A Quality of Light (16 page)

I couldn’t shake the image of that barn cat and as I entered my home-room class, I thought I saw it on the faces of some of the students. Ralphie Wendt grinned at me in recognition. We’d become almost friends in the final three years at Mildmay, joined by the bonds of sport and competition. He’d grown stocky and thick with the muscle of his father, and he admired the verve I’d begun to show in sports. Along with Ralphie were Victor Ringle, Teddy Hohnstein, Vera Dietz and Nancy Hossfeld. Their proximity helped ease the
lost feeling I had in my belly just then. I nodded their way, heading towards an empty desk near the middle of the room.

“Can’t sit there,” said a red-haired boy with huge buck teeth.

I shrugged and headed to another desk closer to the back. As I approached, a tall blond in coveralls and sneakers slid over and sat in it with his hands on the desktop, fingers interlocked. He stared straight ahead, saying nothing. When I turned to the desk he’d just vacated, he slid back across in front of me and took the seat again.

“Mine,” he said.

We repeated this little dance a few time. The silence in the room was thick as I stood there trying to believe it was all just some initiation ritual.

“You can’t have both,” I said.

He stood up suddenly. He was four inches taller than me, heavier, with a chiseled, rough-hewn look about him. He stared at me and I was reminded again of the cat in the barn.

“I can have whatever I want. Wanna try and take it?
Injun.”

As I stepped away I saw Ralphie, eyes down, shaking his head sadly. The blond gave an exaggerated thumbs-up to the buck-toothed redhead and snickered. I took a seat at the back of the room, but as I sat the students around me rose silently and crossed the room to take other seats. Oppressive silence stretched all around us until our home-room teacher, Mr. Tooke, entered and began calling the role. The redhead’s name was Allen Begg, the blond boy was Chris Hollingshead. When I responded to my name with a polite “Present, sir,” they both turned and stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“Kane?” the redhead said. Your name is
Kane?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Nothin’,” Chris said. “We just figured it’d be … Shits in the Woods or something like that.” Chris Hollingshead gushed to a roll of laughter across the room.

Mr. Tooke explained the daily procedures of home room, but I barely heard any of it. When we were sent out to find our way to the first class of the day, I walked the hallway alone. Ralphie, Victor and Teddy scurried down the hall as quickly as mice in flight. I felt,
for the first time, a thick melancholic ache like homesickness, the kind you get on rainy afternoons a thousand miles away from those you love.

I ran the gauntlet again at lunch time. As we passed to and from our lockers, the crowd along the window ledges cat-called, whistled and whined words like wagon burner, spear chucker, squaw hopper, savage and itchy-bum. I held my head down, hoping to pass by invisibly. When we cleared the area and the hooting and hollering died down behind us, John laughed.

“Rednecks. I thought I left rednecks behind in Toronto. I don’t believe it.”

“What’s a redneck?” I asked, grateful for a friend to talk to.

“They
are,” he said, hooking a thumb back over his shoulder. “A redneck is someone who hates anyone or anything that’s different than them. They’re stupid.”

“I don’t think they hate me. They don’t even know me.”

“They don’t have to
know
you. They just have to see you’re different.”

“Different?”

“Yeah. You’re Indian, they’re white.”

“So?”

“
So?
That’s all they need.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I told you … they’re stupid.”

“Maybe if I just talk to them.”

“Yeah, right. Didn’t you hear all that? Think they wanna talk to you? They’d just shit on you all over again. Worse, even.”

“Because they think I’m an Indian?”

“Because you
are
an Indian.”

“But I’m not! You know that.”

“You are, Josh, you are. You’re gonna have to face that. In your house, on the farm, with your parents, in Mildmay, maybe you think you’re not, but you are. Out
here
you
are!”

The afternoon had phys ed, biology and math, so Johnny and I stuck together for the rest of that day. Now and then, we’d pass clumps of students slouched against lockers or sitting in the
hallways, and the silence would descend until we walked by. Johnny would stare ahead of us, tight-lipped and quiet, but I looked right at them. I looked to see if there were traces of that barn cat in their eyes or perhaps, even, a break in the iciness, a mute sign of welcome, or just a simple neutrality. I became aware that mine was the only brown face in the entire school.

I realized that even in Mildmay Public School the case had been the same. I just hadn’t noticed it because I’d always been a part of a small, insulated world. Any differences had simply melded into the general background — I was accepted as the farmer and the Kane I believed myself to be. This new reception was like one of those bitter winter days when the wind cuts through the warmest of clothing, settling into the bones like a weight. I stood in the hallways of Walkerton Secondary School that day feeling as obvious and alone as a fencepost in a field of snow.

Y
ou lacked vision, that’s all. If Indians and Christians have any common ground, it’s visions. Your tradition has the burning bush, Ezekiel’s wheel, the fiery chariot that comes down to take Elijah to heaven. Indians have the white buffalo, Black Elk’s vision and the intimate kind that come from a vision quest. The difference is that Indians promote the seeing of visions while the church wants to keep it a part of the Bible. If you’d grown up in an Indian environment, you’d have known about vision, maybe even had one by the time you were fourteen. Vision gives you a sense of yourself, a sense of the universe and your place in it, your direction, your focus, your role. Instead, you walked into Walkerton with rural blinders on. I spent my first ten years in Toronto where I saw what the world was really like. Sure, the laid-back atmosphere of a place like Mildmay can help you get over that, maybe even forget some of it, but the world slaps you in the face sometimes and you wake up. You got slapped hard for the first time that fall. But you didn’t need to.

I love your parents, Josh. If mine had been a fraction as devoted as
yours, maybe things would have been different for me. But once you step into the adult world and realize you have to react to everything one way or another, then you start to realize that devotion has a price. The price is vulnerability. You walk into the world used to protection and shelter, the idea that you’re always going to have that cocoon around you. No one’s ever explained to you that there are spiteful, hateful, mean and vicious people out there. No one’s ever told you that the world, for the most part, categorizes on a skin-first basis; all your niceties, all your manners, all your faith and belief, all your spiritual spit and polish doesn’t add up to a hill of beans in their eyes. You’re just an Indian, a nigger, a chink, a rag-head, a nip or a Paki.

But the people that have learned all along how it feels to live within that skin, all the things their skin encloses, all the truths, the strengths, the uniqueness, the histories, philosophies, those are the people who can transcend the judgments. They have a vision of themselves and their people. Your parents, Josh, never let you find a vision of yourself that was real. They were so devoted to you, so set on the principle of teaching you the good Christian way, the Kane way, they never allowed you to find the Indian in you. They never allowed you the knowledge of the world as it really is, the way it can slice into you like it did that first day in Walkerton. They let you walk into a hostile environment unarmed. You walked in there without a vision of yourself or a vision of the world. All you had was love, faith and belief. Now that’s good for most things but without vision and action based on that vision, love, faith and belief are just butter in the hot skillet of living.

You were unarmed. You didn’t even know what a redneck was. You didn’t have one thing to fall back on when the name-calling and the hatred came up in your face. You didn’t have any cultural pride, any heritage, any tradition, any knowledge of Indian things at all except for the hokey shit we got in textbooks. Pocahontas and the First Thanksgiving hardly qualify as ammunition. And that’s dangerous. How the hell is a person supposed to defend their self when they don’t know what that self is, what it represents or how it’s sustained, defined and perpetuated?

That’s how assimilation starts, Josh. They take everything away and never allow you access to the real information about yourself or your people, your history, your heritage, your spiritual legacy, your language.
When the attack starts you’re so removed from yourself, a part of you starts to believe it all. Pretty soon you’re willing to do anything to fit in, to appear to be a
part of
instead of
apart from,
to shut the shouting off so you can live with some semblance of peace. The more you adopt the outside ways, the more you disappear because there’s nothing left to chain you to yourself, your real self. You’d do anything to shut off the shouting, but by the time it dies down around you, the price tag appears and you realize that it’s going to take forever for the yelling to go down
inside yourself.

How do I know all this? Look at my life. I was never given a history or a heritage either. I guess the truth is that you don’t have to be an Indian to be disinherited. The only difference between you and me is that I was white and never had to enter a room skin first.

I
have always loved photographs. The way they bring time and place and emotion into your hands like an offering. The way they capture the essence of their living subjects, making them alive again in intimate recollections, the little things you put aside as minor until you see them again. The way the hair may have tufted atop the curl of ear, or the tiny wrinkles on a young girl’s brow, the half-worried look like yearning around the eyes, or the way the mouth behaved in unrestrained jubilance. They sit in the shallow cup of your palm pulsing with history, the hushed notes of a life, a scale, measured, exact and timeless. I have always looked a photographs as though I could reinhabit the places they showed, like I could re-enter my life at certain junctures and recall the thought that passed through my brain at the moment the shutter closed, or that I could be present at the moments of my history that existed before I did, step into the anonymous lives of people like my grandparents and feel the veined and furrowed backs of hands I have always admired but never known.

I sat in the living room the evening of that first day at
Walkerton Secondary thumbing through the Kane family album like I’d done countless times before. I saw the passage of generational time in the photos of great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, the great spawn of Kane family history. I saw the ruddy, weathered look of farmers, their wives and children. I saw the carbon-copy features passed on unmistakably down the line of years. I saw the faces, the skin, the color, white — until mine. Suddenly sepia.

The darkening like an eclipse across the face of a planet.

As I leafed through fourteen years I saw myself for the first time as a grafting on the family tree. My father reading
The Farmers’ Almanac
in his chair beside the radio and my mother, lips moving slightly, perusing Catherine Marshall’s
A Man Called Peter
beside the window seemed to me as pale and luminous as we imagine ghosts to be, their whiteness stark and startling. I stared at the flesh of my arm, back up at them, down to my skin again and back up at them, the contrast mesmerizing, suddenly compelling, the word
Indian
and the word
Kane
voicing themselves in whispers with each shift of focus.

“What are you looking at, son?” my mother asked.