Born with a Tooth (10 page)

“OK,” I finally said. “Something simple. How about a bear? After all, doesn't that Ojibwe guy, Oliver Sandy, down on Manitoulin claim he's a bear man?”

At the mention of this, Dink bristled, and I thought to myself, huh! Maybe he's going to turn into a porcupine. But he didn't.

“Don't ever speak the name or mention the likeness of Oliver Sandy in joking, or even at all, Xavier Bird. He has more power than you could ever imagine, more power in his foot than some
storyteller
,” he spat the word out, “some storyteller with big dreams of becoming a healer.” And with that, he stomped out of Christine's. Oh, we got a good laugh out of that. You don't grow up around here making big claims and not being able to live up to them. Annunciation House is a rough reserve. And after all, the four of us had helped raise Dink.

Dink's real name was Francis, but he grew up with the nickname Toad Boy and, when he was older, Toad Man. Poor Francis was born ugly enough to be given many ugly nicknames. One time a girl he was trying to pick up in Cochrane said, “Get away from me, you dink,” and his new name was born. When Dink was a child, the white schoolteachers thought he was slow, maybe a little retarded. His drooling didn't help. Most of the other kids pelted him with dog shit, soft and stinking in summer, hard as the hardest rock in winter. So Elijah and Jeremy and Christine and me took him under our wing in grade six. He was such a pathetic little sight. We taught him best we could how to walk like a warrior, to never take an insult but to strike back blow for blow, even if it meant he was lying unconscious in the schoolyard with the nuns hovering
over him tsk-tsking like a gaggle of grouse hens. It was the only way to survive. Slowly Francis toughened and drooled a little less often.

He moves slowly, as if he is under water or always walking in a strong headwind, and maybe this is why he is so good in the bush. My mother used to say that
Gitchi-Manitou
never once created a person without giving him or her some special talent, and Francis' is knowing the ways of the bush. He can sneak up on a moose or caribou and practically touch its ass before that animal even knows he's around. One of the craziest sights I ever saw was way up north in the bush, hunting one winter. I watched as Francis ran through a herd of caribou like he was one of them, the caribou ignoring him the way you ignore a bothersome friend.

Dink can live in the bush for days, slowly, quietly picking his way through the thickest brush, eating edible plants and berries as he walks, spotting animals even before the elder hunters are sure what's around. He has the gift in a dying culture. Once that gift would have been worth everything but now it's worth a few hundred dollars a week to Yankee hunters up from Michigan or Minnesota. Dink isn't an ugly kid in the bush, he is the man.

It's hard to travel anywhere within three hundred kilometres of Annunciation House and not find someone related through blood or marriage. But Dink was double cursed. He came from a dead family line. He was the last man named Killomonsett that anyone knew of. His father drowned seven months before Dink's birth. His mother died during it. He had no brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins. In the rough country of Northern Ontario where family is granted one of
life's few comforts, Dink was alone, raised by nuns. The belief around the reserve was that when Dink's mother saw what she'd brought into the world she couldn't live with it, and any other living relatives died of the shame of him.

My family, we're big and noisy. I've got seven older sisters and six older brothers. When I came out, everyone figured I was the last for sure. My mother was in her mid-forties by then and, as far as I've ever been able to tell, I was an accident. But really, who isn't in this world? My mother was forty-nine when she found out she was
kekiskawusoo
, pregnant, once again. “Thirtythree years of pregnancy!” she shouted at my father when she found out. “You're cut off, you!” One month to the day shy of fifty, my mother had Gloria. She celebrated a half-century of life with yet one more child attached to her breast. “I can't even have a cold beer to celebrate,” she growled at my father. But my mother loves Gloria. She's always been the special one in my mother's, in my family's, eyes.

Two of my brothers, Michael and Raymond, are sitting with me at our parents' kitchen table the day after my teasing Dink, the day Gloria promised to come by to visit us. We're drinking coffee and chatting with our
otawemaw
and
okawemaw
, our parents, inseparable after fifteen children, like two wings to the same goose. None of us three brothers says out loud that we're here to see Gloria, but when we arrived at our house and saw one another, we all knew we were here to see her. Gloria is the baby, the spoiled one.

We sit with our old father and speak of the spring goose hunt. “The
niskuk
didn't come in big numbers this year,” my father says. “I wonder what happened to them down south over the winter. Maybe they decided they like Florida better than here, eh?”

“They're being overhunted by the
wemestikushu
down south,” Raymond says. “And then their government turns around and says we are the people overhunting!” Raymond is the political one.

“If only they knew what bad shots we are, they wouldn't say that again,” Michael says. My dad and me, we laugh. We're a lot alike.

“I don't want to hear no swearing,” my mother shouts from the back porch. My father points at his ears and mouths, “She's going deaf,” then says with a little volume, “If we laugh, she thinks it's about something dirty.” We all nod and sip our coffee knowingly, as if it's a medical fact that the more babies one has, the worse the hearing gets.

“I'm glad Gloria's decided to come home,” Michael speaks up. “Cities are no good for you.”

“Wouldn't you feel lost wandering around in crowds of people like that?” I ask. “You'd always feel like you were” — I pause for the word to come — “surrounded ... by a bunch of white people.”

“That's never a good situation for an Indian,” Michael says.

“We're already surrounded by them,” Raymond speaks up.

“Just look at the laws we are forced to abide by. Turn on the TV and look at all the white faces spewing out white ideas.”

“We're surrounded by them?” my father asks, looking puzzled. “The only ones I know of are those teachers there at the school. There can't be more than eight or nine of them.” Father stops and thinks for a moment. “But one of them doesn't really count because he learned how to speak Cree better than most of you.”

Raymond gets up for more coffee. He knows his arguments are like clouds to Dad's sunshine mind.

The sound of a car on the dirt road outside has us all straining to look out the window. But it's only Bert Trapper in his rattle cab, dropping off the neighbour, Old Lady Koostachin. The dirt kicked up by his tires hangs in the air. The shiny green leaves of the trees are covered by the grey dust of the road.

“We need some rain soon,” my father says. “No rain all summer means a hard winter.”

“Looks like the road needs to get oiled again,” Michael says. “The dust is enough to choke me good.”

We hear another car pull up in the afternoon silence. I hear low talking and what might be quiet crying. The car door slams.

“It's Gloria,” Raymond says, standing up and walking to the front door. He opens it and in comes Gloria, with sunglasses on, looking a little chubbier than when she left, like she's been able to find enough goose down in Toronto. I think the weight looks good on her. She's always been such a skinny kid.

We all say our hellos and I point to the sunglasses she's still wearing in the cool darkness of the house. “Did you become some kind of movie star when you were down there?” I ask. She just smiles.

“Tell us about the south,” my father says to her, my mother in from the porch now and hugging her, cooing over her.

“It's scary down there,” Gloria says quietly. “Too many people. Everywhere you go, people.”

“I was down there before,” Raymond says. “When we did that march and protest over unceded lands.”

“Here, take those off,” Mother says. “I need to see your eyes to talk to you right.”

She reaches up to remove Gloria's sunglasses, but Gloria reacts quick as a rabbit, stepping back and reaching up to hold
her sunglasses in place. “What's this all about?” Mother asks, reaching up again to Gloria, this time Mother the quicker one, snatching them away.

We all stare at Gloria, none of us talking. Her right eye is puffed almost shut, the area around it black, circled by lighter shades of green and yellow.

“What's this?” my father asks. “How did you hurt yourself?”

“I ... I ... it's a long story,” Gloria says. “It doesn't hurt as bad as it looks.”

“Did somebody hit you?” Michael asks, his voice full of disbelief. He is six foot three and maybe the strongest man on the reserve.

“Was it a city person?” I ask.

“It was Dink,” Gloria says finally. My first reaction is to assume it was some sort of accident.

“He hit you?” Michael asks.

“He's not been himself lately,” Gloria bursts out. I can't picture Dink hitting her. “He's sorry for doing it,” she says. “I know it.”

Michael and Raymond are already in action, walking towards the door. I run to join them. “You stay at my place for a while,” I say to her before my brothers can.

“Please don't hurt him,” Gloria says. “That's not going to make anything right.”

We walk out into the afternoon sun, us three brothers, walking long strides down the dirt of the road, looking for Dink. I'm torn. I know I shouldn't be. He shouldn't have hit her. But I'm torn.

We get down to the trading post and people hanging about know something's up. The Bird brothers are obviously on the warpath. It's the body language. Dink's not gone into hiding.

We can see his car a hundred metres away, in the parking lot of the Northern Store. Raymond and Michael point to it at the same time. We get there and wait by his car for maybe five minutes before he appears from the store with a bag of groceries under his arm. He's close, maybe ten metres from us, before he even looks up. He doesn't look surprised. He doesn't try to run.

“Wachay,”
he says in greeting. “What's up?”

“You know what's up,” Raymond says, walking to him.

“And you definitely know it has to do with Gloria,” Michael says, following close and to the left. I circle around to the other side, shaking my head.

“What were you thinking? We treated you like family for years,” I say to him. He seems resigned to what's coming. He places his groceries on the ground.

“If you're going to shape-shift, you'd better do it now,” Raymond says, reaching out and grabbing Dink's arm. When I grab his other arm, it's cold. Not just scared cold, but cold as a fish or a bottle of beer from the fridge. We start swinging, doing what we have to do.

We leave him conscious but with swelled eyes that will blacken by nightfall and bruised ribs that won't let him sleep tonight so he can think about what he did. We could have been much worse, but I think my brothers felt the same bond beginning to break that I did.

As I walk back home, I think about how Francis was, how he didn't utter a word the whole time, how when his eyes were open, he just stared at the sky. As we left him he uttered some words I couldn't make out. They didn't sound English or Cree.

“Don't curse me with your bearwalker bullshit,” Michael said, acting like he was going to go back and hit Dink some more.

“It's not bullshit” is all Dink had to say, lying on his back. We got out of there before the police showed up.

Long after I'd gotten back home, what I'd done was still bothering me, so I went out to my old friend Antoine Hookimaw. Antoine is known for hundreds of kilometres around as a healer, a medicine man. It was him who first noticed something special in me. When I was just a kid he went to my mother and said, “You know, there's something not right about your boy.” My mother agreed. He offered her and my father his help in the form of taking me out in the bush, teaching me to watch and learn patience, to do sweat lodges and other old-school Indian things. He kept at it as I got older because I had the desire to learn. I became his student.

I walked down the railway tracks a couple of kilometres and into the bush to Antoine's house. I guess he's the closest thing I got to a
moshom
. Both my parents' fathers are dead a long time. Antoine Hookimaw. Antoine the Boss. He's not the boss of anyone but himself, that's just how his name translates from the Cree. Antoine once told me about how names were given to the Indians by Hudson's Bay Company traders when they first came around.

“Those traders, they couldn't pronounce any of our names,” Antoine said. “Those traders, lots of Scottish, they treated us like we were
awasheeshuk
with dirty diapers, but they had a sense of humour, some of them. So when they asked my grandfather to give himself a name they could pronounce, he told them Hookimaw. Everyone on the reserve got a good laugh out of these Scottish calling the little Indian who brought them furs ‘boss.'”

Antoine's at home, cooking bannock on his wood-stove and talking to himself. He's ancient-looking and smells of
smoke and his eyebrows are bushy enough to nest whisky-jacks. Whenever I visit him, he tells me about last night's dreams as he boils us water for tea.

His parents and his wife and two of his sons who are dead now come talk to him all the time when he is sleeping. They tell him how their day was and scold him for not eating right or for his rare habit of going on a bender for a couple of days, drinking bottle after bottle of Cold Duck. Antoine's father retells stories of how he and Antoine's grandfather used to live in the bush for weeks at a time, trapping beaver and lynx and hare. His father talks to Antoine only in Cree and his sons talk to him only in English, so there are many times I have to explain expressions his sons have used the night before, the best I can translate them into Cree.