Keeper'n Me (10 page)

Of course I wanted to hear it. She closed her eyes real tight and her foot started beating on the ground, one two, one two, one two. A heartbeat rhythm. The rhythm of the drum. The rhythm of prayersongs. Her head started bobbing to the ancient rhythm and her tears glistened in the firelight and brought a few to my eyes too just then. Finally she started to sing, soft and low.

“Bih'kee-yan, bih'kee-yan, bih'kee-yan,” she sang, her voice breaking over the words. “Bih'kee-yan, bih'kee-yan, bih'kee-yan.”

That's all. Just one word over and over and over again for about five minutes, with her foot still tapping that rhythm, her head still bobbing in time, tears flowing like a river down her face and her body swaying and swaying with her arms hugged around herself.

“Bih'kee-yan,” she sang, “bih'kee-yan, bih'kee-yan.”

When she finished she looked over at me and smiled, rose up, walked to me and grabbed me up into a great big hug and held on for a long, long time.

“What does it mean, Ma?” I mumbled through tears and her hair. “My song, what does it mean?”

She breathed really deeply one more time and said, “It means, come home. Come home, come home, come home.”

She hugged me again and headed into the cabin, looking over her shoulder one last time to ask, “You wanna come stay with me, my boy, make this your home now? Come home? Be with me? With us? You take that empty room 'side mine, okay?”

“Yeah, Ma, yeah,” I said. “I'll be in soon.”

“ 'Kay then,” she said and waved.

“ 'Kay then,” I said.

I sat by that fire and thought for a long, long time. The sounds of loons and wolves in the distance, the wind, the water lapping up softly on the dock down below, everything seemed to punctuate my thoughts that night. I thought about this James Brown Indian coming home, about these strange-talking, strange-looking people who opened up their reserve and their hearts to me, about my ma, my dad, my brothers, my sister and the sound of the wind that was breezing by my ears instead of ripping through my guts that night. Thought about all them years spent moving, running, searching, trying to find who held the missing pieces of that puzzle. And I thought about an old Ojibway woman beside a small fire on a lonely winter's night, staring out across the land and the universe towards someone, somewhere in a place far away, singing soft and low, over and over and over … bih'kee-yan, bih'kee-yan, bih'kee-yan.

First of all, you've got to realize that the lake is like a reflector, okay? What I mean is that on those long, calm nights we get around here, a voice can carry for miles. We used to eavesdrop on conversations whenever we'd see Myron Fisher and Mabel Copenace heading out on the bay in her auntie's canoe. They'd be talking all lovey-dovey across the bay and we'd catch every line. Old Myron would be mad as hell and chase us all around the townsite whenever we'd repeat what we figured were the sweetest lines of the evening. Myron and Mabel have been married for about three years now, got themselves a boy named Theodore and are living in a house at the east end of the townsite. Maybe all the teasing helped, I
don't know. Anyway, the lake is like a reflector that can take a whisper clean across.

Now according to Mabel's auntie—not the one with the canoe, the other that's older and has a face like a fresh-scraped deer hide once the wet's all squeezed out—there was a time on this reserve when the lake was the only way to get a hold of someone on the other side. People would just wander on down to the dock and yell across.

Actually, White Dog's not the only reserve up here's got their own open-lake telephone. This northern part of Ontario's full of lakes and we Ojibways always seem to be finding ourselves settling down on the shores of one. Once you've seen one of our long summer sunsets from across a northern lake, well, you start to get a better idea of why the old people would settle down there.

Anyway, I'd been back here about four months. My ma had cut my Afro off about three days after I was home and around about that time I was one scruffy-looking Indian. Funny how fate turns things around, eh? I told Ma about the old Pancho Santilla gaffe I used to run on people before I became a black man and she just looked at me and laughed.

“Good thing you don' try that now, my boy,” she said. “People see you like this with no hair now they be callin' you one a them Mexican hairlesses!”

Funny lady, that Ma.

Making White Dog my home wasn't as easy as maybe I make it sound. For days on end I still wanted to
hightail it back to familiar streets. I felt like a very big fish out of water for the longest time and to tell the truth, it was scary. But the White Dog folks and the feeling that was seeping into me from this land all started getting me to feeling more and more comfortable the longer I hung around. In fact, I don't remember ever making the decision to stay. It was more like one day I was walking around and it was already made. Nobody was coaxing the answer out of me all that time either. I took to feeling like I'd just been a part of the place forever and like Stanley had told me those first few days, everyone just seemed to want to treat me like a little kid. The little kid they'd never got a chance to know. Pretty hard to think of leaving a place when everyone's feeding you, giving you things and making you feel all special all the time. Anyway, I fell into the idea of being home long before I even knew that's where I was. Took some getting used to though.

See, there wasn't much to do except hang out with my brothers and their friends and try to fit in and not stick out all at the same time. Which is kinda hard when you don't speak the language, never done any of the things people like to do around here like hunt and fish and all and you're running around with a heada hair looks like a bad scalping job by a near-sighted Cree. But I was slowly getting comfortable. Most folks knew who I was, where I'd been, some of the things I'd done out there, and were pretty hip to the fact that I hadn't been around my own people for a long, long
time. They'd kid me about it but generally they tried to help me get feeling I was home again. It happened over the course of that first summer, but slowly. Living with Ma helped the most.

Anyway, there was a big bunch of us sitting around on the other side of the bay one evening. We had a fire going and were listening to Wally Red Sky singing all his favorite country-and-western songs. Wally's okay, I suppose, but I always figured someone should have told him back then that there was a few good tunes written after 1952. See, Wally's always been the big dreamer around here. His family goes back a long way in the local history. What with his great-grandfather being one a the main signers of Treaty Three back in the 1870s and every Red Sky after that somehow getting into the politics, making big plans has been a Red Sky mainstay for as long as most can remember according to Ma. He'd got hold of his daddy's guitar when he was eight and ever since then has dreamed of being the biggest Indian country singer ever. Trouble is, his high notes sound like what you hear in the bush during rutting season and his low notes sound like a moose four hours after a feeding frenzy on skunk cabbage. But a nicer guy can't be found. He was right in the middle of some sappy ballad about some long-haired gal named Sal who lived in the middle of the wide open spaces when we heard it.

See, the open-lake telephone system can be kind of spooky when you're not ready for it. Voices have a habit of floating up at you outta nowhere. My cousin Connie
Otter just about jumped right outta her skin when we heard this voice go, “Hoo!” That's all, just “Hoo!”

Whenever Ma'n me head out blueberry picking she's always hooing away when I pick my way outta her sight. One good hoo can carry a long way by itself even without the benefit of a reflecting lake. Ma says it's the way the old people used to locate each other in the bush.

So we hear this hoo and all the rest got lost in the roar of laughing that erupted when Connie Otter hightailed it into the bush so fast she ran clear out of her gumboots. We could hear her crashing through the timber and someone finally had the sense to yell back over, “Hoo!”

Now it generally takes a while for a good hoo to travel across so it was a moment or two before we got a reply.

“GAR … NET … RA … VEN … THERE?”

“YEAH … I'M … HERE!”

“ 'KAY THEN … KEE … PER … WANTS … YOU!”

“WHAT? … KEE … PER … WANTS … ME?”

“YEAH … KEE … PER!”

“ 'KAY THEN … BE … O … VER … SOOOOON!”

“ 'KAY THEN.”

Wally Red Sky bumped against me in the darkness. I could tell it was Wally because no one else on this reserve still uses Brylcreem. Or at least they don't use as much of it as Wally Red Sky.

“Keeper? Wonder what that old fart wants with you?”

“Don't know, Wally, maybe he needs help finding one a his bottles.”

This got quite a laugh because Keeper'd been the local drunk around here for a long time. Well, there used to be a lot of local drunks but old Keeper'd been the one most people talked about most of the time. One of the things you could count on from Keeper was to find him stumbling around in the mornings turning over rocks'n logs and stuff trying to remember where he'd hid his bottle. I remember wondering how anybody could be called Keeper when they couldn't seem to keep anything.

Anyway, he surprised everyone when he went away. Guess he just one day up and walked in and asked chief and council to send him off to the Smith Clinic in Thunder Bay to dry out. This was about three weeks after I got here and no one expected him to really go, so it was an even bigger surprise for folks when old Keeper asked to stay an extra coupla weeks because he figured he needed it.

His best drinking buddies had been wandering around pretty confused about all of it. My uncle Buddy wasn't buying any of it.

“Ah, that old fart's just restin' up,” he said. “Been drunk as long as me'n Keeper been drunk, you stay that way!”

He was the one to know. Uncle Buddy used to say that when he's “whistled over” as he calls it, they won't have to waste any money on embalming fluid on accounta he's drunk enough in one lifetime to keep him pickled forever. And there's those around who agree.

Anyway, there was a lotta differing opinion on whether old Keeper meant what he said about having enough. I thought about this all across the lake. Keeper was one of the people who were there in Stanley's cabin to meet me that first day. I hadn't seen too much of him after that, being so busy getting to know folks and visiting around like I was then. I remember carrying him outta the bush once when he'd passed out in there and was getting rained on real good and I remember catching his eye one night on the shoreline staring out across the lake while I was sitting there doing the same, but we weren't exactly buddies or anything. Still, one of the things you learn around here first is that you gotta respect what the old folks either tell you or ask you to do. It's part of the way we are. So I headed over to find out what the old guy wanted.

I stopped by home to grab a warmer jacket and found my ma sitting at the table. Ma's one a the best moccasin makers in the area and she was hard at it again that night. She was trying to teach me how to do things like beadwork and stuff but my fingers never went the way they were supposed to and I was always leaving little piles of half-done things lying around for her to fix up. Anyway, she was sitting there sewing away like her hands don't need help from her eyes and she was smiling.

“Ah-ha. Got holda you, eh? Keeper's lookin' for you.”

“What for? That old guy doesn't even hardly know me.”

“Well, that ol' guy's got somethin' he wantsta tell you. Might help you find your way around.”

“You talk to him?”

“Hey-yuh,” she said. “We been friends long time, Keeper'n me. We were in the residential school together for a while and we even been drunk a few times too.”

“Oh, I get it. Maybe now that he's all sobered up and got his memory back he wants to tell me some juicy stories about him and you!”

“Hmmpfh,” Ma said, but smiling all the while. “Ain't no juicy stories! Even if there were, that old guy couldn't do any real good stories proper justice anyhow!”

“So where is he?”

“ 'Member the old cabin we showed you round the bay?”

“Where my grampa lived?”

“Hey-yuh. He's stayin' there now.”

“ 'Kay then. I'll be back soon.”

“ ‘'Kay then. Careful walkin' through that bush.”

“ 'Kay then.”

My grampa was the oldest person on this reserve when he died. He'd have been about ninety-eight and passed on about three years before I made it home. He'd never ever learned English and from what my ma and other people told me, he was the last of the real traditional Ojibway around here. He had a sweat lodge near the cabin where I was headed, made tobacco offerings, tried to help people and held pipe ceremonies at his place now and again. Real traditional man. I never knew anything about all that when I went out to meet Keeper that night and frankly all the talk I'd heard about it freaked me out.
Sometimes it was hard to shake those old images of my people out of my head, and when I heard talk about spirits and ceremonies and stuff I always envisioned big fires with drums going crazy, people dancing around in strange get-ups, war whoops and planning a raid on the unsuspecting settlers. It was spooky on accounta life around here was nothing like that.

It was always the hidden parts of my people that worried me the most. It was fine to wander around the reserve learning bits of the language and how to hunt and stuff, but all the talk of ceremony and ritual bothered me. I remember watching my uncle Gilbert praying and sprinkling tobacco by the base of a big pine tree when he took me out deer hunting one day. Gilbert said it was what we were supposed to do before we went out. Making that offering of tobacco showed respect for the animal we were gonna take and was also a prayer for our hunt to be good. My ma was always singing and praying and covering herself with the smoke from smoldering cedar, moss and something called sweetgrass, but she never tried to force me into doing any of it.