Wake The Stone Man (4 page)

chapter four

I stepped off the curb and stood in the middle of First Avenue holding my brownie camera in front of my face. “Nakina!”

“What?”

“I said watch for cars.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm trying to take a freakin photo and I don't want to get run over.”

I was creating my masterpiece. It was 4 p.m. on March 25, 1968
, and I was capturing Fort McKay for posterity. Well, maybe not posterity — I just wanted to freeze-frame what I was looking at right there the way it was. No smoke and mirrors, just the main street of the town in the raw. I shot in black and white and tried to keep everything simple. I took a photo of the clock in the Empire tower and the basket man pushing a baby carriage full of wicker baskets in front of the hardware store. I took a photo of Mary Christmas.

I never knew what her real name was, but everyone called her Mary Christmas because she wore these red and green ribbons in her hair. She was pretty festive with her make-up too. She painted bright red circles on her cheeks and when she put on her ruby red lipstick she drew outside the lines. She was old and wore a ratty fur coat that almost touched the ground. She was always wandering up and down the street talking to people or just talking away to herself. Seemed happy. Everybody knew her.

The story was she came over from the Ukraine when she was just a kid, and she was supposed to marry some guy who was waiting for her in Canada. It was all arranged like that back then. Problem was, when she got to the dock in Fort McKay — no husband. No one ever showed up to get her. That was in about nineteen twenty-something, and this poor kid was standing on the dock with her Ukrainian bride's ribbons in her hair going nuts and screaming in Ukrainian because she didn't speak any English. No one knew what to do with her, so they took her to the nuthouse. No kidding. She stayed there most of her life too. Eventually some Ukrainian folks helped her find a place to stay — but by then she was old. Well anyway, that's the story.

I took the photos in black and white and planned to paint them like that too. I was thinking about that movie
Night and Fog
and how it was mostly black and white, so when there was anything in colour you knew it was important. For the photo of Mary Christmas, when I painted her I would paint her lips and cheeks red.

I took a photo of the Odeon Theatre.
Fahrenheit 451
was playing. It was directed by Francis Truffaut but because some of the lights on the marquee were burned out it said “directed by –ranci-T---f-a-t” Ha. I took a photo of the brass bells in the steeple of Knox United Church, and I took a photo of the park across from the church with the old chestnut tree.

I took a whole series of photos of the Lorna Doone Tea Room. The Doone from the inside, the Doone from the outside, the Doone dog — classic. Nakina was with me that day — a rare event that spring. I took a shot of Nakina inside the Doone, and then I went outside when she was eating and took a shot of her through the window. The lights of the neon sign made her face green.

She didn't know I was taking the picture. She was looking straight ahead and had this faraway look on her face. Nakina always had attitude — always ready with a smart-ass remark or a joke, but that day I saw something different. That day she looked serious — maybe angry. When I went back in she was drinking a Coke and talking to the waitress, who bounced her cig between her lips as she talked. Talent.

A Coke and a smoke at the Doone. I took that shot too and I thought I would paint the lit end of the cigarette red.

“So what are you going to do with the photos?” Nakina asked.

“I told you.”

“Paint them?”

“Yeah.”

“So why do you have to paint them when you have the photos.”

“Come on Nakina.”

“Seriously. Seems like a waste of time if you already have the photos.”

“I need the photos to remember the details when I … never mind.”

“So, am I getting an invitation to the opening night?” she asked.

“No.” I was getting angry with Nakina but I didn't really know why. I felt she was making fun of me because I was pretending to be an artist. And she was right. I was just messing around. I didn't know what I was doing.

“So what
are
you going to call your big show?” She asked.

“I don't know.”

“No, really.”

“Piss off!”

“Piss off. Nice. That'll look good on the poster.”

“Very funny.”

“Seriously, what will you call it?”

I thought for a few minutes, “Sixty-eight. Get it, from nineteen sixty-eight — the year I took the photos.”

“Don't call it that.”

“Why?”

“Just don't, OK.”

I took another bite of my burger. “What's wrong with sixty-eight?”

“Leave it, Molly.” I looked over at Nakina and could see she was getting upset.

“What's your problem?”

She was silent for a few minutes, head down looking at her plate, then she quietly said, “That was my number.”

“What number?”

“In the residential school. They gave us numbers. Not names — just numbers. I was sixty-eight.”

***

That summer Nakina came with us to our camp at Loon Lake. The camp was a couple of hours out of town on the west side of the lake. There were a lot of camps on East Loon but ours was on the far end with bush on either side. We drove to the end of the Loon Road and hauled all our food and supplies about ten minutes down a narrow path. My grandpa built the camp in 1904, and in those days, before the highway went in, they came out to the camp on the train.

Nakina and I slept in the shed near the tracks and every night at 11:30, when the Canadian rolled past, we'd sit up and watch the lights of the passenger cars flicker by.

“I'm going on that train some day.” I was leaning on the windowsill trying to see the people in the cars.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. Out of here. Think about it, you go to bed in Ontario and wake up in Manitoba or Quebec.”

“And then what?”

“I don't know. It would be different that's all. Do you think that's the one?”

“What one?”

“The train in your dream. The train that brought you here.”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

***

Every day at the lake that summer was perfect. In the morning after breakfast we would put on our bathing suits and head down to the dock. We swam and rowed around in the little rowboat called the Little Tink that my dad built for my mom. Some days we walked down the train tracks to East Loon to get candy from Hans Hogan's store, and on the walk back we'd pick pails of wild strawberries that Mom made into jam. We swam until we had elephant skin and fished off the dock using worms we found under the rocks.

One day Dad and I were splitting wood and Nakina asked if she could help. Dad showed her how to set the piece of wood she was going to split on the chopping block and stand with her feet apart. He showed her how to set the blade of the axe where she was going to make her cut and to check for knots, which could be hard to split. He showed her how to raise the axe slowly over her head, sliding one hand further along the handle and bringing it down in one fast smooth move onto the centre of the wood. She messed up a bit at first but once she got the hang of it she was pretty good.

Before supper Mom and Dad came down to the lake for a swim, and while they sat on the dock drying off we listened to them talk. Mom said when she was a kid they'd sit on the dock and listen to music from Captain Nobel's camp. He was famous. Invented some kind of gas mask I think and he had this grand piano at his camp. Don't know how it got there — maybe they took it over on a boat. Mom said sometimes his buddy Robert Flaherty visited him. Flaherty was the very first documentary filmmaker. He went up to the Arctic and shot the film
Nanook of the North
. Flaherty played violin and Captain Nobel played piano, and all the folks on the lake would sit on their docks under the moonlight listening to their music.

Sometimes after supper Dad built a bonfire, and we roasted marshmallows and watched fireflies flit like Christmas lights in the trees. If it was raining we stayed inside and Dad would put a good fire in the fireplace. Mom and Dad and Nakina played board games or cribbage, and I sat by the fire and read. I'd brought a pile of art books with me from the library. It was the best summer. Until the end.

It was our last day at camp and Nakina and I had been rowing along the shoreline in the Little Tink. We'd rowed across to East Loon because I wanted to show Nakina where Sheila Burnford lived.

“Look, there she is on her dock.”

“So who is she?” Nakina asked.

“A writer. Did you ever read
The Incredible Journey
?”

“No.”

“I'll lend you my copy. It's about two dogs and a cat that get separated from their owners and they cross the country to find their way home.”

“And that's her?”

“Yeah.” I rowed a bit closer to the dock and we could see an older woman sitting in a chair on the dock reading.

“They made a movie of it,” I said.

“Of what?”

“
The Incredible Journey.
It was a movie.”

Nakina was dragging her hand in the water making patterns as I rowed. I put down the oars and waved to Mrs. Burnford. She waved back.

I rowed to the far end of the lake, past the girls' camp, and then along the West Loon shore. I loved the squeaking sound the oars made in the oarlocks when I raised the paddles. We were passing a neighbour's dock and Nakina and I were talking about what we were going to do when we got back to town. She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and when I looked up I saw she had that spacey look she got just before a seizure.

“Nakina?”

She didn't answer, so I turned the boat around and started rowing towards the closest dock, but it was too late. First she went stiff, then she started thrashing around, and before I could grab her she fell out of the boat. Mr. Ellis and his son were in front of their camp, and they both jumped in the lake and swam out to us. Mr. Ellis got Nakina's head above water but she was kicking and thrashing so hard I thought she'd take him under with her. It took two of them to get her to their dock and by that time a crowd had gathered. They laid her on the grass in front of their camp and someone ran down to the far end of the lake to get my mom and dad.

Dad drove Nakina back to our camp and put her on the couch. I sat by the fireplace watching her sleep, and I could see Mom and Dad talking outside on the dock. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I knew it wasn't good.

Nakina woke up early in the afternoon and had a big lunch, and even though we weren't supposed to go home until the next day, Mom and Dad closed the camp and we headed into town that night.

***

When it came to clothes Nakina and I were like real sisters — ready to rip each other's throats out. Nakina was big on clothes. I wasn't. The great divide. She went in for lipstick and miniskirts and backcombed hair, and I went for no make-up, patched jeans and bare feet.

“God Molly, throw this blouse out.”

“You don't have to wear it.”

“I wouldn't wear it; I'm not a lumberjack.”

“Lumberjack blouse. Good one,” I said.

“Seriously, you could make an effort. It wouldn't kill you.”

“What for?”

“To look good,” she said.

“For who?”

“For anyone.”

“Shut up.”

“No, you shut up.”

“I hate your face pretty much.”

“No, I hate your face pretty much.”

We always ended our arguments with the Fort McKay official greeting “I hate your face pretty much.” It meant a lot of things, like “Hi” or “See you later” or “Go to hell.” It was versatile.

It was OK for Nakina to talk about clothes. She looked good in everything. She had it all — straight black hair she didn't have to iron every night. Dark skin — no blotchy freckles. She had high cheekbones, a long narrow face and a thin straight nose that made her look real classy. She was built too and she knew it.

Jeans were good enough for me. They hid my skinny legs and boney knees and the lumberjack shirt hid my flat chest. Each to her own.

One day after school we were in Portland's Ladies Wear, the snootiest store in town, and Nakina wanted to try on a fur coat. A fur coat, for christ's sake. I just had to get out of there. The owner, Mr. Portland, was about to throw us out because of that whole unwritten law about not being allowed in the store if you're an Indian. He was doing that crossed arms thing, and Nakina waltzed in and said “I'd like to try…” She stopped speaking and put her head down for a moment, then looked up and said, “try on this fur coat please.”