Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past (19 page)

From dusk to dawn, through the streets of the village, in its various spaces, in the forest openings, Kateri's mother and father have searched for their older daughter. This is their ordeal and it seems that, as far as they are concerned, everything except what belongs to Kateri's world has disappeared. An odd silence reigns between this father and this mother, a silence louder than all the sounds of the whole village. However much they cry out, the silence, the interminable silence, keeps them enclosed within the walls of their grief.

“My daughter has disappeared into the glacial night and my heart violently contracts when I think of her, and I think of her all the time. I am a peacekeeper and I know what goes on in the villages and on the reserves. Death waits everywhere in his own particular way. I know that in most cases, Death goes only where he is allowed to go. Strangest of all is that, when Death is kept waiting at the door until the dying person is ready to go, Kateri is obstinate enough to slam the door in Death's face. Kateri's disappearance has brought my wife and me closer together … When I speak to her, I speak more gently … She listens to me very
attentively, then she starts to cry once again. Someday, that little scourge will find out how many tears she has cost her mother. Her mother, a woman so proud that she has never asked anything of anyone, is now following me about like a beggar, while asking all those she passes for the charity of a mere hope.

“I'm looking for my daughter. Listen! Look! Here she is in a photo. It was taken on her eleventh birthday. If you've come across her, you'd surely recognize her. Wouldn't you? But it's got so cold, you might have forgotten already … I know that my head is confused, my memories are all mixed up because of the cold. I beg you, look again at her face so you can engrave it on your memory. I'm leaving now, it's so cold …Heat is a treasure we must keep safe … When you see my daughter, the one called Kateri, tell her that my house contains an endless source of warmth.

“My wife is begging someone to grant her the alms of a single hope for our future, she has told me. I wonder whether anyone can hear her as she is crying so hard. I am holding her by the hand because she cannot see very clearly, thanks to her tears.

“Before my daughter disappeared, I rarely cried. So I had a vast storehouse of tears inside me and I didn't even know it. I should have cried more, I should have cried ahead of time, before the sorrow that is to come.

“My wife looks as though she has aged ten years overnight. When she bends over those children who are sleeping wrapped up in newspaper, with their tears frozen to their cheeks and icicles in their hair, she looks as though her whole life has passed in a single moment. When I look around, with a poor horrified glance at the world, I feel that hell itself is spilling across the earth.

“Wherever the children are, there is a stench of putrefaction, and the walls of even slightly obscure places are covered with horrible stains and running with freezing drops that make me think of my own tears …”

“Husband, what have we done to our children? What have we done to our children?”

When Kateri opens her eyes, it is daylight and Jérémie is standing at the foot of her straw mattress, with a pale smile on his lips. Kateri immediately understands what has happened in his heart and asks in a most gentle voice: “Jérémie, where is Chamia?”

Chamia was Jérémie's little dog, a dog that ran far and near and came back tirelessly … a dog that would travel the road a hundred times to come back to you. Jérémie understands that his little dog never tired because to Chamia, the road was never the same. He also believes that, with the aid of the full moon's light, the little dog could see at a single glance the great procession of all the roads of the immense earth. Even that did not discourage the little dog—on the contrary, it only gave renewed strength to its heart and legs.

“Some day,” thinks Jérémie, “I too will be stronger than the road, stronger than exhaustion.”

“Where is Chamia?” Kateri asks again. “We never see you together any more.”

“My father killed him,” Jérémie answers in a muffled voice. “He said he was sick, that he was too old … He put a shot through his head. My father was lying! He's a liar! Chamia was only seven years old, not old for a little dog who was never sick.”

A shiver comes over Kateri, a shiver that looks like a shudder of dread.

“Kateri, I'm afraid. When my father looks at me … I am thirteen years old and I can't help wondering if he isn't figuring my age like the age of a dog! I don't understand any more. Everything he does or says, everything that bursts out of his mouth, seems cruel and dangerous.”

“We have to feed the fire,” says Kateri. “Later, we'll go collect branches and small logs. It should be a fine day.”

In the house where Tobie lives, a woman has just spoken the same words.

“It should be a fine day, a day newly washed by the moon and the
sun, a radiant day. I hear Tobie in the kitchen … I smell bread toasting … My son is good and he is brave. It is thanks to him that I can find the strength to grit my teeth and keep on going. I know that the sun will one day rise on a better day.”

On the reserve, a man crazed with rage and grief has come to knock on the door of the house belonging to Kateri's father. He is using the butt of his gun. It seems as though he wants to burst it into a million pieces. Just when it seems that it is on the verge of giving up the ghost, the door opens and there stands a man, also holding a gun.

“You bastard, give me back my son!” Jérémie's father bellows at the man standing in front of him.

“I don't know where your son is. I didn't even know he too was gone,” Kateri's father answers, pointing his gun at the father of his daughter's best friend.

“You've put Jérémie in jail in revenge for your daughter's disappearance!”

“I don't put children in jail!”

“You're just lying! I want to beat you up!”

“My sons, I have two objections,” says a voice from afar that is speaking as it comes closer. “In the first place, you are going to hurt yourselves; in the second, I don't see what good will come of your putting a bullet in your bodies.”

It is the voice of an Elder. The news has spread like wildfire through the reserve, and door after door opens as the Elders walk with solemn and deliberate steps toward the two men who are about to kill each other.

“What are we going to do with you when you are dead?” one grandmother asks, her throat trembling. “You are neither hare nor rabbit.”

“If you want to try out your guns, pick a target about the same size as you are … If you hit it, let the other guy know,” a grandfather says.

“When our children disappear, our duty is to bring them back home, offering them peace and justice, love and beauty. And no quarrelling on their account,” says another grandmother.

“I am searching for my daughter day and night …”

“I have looked for my son all morning …”

“You are looking for your children with thoughts that make your hearts grow smaller!” says another grandfather.

“We are all linked to one another and each of us must be responsible for everyone else. Like our sons and daughters on the battlefield, we, the Elders, no longer sleep nor dream. The world is drunk on blood and our souls are drowned in sadness,” moan the grandmothers.

“I have heard nothing from my granddaughter for months … She and her friends enlisted in the army to take care of the wounded and console the dying … Sometimes I see her running through the palpable darkness of the battlefield,” says the eldest of all the grandmothers.

“In the olden days, our people had a secret power to comfort their children's souls and keep off impending danger,” says a grandfather, holding his breast as if an invisible arrow had pierced him to the heart.

“We must leave it up to those who watch over us, according to the way of our tradition,” the Elders chant, bonding themselves to one another. “If we do not …”

“If we do not?” The two fathers, armed with guns, ask in a single troubled voice.

When there is silence, it is Kateri's grandmother who answers: “If we do not, then we would rather that this very old world come to an end and that everything return to nothingness.”

The band of Elders, united in a great circle, nod their heads as they listen to the old woman's answer, for she has been coming closer to the world of the Spirits for a very long time.

She continues her words: “My brothers and sisters, I have had a vision. You will certainly be amazed to hear me speak of vision in these times when the world is strangely and so rapidly darkened by so many dying in fear and bitterness. But listen to me speak of this vision—see the Great Spirit in our children.”

“If you see with a pure and humble heart, this is a great vision,” maintains another of the grandfathers, an old soldier of the First World War who left an arm and a leg on the battlefield in a blood-filled rut.

“Our children, our young people,” Kateri's grandmother goes on, “with their actions, their language, and their absences are protesting against the darkness, against the foulness, against death.”

She pronounces these last words while examining Jérémie's father down to the depths of his being … It must make his head swim so that he comes to lay his gun at the feet of one of the grandmothers … Having done that, he then asks her and all those gathered there to hear him and counsel him.

“By what evil spirit, by what demon, am I possessed?” asks Jérémie's father.

“Everyone, at least once in his life, comes in contact with a demon, an evil spirit in human form,” says Kateri's father.

“But under what circumstances did you meet him, my son?” ask the grandmothers.

“When my wife was alive, she and I often used to go picking wild berries … Last summer, on the anniversary of her death, I went back to where we used to go. Just before noon, when the sun in the sky said that it was time to make lunch for my son, I turned back. Suddenly, I sensed a presence. Up ahead, by the edge of the path, a man was sitting motionless upon a large boulder. To get back home, I had to pass in front of him … To go around him would have meant a loss of face … A terrible foreboding swept over me as I went forward … But he did not appear threatening and bore no distinguishing marks. The closer I came, the more a blank horror seized me … When he turned his head to watch me approaching with his eyes like dark chasms, I saw that his gaze came from death itself …I passed him by, avoiding looking at him. I heard his voice hissing, ‘I will have you, go on. I will have you.' As I heard this voice, horrible visions cast themselves on me and made me throw my hands in the air in my despair. I was a prisoner, I belonged to this evil spirit, to these visions of horror … I fell to the ground, unconscious, all my strength spent. When I opened my eyes, the sun was setting and the man, the evil spirit, had disappeared …”

“And what of the stone on which he sat?” a grandmother wants to know.

“Pfft
…Gone up in smoke, just like him. Since that day, I have been in pain as though I'd been hit by the cries and howls of the dead. I spend my time cursing life, this bitch of a life, and that damn dog that my son prefers to his father …”

“When you curse, you are not doing your job as a father,” the grandfathers chant as they close the circle around the two men again.

“To curse is to give up on everything,” chant the grandmothers in their turn. “We are intended to dispense blessings, to kiss our children's hair and foreheads and cheeks. To embrace each and every one of our days on this earth.”

“A father's lips, a mother's lips, are softer than the finest cloth,” Kateri's grandmother chants.

“My wife says that we never say enough to our children or enough about them,” Kateri's father murmurs as he places his gun on the snow, at his mother's feet.

“My life has been full of curses,” moans Jérémie's father. “My son has turned from his father … He does not want my suffering,” he moans even louder. “He is afraid!”

“Children, my son, are not afraid of suffering, not of the kind of suffering that is shared by all and is not lost. They are with us in this sort of suffering. But the suffering that you express, it is sterile suffering because you throw it back onto others. Your suffering,” says Kateri's grandmother, looking at him with those eyes that induce dizziness, “that suffering that you bear inside you is a sterile and hellish suffering, a suffering that demands that you be ready for anything, even murder, to put an end to it.”

“My son can't know anything about that … It's a secret … my secret,” Jérémie's father answers, with a cracked laugh like a crow.

“Children, young people, play with their fathers' secrets the way the fathers play with the ammunition for their guns,” the grandmothers chant, in their voices the light breeze of a secret dove.

Kateri's father is shaking Jérémie's father.

“My brother, give your son the gift of a living father who has triumphed over despair and his demons. Only by remaining alive can one
come to the end of his life! Come with us, my wife and me, and look for our children …”

“Our people have walked for many years along the Trail of Tears,” says a grandfather, raising his arms toward the sky. “Our lives have become lives like dead branches that, despite everything, creak under the tread of our sons and daughters who with wild eyes march across the battlefields that reach farther than rivers. At night, when I am sleeping and my thoughts take a rest from the material world and I approach the Spirit, I hear their moans. Their souls are in danger! We must gather all our strength and prepare a great ritual. The sun will travel more swiftly today as it is the Solstice …”

Kateri's father and Jérémie's father stand and object: “First we must find our children!”