Kathy Little Bird (6 page)

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Woman went to the Eight Bells and told Jellet. He closed the pub and brought a couple of cronies home for moral support: Hubert, who weighed three hundred pounds all muscle but wouldn’t hurt a fly, and Black Douglas, the only cardsharp our little community could support.

They brought two bottles of Irish whiskey. At the house Hubert made a great fuss about adding it to coffee. Getting out the percolator and putting water on to boil was as far as he got before flopping down at the kitchen table to catch up with the other two.

Jellet was going on about losing a loving and loyal companion in the prime of life—how disgusting, how maudlin. But as he talked I realized he truly was grieving. He just didn’t know how to do it except with other people’s words. His buddies kept assuring him they would stand by him, ready to help any way they could. Of course they didn’t have specific suggestions. I sat in a corner listening to them.

I’d put Morrie to bed and left the light on in the hall. This was strictly forbidden. I think Jellet noticed, but he decided not to say anything. Black Douglas laid out a hand of clock solitaire. He was waiting for me to turn in before suggesting
poker, and in the meantime probing Jellet as to how he had come to marry an Indian girl, pretty though she was.

A change came over Jellet’s face. His usual sour expression vanished. I’d seen him happy only a few times in my life, and then when he was roaring drunk. This was a different kind of happiness, simple, faraway. He didn’t smile, but his mouth softened with remembering.

They’d met in the Italian campaign of World War II. He had been assigned as a replacement driver for the New Zealand general, Tuker. Tuker’s penchant for poking his nose into every corner of the front lines at Monte Cassino sent half a dozen drivers to the hospital. When he ran out of New Zealanders, he borrowed Jellet from the neighboring Canadian corps. Tuker disagreed with the Fifth Army plan to destroy the Monte Cassino fortress monastery by air power. He was convinced he could take it by ground action. He asked General Mark Clark’s headquarters in Naples to supply him with blueprints of the buildings and topographic maps of the environs. Intelligence claimed no such information was available. Tuker blew his top, rousted out Jellet, and set off for Naples, where he intended to research the monastery himself at the public library.

“He stops a war to go to the library?” Hubert asked.

“Did he have his library card with him?” Black Douglas, a few sheets to windward, snickered at his witticism.

Jellet, ignoring this, tried to picture for them the steep rut at the side of the road, and how it was the jeep turned over, breaking his arm. Tuker himself had to drive back to the casualty clearing station, where Mum, a surgical nurse, set Jellet’s arm
and gave him a shot of penicillin against infection. Then a shot of morphine. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever set eyes on, and the kindest, and the gentlest—the only person in his life who had treated him with any consideration.

Here Jellet launched into a bitter tirade against his parents, his family, his father’s administration of justice. Whenever an infraction occurred, his father took out his appointment book, set a date, a time, and an estimate of the requisite number of canings. “Saturday, before breakfast, 6:40
A.M.
, here in the study, eleven strokes—” The boy had plenty of time to think it over. When World War II broke out, he traded home for the Italian front. You got shot at, but you didn’t have to make an appointment.

At war’s end Jellet came back to Canada to learn that his parents had died. Most of the estate went to other relatives, but he inherited a small piece of property in a little town near Lesser Slave Lake, which his father had foreclosed on. Formerly an elegant pub, it had rapidly deteriorated into a hangout for bums, Indians, and riffraff in general. The family urged him to sell it and go to work in their law firm.

“In other words,” Jellet said, folding his hands, “take orders from them. No way. I told them all what they could do, moved here, cleaned up the bar, and hung out a sign, OPEN FOR BUSINESS.”

It struck him that he’d heard the name of this town in Italy. The beautiful nurse at the Cassino front who’d sat with him, eased his pain, talked to him, smiled—she was from here.

It was a sign from God. He had his own business free and clear.
With a wife and children and a cellar full of beer, he could build a good life. The Eight Bells became a going concern, but the muse he had built his fantasies around now lived in Montreal. He tracked her through the Sisters of Charity Hospital. It was a bit of a shock, however, to find that in the meantime she’d married and had a baby, particularly that the father was German. Also, Mum was quite open about Crazy Dancer.

Jellet decided to go slow. He wasn’t so sure this was the right woman for him after all, twice married and Indian. The war was over, and people who had gotten used to seeing Indians in uniform or mentioned in the casualty lists reverted to old habits and treated them like the invisible minority they’d always been.

On her part, Mum was puzzled by the sudden appearance of a ghost from the war, and too wrapped up in her own problems to pay him much attention.

“Maybe I should have packed it in then and come home,” Jellet said mournfully. Black Douglas performed a cascading shuffle; they polished off the whiskey and started to look for a bottle of vodka Jellet claimed to have hidden on top of some cupboard or other.

When it was found, Jellet resumed. Yes, it was the war that brought them together. Both had lived through experiences no civilian wanted to hear about. They found things to shudder at, to shed tears at, and they laughed over the fact that it was she who ended up driving General Tuker to the public library in bombed-out Naples. “You missed a fantastic dinner,” and she told him of the meal the general had treated her to. Jellet’s memory
was of the shot of morphine and her touch.

They made a deal. “The baby,” Jellet said, “needed a father. She needed a home. I needed a wife. We were married.”

Now the vodka was gone. While they were looking under sinks and behind furniture for a replacement, I stole out. I knew the rest. Jellet’s family and friends took one look at Mum and cut them off, socially, economically, permanently. Jellet responded by withdrawing completely from society. He had no truck with anyone from the town. No church, no school, nothing. The Eight Bells and our falling-down house…and a tiny strip of birchbark from Mum’s old life. She planned one day to make it into a toy canoe. That was all. We lived as hermits.

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I stood graveside, a spasm went through me to see Mum lowered into the ground, joining all the yesterdays since the world began. It was awful to see dirt shoveled in, until I remembered she liked to sift through the soil with her fingers for earthworms, which she prized. She liked the smell of loam, the good, rich earth smell. Cree songs told of these things and this is what I sang standing there on that desolate, windy plain.

Afterward I ran off to Abram. He came out of his house and walked with me, and these were his words. “You husk the body off,” he said, “so the soul can be free.”

I thought about it. It seemed sensible. “Why can’t we know these things?”

“I guess because we’re human beings.”

“And sinful?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so. It’s just that we can’t comprehend great things yet.”

“But it’s my Mum, Abram.”

The tears I couldn’t shed gathered in his eyes. He would have felt better if I’d been able to storm and cry and carry on in my usual fashion. He could have comforted me then. Only, I couldn’t do it. I felt detached from myself and from the world, alienated and alone. For once Abram couldn’t help.

I
RETURNED
to the house to find a bouquet of wild flowers and a rabbit left on our porch. There was a note signed by the Mennonite community offering sympathy and prayers. Away to the side was a single wild lobelia. No need to tell me. Abram. Jellet almost stepped on it, but I snatched it up.

Jellet was watching me; he had things to say. “Now that your mother’s gone you’ll have to step into her place, try to fill it. That will mean being a mother to the boys.”

“Then they’ll have to go to school,” I snapped. “I can’t teach them.”

“That’s for me to decide,” he said.

I ignored this and went on. “I’ll need help in the house too. A Mennonite girl for a few hours a day.”

“What do you think I am, a bank?”

“It won’t cost much. I’ll talk to them.”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

I was amazed to hear myself stand up to him. “You’re not going to make a workhorse out of me.”

“Your mother not cold in her grave, and back talk from you already?”

“I don’t mean it as back talk. There’s a limit to what I can do.”

“What you’re
willing
to do,” he blustered.

“Yes.” I had stood up to him, but had I won concessions? The first test would be Monday.

I walked the boys to school, talked to the teacher, and got them properly registered. On the way back I hummed to keep up my resolve. Jellet would be furious. But done is done.

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Woman slipped in the back door. She hadn’t been at the funeral. Jellet and his buddies would have run her off and enjoyed it. But she was Mum’s only friend, and she had nursed her to the end. Her herb medicines had soothed Mum’s cough, and her other potions, who knows, perhaps dulled the pain.

Elk Woman told me that she had known the day Mum would die. Mum had known too. The voices of the Grandmothers always came to a Cree, and that’s what my mother was, a Cree, born of a Cree mother and a Metis father.

Elk Woman had come to take me to the res. “Your grandfather, Jonathan Forquet, is here. He is an old man, a sick old man, but he walked across Alberta to be here.”

Mum hardly ever spoke of Jonathan Forquet, and then not as her father but as a wise man who had helped her
through a difficult time. I remembered her saying, “I was his daughter, but he was never my parent. He chose to be a parent to the Indian nations from Nunavut to the Yukon.”

“Why didn’t he come in time…to be with her?”

“It’s not necessary,” Elk Woman said. “He’ll be with her on the other side. What is necessary is to walk beside her a little way on her journey.”

Jonathan Forquet.

I squeezed my eyes closed trying to remember. As a young man he’d been a hunter and trapper. Then he heard of the teachings of the prophet Handsome Lake and for him the words of Manitou and Christ blended. From this time forward he was called to officiate at longhouse rituals. And now he’d come to hold the ceremony that closed his daughter’s life.