Wake The Stone Man (2 page)

chapter two

It was two years before I saw her again. I'd been sick the first week of high school so I had to go to the office to register. I was waiting outside the principal's office feeling so nervous I thought I would puke, when she walked over, sat down beside me and said, “Hi,” just like that. Hadn't seen her since the day she was trying to escape from the residential school, and she looked right at me and said “Hi” like we were best friends or something.

“Nakina Wabasoon?” The principal stuck his head out of his office. “Come on in.” After a couple of minutes the principal came back out and nodded to me.

“Molly Bell? Come in.”

I went in and sat down in a chair beside Nakina. The principal was short and fat and had a wonky eye so you never knew if he was looking at you.

He went through a lot of stuff about teachers and lockers and wings and periods and I kept nodding my head like an idiot. I was nodding and smiling and wondering which one of his eyes was the real one and which was the glass one, and I didn't know what the hell he was saying.

Before we left his office he said to Nakina, “I see here on your file that you have epilepsy.”

“Yes.” She looked at me and I could tell she didn't like him saying that in front of me.

“I'm going to set up an appointment for you to meet with the school nurse. You can let her know about your medication and give her your doctor's name.”

“OK.”

“Oh, and Molly.”

“Yes?” I said.

“I want you to go with Nakina to the nurse. Since you're in the same homeroom you'll know what to do if she has a seizure.”

“OK.”

Outside the office door I turned to Nakina and said, “So, what's epilepsy?”

“You'll find out,” she said.

I was just about to tell Nakina that I didn't have a clue where we were supposed to go and she said, “Follow me.”

So I followed her down the corridor. I followed her to our lockers. I followed her to our homeroom. And after that day, I just kept following Nakina.

We were both in Mrs. Kouie's English class. English for girls in secretarial arts and cosmetology. Cosmetology — I remember getting real excited about that till I found out it had nothing to do with the theory of the universe.

I liked English. Liked books. Never told anyone but my favourite place was the Brodie Street Library. I used to sit at the table under a stained glass window with two big heads — Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. I liked sitting with Charlie and Billy.

Mrs. Kouie loved words, metaphors and allegories. She loved poets. But most of all Mrs. Kouie loved Leonard. Mrs. Kouie let us borrow her poetry books, and on our lunch break Nakina and I would find an empty classroom and read Leonard. Then we wrote the poems in chalk on the board to see the shape of the words of Leonard Cohen.

Nakina discovered
The Spice-Box of the Earth
and began to read aloud “For you I will be a Dachau Jew and lie down in lime with twisted limbs...”

“That's me,” she said.

“He's writing about Jews. Are you a Jew?”

“He's writing about the holocaust.”

“Are you a holocaust Jew?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Get out.”

“I am.”

“Get out.”

“He means Jews metaphorically.”

“You're a metaphorical Jew?”

“Don't be an ass, Molly.”

“Seriously, I don't get how you are metaphorically a Jew.”

“I'm Indian. Anishinaabe.”

“So.”

“So we're like the Jews. The Jews of Canada.”

“You're a Canadian, Indian Jew. OK, so what about the holocaust?”

“Do you even know what a holocaust is?”

“Sure, what happened to the Jews in the war.”

“No. The word. Do you know what the word means?”

I shrugged.

“Genocide. The slaughter of a race. What they did to me.”

“Come on. Who slaughtered you?”

“The residential school.”

“I don't get it. How?”

“Red kids in — white kids out. Genocide.”

I got quiet after that. Didn't know what to say. Just got up and went back to class. Couldn't concentrate on anything all afternoon.

Red kids in — white kids out. I kept thinking about the first time I saw Nakina, climbing the chain link fence trying to escape with the belt coming down on her back. Leather belt coming down to whack the Indian right out of her.

***

Nakina started coming home with me. Don't remember if I invited her or if she just came home with me one day and kept on coming. She was living with a foster family in Rosslyn Village then. The Dekkers. Dutch family who ran a milk farm. When she came home with me for dinner she usually stayed overnight, which was fine by me.

Nakina loved cards and cribbage, which I hated, so she was a hit with Mom and Dad. They would sit around the table all night drinking pots of tea and yapping away, playing cards. Dad would sit there with a cigarette on the go and Mom would have her hair up in curlers and Nakina would have a bowl of popcorn in front of her.

Me, I'd curl up on the couch with a book. Books were how I got my kicks. Mrs. Comusi across the street drank. She'd sit out on the steps in the summer with her magazines and gin, and by the time the street lights came on she'd be dancing like a rag doll across the lawn shouting at the neighbour men to come and join her. She was happy as a pig in shit and everyone knew it was the gin. But hey, what the hell. Gin did it for her, books did it for me. By high school I had a four-book-a-week habit.

It was nice having one more warm body in the family. With just me around it got boring. I bored myself. Too quiet, too shy, too scared of my own shadow. Nakina was a kick in the ass.

Our family sure needed it. When I was ten my mom got pregnant. I was excited about having another kid in the family, but when she came back from the hospital there was no baby. Nobody told me what happened. No one ever spoke about it and somehow I knew I couldn't ask. She got quiet after that and it got harder to talk to her. People kept telling my mom how sorry they were, but they forgot she wasn't the only one in the family who lost that baby.

When Nakina started coming home with me things got better. She was funny and said stuff I could never get away with. Like one time at dinner my dad was asking if she helped out on the Dekkers' farm.

“Yeah. Last week they let me help band the calves.”

“What's that?” I asked. Big mistake.

“You lay the calf down on the ground, tie its legs together, then grab the balls in one hand and this metal thing with an elastic band in the other. Then you put the elastic band over their balls and zap them right off.”

I thought that was hilarious. I mean, seriously, she said “zap their balls off” at the dinner table, which cracked me up so I kept laughing, and guess who got into trouble.

Nakina would sit at the table when mom was cooking, peeling potatoes for her and asking questions. Like she was doing research on families. On
my
family. I listened. It looked like I was reading but I was listening. Listening to my mom talk about how she could see the grain boats out the window of her bedroom at the top of Grandma's house in North Fort when she was a little girl; how they made Spitfires at the Auto Works during the war; how she met my dad at a dance at the officers club. She told Nakina about how she and my dad moved to a cabin north of Nipigon after they were married and how my dad and his friend caught sturgeon and sold caviar to a store in New York. People paid a lot of money to eat fish eggs. Gross! My mom talked about her friend Martha, who was Ojibwe and had a trapline with her family near our cabin. I don't know why my mom never told me any of this stuff. Guess I never asked.

I looked at Mom and Nakina standing together at the sink and I thought they looked more like mother and daughter than my mom and me. Nakina was the same height as Mom, and they both had long black hair pulled into a loose ponytail. And they were both — I don't know — round, and curvy. I looked down at my stick legs and flat chest. Lucky me, I inherited my father's chest.

That night when Nakina was playing cards with Dad I helped Mom wash the dishes.

“How old was I when we moved back here from the cabin?” I asked.

“Oh, you were going on five. You started school that fall.”

“Is that why you moved back?” I asked.

“Partly. Dad's business wasn't going too well, and I missed the city.”

“I remember my bed at the cabin — it was like a princess bed with a frame covered in white lace.”

“Not lace, mosquito netting.”

“It felt like a princess bed to me. ”

“When you were a baby my friend Martha showed me how to string a hammock between the beams of the cabin. It kept you up high where it was warmer, and away from the mice.”

“Did you like living there?” I asked.

“Sometimes. It was hard, but we were happy.” Her voice trailed off and she seemed to be getting sad so I didn't ask anything else.

That night when Nakina and I were in bed reading I turned to her and asked, “What are you going to do?”

“What?” She looked over the top of her book at me.

“What are you going to do?” I asked again.

“When?”

“When you get out of here?”

“Out of where?” she said.

“Here.”

“This room?” she said.

“No, idiot.”

“Out of where?”

“Fort McKay.”

“Trying to get rid of me?”

“Come on. Seriously.” I put down my book on the French Impressionists and looked across at Nakina.

“Dunno. Haven't thought about it,” she said.

“Want to know where I'm going?”

“No.”

“Paris. I'm going to go to the Moulin Rouge, where Toulouse-Lautrec hung out, and to the Louvre to see the Cezannes.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. And I'm going to live in an attic in the Latin Quarter with my French lover and paint all day.”

“Very funny.”

“I'm serious,” I said.

“What's the point of making plans. You'll never get out of Fort McKay.”

“I will.”

“You won't.”

“I will.”

“You never will.”

“Shut up.” I closed my book.

“Hey Nakina.”

“Yeah.”

“You know that first day I saw you.”

“In the principal's office?”

“No, that day you were trying to get over the fence at the residential school.”

“Yeah.”

“Where were you going?”

“Home,” she said.

“Where's home?”

“Dunno.”

“Oh.” I put my book down and turned off the light. “Hey Nakina.”

“What.”

“Well, if you didn't know where home was…”

“Yeah?”

“Well, how were you going to find it?”

“God, Molly.”

“No, really. What were you going to do when you hit the ground on the other side of the fence?”

Nakina rolled over and sat up on one arm. “Find the tracks.”

“The tracks?” I asked.

“Yeah. Tracks.”

“What tracks?”

“Train tracks, genius.”

“Fuck off!” I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep but I couldn't stop thinking. “Hey Nakina?”

“What?”

“Why were you going to find the train tracks?”

“Because that's all I remember. A train.”

“What train?”

“I remember a train that came through the bush stealing kids. Taking us away.”

“Away where?'

“Here, I guess.”

“And that's why you were going to find the tracks?”

“Yeah.”

“But I still don't get it. How would that help you get home?”

“Tracks run both ways.”

“Oh. Hey Nakina?”

“What.”

“Good thinking.”

***

I was sitting on the front steps with Nakina playing cat's cradle. She held her hands up in front of her and I looped a long circle of string in and out of her fingers to make a star shape. It was cold. Winter was in the air and the grass crunched when you walked on it.