As Long as the Rivers Flow (10 page)

At that moment, Martha decided that she would make Toronto her future home.

But as the night wore on, Russell, who had not paid any attention to Martha during the years they had known each other on the reserve and at the school, seemed to notice her for the first time.

“Hey,” he said, twisting off the top of a bottle of gin and holding it out to her. “Why dontcha take a little swig. It’ll cheer you up.”

Martha had taken the occasional drink since she had started hanging out with the other survivors, but she had confined herself to wine and had not enjoyed the taste. She took the bottle of hard liquor and held it in her hands, uncertain whether to accept Russell’s invitation. Seeing her hesitate, he egged her on.

“Go on,” he said. “It won’t kill you. We’re all drinking. Whatsamatter? All of a sudden you’re better’n the rest of us?”

Martha tipped the bottle back and took a deep swallow. Russell was good-looking and someone, unlike herself, who had not been afraid to stand up to the nuns.

Gasping and choking, her throat on fire, she wanted to throw up but a deep, warm and exhilarating feeling such as she had never before experienced started in her stomach and mounted to her head, driving away her anxieties, making her deliriously happy and transforming the world around her into a place where everyone was her friend.

“Good, that was really good,” she stammered.

“See, I told you,” he said. “If one drink can make you feel like that, two’ll make you feel even better.”

Smiling goofily, Martha seized the bottle and took an even longer drink. This time, she became dizzy and her head began to spin. Finding it hard to focus and to stand, she stumbled and fell to the ground.

Russell helped her to her feet, and led her away. “I know a quiet place not far from here where we can have some fun in peace,” he said.

The two lurched along in the dark, hand in hand, laughing, talking and drinking until they came to a little moss-covered moonlit clearing. Russell drew Martha to him and kissed her and told her that he loved her, had always loved her and wanted her to be his girlfriend. He dropped to his knees drawing her down beside him. Martha reached over and loosened his belt and he rolled to one side and removed his clothes. He then pulled her down backwards on top of him and kissed her, repeating again and again that he loved her, that she was beautiful and that he wanted her to be his girlfriend.

But while Martha moaned with pleasure, she grew irritated when Russell continued to insist that he loved her. Through the
alcoholic fog that befuddled her mind, she heard herself telling him, “You don’t mean it. You’re just like Father Antoine saying nice things to me to get your way.”

That was the last thing she remembered before waking up alone early the next morning, naked, covered in mosquito and blackfly bites, with the sun in her eyes and a throbbing headache.

When Martha discovered she was pregnant, she told Russell. To her surprise, he was happy. “That’s great news,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to have my own family. Let’s get married and raise the kid together.”

For Martha, however, marriage was out of the question since she suspected their lovemaking had meant no more to him than it had to her. She knew, however, that many of the girls who returned home from residential school were becoming pregnant and moving in with the fathers of their babies as unwed mothers. She decided to do the same thing. She would have to put her plans to leave for Toronto on hold until after she had the baby, but at least she would be able to get out of her mother’s house.

She thus told Russell that although not ready for marriage, she would live with him on condition he found them a house. The band council, however, had no funds to provide accommodation to anyone, let alone young couples, who were expected to move into the cabins of their parents and live with them until they built their own log homes. Most of the young people returning from residential school were prepared to do just that, even if it meant a dozen or more men, women and children had to squeeze into homes suited to families of four or five.

Russell, however, managed to obtain possession of the house of a distant relation, an old bachelor, who had recently died. In fact, their new home was just a one-room tarpaper shack. On one side of
the room along a wall was an ancient cast iron bed with sagging springs and a filthy mouse-hole-riddled, yellow-stained mattress that smelled of mildew and urine. In the middle of the room, a makeshift stove cut out of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum squatted on legs of empty bean cans, and a column of rusty stovepipes reached up from an opening on the top to the exposed roof, emerging on the other side as a rudimentary chimney. A battered table made of rough lumber with a handmade chair pushed up against it leaned against another wall. A jumble of mouldy, picked-over men’s clothing had been tossed into one corner, and in another was a dipper and an empty galvanized steel pail used to carry water from the lake.

The only other piece of furniture in the room was a tattered couch that reeked of old, unwashed men and their billy-goat smell. There were mouse droppings on the mattress, table, chair and couch, and dirt and debris littered the floor. The front door was off its hinges, and water-stained pieces of cardboard covered windowpanes broken by children with nothing better to do. Strategically placed throughout the house were empty lard buckets to catch the water that dripped through holes in the tarpaper roof when it rained.

The new couple made no effort to clean up the shack and to find more furniture. Their friends did not care. The gang of survivors now dropped by every day, sitting on the floor and talking, laughing and arguing late into the night. As before, they celebrated welfare days with bootleg wine and liquor. When they ran out of money, they made a potent homebrew from dry raisins, yeast, water and sugar and kept on drinking.

Martha’s mother was overjoyed that her daughter was expecting but shocked at the behaviour of her daughter.

“This is no way to live,” she said, when she went to the shack
one morning. “There’s a baby on the way. Grow up. I didn’t raise you to live like a pig.”

“But you didn’t raise me,” Martha said. “Remember? You sent me away when I was little and let the nuns do the job. So why don’t you leave me alone? I know what I want. I’ve got more in common with the kids who were with me at that school than with you!”

After her mother left, Martha celebrated by filling a glass with homebrew and drinking to freedom and to the revenge she was exacting against her mother. But her angry words masked another truth. While resigned to having the baby, she did not want it, afraid to bring into the world someone whose lot in life would probably be as miserable as hers. Besides, she had no idea how a child should be raised, and had not the slightest wish to learn.

Perhaps unconsciously passing a message of rejection to her unborn baby, she abused her body by drinking heavily for a month before it was born and was drunk during its delivery. When she sobered up, however, and saw her baby, a boy, for the first time, her maternal instincts kicked in, and she was overjoyed, convinced that her child was absolutely the most beautiful, the most intelligent and the most lovable infant that had ever existed.

That opinion was naturally enough shared by her mother who took pride in assuming the role of Nokomis, or grandmother, to the little one. The two women, united in their common love for the little boy, put their differences aside, at least for a while, and Martha left Russell to move back home to occupy her old room. Her mother took out of storage the
tikinagan
that Martha had used when she was a baby, and gave it to her daughter for the baby. Shuffling around her cabin, she fussed over Martha and took great pride in her grandchild.

Martha liked being spoiled and had big plans for her baby. His name, she decided, would be Spider, after a prominent web-shaped birthmark on his forehead. He would have an easier life, she was
determined, than she had had. Thankfully, the last residential school in the province had just closed its doors for good, and Spider would not face the prospect of being torn from her at the age of six to be raised by white people in an institution devoid of love.

Several months later, however, after a fierce quarrel that started when Martha’s mother made a disparaging comment on the quality of her daughter’s housekeeping that escalated into a full-blown verbal battle in which both women dredged up past real and imaginary wrongs, Martha strapped Spider into the
tikinagan
and returned in a huff with him to the shack. Russell had prepared the way by coming every day to her mother’s home to plead that she come back to him. He loved her, and parents should live together, he said. Their friends were wondering if she thought she was better than they were. And Martha, even if she would not admit it, was now in love with him.

Her broken-hearted mother went to the shack in a final attempt to reason with her.

“You’re making a big mistake. If your father was still alive, he’d tell you the same thing. Just think of the well-being of Spider. Your roof leaks, your house is dirty, full of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts and the windows are broken. All the drunks and good-for-nothings hang out here. You can’t raise a child in such conditions.”

“Look who’s talking,” said Martha. “There you go preaching to me about how to be a good mother, and yet you sent me away at the age of six to that school. You wouldn’t even believe me when I told you I was being molested. You’re a hypocrite and I hate hypocrites. Now go away and leave me alone!”

Martha’s mother was only in her early forties but like many Native people of her generation who had spent years on the land, looked much older, with a deeply lined face and sunken mouth filled with the blackened stumps of diseased teeth. When her daughter
unleashed her torrent of recriminations, she bowed her head and bit her lip.

Once Martha had finished, she tried to make amends. “I can’t deny I let you down and wasn’t there when you needed me. I’m also bad tempered and hurt your feelings. But I can help you with Spider now. I’m his Nokomis and I love my little grandson. Can’t you let bygones be bygones and forgive me?”

Martha slammed the door in her face

Martha and Russell reverted to their old ways, welcoming their friends back to their shack and drinking heavily. When she was sober, Martha made an effort to feed Spider, to play with him and to keep him clean. More often than not, she drank too much and forgot he was even there. Other unwed mothers moved in with their babies and they, like Martha, let their infants go hungry and left them in soiled clothing while they drank, smoked and partied.

One day, officials of the Ontario Children’s Aid Society, responsible for the welfare of children in Canada’s most populous province, arrived on their doorstep.

“We regret,” they said after inspecting the living conditions of the babies, “but the infants in this house are being neglected. It is in their interest that we take them away and put them up for adoption to couples in Canada and the United States who will give them the love and care they deserve. The new mothers and fathers will not be told of the origins of the children and the children will never know the names of their biological parents. To protect them, you will never be told where they are being placed, and you will never see them again. Our decision is final and you have no recourse under the law.”

The officials took the babies, including Spider, and departed.

I
N SHOCK OVER THE REMOVAL OF
S
PIDER
, Martha did not fully grasp the extent of her loss for some time. At first, she blamed white people in positions of authority for trying to force her and the mothers of the other children taken away by the Children’s Aid Society to conform to the standards of the outside world. Then the full weight of what had happened hit her. How could she live without her little Spider? How would he be able to cope without his mother? She could not bear the thought she would never see her baby again.

To make it worse, she knew deep down inside that her mother and the Children’s Aid Society had been right. She should have been a better mother. She had not taken care of Spider’s basic needs and had been a drunk. Her friends lived aimless lives and neglected their kids. She deserved what she got. However, perhaps all was not lost.

“I’ve decided to quit drinking,” she told Russell. “Why don’t you do the same and we head off to Toronto and make a new life for ourselves. There’s no future here. We could look for Spider. Maybe
we could get him back if we show Children’s Aid we’ve cleaned up our act.”

“I didn’t know you believed all that stuff they fed us at school about the wonderful life we would have if only we lived like white people,” he said. “You stop drinking and take off if you want. I like it here and am not going nowhere.”

“I wouldn’t leave without you,” was Martha’s answer. “I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to change your mind.”

Russell’s answer was to take the
tikinagum
and throw it out the door, shoving Martha out after it.

“Now go home to your mother if you know what’s good for you.”

He returned to drink and to brood sullenly as the other couples who had lost their children to the Children’s Aid Society partied. Several hours later, by now blind drunk and belligerent, he ordered everyone out, angrily telling his guests not to come back. He then seized an axe and in a wild fury chopped great chunks of wood out of the walls and broke up the furniture. Hurling the axe to one side, he kicked over the stove, stomped on the stovepipes and smashed with his fists the shack’s few remaining unbroken windows. His rage spent, he settled down on the floor, his back against the wall, a bucket of homebrew and a dipper beside him, and drank until he passed out.

When he came to and saw Martha standing in front of him, he lurched to his feet, knocked her down and kicked her repeatedly in the ribs, howling drunkenly, “I warned you. I warned you. I warned you not to come back.” He then took a gallon of coal oil, sloshed it on the floor, set it alight, and as Martha crawled out the door of the burning shack, slipped away into the bush.