Smoke River (27 page)

The clan mother’s voice dips as she finishes her talk. “We kept resisting, returning to our true leaders. The next time, your government sent in the black boots. I was a young girl, mostly well behaved.”

There is more laughter, followed by whispering across the room, like a wind through dry leaves. Linda removes the pins that keep a tight roll at the back of her head. Long grey hair falls to her shoulders. She reaches behind, grabs a fistful, and yanks it up from the back of her head so her face grimaces. The negotiator startles.

“This is how they dragged me out of our traditional council meeting when the raiders came again, Miss Taylor. Do you know how painful that is? My scalp bled. For six months I could not brush my hair. I had it cut off. These things you don’t forget.
That and the feel of a black boot in your ribs from a man who thinks you are lower than a dog.” She drops her hand; a warm, thick banner of grey rolls down between her shoulders. And for a moment Helen sees the elder shape-shift into that young woman – smooth-cheeked, straight-backed, with beautiful hair – who bled. Like Cherisse.

“This democracy of yours is a funny thing, no? You wanted us to rule ourselves with a government like yours, yet it took you long enough to let us vote in your democracy. Ha, good trick, that! But we were better off without it. We already had our own government, our own democracy. Still do. Nearly four hundred years ago, the Two Row Wampum treaty ensured we’d live side by side with Europeans, parallel lines that didn’t interfere with each other. Then in 1763, your predecessors again proclaimed they’d respect our rights to the land we occupy, and thus, how we live. You have broken that promise.
Eh ne’e na’a wen’ne
.” The clan mother sits. And she is old again, defiant still.

Three days earlier, looking down at Cherisse in the hospital bed, Helen thought only,
She’s alive
. Native women were tossed from cars like fast-food wrappers; their bones were plucked clean by coyotes and vultures; they disappeared with nothing left but poster pictures and the water-drip torture of hope. Before the drive to the hospital, she’d gone to Joe’s trailer to gather some things and found the smoky atomizer in Cherisse’s bedroom. It was a queer object, but Helen recognized its magic. She tucked it into her hand, and later under Cherisse’s hospital pillow, hoping it was as powerful as a witching bone. As long as Cherisse was safe from further damage, Helen wanted her to stay in the hospital, so she, an old woman, could coax the demon of truth out of the darkness with a bowl of blood and a hunter’s patience.

Shayna’s head and heart are splintering. A baby on the way. A niece in the hospital. A blockade that’s packed the negotiating room with too many men: government aides, Chief White and his cronies, Clarence in designer eyeglasses, the unreadable Elijah Barton sitting with two Warriors, thick-necked and bulging in their dress shirts. And among them a woman with sleek hair and manicured nails doing a man’s bidding: Antonia Taylor.

The negotiator pushes her glasses up her nose, takes off her blazer to reveal a cap-sleeved blouse. Her arms look soft and pale. She forgets to thank the elder. She turns and whispers loudly for someone to fetch her a juice. A man returns empty-handed; the juice has run out. “What, no juice?” says the negotiator. She calls a recess to remedy her thirst.

Helen finds Shayna and presses a paper bag into her hands, another care package from Ruby: two tuna sandwiches, a carton of milk, fresh strawberries, and yogurt. Shayna has felt her aunt watching her these past few days, making a meditation of what she eats, counting the calories and nutrients to herself as if they were rosary beads. Another woman with a child in her belly would not let herself go hungry, would not sleep outside half the week under stars muddied with barrel-fire smoke. She folds the bag closed, her appetite vanquished by worry, stores it in her satchel, and squeezes the older woman’s arm. “I have to catch someone first,” she says, and she is up.

They can’t talk about Cherisse, not yet. Shayna wants her niece to come home to the reserve. She has no trust in the medical system, in any institution. Shay will wrap her in old hunter’s blankets. She will lie her in the sun by the window, sponge the young woman’s wounds with witch hazel, and feed her bowls of broth. Together they will beat the walls, burn her clothes, cut her hair. One day Cherisse will be strong enough to cast out the spirit of her tormentor. She will sing again. Her hair will grow back.

Standing outside the hotel lobby with a cigarette drawn to his lips, Louis Greene, bronzed and vacant-eyed, straightens so his big chest stretches his dress shirt when Shayna approaches. She is not surprised by the trombone slide of his look, from her lips and down her neck to the first button of her fresh blouse. Her face feels tight from weeks in the sun. She offers a reluctant smile, clears her throat, tries to sound authoritative. “We need to talk,” she says. “Two of your men got drunk last night. They rode their
ATVS
over the lawns of residents out on County Road 13.” He nods his head but offers nothing.

“The clan mothers forbade alcohol and drugs at the reclamation.” She retrieves a folded newspaper from her satchel, shoves it, headline first, into his pitted face. “That little incident made the newspapers. It makes us look bad.”

His smile is more like a wince of pain. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, holds it out to her.

Shayna looks at the skin of his forearms, strangely scratched, as if he’s wrestled a frightened animal. She grabs his wrist, turns it over, and examines the marks. “You get into a fight with a wildcat?” she asks. “Or a girl?”

Louis tips his head back and laughs. “Something like that.” He lets his hand be held like a hopeful boy, as if he were giving her a gift.

Shayna lets go of the large fist, the white package falling with it. She recognizes the label. “You on Barton’s payroll?”

Louis lights up his cigarette, leaves the question unanswered, his smile arching upward.

“I need you to discipline your men. We already have an image problem,” she says.

He laughs again, stretches his neck.

Another small story in the
Interlake Post
that morning quoted a Doreville citizen who claimed to have seen two natives, their ball caps and kerchiefs replete with Warrior insignia, sniffing gasoline
and torching a police car in the early morning hours on the day of the raid. She wants to ask Louis about that. A police spokesperson said they have fingerprints and footprints. She wants to ask Louis what else travelled with them from the Seaway besides tents and sleeping bags, ill-fitting dress shirts. Shayna imagines milled steel, cold as chromium plate, the colour of a moonless night. She wants to ask Louis about her niece. Did he see her? What does he know? Those scratches. But now more people from the negotiating room are outside; she senses Elijah Barton circling closer to them, curious.

“This conflict will not be won with public relations,” Louis says. “It will be won with history, the history everybody forgets.” He reaches out to her and gently gathers a few strands of her hair in his large hand, rubs it between his thumb and forefinger, as if he has always done this, as if he needn’t ask.

Her body springs to attention. She does not want to feel desire. She wills herself not to. “Guns,” she says, finding the right words. It is almost a whisper. “You can’t use them. You can’t bring them out. We’ll lose any goodwill we have.” If he places his skin against hers, a slight brush of his roughness against her fretful dampness, she will make him bleed. So it will be anger he remembers her for, not pleasure. “Even the rumour that you are armed, and all these poverty groups and unions and environmentalists will hightail it outta here.”

“Panama, Estonia, Ireland, Persia … You know, they recognized our sovereignty in the nineteen-twenties,” Louis says. His eyes look beyond her. “We had our own passports.”

“I need you to promise …” Shayna calculates. A swift kick to the nuts, a gouge to the eyes. She wants maximum pain with a minimum of time for him to react. She is surprisingly fleet under pressure. A jackrabbit.
Just try
, she thinks.
Give me the excuse
.

“Since they started to take our land, since they started to impose their elections, control our money, we’ve resisted,” says
Louis. “This reserve resisted! Since when did public relations matter more than peace, power, righteousness?”

“But you don’t need guns.”

“An enemy’s foot is in our country.”

Shayna slams a heel into the ground, raising a small cloud of dust. Now heads have turned in their direction. She lowers her voice. “I know my fucking history. Guns aren’t our history.”

Louis drops her hair. He looks at her sadly. “There are no guns, sister. What kind of fool do you take me for?”

She feels her chest collapse. Her eyes fall to his forearms again. “You should have somebody look at those scratches.”

The negotiations resume, but now the room is warmer, as if the government aides have cut the air conditioning in an attempt to hasten the proceedings. Jackets are abandoned, sleeves rolled up. The water jugs are passed around, depleted. No one comes offering refills.

When the next elder gets up to speak, Antonia Taylor raises her hand to stop him. She pulls herself close to the microphone. She reads a long section from the Indian Act, then another from the Constitution and a select passage from the U.N. Charter. “We are bound by these charters, conventions, and legislation to negotiate with democratically elected governments. The band council is the only legitimate leadership recognized by the federal government. And so I must ask, is there a member of the band council here?”

Disappointment, like a reprimand, makes the elders flatten their lips. Shayna turns. Chief White occupies one of the chairs designated for spectators, set up behind the half of the U-shaped table across from the negotiator and her team. He looks smug, expectant. She watches Clarence take off his glasses and wipe them, avoiding her glare. He is about to speak, to hijack the proceedings, to poach authority from the elders and her – this much
is clear. Shayna stands up, walks to where he sits beside the chief, and blocks his view of those across the table. If he’s going to betray them, he will have to do it looking right at her. She hears uncomfortable coughs, legs crossing and uncrossing, whispers on each side of them.

Clarence puts his glasses back on and she sees that his eyes are tired, his face puffy, his vigour paid out steeply to city living. He smiles at her, a smile that has remnants of love for her, a hint of the vulnerability he showed when they were at their best.

Antonia Taylor leans into the microphone again and repeats, “Okay, folks, one more time for good measure. Is there a member of a democratically elected band council here?” The federal negotiator looks squarely at Chief White. He turns to Clarence with an impatient gape.

“Shayna, you need to move,” Clarence says, leaning forward. “You heard her; they won’t negotiate with you. You can’t just keep standing in the way of things.”

Off to one side, Shayna sees that Elijah Barton has also left his seat. Now he is kneeling, whispering to the clan mothers as if he were one of them.

“Standing in front of things can be very effective, Clarence,” she says, using the same half whisper he used with her. “You might try it sometime. Take a break from shuffling papers.”

Behind her comes the sound of amplified throat clearing. Shayna turns to see Linda Goodleaf at the microphone again. Behind her is Barton, smiling, with his arms crossed. “I have a question for you, Miss Taylor,” Linda says.

There is a moment when it appears that the negotiator will disallow this. An aide whispers in her ear; a reluctant nod follows.

“Are
you
an elected member of the government?”

The room becomes very quiet.

“I was with a previous government,” the negotiator answers.

“But are you now?”

“No,” she says, the salt of resentment in her voice. “But I am the hired representative of a democratically elected government.”

The clan mother smiles with kindness. “We too are representatives, Miss Taylor, but we won’t receive any payment for being here. We represent the peoples of the reclamation. And I suggest that we have arrived here very democratically. A vote was taken among all those involved, and they asked us to be their representatives. There is no one else in this room, or on the reserve, who can claim such support.”

The negotiator forces a smile. Again she looks at Chief White, as if appalled by his truancy, his silence. Clarence whispers to him. The chief mutters, casts his eyes downward, and Shayna returns to her seat.

A sharp sound exits from the negotiator’s pursed mouth – a tongue-flattened expletive. Then her hands are up and she calls for another recess, exiting to the lobby with a cellphone stuck to her ear, swatting papers at the aides who approach as if they were gnats. “Is there any juice in this godforsaken place or what?” she snaps at one.

Linda Goodleaf clasps Elijah’s hands. He beams triumphantly. Shayna realizes she will have to congratulate him. It makes her nervous, his easy move into being their redeemer. She opens the paper bag from Ruby. Finally she’s hungry, as she hasn’t been in weeks. The tuna sandwiches are warm but the celery in them still crunches, and there is just enough mayonnaise, salt, and pepper. Shayna devours them greedily, one after the other, before anyone can approach her and she feels compelled to share.