The Last Woman (30 page)

In Black Falls, Billy often spent the night. After Richard went to bed, he could hear him downstairs – the knock of his coffee mug, the gush of a tap, the long silences when he imagined him brooding over the map of the Nigushi region – that wilderness scattered with a thousand lakes and scores of rivers where Billy seemed to know every portage, every camp, touching at the spots with thick middle finger, as if he could somehow feel the very stones. He usually slept late, and in the morning when Ann and Richard came down to breakfast, he was nowhere to be seen. During the day, Ann painted, while Billy – so Ann reported – went off downtown, where he “saw people” or visited the library. Arriving home for supper, Richard might find Billy and his wife talking at the kitchen table. Ann became someone else with Billy, in the way a person is said to be when he changes languages. She was more
talkative, he thought, she laughed with more abandon. She was quicker to anger too. More than once, Richard heard her chew Billy out for one thing or another. He expected an explosion, but Billy bore her criticisms with a grinning, half-pleased sheepishness as if they were a kind of compliment.

That Billy was clearly in some way still in love with Ann was obvious. Richard accepted this with amused tolerance. He chided Ann affectionately about Billy’s devotion. She laughed his comments off, though she never seriously denied them. It never occurred to him to mistrust her. The three of them were close: that was the point. Richard thought they balanced one another rather well. Passion needed reason, he once quipped, when Ann teased him in front of Billy about his habitual prudence. But her remark stung.

Those days, the cottage was often full. Ann’s father might drop by with his girlfriend. Bea, a middle-aged, sporty type who drank strong gin and tonics and claimed to have met, in her youth, the Prince of Wales on an Alberta ranch. There were scholars too, whom Richard and Billy were consulting about the claim: snorting at recondite jokes, their shirt-tails loosely anchored, they droned on about kinship systems among the Indians of British Columbia; about the crushing indifference of university administrations to their important work. And then there was Glyn Thomas. Billy found Glyn on one of his jaunts around the Falls, a young grad school dropout, down on his luck and waiting booths in a Chinese restaurant. Richard was skeptical – shouldn’t they advertise in Toronto for a researcher? But Billy insisted on Glyn, and he turned
out to be right, for the young man proved as dedicated, in his way, as Billy. In several cities, he turned archives upside down and came back with gold. On Pine Island, he and Billy lugged an old tape recorder from house to house, collecting people’s inherited memories of the treaty signing. Glyn also compiled a genealogical chart of all the families on the Island. “The official version,” Billy liked to call it, in deference to the fact that on Pine Island, not a few people could point to more than one father.

For convenience’s sake, and to save Glyn money, Ann and Richard lent him a room in their Black Falls house. When they moved to Inverness for the summer, he and his cartons of papers moved with them. Tall, fiercely intelligent, with a kind of lingering teenage shyness, he doted on Ann, whom he followed around with not-so-idle questions about her painting. Richard scarcely minded. All their guests loved Ann; later, he would think she was never more attractive, more bountiful, than at that time. People rushed to help her. They brought her gifts and stared at her during meals; he felt himself truly fortunate.

Her painting was going well in those days. She had found a Toronto dealer and her first show all but sold out. It was the period of her cottage paintings. Her bright colours, put down with apparent carelessness, were balanced by passages of darkness in which something uncanny and threatening lurked. “In a lesser painter, these subjects might have been sentimental,” the
Globe and Mail
enthused. Richard’s favourite canvas showed a family picnicking by the water. Standing off by herself, unobserved
in a cave of shadow, a small girl watched the others with an air of otherworldly detachment, as if she did not understand what she was seeing or why the others did not ask her in.

Later, Ann would turn to such waifs as her main subject. They usually appeared in distant windows and doorways, or were glimpsed in passing cars, always with the empty faces of those removed from life. Richard was fascinated; in some way he identified with these children, for he was one of those, he secretly felt, who had never entirely engaged.

After two years of preparations, the case of
Pine Island versus the Crown
was heard in a windowless Toronto courtroom, under the provincial crest with its rampant bear and stag. The walls were panelled, the floors carpeted in moss-green broadloom, the benches and tables of solid, lacquered oak. Richard had never appeared in so high a court, and put on his robes with anxious pride, eager to be a success in what he hoped would be the defining moment of his nascent career. Self-conscious about his lack of experience, he tried to speak in a slower, more considered manner than usual, standing behind his table or, when he was questioning witnesses, moving up and down before the bench, his dark skirts swishing in a pleasant way around his legs. Judge Wannamaker proved difficult to impress. He would wince as he rubbed the top of his huge, bald head in what seemed to Richard barely
concealed impatience; or he would gruffly interrupt to demand clarifications. Richard felt he showed the Crown’s lawyers an easier hand.

Yet Judge Wannamaker did say yes to the traditional clothing. When the Crown, as expected, tried to argue that the Pine Island people were mere wanderers who had drifted about the north country for generations – and that therefore the present-day inhabitants were not likely descended from the people who had lived on the Island in the treaty period – Billy said to Richard, “Let’s bring in the ladies’ work.” For the same distinctive style of beaded decoration had been made on Pine Island for time out of mind – proof of the established customs of an established people. A score of old Pine Island garments, made during the last hundred and fifty years, were imported from the Royal Ontario Museum. These were hung around the walls of the courtroom, alongside more recent creations by living members of the community. Tunics, moccasins, leggings, gloves, vests: all bore the same patterns of beaded curlicues, geometric shapes and flowers, while some were fringed with the fur of beaver or wolf, and the newest gave off the pleasant, smoky scent of tanned hide.

Billy was exhilarated by the arrival of the clothing. It was as if he had found the key to victory, as if the garments themselves would somehow sway the court, conveying the influence of the ancestors into the judge’s mind.

Apart from the lawyers, the judge, and the court recorder, tapping away on his machine, the courtroom was nearly empty. Occasionally a reporter from one of the
dailies drifted in, or one of those mysterious people who make it their business to follow trials. Richard would remember a small, wrinkled woman in a soiled raincoat and an old native man from the city, who always entered with two plastic bags stuffed with other bags and sometimes giving off the odour of food. He would sit breathing heavily through his mouth, and from time to time Judge Wannamaker would frown at him in irritation.

Now and then a few individuals from Pine Island appeared. Sitting nearly motionless, they watched the proceedings intently, their faces rarely betraying their reactions. Sometimes during a break, they would wander over to the display of clothing, running their fingers over a pattern, peering inside a vest, studying the craftsmanship of their ancestors.

In the rows of spectator benches, the one constant presence was Billy. Upright, as still as stone, he usually sat at the very back. Richard could never forget him for long. He felt that every word he uttered was being scrutinized by that silent figure. The other side was clearly aware of him as well, for when someone made a telling point, one or two of the Crown lawyers might glance around to see how it played with Billy.

When the judge struck his gavel to signal a break, Billy would rush to their chambers at the side of the courtroom with some new suggestion he thought Richard should take up. Richard found the relentless pressure distracting. At times, words were exchanged. Silences burned. The figure at the back of the court began to seem like a second judge.

Yet when it came Billy’s turn to take the witness stand, he performed superbly, Richard thought. Under close cross-examination by the Crown’s lawyer, he deftly picked his way through the traps laid out for him.

“So let me understand, Chief Johnson, for a hundred and twenty-six years your band accepted an annual treaty payment.”

“That’s right.”

“Yet it’s the whole basis of your claim that Pine Island never signed the treaty. All the evidence you’ve mustered here is in support of that argument.”

“That’s right.”

“So why did Pine Island, over all that time, accept the payments that were intended for those who had signed the treaty?”

“We no longer accept them.”

“Yes, but my point is, if there’s an oral tradition on the Island that you never signed, how, if that’s true, could the community have accepted, for well over a century, the payments in good conscience?”

Billy paused for a moment before looking at the other man, waiting in his robes. “What would you do if the government sent
you
a cheque?”

“Order!” Judge Wannamaker said as a ripple of laughter rose from the few spectators who had wandered in that day. “Answer the question, please.”

“It was understood as a gift to all the bands of the region, with no strings attached,” Billy said. “We are a poor people. We could not afford to turn it down, and thought
that it in no way compromised our independence. If the government bureaucracy had made a mistake, then it was their responsibility to correct it.”

“Do you think, now, that it compromised your independence?”

“No. It didn’t compromise it in law. But perceptions are important, so now we send back the payments.”

“All right, let’s turn to another matter. You claim not to have signed the treaty, but there’s a signature on it, or rather a mark, attributed by the treaty commissioners to one Peter Bluelake. And it says on the treaty itself that he is from Pine Island. Was not Peter Bluelake a member of your band?”

“Yes, but he was not a chief. Not a person of authority. He was only eighteen years old at the time, as our genealogical charts show. He had no permission to sign.”

“Well, why would he sign, if he didn’t have permission?”

Billy flashed a look at Richard: they had been expecting this. “There was a lot of drinking at the treaty signings. Perhaps someone liquored him up, flattered him, coaxed him to sign.”

“That is speculation, isn’t it? Do you have proof?”

“Do you think an eighteen-year-old boy would be delegated to do something so important?”

The days turned to weeks, the weeks to months, the arguments went round and round. Endlessly, the court recorder’s machine made its pattering-rain sound, the judge scratched at his notepad, the lawyers murmured and paced – a team of four on the Crown’s side, Richard on the
other – and in the witness stand a steady stream of historians and ethnologists cleared their throats and offered their long-considered opinions. There was the respected and well-known historian who could not read French (though many of the relative documents were in that language) and there was Glyn Thomas, who could (though his testimony was later discounted by the judge because he did not have a Ph.D.). There was the outdoorsman who had made detailed maps of the Nigushi district, painstakingly noting the native names for every river, stream, lake, slough, portage, camp, and island, and there was the author of ten books who, despite never having been in the area, proclaimed that their accuracy was “dubious.” There were native elders, men and women of such dignity that even that quiet courtroom attained a deeper hush. Some spoke in Ojibway, and for a moment in the spell cast by those clicking consonants, the plaintive drone of vowels that seemed to emerge from under the earth, the rampant bear and stag and the beautiful garments made perfect sense – for how could anyone imagine that these people had not, in a deep historical sense, carried the whole province on their shoulders? And the court recorder tapped on, and the thickly padded doors at the rear opened and shut, and someone coughed, and at times, in that windowless hall under its shadowless fluorescent lights on its scuffed moss-green carpet, Richard would momentarily lose track of what time it was, what season.

To conserve funds, he and Billy shared a room in an old Toronto hotel where the pipes clanged in the walls and in
the alley across the road the girls from a strip club smoked in their heels and tiny skirts. Billy, who had taken up cigarettes, would sit at the open window exhaling as he watched them. “She’s back,” he’d say of a tall blonde he professed to admire.

While Richard tossed, sleepless, Billy snored in the other twin. While Richard waged a steady guerilla campaign for order, Billy left his clothes and papers all over the room. The room took on the particular odour of two men living together, of deodorant and sour sweat and smoke laid over the deeper fug endemic to the ancient furniture and walls. They padded about in their underwear. They talked endlessly of the claim. They quarrelled in voices tense with restrained anger. Richard insisted the trial was going well. Billy was skeptical and, at times, almost despairing. He thought Richard was missing some important opportunities; he wondered if he was trying to do too much on his own. After all, there were four lawyers on the other side. Couldn’t Richard use some help? Richard felt insulted, but he brushed aside the proposal with a show of breezy indifference: they were doing just fine.