Kathy Little Bird (5 page)

To escape thinking about it, I took to singing everyone. Mum was a slender, crisp melody, with little runs for the joy she put into things. Jason was a boisterous refrain, light and good-hearted. Morrie of course was a hop, skip, and a jump up and down the scale. And Jellet a lot of bombast.

It was Abram I had trouble with. I did him as a kind of gospel hymn, but that was only part of Abram. Anyway, it got me through the winter. I also tried slipping into the old dreams about my Austrian father. When I was little I’d imagined him as living in a castle on top of a hill, with hunting dogs at his feet. He’d come for me of course, and the castle would belong to me then, and the dogs. As I grew older that dream faded from its unlikeliness.

Spring went by too fast and summer was brief, as it always is here. I’d counted on warm days to get Mum well. They were here but didn’t seem to help. I was as housebound as in the winter with the Sargasso Sea closing about me. It was almost impossible for me to get away, because if I didn’t do the chores, Mum would. So I stayed close, only seeing Abram once or twice. We laughed about the plans we’d had and said what children we had been. I think he felt shy with me, and for some reason I did with him.

I hated to see fall come that year. I had no dreams to pull around me, and I was afraid of another long white silence. Cabin fever, Mum called it. But it was on account of her that I
dreaded it. She slept a lot during the day and coughed most of the night. Her movements slowed, so that one felt her think about doing something before asking it of her body. I didn’t want to sing her anymore because the little runs and trills weren’t there.

There was no holding back Alberta’s climate. Housebound most of the time, there was nothing for it but to resurrect the old fantasy world. The one I liked to relive was when my father came back. He got lonesome for Mum and wanted to be with her again.

And there was I, a daughter he didn’t know he had. In some of these daydreams I rushed into his arms and he hugged and kissed me, and said he would never go away again. Sometimes he’d pack us up, Mum and me, and take us back to Austria. Just for a visit of course. It wasn’t a castle anymore, but a nice snug house. He taught me to sail on the Bodensee. We hiked forest trails and searched for sprigs of edelweiss. He loved me so much that he wanted me to stay with him forever.

Observing me, Mum would frequently say, “You’re so quiet, Kathy. What are you thinking?”

I’d laugh and shake my head—out loud it would sound stupid.

Snow gusted against the house, blown high by wind. Wolves howled. In mockery I sang back at them. I sang the quiet, I sang the storms. I didn’t sing Abram anymore. I didn’t know him as well as I had. When I was fifteen I had known him. When I was eight I’d known him best of all. Now that I was seventeen I didn’t know him at all.

Warm winds, springtime chinook. I began to think it would be all right, that the family had made it through another year.

With the thaw came comforting buds, light new foliage, and Elk Woman. Saskatoon berry jam, freshly baked bread, stalks of wild asparagus. She took to coming by with these and other gifts produced from her voluminous skirt. She would look around for the pail in which she made tea, start the water boiling, draw up a chair, and sit with Mum. They were old friends. They had gone to school together, and she had given my Mum a wolf tail to remind her she belonged to the First Nation people. Elk Woman always slipped a small packet of herbs under Mum’s pillow. “Good medicine.” Mum would smile and say she thought the last one had helped her. I thought that was good of Mum, being a nurse, to pretend so outrageously for Elk Woman.

One day, a bright, sunny, blue-sky day, Elk Woman motioned me to the porch. “You’re a strong girl, Kathy. And you’ve strength in you that you don’t know about yet.”

I had an intimation that I wouldn’t like this conversation. I didn’t want to hear what Elk Woman was about to say.

“Mum feels better today. She sat up in the rocker for a while. Now that the weather has changed…”

“My little bird, Loki the Trickster has made up this dream for you. I, your friend, tell you your mother makes the long canoe trip.”

The top of my head was blown off, as though Jellet had aimed his shotgun at me and pressed the trigger. “Get off this porch,” I spoke quite steadily, looking Elk Woman in
the eye. “My dad’s asleep in the back bedroom. He doesn’t allow Indians on our porch. I’ll wake him up and he’ll run you off.”

“Oh little bird,” Elk Woman said sadly, “don’t pull away from your friends in bad times.”

I threw my arms around her. She was a power woman, a wind shifter. “God won’t let her die, will He?”

“When you come to the end of your life, you got to die.”

“But she’s not at the end.”

“The best you can do for her, Little Bird, is to let her know you’ll be all right. It’s you she’s worried about.”

I looked at her hard, trying to see into her. “Why should she worry about me?” I asked. “I’m grown up.”

She returned my glance speculatively, as though testing the validity of my statement, then said, “Have you talked to your brother?”

“To Jas? No. I can’t. I can’t talk to him, not about Mum.”

“You should. More important than giving him dinner, is to set his soul right.”

“I can’t do it.”

“There’s no one else,” Elk Woman said practically. “Now go in and see does your mother need you.”

I looked at Mum with Elk Woman’s eyes and saw an emaciated woman, her usually glowing copper skin a faded yellow, her face dominated by eyes. The circles under them were like the frame of a picture setting them apart, making them alive.

Mum must have heard me come in, because she asked, “Has Elk Woman been talking to you?”

I nodded.

“Jas is almost grown. A big boy. Jas will fall on his feet, like a cat. Jas will be all right. And Morrie won’t remember—” The word
me
trembled her lips, but she didn’t utter it. Her voice faltered like a toy that’s overwound and starts up again. “And you, Kathy, music. Music is what you’re about.” She had tired herself, and signed that she couldn’t talk any more.

I sat and rocked and waited. After a while her voice came again. “I’ve been saving up, Kathy. A present. Jas has the money for it. It was to be a surprise for your birthday. But I want to see you with it. It’s at the pawnshop, a guitar. Go with Jason into town and get it.”

A guitar. How thrilled I would have been even yesterday. Now it was an inheritance, like the reading of a will. But Mum was smiling, anticipating my pleasure. I managed a smile too and went to find Jas.

He was out back checking his polliwogs, waiting for them to become frogs. One thing I liked about Jas, eventually he returned the creatures to where he found them. I think he picked that up from Abram. Not that Abram ever preached to anyone. But Jas noticed the way he did things, and did them that way too.

“Mum wants us to get the guitar.”

“Okay.” He disappeared to retrieve the money from some secret place. The bills were pretty dirty, but still legal tender, as they say. “How come you get to have it now?” he asked. “It’s not your birthday yet.”

“She wants me to have it now.”

“Because she’s dying, right?”

“Jas, if you cry I’ll never forgive you.”

“Who’s crying?”

I reached out and took his hand. I know I shouldn’t have favorites, but he was my favorite brother. Morrie played tearing-around games and practiced for the minor leagues in the backyard. He’d miss Mum, but she was right, he’d forget.

Jas made a big effort. “I bet you’re happy about the guitar.”

“I hate it.”

“Yeah,” he said. He understood.

When we finally stood before the pawnshop, there it was in the window. In spite of myself, I was excited. A name was scrolled on it in gold print—Martin. I let Jas negotiate the business, and reaching through the back of the window, picked it up and plucked the strings. It wasn’t tuned, but the sound was mellow and sweet. I sat down in a dusty corner and cradled it, working the frets, tightening, plucking again, bending my ear close.

That was it.

My guitar and I spoke with one voice, my voice, but enhanced, reverberating, it was like singing in chords.

I hurried back to sing to Mum, but softly, so as not to wake Jellet. Austrian folk songs, that’s what I sang. The ones my father taught her, and she taught me.

“You have a knack of carrying a person right into the music,” she said.

Elk Woman stole in soundlessly to listen. Jason stood in the doorway.

Mum murmured, “You have a wonderful gift, Kathy.”

Elk Woman grunted. “See that it doesn’t ruin your life.”

Mum looked at her reprovingly. “How could anything so lovely do that?”

“Loki the Trickster sees to it.” She added matter of factly, “It’s his job.”

M
UM
lived more and more in the past. She would tell me things about my Austrian father as though they happened yesterday. But more and more it was someone else she talked about. Someone called Crazy Dancer.

She married Crazy Dancer first, before she fell in love with my father. But it was a Mohawk ceremony, and before they could do it again in church he was shipped off to Europe. The troopship was torpedoed and went down with all hands. Only Crazy Dancer wasn’t on that ship. He came back at the end of the war to find Mum married to my father.

It was hard for Mum to explain two loves. “The war destroyed so much. What was left, we destroyed. None of us knew how to pick up the pieces.”

When she told me, “Your father and I were happy,” I believed her. Then in the next breath, “I’d try to wake myself out of dreams, because it was Crazy Dancer standing by the bed, looking at me. Sometimes he would be sitting in a chair, fixing something, he liked to fix things. He especially liked motors, carburetors, housings, and fittings of all kinds. We
usually had an old car or motorcycle but no transportation, because it would be in pieces on the sidewalk, and Crazy Dancer would be joyously greasing or filing away at some part. Very few of these parts belonged to the original engine but were swapped, traded, and on rare occasions bought from the owner of another vehicle, never from a store.

“You were a year old when he came back. The first thing he did, before saying ‘hello’ or ‘I love you,’ was help carry the buggy with you in it up two flights of stairs. He was the old Crazy Dancer, full of high jinks and wild imagination. But, though he tried to conceal it, his health was gone.”

As a nurse, Mum knew the signs: chronic bronchitis, then emphysema. She saw that he got proper medical attention. It was too late. Too much scarred lung tissue, too few active cilia, too frequent respiratory infections.

“Double pneumonia,” Mum said, reliving her last desperate effort to save Crazy Dancer. With a paring knife, she performed what she called a “lay tracheotomy.”

“I didn’t do it as skillfully as a surgeon would, but there’s a place under a man’s Adam’s apple where the membrane is thin. With a paring knife and a drinking straw I was able to keep him alive. I got him in the car, threw you in the backseat, and drove to the hospital. He held the straw in place himself and tried not to pass out. And you know what that crazy Indian did? He patted me on the knee to show he approved of my driving. He’d taught me, you see. And…”

Her lips still moved, but I could no longer make out the words. I folded the story away with that of the young Austrian
officer in Hitler’s navy who had gray eyes. And the one about a girl who married a Mountie and passed her name on to me. These were the tales I recounted to myself. Like the castle in the Austrian Alps, dream and daydream, their fabric was a lost reality in which I could no longer hide.

T
WO
nights later I had to accept another reality; with Jellet at the pub, Morrie tumbling around in the living room, me singing, Elk Woman sitting unblinkingly beside her, and Jas lolling against the wall, Mum died. She died without a word, without a sound.

I didn’t know. I was still singing when Elk Woman took crushed rosemary leaves from her pocket and began sprinkling them over the bed.

I put down the guitar. “What are you doing?” It was a question I didn’t need to ask.

“She had an easy passing, just slipped the moorings.”

I stared at my mother, a slight figure who was no longer there.

“Where is she now, Elk Woman?”

“There aren’t words, little one. She is weaving herself into the great design.”

“Then she hasn’t just ended?”

Elk Woman smiled, “She has just begun.”

With a great cry Jason threw himself at the bed and, grabbing Mum by the shoulders, tried to shake her alive.