewhat tentatively to do a little cooking. But Pam was so much quicker that she was soon doing the majority of the meals.

For a while Abram and I teamed up to prepare gourmet Sunday dinners. I was a great salad tosser and expert at arranging food to look appetizing. Abram did the serious cooking. He was a master of aromas. He claimed that sixty percent of what you think you taste, you really smell. Then one day I had a headache and Pam took over. And for some reason that’s
the way it seemed to fall out from then on: Pam freeing me of one more task.

One day a half-grown, forlorn Siamese cat found us. We fed her, petted her, and she took over. In no time she became a sleek beauty we called Ming-Ling. A favorite pastime for both Ming-Ling and me was to watch Abram shave. When he left the Believing Church the beard had come off. For him it was symbolic; for Ming-Ling and me the daily process of scraping off stubble was fascinating. I couldn’t say why—except that Abram did it. So a small custom was initiated. But Pam didn’t think it was hygienic to allow the cat on the counter.

I was thinking about this as I sat drowsing in the last of the sun. The warm June day was cooling off and I was glad of the throw Abram had tucked around me. Or was I? I didn’t like the picture it generated—blanket, wheelchair, cripple. My mind jumped to the First Nation people of the Arctic Circle. They have a custom that when a member of the family is too old or too sick to contribute, they are set on an ice floe with a few days’ provisions to gradually fall into frozen sleep. Cruel? No, it is the natural way. The proof is that it is the person herself who makes the decision and pushes off on the ice.

The Cree always begin stories by saying, “This is a true thing I tell you.” So I suppose it’s true about the ice floe and I wonder about the story Pam read me this morning. It was a Bible story. Genesis, I think, Abraham and Sarah. Sarah had an Egyptain slave girl whose name was Hagar. Sarah told
Abraham to go in to her slave girl. And Abraham listened to the voice of Sarah, his wife.

I could hear Pam bustling about. She was very much at home in my kitchen; she knew where everything was. Abram had gone in to lift out the roast. I could hear them laughing.

Abram came out. “The sun is almost gone. Let me bring you in.”

I smiled at him.

“You were sitting here so quietly,” he said, “I thought you’d fallen asleep.”

“I was thinking of Bible stories. Do you have a favorite?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I do, the one about Abraham and his wife.”

“Where Sarah conceives at the age of…”

“No, the part about Hagar.”

Abram didn’t answer, but released the brake on my chair. “What about Hagar?” he asked.

“Nothing much. Just that I like the story.”

Pam called from the kitchen; he brought me into the living room and went to help her. He wouldn’t attach importance to it now. Later he’d remember.

I didn’t want to traumatize him further. I hoped he’d attribute it to my music. He’d think, “She couldn’t live without her music.” The truth is, Abram…I’m not in pain. I don’t lack for anything. Everyone is kind to me. And from the beginning you’ve been Abram, which is my highest praise. But I can’t live any longer without living.

People will say, “She knew success, fame, fortune….” But I was what they made me: Mac, the agency men, producers,
sound mixers, all those years. In that time of tinsel and glamour, there’d been no more than an occasional glimpse of me. So now there was not much to hold to. Too late I’d married Abram. Too late the Cree songs. Too late I became left-handed. The time of the benefit—I think I was meant to go then; it would have been a fitting climax.

Abram returned to wheel me to the table. Recently he seemed light of heart. The haggard look he’d worn had lifted. Just when had this happened? I tried to think back. My mind came to the night I made that discovery about my inability—about my body. And there it stalled. Perhaps he hadn’t waited for my tacit complicity. Perhaps he had no need of Bible stories. Was it from that time that Pam had begun bustling about in my home so efficiently?

Abram sat beside me and took my hands. I think he wanted to talk about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, but Pam came in with the roast on a platter.

It was a lovely dinner. I particularly enjoyed the cucumber salad.

Perhaps the simplest method would be to take the Lincoln for a spin. But what if I survived? I had a surer way. In my medicine cabinet were forty yellow-jacketed sleeping pills. Knowing they were there had made it possible to go on.

No more. Today it was over.

Why today?

Because it was like every other day—that’s why.

After dinner I drifted off into a kind of dream state, in which I took off my clothes, discarding them one by one. Indians
believe that disrobing in a dream is a sign of approaching death, a shucking off of the body.

A careful assessment would leave no doubt.

I’ll begin with Mum. I ran out on her when I ran out on my brothers.

I went off with the first man who promised to take me to the bright lights.

But I wasn’t good even for Jack. He was getting by just fine selling ponies and winning bar bets. I dragged him into showbiz, where he was outclassed. Gambler and drinker he was, but he had a wonderful gift for enjoying life. Until I came along.

I didn’t treat Mac much better. It must have taken a lot for a man of his pride to keep begging me to marry him. I considered it a joke. But he thought of it as a fitting climax to a successful partnership, with me in the spotlight and him pulling the strings. The denouement was the appearance of Abram. He figured I’d marry Abram and he’d be left in the lurch, so he took another way. He figured he’d earned it. Consequently, instead of the wheeling and dealing he thrived on, he’s stuck in some Caribbean hideout, shacked up with a local belle, paying off the
policia,
and bored, bored, bored to death—thanks to Kathy Little Bird.

Jim’s case was next. I really let him down. Jim Gentle. A perfect name for him. A gentle, sweet person in this rough, uncaring, dog-eat-dog world. I let him teach me music and songwriting, I let him teach me lovemaking. Then, the moment I learned he had problems, I was gone. That it finally
turned around, that he’d made it, in no way absolves me. It was one of those lucky breaks that happen.

Abram I saved for last. I’m ruining Abram’s life by my dependence on him. He seemed ready, willing, and able to shoulder all the grief I brought with me. But what of the night he broke down and cried? It’s not right to load it all on him. Mum used to say, “The weak eat up the strong.” I hadn’t known what that meant then, but I am doing that to Abram. Besides, how long can I go on playing the part of a housewife who doesn’t keep her own house? Of a lover unable to feel or respond to sex?

Anything else?

Oh yes. Kathy Little Bird as mother. Leaving the main indictment out of the list was signficant. I can’t bear thinking of my redhaired daughter.

So what does it add up to? I’m not a mother, not a lover, not a wife. I’ll never walk again. I’ll never sing again. The answer is forty gelatin capsules.

P
AM
was humming as she stacked the dishwasher, and Abram, complaining that he’d been doing too much reading, went to check on a new shipment. I wheeled myself into the bathroom and poured out the yellow-jacketed pills. I knew how many there were. Forty. I counted them to make sure. I didn’t want to do things halfway, make a mess for Abram.

I put all forty into an empty aspirin bottle, which I took to my bedside table. It wouldn’t look suspicious there if anyone should see it. I had decided on tonight. I would go to
sleep and not be a bother or make trouble, or stand in the way of Abram having a wife. Or anything, anymore.

I wandered out into the living room and, going to the piano, picked out my Cree Shadow Song with one finger. I thought Abram was still in the shop, but he came in through the house. I was struck by the way he stood there in the doorway looking at me.

“What would you think,” he asked, “of a world of becoming?” I waited, knowing he had more to tell me. “You, me, the earth, the universe, God himself, all in the process of evolving.” He advanced farther into the room. “And what would you think of a God that needed our help as much as we need his?”

“Hmm,” I said.

If this solution lifted the burden he lived with, I liked it. I was glad that God, after years of banishment, was back in his life. I knew Abram would be happier with God.

“Thomas Aquinas says that God gave human beings two paths to understanding: the way of faith and the way of reason. But since there is only one truth, the two paths must arrive at the same conclusion.”

“Are you there yet, Abram?”

“No. And I may never be. But it’s enough to know that even though the two paths diverge sharply at the outset, they will join at the end, resolving all theological dissension, and produce pure thanksgiving.”

He knelt beside my chair. “Once again you have brought light to my life.”

“How?” I asked, because I really couldn’t see how.

“By sitting there patiently listening to me even when you couldn’t talk. By every once in a while wheeling yourself into the kitchen and fixing me a cup of hot chocolate. Kathy, I feel now what I was unable to as a boy—a call. Remember, you asked once how the call was heard. And I said it was felt through your entire body. That was right, Kathy. That’s how it is.”

I was glad for Abram, glad that the agony of doubt was lifted from him. It had been good for him to reason it all out with John. I was glad too that I had a part in it. But in case he would think I wasn’t acting normally, I told him he was hopeless, the same dreamer he had always been.

He cheerfully agreed. “You’re absolutely right, Kathy. But everything in the world got here by way of an idea—in God’s mind or ours.”

I laughed and threw the rest of the evening paper at him. He divided it, keeping the sports pages, carefully avoiding the entertainment section, and tossing me the editorials. I scanned it. Nothing of interest. I don’t ordinarily read letters to the editor, but something caught my attention—a signature.

One of the letters was signed Kathy Mason.

A sharp quiver ran through me. Partly it was pain, but with it an inordinate alertness. I read with a concentration I hadn’t been able to summon till that moment.

Kathy Mason wrote on behalf of a young man, a First Nation person. Lone Walker. That name had been in the papers recently. Wasn’t that the Indian they were looking for in the murder of a Mountie?

The letter from Kathy Mason was written to say she was with Lone Walker at the time of the shooting. She asked for amnesty so he could come in and give himself up. He was, she wrote, an innocent man….

The print blurred.

Kathy. It was my Kathy. And it seemed she was in love with Sam Lone Walker, wanted for murder. Jas hadn’t said a thing about this, and Elk Woman, if she knew, decided I was in no condition to handle it.

If I had put this together correctly, then this was a girl in trouble.

This was a girl who needed her mother.

“When she needs you,” Abram had said.

I remembered asking, “How will I know?” And his reply, typical Abram: “Have faith, you’ll know.”

I read the letter through again.

My poor child, what had she gotten herself mixed up with, and who? Why hadn’t the Masons taken better care of her? Why had she been traipsing around Alberta on her own?

“Abram,” I said, handing him the section. “Read this.”

He ran his finger down to URANIUM STRIKE.

“No, no. Letters to the editor. The first one.”

He read carefully and looked at me with a troubled expression. “You think it’s her?”

“It’s got to be.”

“Call Jas before you jump to conclusions.”

My fingers were trembling so that Abram took the phone and dialed for me.

“Look, Kathy,” Jas said when he heard my voice, “I know I
should have called you, but I didn’t realize at first that she was involved with Lone Walker, who at best is a maverick and at worst a killer. How was I supposed to break something like this to you?”

“Oh my God.”

“I guess I was wrong not to call, and I’m sorry, but…”

“I’m not angry, Jas. I can see how you felt. But what do we do now? That’s my question.”

“Well, she’s determined to clear Lone Walker.”

“And he won’t give himself up?”