Celia's Song (6 page)

The windows of the living room had been blackened for the wake. But for the candles glowing around the body, the room was dark. Celia stared at Grandpa. He was out the day Gramma died and even though he laid her out, he sat on his chair at the wake and looked about the house, like he was trying to find her, like he was not really convinced she was gone and he expected her to show up any minute.

After Gramma's wake, under the light of a sliver of moon, Grandpa faced the funeral pyre. The women gathered behind the men and the grieving song began. The men murmured words in the old language, tossed cedar on the pyre, and then lit it. Grandpa lurched forward. Two men grabbed him. They sang deeper. One of the men holding Grandpa urged him to sing. He held cedar against the middle of Grandpa's back. Grandpa's head lolled back and forth for a minute, the song jerked its way out at first, then it reached full sound and finally Grandpa was grieving, the sound of it loud, long, deep, and beautiful. That's when they began burning her things; red bits of cotton, stripped blue cloth, wool panels
cut from old men's pants, bits of ribbon, and a mountain load of colourful cut-up squares and triangles preceded the larger pieces; finally the bolt of white cotton was unravelled and thrown at the pyre. Momma had very nearly clenched her teeth at the bolt of cotton.

Celia recognized the song. It was the same song Momma had sung for her Jimmy. Tears filled Celia's eyes. She tossed her head to one side; why hadn't she remembered hearing this song before? This time she let the song fill her up. She swallowed it. It tasted full, round, and hopeful. Why had it been so hard for her to sing that song last week? It was as though this was the first time she had heard it and felt it.

Celia watched the funeral fire until the last ember died, and then she returned to Gramma's house. Momma wept over the burning bolt of cotton, but Celia paid her no mind, Gramma's kitchen was filling up with the scent of blackberry pie in the oven. Over the stove a cone-shaped cheesecloth sack, plump with blackberries, dripped juice into a jar below, setting itself into jelly. Grandpa was not there. Celia scoured the house for some evidence of illness, maybe some pills with strange Latin-sounding names that would point her in the direction of the big medical text in Stacey's house, where she could solve the riddle. “We didn't go to them people then,” some mocking voice told her. She turned to look to see who was talking, but no one was there. She shivered and kept looking.

No pills in the kitchen cupboard, just clean white un-matching dishes, un-matching mugs of all shapes and sizes; white bowls, there were plenty of white bowls threatening to spill out of Gramma's curtained cupboards. The cupboards strained to hold Gramma's dishes from view. She stopped looking at the details of Gramma's kitchen and looked about for the bathroom, and then she remembered: Gramma had no bathroom.

Celia faced the curtain to Gramma's bedroom. She stood at the entrance to the bedroom and waited. She waited for some sign of permission to invade this sanctuary, this room that no one had dared enter while Alice was alive and was now off limits because she was dead. Grandpa had taken to sleeping on the couch in
front of the television; he could not face the room that was now so deeply empty without his wife. No voice, no permission was forthcoming. Celia shrank herself small. Small children are forgiven transgressions. She slid the curtain aside.

Gramma's room was awash with gold light. Filtered through the yellow-pink-magenta paisley curtains, the light was a fluid pink and pastel yellow. The fussy pleats and ruffles of the curtains stood like managers of
siem
, self-important. The pleats bent the light into a golden fan that hovered over the oak-and-cedar cupboards and trunks in the room. Gramma's shelves were peopled with masks, carved bowls, and spoons — some modern, some so old and black Celia wondered if they were made of argillite. She touched the black spoon nearest to her. “Haida,” she heard her grandpa's voice say, “I am from Haida Gwaii.” Her hand snapped back at the sound of his voice. She looked. He didn't seem to mind her being there. Haida Gwaii. The waters of the seas swirled around the word. Whalers, seafaring traders, men of song, of purpose; indomitable men. “I canoed all the way from Skidegate to here.” He chuckled as though even he couldn't believe his youthful silliness. She stared at his stilllithe body and nodded. She could see Grandpa canoeing a thousand miles to be with Gramma. She smiled. It pleased her to know that he had left his pristine island home, dipped a paddle over miles of water, voyaged to this village, this place, and this woman who was her gramma. If Jimmy … She stopped herself and continued to look.

One cupboard held communities of white porcelain geese,
swans, ducks, and little white girls getting ready to waddle through whatever garden they were standing at the edge of when someone conjured them from clay, up to kiln, up to this sweetly lit golden wood reality. Where had Gramma found them? Celia turned to Grandpa. He was already gone.

Instead I was there motioning for her to follow. Finally she saw me and trundled along behind me as though following a shapeshifting mink storyteller were as normal as can be.

“She must have been young once,” Celia said to me. She leaned against a tree. She landed in some other place with old Salish names and a language that sounded foreign to her ear not because she didn't recognize the words, but because they slid off the people's tongues so easy and plain. Today's speakers are either teachers or students, so the language sounds serious and strained, bereft of humour. It is painful to listen to, much less participate in.

Bush surrounded Celia.

I sat on a rock and watched as Celia waited for the sight of humans.

Laughter wafted from behind bushes of blackberries, between snippets of song and story. Celia rounded the bush. A half dozen young girls picked berries, their cone-shaped cedar baskets strapped to their foreheads and hanging down their backs to the waist, swishing with every movement. Neither song nor voice nor laughter interrupted the steady rhythm of the picking. In the distance, a young man stood watching the land in front of them, his back to the girls. He was positioned on the hillside to see what was coming.

Celia recognized her gramma's grandmother: the first Alice. The other girls called her “Alice.” Every time they said “Alice” they
laughed as though it were the most ridiculous and meaningless sound they had ever heard. It seemed preposterous to the girls that this sound should become this girl's name. The name “Alice” did not suit this girl who told stories of exquisite quality while they picked berries. Not this girl who could shrink time and enrich even the most ordinary moments with stories of such alacrity that the picking hardly felt like work at all. Celia's Gramma Alice must have been named for her gramma.

They were rolling around the story of Alice's name between fits of laughter. “This man Father McKilty runs about naming the world, naming himself ‘Father,'” and they laughed harder, as though some man naming his world were about the funniest thing they had ever heard. Today they had all received new names. “Christian names,” McKilty called them. He threw water at them, and then named them. The girls took water from their gourds, threw it at one another, and renamed themselves even more ridiculous things, like “See-yah,” “Schokem,” “Hoschem,” and other berries. They mimicked the sound the priest made, Alice became “eh-ternal,” Mary became “for-effer,” and they laughed some more. Alice had to run off behind a bush and squat someplace far from where they picked, unable to hold the water from her body as the laughter shook it loose. This caused more squeals from the girls. Picking finally stopped as each emptied her water. All the while, the young man stood unmoving; with his eyes he swept the hillside, watching for any possible threat to the girls.

Alice's grandpa sat still on a bench outside his longhouse, talking to the interpreter who was standing next to the black robe. He wanted to know what the names meant before he let McKilty in the house. The priest had no idea what he was asking and the interpreter had no way to make the old man understand the priest. McKilty kept telling him the names meant the girls would be saved, they would enjoy eternal life, they would live forever in the lap of Jesus Christ. Grandpa thought McKilty quite mad. He could not picture any of his daughters living forever on some man's lap, much less all of them. He said as much to the translator. The translator told him that he thought McKilty meant the men too. Grandpa doubted any of the men would want to sit on a man's lap at all. Well, maybe Lilt. Besides, humans have to leave. They can't stay here forever.

Maybe that's why these people had to leave their home: there was no room there. He pictured a land of useless old men and women sitting on some guy's lap — well, surely they took turns. What kind of a man wants to have women sitting on his lap forever? And what kind of men and women would want to stay on anyone's lap for all eternity? How big is this Jesus man? He can't be bigger than Sesquatch. How can he hold so many? Grandpa repeated the words to the translator to be sure he got them right. McKilty answered that they would sit on Jesus's lap in heaven, next to God. The old man looked around. Who is this God-man? He couldn't picture anyone wanting such a lazy eternity. The old man was beginning to suspect that the interpreter was not getting
it right, that he could not do his job, so he carefully explained to him what he meant and asked the man to have another go at it. McKilty went into some fervent tirade about “fire and damnation,” which was completely off topic in Grandpa's mind.

The translator was now red in the face. He had no way to bridge the gap between the vastly disconnected meanings each man held around the same words. Grandpa wasn't satisfied and the translator told McKilty this. Frustrated, McKilty's eyes flashed fire and his teeth clenched tighter than usual. “They mean your granddaughters will be baptized,” he said. “Without baptism they cannot have medicine against our diseases.” McKilty then looked oddly at Grandpa. Grandpa thought Father McKilty looked like a foolish boy who had stabbed himself while playing with his father's fish hook and lacked the courage to thread it through and remove it quietly without saying anything to anyone — and especially lacked the courage to tell his father. Grandpa couldn't figure out what such a look was doing on a grown man's face, but he recognized the word “medicine” and understood the threat.

He also knew that names committed a person to something or someone and the names being given to the children committed them to this man Jesus who was the Son of God, whoever that was, and this would change them and change their commitment to themselves. Names also meant something in and of themselves; they shaped children in some way. He was uneasy about having his daughters and granddaughters commit their lives to strange names that meant nothing to his people. He was also unsure of committing his children to this man, this arbiter of Jesus and God, who did not seem to be all that mature or sane. But he also knew that the villagers needed medicine to get them through the diseases these white men brought: baptism, names, and medicine or no baptism, no names, and no medicine. He turned all this over in his mind and failed to understand why anyone would put his people in such a position. Why would anyone bring disease and then withhold medicine so they could rename you and then commit you to some stranger who wanted you to sit on his lap?

He stared at Father McKilty. This man was more than odd. He introduced himself as the old man's father. He talked nonsense about sitting forever in the lap of Jesus and forever-life in some place the old man did not recognize. Was he going to take the children there? Grandpa wondered at the arrogance it took to name
yourself the father of someone who is clearly twice your age. He shrugged; clearly they were not speaking the same language. Grandpa did not know enough about these people to dig up the question whose answer would settle his mind. He finally accepted that he would never understand this father and waved his hand at the priest saying, “Baptize and name who you will.”

This was the beginning of their own end.

“There is power in naming,” Grandpa had said to his daughter when she told him she was going to send her daughters to the priest to be named. “Names mean something. They encourage children to travel on a certain path. The sides of character are reflected in a name. If you don't know the meaning of the names, how will you know what sides having them will show? Meaningless names could reduce them to a meaningless existence.”

“There is power in their names,” his daughter replied. She had watched the men bury the dead. She had wrapped body after body in the crude blankets they had received in trade from even cruder white men because there was no time to weave their own. They all returned home improperly dressed. The shame of seeing her relatives going home half-naked burned her eyes dry with grief.
She could not face another round of death.

“Both things are true,” Celia's great-great-grandmother sighed.

THE CANDLE IN FRONT
of Celia jumps at the accidental touch of her hand as she mimics Alice's Gramma throwing up her hands and sighing.

“You all right, Aunt Celia?” Jacob asks. Celia scrambles to come back to reality and find an answer.