As Long as the Rivers Flow (23 page)

From across the water came the cry of a loon—a strange and haunting sound unlike anything he could have imagined in his years in the city—rising and fading, rising and fading. Shortly thereafter came an answering song, and another and another.

“Do as the river tells you,” they seemed to be saying. “We are the voices of your ancestors and know what is best for you.”

After the rain ended and the mist lifted, revealing a world lush and washed clean of impurities, he pushed the canoe into the water, climbed aboard and let the current take charge again, confident there was now some purpose to his journey. For the first time since running away from home to join the punks, his body was free of alcohol.

All creation—the rushing water, birdsong, a piece of birchbark floating by, the buzzing of a mosquito, the cry of a raven and the hoofmarks of a large animal on the shore—was now infused with an unexpected and beautiful vitality. Even the swamps were no longer sinister quagmires, but were floating gardens covered in white- and purple-flowered water lilies. Filled with exaltation, he felt for the first time connected to his Native roots and to the world as it had existed before the coming of the white man.

Later that morning, off in the distance, he saw smoke rising from a campfire, a tent, and an outboard motorboat pulled up on a large, smooth shelf of rock along the shore. When he approached, an old couple came out of the tent and waved for him to join them.

“My name’s Spider,” he said after he landed. “The current took me down the rapids from Cat Lake a week or ten days ago and it’s too hard to paddle back.”

If the elders were surprised at seeing someone suddenly appearing at their camp with no food supplies, no extra clothing and no tent, they were too polite to let it show.

“Gdi nesh naabem nah?”
asked the wife, asking him if he spoke her language.

“I’m sorry,” said Spider. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. I was adopted out when I was a baby and never learned my language. But I’m from the reserve. My mother tracked me down in Toronto and brought me back a few weeks ago. I’ve had a tough time on the river but I’ve also learned a lot.”

“Let’s have something to eat before we get into all that,” she said. “You look like you’re starved.” It took no more than thirty minutes for the meal of bannock and fried pike to be prepared and eaten. Afterwards, the husband handed Spider a tin mug of hot sweetened tea and asked him the name of his family. When told that Martha Whiteduck was his mother and Raven his sister, the old couple were pleased.

“Your grandparents,” the old man told him, “were wonderful people and good friends. And of course we know your mother, Martha, and your sister, Raven. We were sad when the Children’s Aid took you away so many years ago. You must have had a bad time down there in the big city with all those white people.”

When Spider made no reply, the old woman, who was the more
direct of the two, asked him, “Now tell us why you’re really here, and how you survived all those days with no food?”

“The river saved me,” said Spider. “It took me away from the community when I had too much to drink and was thinking of killing myself. It talked to me, telling me not to give up when I thought I wouldn’t survive.”

When the old couple exchanged knowing looks, Spider thought they were making fun of him. “I know it sounds strange, but I’m not joking. Maybe I was delirious but something or somebody saved my life.”

“We weren’t laughing at you,” said the old man. “The white man and many of the people back at the reserve might say you were just imagining things, but we believe you. Your grandparents would have believed you. We think the river brought you to us for a reason.”

A
S TIME WENT BY AND THERE WAS NO WORD
from Spider, Martha became frantic.

“He probably doesn’t know how to swim and he’s fallen out of the canoe and drowned,” she told Raven. “Or maybe he’s hurt and is lying all by himself on some lonely beach. Or maybe he’s been attacked by bears or wolves. Whatever! If only I could be at his side when he needs me!”

“I don’t think he does,” said Raven. “He’s big enough to take care of himself. Besides, isn’t it a little late to start worrying about him?”

More diplomatically, Joshua made the same point when Martha went to him for help. “He hasn’t been gone long. It’s summer and there are people from the community camping along the river. Someone will take him in.”

Martha was deeply wounded. The only people she could turn to for help were not taking her concerns seriously and it became too much for her to bear. One morning, after spending the first half of the night tossing restlessly on her bed and the second half in a deep
and dreamless sleep, she woke as usual at seven o’clock, but with tears in her eyes and the taste of despair in her mouth. It was back—the whiff of dread, the overwhelming longing for oblivion—the depression she had suffered through some thirty years ago when she had returned home from residential school was back.

This time she was not going to let it torture her like it did when she was a sixteen-year-old. But when she tried to get up, feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred spread through her body like a poison, making her fearful of the day ahead. Bursting into gut-wrenching sobs, she forced herself to sit up, pushed her feet over the side of the bed and dragged herself over to the closet to pick out clothes to wear that day.

So far so good. Now if only she could make it to the office, maybe she would be able to dispel the beast in the routine of work. Afraid to say anything to Raven in case she broke down altogether, Martha stifled her weeping, ignored her daughter who was looking at her with concern from her seat at the breakfast table and concentrated all her efforts on making it to the hook by the front door where her car keys were hanging.

Her legs protested. “We don’t want to go any farther. Turn around and go back to bed.”

Martha refused to give up and forced them to obey, focusing first on one, and on the other, lurching forward like a child learning to walk until she reached the hook. She grasped the keys, lifted them from their perch, paused to gather her strength, pushed open the front door and stepped out onto the stoop.

A wave of dizziness overpowered her and she slumped down against the wall. When the vertigo lifted, she pulled herself to her feet and proceeded slowly and carefully down the steps to her car. Once inside and seated, she grasped the steering wheel tightly, leaned forward, closed her eyes and struggled to regain control of herself.

The cloud gradually lifted and she was able to turn on the ignition, put the car in gear and start driving to the band office. By the time she arrived, she was already feeling better, and she kept her sickness at bay throughout the day by keeping busy. But that evening, driving home, she once again tasted despair.

“I’m really feeling bad, Raven,” she said when she entered the house. “Could you make your own dinner? I’ve got to go to bed.”

Without waiting for an answer, Martha entered her bedroom, closed the door and collapsed fully clothed on her bed. Twelve hours of deep, dreamless sleep later, she woke with tears running down her cheeks to fight her way to the band office again. And when she returned home, she went directly to her bedroom, fell onto her bed and went to sleep.

This time Raven came into her room, shook her awake, undressed her and made her eat some soup. Martha obeyed mechanically and was asleep before her daughter left the room.

“You’re in trouble,” Raven told her mother the next morning when she emerged bleary-eyed from her bedroom. “It’s not normal to have to sleep so much. Is it because you’re worried about Spider? I’m sure he’s okay but if you want, I’ll organize a search party. Is that what you want?”

“No, no, it’s not about Spider any more. I just need rest. I’ve been through this before and can handle it by myself.”

“You can’t do it alone,” said Raven. “Why don’t you go to the nursing station and get some pills? Or maybe the next time the doctor comes from Thunder Bay, he’ll be able to do something? Maybe he’ll fly you out to see a specialist?”

Martha, however, refused help and her depression worsened. Instead of dreamless nights of deep sleep, she was now afflicted by restless nights filled with wild dreams involving Father Antoine, the
residential school, the bearwalker and the Wendigo. She soon began sitting up late into the night, drinking coffee and putting off the time when she would have to go to bed. The nightmares invaded her waking hours in flashbacks of guilt, rape and loneliness until she became almost comatose with dread and anxiety.

“Why don’t I just kill myself and end this agony?” she asked herself. But no matter how much she suffered, something deep inside told her she didn’t have the right to take her own life and that she had to live for the sake of her children.

Late one afternoon, thinking alcohol might make her feel better, instead of going straight home after work, Martha drove to Lester’s.

Tall and wiry with a scraggly beard on an acne-pitted face, Lester was a few years older than Martha and they had known each other since childhood. Both had passed their earliest years on the land, both had listened to the elders tell the old stories around the campfire in the summers and both had been shipped off to residential school on turning six. Lester had also been one of the big boys who had bullied her little cousin and stolen his food prior to his death. In the years that followed, Martha had made clear to him her disdain, and never spoke to him unless she absolutely had to.

Thus when Lester saw Martha walking in his door, he had difficulty in suppressing a smirk. Despite going to Toronto and supposedly doing well, she’s no better than the rest of us, he thought. But what if she wasn’t looking for a drink but was going to create a fuss about the way her son had been knocked around on his premises?

“Look, Martha,” he said, before she could say anything. “Spider got roughed up here the night he went missing, but it wasn’t my fault. Everybody knows I keep my nose clean and don’t allow no fighting at my place, but he got belligerent with the others and bit off more than he could chew.”

When Martha made no comment, Lester invited her to have a drink.

“We’ve known each other since we were kids. You went off to the big city to make your fortune and I stayed home and went into the booze business.

“If I do say so myself, even if some people look down on what I do, I’ve done better than you or anyone else from the old days—new four-wheel-drive truck every other year, new Bombardier snowmobile every winter, widescreen TV, twin V-6 Yahamas on my boat—”

Martha cut him off, saying she’d have some rye.

“Okay, okay, not in the mood for small talk I see. But the customer is always right and if you like hard stuff, hard stuff it’ll be. Me, I stick to wine. Can’t let myself get too high when I gotta serve my customers.”

He pulled a half-empty bottle from a shelf over the kitchen sink, poured a shot into a water glass and handed it to her.

“Want a little ginger with that?”

Martha shook her head, took hold of the glass, closed her eyes and tossed back the contents.

“That’s just what I need,” she said, shuddering as the whisky burned its way down her throat. “I’ll take a bottle if you got it.”

Even though Martha had to endure the snide comments of the other customers, she began going to Lester’s on Friday nights after she received her pay to buy two bottles of whisky at two hundred dollars each. Once home, she would hand Raven whatever was left of her money to buy groceries and the other necessities of life and vanish into her room. She would then drink herself into oblivion until Monday morning when she would emerge with a splitting headache and feelings of remorse.

Although she dragged herself to the band office each workday, she was now moody, easily distracted and no longer took part in the friendly banter among the staff. When she started to make mistakes in her work, Joshua took her aside.

“Martha, it looks like you’re going through a tough time. Do you mind if I speak frankly to you, as a friend and elder, not as your boss?”

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you myself,” Martha said. “I know my work’s fallen off. I’m fighting a depression. Probably it’s a flare-up of the one I had when I came back from residential school. You remember? The one you helped me with that day when we sat together and talked down at the shore? When we saw the ancestors in the clouds? All those old experiences are coming back. I’m reliving the abuse of that pedophile priest, Father Antoine, again.”

“Let’s work on your depression together,” said Joshua. “But you also have to recognize you’ve got a drinking problem and if you don’t watch out, you’ll become an alcoholic.”

“I trust you, Joshua. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’m desperate.”

“The first thing you have to do is to stop drinking, “was Joshua’s response. “I mean really stop. No more visits to Lester’s. No more using your depression as an excuse to drink. Promise?”

Martha promised and did not go to Lester’s after work the following Friday evening. But the next day, after a difficult, sleepless night, her resolution faltered and she set off to buy a bottle of whisky. On the way to the bootlegger’s, however, she passed a small building where a Native preacher from a nearby First Nation held regular church services, prayer meetings and evenings of gospel singing. Preoccupied with her own problems, she had paid little attention to it in the past. But this time, perhaps because she was feeling guilty about breaking
her promise to Joshua, she stopped her car and walked over to read a notice tacked onto the front door.

Martha returned home and the next day she joined a small group of community members who came together on Sundays for weekly worship. After the opening hymns and community announcements, the preacher stepped up onto the raised platform and approached the pulpit, held his Bible tightly in his left hand, pointed his right hand at the congregation and began his sermon.