Fall from Grace (9 page)

I lifted my hand to wave it away and opened my mouth to say, No, thanks, but I froze. Even though I didn’t smoke and would normally refuse any offer of a cigarette from anyone, I realized that in many native cultures, the Cree included, an offer of tobacco, no matter how minor, could be an offering of peace and friendship, a sacred thing. To refuse, even if you don’t smoke, created an insult on par with spitting in a priest’s face when he offers the host or slugging a Buddhist monk ’cause he smiles at you.

So I sat there, wondering if I should take the smoke as a gesture and just pocket it. But would that further insult him? Was the offer of the tobacco just the first step in a ritual I couldn’t comprehend? Was I expected to light up and share in the smoke as a bond of friendship? I shut my eyes, knowing that this was just another reminder that I shouldn’t have agreed to Larry’s proposal. What the hell did I know about being Indian if I couldn’t even figure out how to accept or refuse the simple offer of a cigarette?

The old man seemed to understand what I was thinking because his blank expression morphed into a smile so slowly that I barely saw it happening. “You know,” he said with a soft Cree accent, the slur of the English barely noticeable, “I think it was Freud who said ‘sometimes a cigar is a just a cigar.’ So if you need or want a smoke, take the cigarette; if not, don’t. We’re just hanging out, not negotiating a new treaty.”

I finally let out the “No, thanks” I had been holding in, shaking my head at my own stupidity. The elder nodded and then slid the smoke back into the pack and tucked that into his storm rider pocket.

I pulled myself to my feet, shaking the cold out of my legs, and for about a minute we leaned against the west wall of the Friendship Centre watching the scattering of cars roll back and forth along Ninety-seventh Avenue. I wondered how to break the silence, how to engage the elder in conversation, but since I was still feeling the lingering effects of my emotional outburst, I was a little embarrassed. I should have said something besides, “Think it will snow soon?” Something deeper, more significant, something less banal, but that’s all I could come up with without sounding like a moron.

The elder took a deep puff of his cigarette and gave me a thoughtful look, as if I’d asked him, Why is there air? or, Do you know the meaning of life? After several seconds he nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Maybe, but you never know this time of year, you know?”

“Yeah, guess you’re right.”

We fell silent for another minute or two. Traffic was starting to pick up a bit, rush hour about thirty minutes away from its peak. The wind started to make me shiver so I wondered if I should go back into the building for my coat or just cut my losses and head back to the office and write my story.

“So,” the elder said out of the blue, making me jump and pulling me out of my thoughts. “Where do your people come from?”

The elder’s question was similar to those I got asked whenever I said that there was native blood flowing in my veins, but it had never been expressed in that way. Everyone always asked where my mom came from or how native I was, in blood fractions. Nobody had used the words
your people
in that way, not even Mom. Her side of the family was just those Indians, sometimes Uncle So-and-So or Auntie Such-and-Such, but never
her people
.

Unlike Dad, who could and would trace his family lineage back to Champlain, reminding us over and over that even though we didn’t speak a bit of French save for
“Voilà Monsieur Thibeau, voici Madame Thibeau”
and
“Où est l’autobus?”,
if Quebec ever separated from Canada, we would have no trouble getting dual citizenship, probably even before all those Algerians and other Africans who now lived there.

But every so often I would hear the odd story from Mom, or from a visiting relative or during one of my rare visits to Mom’s hometown, so later on in life I was able to piece together some type of history of my mother’s side of the family.

The elder was patient and quietly waited for me to figure out my answer. Maybe he was aware of the significance of his question and was allowing me the time to figure things out. Or maybe he was just being polite.

“Mom was born in Norway House. That’s in northern Manitoba, just north of Lake Winnipeg,” I said, pointing to the east. “So I guess that’s where my people are from.”

The old man nodded and, after a pause and a puff, said, “Swampy Cree, right? Did a lot of fishing?”

“Yeah,” I say, remembering my massive Uncle Walter who just happened to be in Winnipeg as we were driving on a family trip to Quebec. I recalled meeting him for breakfast at some diner, and the sight of him measuring the distance between the seat and the table in a booth to see if he could fit his gut in. I also remembered Dad saying Uncle Walter was a fisherman, but couldn’t figure out where he would fish in the Prairies. It only made sense when I saw Lake Winnipeg a couple years later during the one and only trip we ever took to Mom’s hometown. “They also did a bunch of trapping and building of York boats when the Europeans dropped in. Mostly Scots and Scandinavians from the Shetland Islands, just north of Scotland,” I said, with a nod.

“Ahh, so that’s where the red hair comes from,” he said, pointing at my head.

I smiled, but shook my head. “Actually that’s from my dad’s side. French Canadian.”

He started to speak fluent French, with a touch of Québécois in the accent. Before he got too far and expected me to answer, I held up my hand.

“Sorry, don’t speak French except for what I learned in high school, and that was pretty useless.”

“
Pas de français?
Not even your dad at home?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Then probably no Cree, either.”

I nodded. “Right. No Cree. Just basic English, and considering all the accents flying around my house, it’s a wonder I learned how to speak that.”

“Oh, I think you speak English quite well. That was a heck of speech you made up there. Short, but you sure made a hell of an impression. Nobody’s going to forget who Leo Desroches is, or what he thinks. By the way, I’m Francis. Francis Alexandra.”

He held out a hand and I shook it. I felt the temperature rise as my face turned red. “Yeah, well. I probably should have worked something out in advance instead of just blurting out a bunch of crazy stuff.”

“Nah, you only said what most of us were thinking. You were honest and that’s all that counts. Just too bad you don’t speak Cree. A lot of our people, like you, have lost touch with the language. Still, we have classes every Wednesday night; you should drop in.”

“Yeah, sounds like a good time but I don’t think so. To be honest, with this new job, I don’t really have the time.”

“No doubt, but you should really think about it. Sure, it’s mostly kids and you’ll probably be the oldest student, but it’ll be a good way to connect with the community.”

“Learn Cree from scratch? I doubt I’d be any good at that. I think learning a new language at my age would be tough.”

“You never know till you try, right?”

“What? You the teacher, or do you get a commission for every student you bring in?”

“Ha, they would never let someone like me teach impressionable kids like you a new language. I just liked what you said and I think one way of getting to know your native culture is to learn the language.”

“Then maybe I should learn French.”

The old man smiled, showing his mouth of decayed dental work. “Why the fuck not? But Cree first.”

“Why Cree first?”

“Just makes sense since you’re not the Franco issues reporter, right?” He slapped me on the shoulder and then tossed his cigarette onto the road. The wheels of various cars extinguished the butt. “But think about it, Wednesday at seven. Just drop in and check it out. Liked the speech and I hope to see you again.”

11

Her name was Grace Cardinal. That’s what it said in the police press release that appeared in my e-mail in-box the next morning. Any concern I had about whether she was native or not disappeared at the sight of her last name. Cardinal was a very popular surname for many northern Alberta Cree. Contrary to popular belief, it had nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with Roman Catholic missionaries stealing native children, forcing them to attend their schools, denying them their native heritage and language, and saddling them with a good and proper European surname that reflected the Church. In actuality, the name Cardinal came from a Montreal-based fur trading family whose sons and nephews and cousins were some of the first fur traders in northern Alberta. And these men did marry Cree women, producing many children, all named Cardinal.

However, this family alone was not enough to spawn the thousands of Alberta natives with the same last name. Cardinal just happened to be one of the first European surnames in the native communities, and when various Cree started dealing with new European legalities such as birth certificates, contracts, and the census, they weren’t allowed to use their Cree names, so many just used the name of a neighbor or some other member of their band who did have a European last name. It was no different from the English taking the name of their family’s trade and then shortening it to Smith or African-American slaves being given the names of their owners.

It was good to give the body in the field a name, to take another step in giving her more status as a person, rather than just a victim. The release also gave me two more facts about her: she was nineteen and she was “known to police due to her high-risk lifestyle.” The second comment was policespeak for “she was a prostitute and, therefore, partly to blame for ending up dead in a field.” Of course, nobody in the police would ever come right out and blame a victim for being murdered, but by using the term
high-risk lifestyle
they covertly held her partly responsible for her own death.

At the same time, they were also telling the regular folks in the city that they had nothing to worry about; that this body found in the field wasn’t one of their neighbors, a member of their family or somebody they worked with. They were saying that people like them, who didn’t live high-risk lifestyles, didn’t have to worry about high-risk trials and tribulations like being murdered and left in a farmer’s field.

The release also noted that an autopsy was pending and that no cause of death had yet been determined. I wrote all these facts into a little story as an update for tomorrow’s paper, but I knew I needed more. Larry had assigned me to give Grace a face and a life, but at the moment I only had the same facts that every single media outlet in the city had. Despite my scoop a couple days ago, we were once again all on the same level and no doubt there were one or two other journalists who were looking for more on Grace. I had to get more, and after sending the story through the system, I called Detective Whitford to see if he was still in a giving mood.

He wasn’t. “All I got to say to you, Leo, is ‘Fuck you. Fuck. You.’”

“Oh, come on, Detective Whitford. I’m not asking for much, just a last known or maybe a family contact.”

“After what you did to me? Do you have any idea of the shitstorm your ‘exclusive article’ caused? Do you know that I was not only personally reamed out by our media relations department and my immediate superior but the chief himself gave me a courtesy call, telling me I personally had to contact every single news director and editor in the city and apologize to them and to reiterate that it’s not police policy to let members of the media into a crime scene tent?”

“What did you expect to happen when you let a member of the media into the tent? Did you expect me to let it slide and do nothing about it?”

“Yes, I did, especially when you told me that you had already written the story in your head, and getting into the tent wouldn’t change that.”

“That was my original plan, but when my editors demanded to know how I knew the victim was female and native, I had to tell them. And once I told them, it was a choice between keeping my job or doing what I told you I was going to do. I’m sorry you got shit for it, but you had to know something like that might happen when you let me in. I mean, you’re not new to this game, Detective.”

On the other end he sighed, and I knew I’d scored an important point. “At least you could have given me a heads-up.”

“Sorry, Detective. Things are pretty busy at the paper prior to deadline and I had two stories to write. And to be really honest, I never have the time to warn people about the fallout my stories may cause. It’s not in my job description. Besides, you’re the one who said you wanted to give this victim a face so she’s not just another dead body in the field. That was your quote directly to me. I’m only asking you to help me continue what you started.”

“Then again, fuck you, Leo. Fuck. You.” Despite his words, the tone of his voice was less harsh this time, meaning that things were okay between us again.

“So can you offer me any further information about the victim such as a last known or a family contact? I’m sure you’ll offer that information if any other media outlets call you.”

“Sorry, Leo. If you want anything more than what’s in the release you’ll have to look elsewhere because you’re blacklisted at the moment. One of the more consistent messages I’ve been getting from those people reaming me out is that Leo Desroches gets only the basic media information from us. And nothing else. If he wants anything else from the Edmonton Police Service, then the answer is supposed to be ‘Fuck you.’”