Celia's Song (9 page)

“Damn if this isn't the same shovel them little boys used to help Momma dig up roots.” He picks it up and turns it in his hands for a minute. His shoulders shake. Judy stiffens; she lets the umbrella drop. She does not want to see Ned's face. A terrible sound is coming out of him. The thunder bellows louder, drowning the sound Ned makes. He clutches the little shovel so hard it snaps. “Oh, no.” He lets it go.

“What the hell are all the names of those roots they used to pick anyway?” he asks as if desperate for the answer. Judy remains silent. It isn't the question that he needs the answer to and she knows it.

“Ain't this some shit,” Judy says, pushing the umbrella back up.

“After the snake left, those girls of Madeline's got so quiet, then Stacey left, and Celia took to daydreaming her life away at school and at her gramma's house. Momma kept cooking and sewing, but now she sits at that machine cursing more often than chuckling to herself like she used to. Jimmy was a little odd, but sometimes I would see this thing come over his face, like, like …” Ned trails off, moves in another direction. “Damn. He hated school.” He picks up a loose stone and tosses it at the dark as though he hates whatever Jimmy couldn't love; at the same time, though, he can't understand why Jimmy hated school. He got to come home after all; what was there to hate about learning?

“Those boys that hung out at the snake's left one by one. A lot of the girls left to marry. The mothers whose daughters left stopped visiting the villagers. Divorce started marking many young women's lives. Maybe it is none of those things and maybe it's all of them.”

“Maybe it's not about any of that?” Judy offers with as much humility as her Prussian origins allow.

Ned looks at her and wonders at what moment he found her
acceptable. Ned's look is very nearly an intimate gesture. Wonderment about the inner life of a woman is not expected, is almost unacceptable. His duty is to accept what women present without wondering. Wondering directed at women by a man could be construed as invasive, rude, unless she was a close relative.

“Give me one of them smokes of yours,” Judy says.

Ned laughs and digs around for a pair of them.

“Are you actually going to smoke this one?” he asks.

Judy pulls hard on the cigarette, holds it down and away from the rain, exhales and decides she has earned a place in this village. She blows out another cloud of smoke and suppresses a cough as she struggles to get comfortable about Ned's wondering before the next thunderclap.

Screw those who decided she was white and so didn't really count. Screw them all. I clap my hands together. I smile. About time you
decide to face that she lives here and that she belongs here.

NOT LONG AFTER THE
epidemic the voting business came. It was Judy who had said, “It will change you. I can't explain how, but it will, know that it will.” It had felt like a warning then and it read like a warning in retrospect. Ned had voted against the government housing plan; but he was only realizing now that it was the voting itself Judy had warned them about. The vote confounded just about everything.

“Do you remember telling us this vote would change us?”

“Yes.” She turns her face in the direction of the lightning and takes another pull of the cigarette.

“I think people thought you were talking about having the government building our houses for us. I voted against the housing program. I knew something was up with this voting business by the way you said it, but I didn't know enough about it to be able to ask a clear question. Now I know that I should have asked everyone to
boycott the vote. We didn't have to vote to get the land, the school, or the vote. They would have given us anything to make sure we took out the mortgages to buy these homes.”

“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.” Judy is dizzy and queasy. She looks at the stub of cigarette and tosses it into the rain-soaked yard.

“Taking up the vote was pure blindness.” Ned drops his butt and steps on it, grinding it into the mud around the grass.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, before the vote we talked and talked and talked. Now we have the vote and, like you said, we let things happen without talking about them. If we had to talk over every aspect of our lives like we used to, Jimmy would be here right now. Maybe next year Jacob will still be here.”

“Don't say that.” Judy can hear Dominic saying “Be careful what you pray for” to her years earlier when she had doubted out loud that they could save anyone from the flu.

“Someone has to.”

“So we give up the vote and start talking?”‘

“We wouldn't be able to talk anyone into giving up the vote, but we have to restore talking. We don't have to give up anything to
talk, Judy. We just got to move our lips and clack our teeth. It won't solve everything, but talking will get us back to where we ought to be.” Ned hesitates, starts his next sentence with an “If” and then stops.

“And the problem with that is?”

“Jacob doesn't speak our women's language, in either his English or theirs. They talk like they are stuck back in some old yesterday and Jacob talks like he is headed for tomorrow. We have to build a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow.” Ned puts his leg up on a log and leans into the storm.

“Oh, well, gee. I thought you had something challenging for me, Ned.” Judy doesn't really have a clue what he is talking about. Jacob and Rena and Celia all speak regular English.

The sky breaks, the clouds divorce themselves from one another, and the earth's crying stops. The moon and stars appear suddenly.

“We have to talk, Judy. And you have to be there.” She feels relief upon hearing his words. It is as though she has an itch she hasn't been able to scratch and now Ned has handed her a knitting needle. She's been bothered by something for a long time and has not been able to name it. She realizes it was silence. Rena had come home every day in the summer and fall from picking this or that medicine, lain them out on the counter, tied them with cedar she had pounded, hung them. It had taken her hours. Judy liked watching her, but there had always been something odd about it and now she knows. Rena had not uttered a word during the hours of work.

“I want you to know, Judy, that from this day forward you are one of us to me. I am not sure if that is a curse or a blessing, but I
can't ask you for anything without offering you a place here.”

“C'MON, NED, EVEN I
know that takes ceremony and witnesses.”

Now they're getting somewhere. Ceremony, witnesses: the Sto:lo way of doing business.

“Yes, but I get to name the guests.” The words fall flat onto the soggy ground.

They stand in the noisy rain for a while longer and Judy acquiesces to one last smoke. She cannot imagine a way for her to play a part in untangling this mess, but she knows that this old man is going to haul her into the vortex of whatever tornado he is planning to set in motion. The thought excites her and unnerves her at the same time. Her upbringing did not prepare her for change. She knows Ned does not think about it; he takes change for granted. He puffs out the last breath of his smoke. His tension seems to leave with it.

“Has this suicide got you feeling shame, Ned?” Judy lowers herself onto the wet bench near the porch. Ned sits on the old rocking chair next to it.

“It isn't about shame. It is a bitch of a world we live in. Recognizing the exit is nothing short of a miracle. Suicide is an exit. I never saw it. Some days like you say I get so tired I fear I won't remember my own name. I fear my wife will ask me what day it is because she is so tired she's forgotten. She has this feeling there is some kind of an appointment someone has to keep but can't remember if it is tomorrow or today because she doesn't know what day today is. No. It is about trust. Talking kept us trusting. Trusting one another secures our sense of hope in the future. The vote kept us from talking for a whole generation. Silence kills hope. It will take a generation of talking to break down the walls. When walls break, Judy, wood splinters fly, slivers land. Who knows who will get hurt.”

“The vote is about not talking,” Judy repeats and laughs as she thinks about the host of rules governing confidentiality — not talking — that are connected to the vote. There are even rules about what you must talk about. She laughs some more to herself. She prays everything is as simple as Ned has put it. In her world of origin it was not that simple, but here maybe it is.

“She's wrong, you know,” Ned says simply.

“Who is wrong? About what? No, I don't know.” Judy is back to her Prussian self.

“Momma,” he answers the first question. “About no wood,” he answers the second. “There was plenty of wood. We just weren't allowed to use it anymore. In those days, ‘not allowed' had meaning. It doesn't now. The government is the one backed up in a corner unable to make their own laws work for them.”

Ned laughs, stomping about in the mud, dancing in the rain. He lifts his head and drinks the rainwater. He hollers, “It doesn't matter now.”

Judy, caught up in his joy, drops her umbrella and dances beside him.

They are about to go back into the house and I have to find a dry spot with a good vantage point. This part of the story is over. I
spot an old birdhouse that hasn't seen birds or seed for a long time
and skip up the tree and go inside. It is a good vantage point to
watch from.

MOMMA STARES AT JACOB
. There is no easy feeling between them. He is slippery, unlike Jimmy. She doesn't know this young man. She can't find the doorway to knowing him. She searches for some
deep feeling inside herself for him. It is there. She loves him. She just isn't sure she likes him. Something stands between her loving him and her liking him. She wants to know what exactly it is that stands between them. In place of her liking is this gaping hole. How did it get there? Was it pages of story, was it language, was it the absence of language, or was it a different being? Jacob's life has been an electrified, television-filled life. Is this electrified life the beast that wedges its way between them?

Momma recalls scraping the bottoms of barrels, looking for what she did not have. She realizes there has been so much no in her life: No eggs to make pancakes, no television to relax to, no radio to sing along with, no newspaper to keep up with the world, no books to escape into, no battery-charged beasts to ease whatever drudgery life dares to present, no quiet moments in which to contemplate anything. It was just get up in the morning, sew, preserve, can, catch, hunt, gather, scrape, pretend you are not without, give up that dress, give up those boots, give up that shirt, give up that new car, give up that notepad, that journal, that reading time, that bath time. Give up. Her life was about giving up. It was easy when them people came and asked them to give up their old way of making decisions in exchange for houses she would not have to work her fingers to the bleeding bone to build. She would not have to truck halfway up the Coquihalla, a baby on her back, dragging a wagon full of food provisions to hunt down some cedar stump, split shakes, bundle them up, put the baby in the empty wagon and the shakes on her back, then take the shakes and child down the mountain to be delivered to a relative to build some substandard house. She would not have to dodge the white man's helicopters patrolling the hillsides for poachers stealing shingles. Her grandchildren, whom she loved more than she ever remembered loving her own children, would have decent homes without their parents risking arrest for stealing wood from their own mountains.

She grabs her knees; a wave of pain goes through them. Memory can be nasty. The pain returns like a bill collector. She may as well be climbing down that mountain with those shakes on her back, the pain is so real. She makes a feeble attempt to stop thinking about it. It's no use. Her mind keeps seeing herself, legs wobbling, the shakes swaying back and forth. They knew, she decides, the shakes knew they were not going to houses like the ones in white town. They knew they were going to get hammered onto some silly shed some woman's relatives will call a house because they will be too polite to call it a shed. The shakes had jumped back and forth on her back, scraping her elbows and threatening her balance, as though determined to force her to drop them. They did not want to come with her. They did not want to leave the comfort of their mountain home.

“We are not who we used to be, Jacob,” she says to no one as she rocks back and forth in her chair. Jacob had sat in front of every children's television show. He had listened to some Indian lady with beautiful long black hair and dancing eyes sing to him. Momma never had that and she could not give it to her children. White people had so much more to give. How did they take these mountains and turn them into all the things they gave to her grandchildren? She wants to know. She can't know. The question sucks the strength from her muscle, weakens her knees, and makes her so dizzy she wants to puke. How did they do that? She swims around
the question like a salmon that by some piece of craziness has gone up the wrong river. She is about to sink into a relieving faint.