The Search for Joyful (3 page)

I closed my eyes and stood in front of him, my face burning as he unbuttoned my blouse.

That night I took down my wolf pawakam. I felt it held the answer to my question. “Guardian,” I whispered, “does he feel what I feel? Does he love me? Really love me?”

The talisman replied sooner than I expected. Sooner than I wanted. I lived a very short time in my Cinderella dream. After school the girls were whispering to each other, speculating who was taking who to the prom. Some had already been asked, and they preened themselves before the wallflowers.

I didn't say anything. Marlene was keeping count at the drinking fountain. She said, “So far, Ev is going with John Boyle, Gwen with Danny Thompson, and Cindy with Phil Dunway . . .”

She went on, but I didn't hear. I left her standing there and walked down the hall and out to the ball field where I knew he would be playing lacrosse. It was baseball season, but a bunch of the fellows got up their own lacrosse game so they could charge and block and work out their hostilities.

“Phil!” I called. “Phil.”

They were taking a break, and Phil was showing off, cradling the ball. He looked up. The other boys did too. They were startled and one of them mimicked, “Phil, oh, Phil, Pocahontas wants you.”

He looked at me. It was a long look. Then he turned his back, laughing.

The public humiliation pinned me to the spot. I couldn't walk away from the shame any more than I could walk away from the anger. I wanted to run, but I was chained where I was. I knew I could never tell anyone, not Mama Kathy, not Connie either.

I had brought this on myself. I had forgotten I was Indian. Remembering released me, gave me strength to walk past my classmates looking neither to the right nor the left, my ears closed to comments.

At home I got out the wolf tail and stared at it a long time. I hadn't known who I was. Now I knew. I would braid wolf hairs into the friendship bracelet.

 
I DIDN'T GROW up until Papa died. He wasn't sick. Something broke inside him and we couldn't get him to a hospital. It had rained for days and the roads had turned to muskeg.

I heard his voice in muffled cries, hoarse and desperate, from the bedroom.

When Mama Kathy came out she staggered against the door. I rushed to her, led her to a chair, and pushed her gently into it.

“The Luminal, Kathy. He asked for it. It's in a small silver packet in the medicine chest.”

“Yes, Mama, I'll get it.”

“Oh, God, the pain, Kathy. It's terrible.”

“I'll get him the Luminal, Mama. It will be better.”

She nodded, and I went into the bathroom, found it, and, filling a glass of water, took it to him.

The covers were knotted into a corner of the bed. Papa's eyes had glazed over like a sick cat's, sweat rolled along his face, and his body was rigid. I poured some of the water on a towel and bent over him, wiping his forehead, murmuring as I worked. “I've brought you the Luminal, Papa. It will relax you.”

He was in no condition to swallow anything. A spasm bowed his body and blood gushed, splattering the wall, ejected with the same terrible force that had taken over his body.

I rushed to the bathroom for a clean towel, passing the door to my room. There, in the closet on the top shelf, was my guardian. I couldn't see it, but I didn't need to see it.

“Help me,” I whispered. “Help him.”

When I returned, Papa was stretched out on his back, sleeping.

I stroked his hand, his capable, strong-fingered hand. What good was his strength to him now? What good were dampened towels and Luminal, even if he could swallow it? What was needed was large decisive steps. Something had gone wrong inside. He needed stitching together, he needed an oxygen tent to help him breathe. He needed a hospital equipped to help him.

His eyes opened. He looked at me and said in a voice that I bent to hear, “You'd make a good nurse, Kathy.”

Those were his last words to me. Mama Kathy came in. Her red hair was pinned neatly back; she had taken hold. I relinquished my place.

I went out and sat on the porch steps. Connie and Georges came and sat beside me. No one spoke. Then Connie gave a quavering little laugh. “You know what I was thinking? Do you remember, Kathy, when you were little, about five, I think? You use to spend hours making concoctions of dirt and grass, all mixed up with seeds and baking powder from the kitchen.”

“I remember that,” Georges said.

“Do you remember what it was for?” Connie challenged him.

I knew. It suddenly came back to me. I was making a medicine so Mama Kathy and Papa would live forever. “It didn't work,” I muttered.

We learned it was peritonitis that took him, a burst appendix. Sergeant Mike looked after the whole province. If a job needed doing, there was Mike Flannigan of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to do it. He was game warden, inspected traps and settled disputes. He kept illegal drugs out of his territory and was responsible for immigration violation and sabotage. And when he'd time on his hands, he repaired the telephone wires and vaccinated a village. He would turn his hand to anything, help anyone, and in the end no one could do anything for him.

Elk Girl explained it to me that night. I was exhausted, out of my head with grief, and had thrown myself across the bed without bothering with a cover. Elk Girl came in, covered me, brought the pawakam and laid it beside me, then opened the window and sat there, looking out. She stared up at the stars, and they, serene and wise, looked down on us. Elk Girl didn't speak. She didn't say that the stars were where they belonged—but they were.

 
WE THOUGHT IT would be a small funeral, just the family and a few friends from the town. But word was carried on the newly extended phone lines and, when these quit, by moccasin telegraph penetrating deep into the woods. People came, white and Indian, from all over the province, people we didn't know but who had known Sgt. Mike Flannigan.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were well represented, their scarlet dress uniforms punctuating the somber attire of the others. Among the guests was Jonathan Forquet. He came not only for Papa Mike but to stand beside Mama.

On the day of the funeral she leaned on his arm. He himself was a compelling figure, spare almost to the point of emaciation. His eyes, when he turned them on you, burned with the intensity of a soul about to leave the body, an arrow ready to quit the bow. When the prayers were finished and he spoke I could understand why the Indians regarded him as a holy man.

“This Mountie we lay to rest today arrested me, kept me jailed for a murder I did not do, refused to give his blessing to my marriage. Yet I am here from across Canada, from Quebec Province. Why? Because when I was starving in body and soul he fed me at his table. He travels now to the west where our people have always traveled. But if he was here he'd laugh in our faces. As he saw it, he did what anybody would do. His own kids died in the diphtheria epidemic, and he was still bringing soup and medicine to people too ill and weak to manage for themselves. But don't think he wouldn't go after a trap thief and bring him in, Mountie style. He was there to fight a fire, or pull an abscessed tooth. He entered our lives, one way or another. Look in your heart to see which part of him you carry.”

Before he left, my father called me to him. He acted as though he had a right to do this, as though he had been here. But it was Papa. Papa was the one to oil my skates, to show me the beaver dam, to explain the migration of birds—it was Papa's lap that was always there for me.

Jonathan Forquet never bothered about me, never inquired about me. He was never part of my life. He was off somewhere being holy, preaching to unlettered Indians who were in awe of him.

Well, I wasn't in awe of him. I followed him reluctantly, my feet scuffing leaves.

He walked a little way into the woods, and the musky smell of decayed vegetation under loamy earth made me think of the grave.

He began speaking again in an intimate way, as though I was his daughter. “You have grown up well. Mrs. Mike is right, there is a look of your mother about you. There is also a look of sadness. Not only because of Sergeant Mike's death, but it has been in you, I think, a long time. It comes from the way you look at life.”

“Don't lecture me. Did you find the beaver dam? Did you fix my skates? I don't even know you. And you don't know me.”

“I do know you. I brought you your name.”

“You show up once. One time in sixteen years. Well, you know what I wish? I wish it was my papa I was standing here with.”

A slight smile hovered about the corners of his mouth. “And that I was where he is?”

I turned away.

“Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter—”

I stopped. I wasn't used to anyone addressing me by this name.

He went on in a detached tone, but I felt the urgency behind it. “When I think of you, when I dream you, when I speak your name, you are with me. Far things are just as near. Didn't you ever feel this?”

“No. Either someone is here with me, or they're not.”

“A namer is never far.”

“You were. To other people you brought religion and all that, but there was nothing for me. And you can't start now, I won't let you.” I was angry to find I was crying.

He went on as though I hadn't said anything, “You must remember who you are. You must learn to be joyful.”

“You haven't the right to expect anything of me. Go take your good works somewhere else.” I turned and ran. The joyfulness he tried to force on me seemed dreadful. At school I'm not accepted—it doesn't matter, be joyful. At work I serve sundaes I can't afford to eat—be joyful. My papa, whom I love more than anything in the world, dies—be joyful.

We didn't speak again. I was glad when he left.

T
wo

AFTER PAPA'S DEATH, we tried to be a normal family. We couldn't talk about Papa at first. We had to and yet we couldn't. It was Jonathan Forquet Mama Kathy told me about. I didn't want to listen because I knew I'd been unfair to him. But I couldn't stop Mama.

“When Oh-Be-Joyful died, he didn't know what to do. He went wild, gambled, made himself ill, almost died. Then he turned to religion, but he didn't find what he needed, not completely. Not until he read the teachings of Handsome Lake.”

“Is Handsome Lake a person?”

“He was a Seneca prophet. Before that, like Jonathan, he was a drunk. This brought him close to death, and he experienced a vision in which it is said he was shown the braiding of all things. When he recovered, he wove the wisdom of the Seneca into the wisdom of the Christian Bible. That was in 1799. It is to this man's teachings your father has brought new life. Every second year in the longhouses a ceremony is held recounting the story of Handsome Lake through dance and recitations. Your father leads this.”

And I had flared out at him, telling off the great man. Well, I didn't care how great or important he was, or what religions he resurrected. He was still an absentee father.

WHEN MAMA WAS finally able to retell the old stories, I felt better. I think she did too.

She told me how primitive and isolated the Northwest Territory was in the days when she fell in love with a handsome Mountie whose “eyes were so blue you could swim in them.” He was about to be posted into wild, untamed country, and he considered her too young to make up her mind properly. So instead of proposing to her, he proposed to her uncle. “The storm still raging, and me standing there, my feet in a basin of hot water.” There were tears behind our laughter, and we held each other and cried them.

“Your papa reached out to people in a remarkable way. For instance, Jonathan.” Papa, she said, couldn't make Jonathan out. His traplines had been plundered and winter furs—fox, ocelot, and martin—stolen. Then the man Jonathan accused of the theft was murdered. In spite of the fact that it was done with Jonathan's knife, Papa did not believe him capable of cold-blooded killing. “I remember Mike telling him if he'd give his word he didn't do it, he'd release him. Do you think Jonathan would do this? No. We had to
know,
all of us, Mike and me—and especially Oh-Be-Joyful—that he wouldn't murder an unarmed man. He spent the summer in that sweltering, mosquito-ridden jail because, as he put it, he couldn't read his innocence in our eyes. . . . Yes,” she pondered, “Papa was exasperated by him, but in a way he loved him.”

I began to know Jonathan Forquet. I began to consider what he had said to me on our walk, and to wonder if I could get back to being happy. Not merely happy as a great many people are . . . but joyful.

Joyful is past happy. Happy is more a quiet content. Joy on the other hand is actively seeking moments when you're high on life, and if those moments aren't there, to make them, to cause them. It was the inheritance Jonathan Forquet meant for me, and for the first time I wanted his good opinion. I wanted to live up to my Indian name.

 
PEARL HARBOR, AND the planes couldn't get off the ground.

Pearl Harbor, and the sea sent dead to the surface like flotsam.

Pearl Harbor, and suddenly the immensity of oceans no longer protected us.

Christmas 1941. The angel from her topmost position on the tree did not signify peace on earth, goodwill toward men. Her golden wings spread over a world exploding into madness. In Canada we kept our radios tuned to the news station and scanned the daily paper.

Georges said from the beginning that when Mussolini and Hitler formed the Axis, all hell would break loose. He bought a map of the world and tacked it up in his room. A yellow arrow showed Mussolini gobbling up Ethiopia; a black arrow showed Hitler gobbling up Austria. A year later Germany, on the pretext of defending Sudeten Germans, took over Czechoslovakia. Georges pasted a black swastika on that country and put a question mark over Poland. Hitler must have had access to Georges's map, because six months later he rolled into Poland, and the word
blitzkrieg
entered our vocabulary.