Wake The Stone Man (21 page)

chapter twenty-six

My exhibition closed at the end of the June. I sold five paintings and the library was interested in buying the Stone Man. I spent a day with Merika taking down the show and packing up the canvases. Most of them were being shipped back to Halifax, but I had decided to keep two of them at the house. And there was one more I didn't pack.

I took the painting of Nakina at the Lorna Doone to the hospital with me and placed it on the floor against the wall where I thought she could see it from her bed. When Nakina woke up she looked at me, then at the painting, and said in a thin voice, “Miigwetch.”

I sat quietly with her for a few hours. Every so often she would say something but I wasn't sure if she was speaking to me or to someone in the room who I couldn't see. The veil kept dropping between us.

Just after she fell asleep her body started to shake. I ran for the nurse.

Epileptic seizure. I had forgotten. They wrapped her body in warm blankets, and eventually the seizure passed. “You want another blanket?” I asked.

“Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“About Loon Lake. Talk to me about Loon Lake.”

I rubbed her shoulder and arm.

“We swam a lot. Remember? And we rowed in the Little Tink. Do you remember the rowboat my dad made?”

“He liked boats.”

“And sometimes at night Dad made a bonfire.”

“We picked blueberries along the tracks.” Nakina said.

“And Mom made pies.”

“No, bannock. Blueberry bannock. Lillian taught me how to make blueberry bannock.”

“That was in Rocky Lake.”

“You were such an asshole sometimes, eh,” she said, smiling at me.

I smiled back and kept rubbing her shoulder. She seemed chilled even with all the blankets.

“Molly?”

“Yeah.”

“Don't bring any goddamn priests in here OK.”

“OK. No priests. I promise.”

“I'm not Catholic.”

“I know.”

“They tried to make me one. At the residential school. Tried to make me into a good little Catholic girl. Made me pray to the new goddamned pope.”

“What new pope?” I thought she was slipping behind the veil again.

“First thing I remember when I got to the residential school. There was a new pope and we had to go to the chapel and pray for Pope John.”

She slept until the dinner trays arrived. “Do you want me to help you sit up?” I asked.

“No. I'm not hungry.”

“You didn't eat any lunch.”

“I just want to sleep.”

Before I left the hospital that night I stopped at the nursing station and let them know Nakina hadn't touched her dinner. The nurse said it was a sign that her body was getting ready to let go.

Before heading back out to Kamanistiquia I stopped at the library. If Nakina was right, if the first thing she remembered after going to the residential school was the election of Pope John, then at least that would give me a date. Something I could use to go through the school records.

It was strange walking into the library again after so many years. I stood for a few minutes beside the stained glass windows of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare and I remembered the weird, quiet girl who spent so many hours there. The building looked old. The carpets were worn and the furniture was tired and tattered. I found the World Book Encyclopedia ‘P' and looked under popes. I found him:

Angelo Roncalli was ordained a priest in 1904 and served in various posts including appointment as Papal Nuncio in several countries, including France (1944). He did much to help Jews during the Holocaust. Pope Pius XII made Roncalli a Cardinal in 1953. Pope John was elected on 28 October 1958 at the age of 77.

Nineteen fifty-eight. Nakina was almost a year older than me so she would have been about six when she arrived at the residential school. I remembered the records from the residential school — the journals of admissions and discharges. I would search the files to see if I could find a journal of admissions for nineteen fifty-eight.

***

Lars had four days off and came out to the house with me. Toivo and a friend were working on the barn. They put in the windows along the back wall and were reinforcing the floor. Lars worked with them.

I was out in the garden weeding. It amazed me how hard it was to get things to grow in that damn clay soil, but the weeds seemed to thrive. I could see four lines of green where the potatoes were poking through. We'd have a ton of potatoes in the fall.

That afternoon we installed the new sauna stove. It took four of us to lift it from the back of the truck. It would last a long time.

When Toivo and his friend went back to town at the end of the day, Lars stayed on. At night we stoked up the sauna and christened the new stove. Lars got the fire going and I carried wood. “I can't believe how fast it's heating up,” I said. “The old stove would have taken twice as long.”

When the sauna was ready we stepped into the outer room and stripped. I wasn't shy like I was the first time I'd been with Lars. We sat up on the top bench and after Lars threw a ladle of water on the stones we sat with our heads down, slowly breathing in the hot steam. I had a bar of birch soap Kikko had given me and I scrubbed my arms. Lars took a cloth, lifted my hair and scrubbed my shoulders and back. I could feel my body relaxing but just as I began to let go, a shiver of guilt ran through me. Not now. I couldn't relax now.

“Talk to me,” Lars said. “What's wrong?”

“I don't think I can do it,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Help Nakina. I don't know what to do. There's so much pain and I don't know what the fuck to do.” I put my head down and tried to think of how to say what I was feeling. “When I'm there, when I'm at the hospital I don't want to be there. That's the truth. I sit for hours and goddamn hours just waiting. I feel like such an idiot sometimes because I don't know how to help. And I can't wait to get away, I can't wait to leave the hospital, and as soon as I leave her I want to go back and be with her. I want to go back and be close to her so she's not alone. I should be there with her now. I need to get this right. I've let her down so many times before, I need to get this right.”

Lars put his arms around me and when he threw another ladle of water on the stones I let the steam wash away my tears.

“Maybe all you need is to be there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just be there. Be with her. Maybe that's enough.”

When the fire died down Lars wrapped a towel around me, picked me up and carried me to the house. I didn't know until that moment how much I needed to be carried.

That night I dreamt about waking the Stone Man. I dreamt I went down to the wharf with Nakina and I shouted to him. There was a great crashing of rock and he sat up and walked across the water towards us, his footsteps churning up the lake into frothy whitecaps. When he got to the wharf the Stone Man reached his broad hand down and lay it on my head like a blessing. Then he wrapped his granite arms around Nakina's frail body and took her back out into the lake with him. The lake stilled as he lay down to sleep and I was alone on the wharf. The Stone Man had taken his daughter home.

***

Nakina slept more every day, and when she was awake she seemed far away. She said a lot of things that didn't make sense and sometimes spoke to people who weren't there. Sometimes she'd speak in English, then say a few words in Ojibwe. I'd hold her hand and she'd say something to me, then something to people I couldn't see, then she'd talk to me like I could hear what they just said.

I sat and held her hand and let her take me into that strange in-between place where she was travelling. It felt peaceful. And in that place of in-between I sometimes felt the presence of my mother and father. There was an energy around us. I didn't try to understand it — it was enough just to be there.

I was getting used to the rhythm of the hospital, the long periods of quiet, then the flurry of activity before a change of shift. I got to know the best time to ask for things and when not to bother the nurses. I knew the names of all the cleaning staff and they made such a fuss over Nakina. I was touched by the small kindnesses I saw every day. And I found out what those funny little toothette things were that I'd seen in the bathroom. The nurse taught me how to wet them with water and rinse out the inside of Nakina's mouth and moisten her lips. It felt good to do something useful.

Mitch and his wife Marcia and some people from the Friendship Centre came to visit. One day they brought Mr. Bannon, an elder from the Fort McKay reserve. They brought sweetgrass for a smudging ceremony. Marcia and I stood near the door in case a nurse tried to come in. We didn't think they would approve. Mr. Bannon lit the dried sweetgrass in a shallow stone bowl and with a feather he fanned the smoke over Nakina. He and Mitch spoke some prayers in Ojibwe and Nakina looked to be at peace. For hours afterwards I could smell the musky scent of the sweetgrass.

There were flowers from Anna, Kiiko and Toivo, and some cards from people she'd worked with in British Colombia. She asked me to read the cards and letters to her, and I could see Nakina had made an impact in their lives when she was out west. She had made a good life there.

Sometimes when Nakina slept I'd stretch out in the chair and look out the window at the Stone Man. I thought about all the years we had lost.

***

“Water. I need water.” Nakina was awake and seemed agitated.

I got a fresh jug of ice water and moistened Nakina's lips.

“I saw the northern lights,” she said, “when I lived in the mountains. They were beautiful.”

“I could see them out at my place in Kamanistiquia,” I said.

“Your house. I like it.”

“I've moved back out there. I'm living there now.”

“Alone?”

“I have a friend. He stays with me sometimes.”

“Is he nice?”

“Very nice. He's very…” I thought about how to describe Lars. “Kind. He's very kind and gentle.”

I hoped she would say more, but she drifted off to sleep.

She was asleep when I arrived the next morning and there was an oxygen mask over her face. The room was still. A nurse came to the door and asked to see me at the nursing station.

“She slipped into a coma last night,” the nurse said. “She's not in any pain. She may stay like this for a few days. She might regain consciousness. It's hard to say.”

“What can I do?”

“Sit with her. Talk to her. She may still be able to hear you, know you're there.”

I went back into the room and sat on the chair beside Nakina. Her body was there and I could see her chest rising and falling. But she was far away. I tried to talk to her but I didn't know what to say. Maybe it had all been said.

I stayed silently beside her, holding her hand, watching her chest rise and fall until her breathing stilled and she was gone.

***

The day after the cremation I drove out to Kamanistiquia with Nakina's ashes in an urn on the seat beside me. There was no funeral. She didn't want that. No ceremony, no one there except me and Mitch standing together on the cement floor at the back of the crematorium. As the door to the furnace opened and the pine box holding her body moved forward Mitch's arm rose suddenly in an arched swooping gesture like a bird taking flight and as her body was fed into the flames I felt Nakina's soul rise and take flight. Free.

At the house I placed the silver urn on the kitchen table and poured myself a glass of wine. I looked up at the painting Celeste had done.
Summer
— the pure joy of a child. I looked at the painting of Nakina out in the boat with Dad — Dad's curly hair blowing back in the wind and his hand on the throttle of the engine. Nakina with the wind whipping her hair across her face and that silly grin on her face. That grin. I looked at the tiny black shoe from the rubble of the residential school. A reminder of all the children who had been lost.

I got out the box with the photocopies from the residential school, lit the Coleman lamp and began to sort through the copies of the ledgers. There were no copies for 1958. The last I had were from 1943
. I turned the dial on the lamp to raise the wick so I could see. The writing was very faint. So many names — Lillian Sabourine, Hubert Moses, Gilbert Sabourine, Rose Jackpine — entries in a journal that might be the only proof these children existed, the only link left between these children and the families they had been taken from. They came from all across Northern Ontario — Perrault Falls, Red Lake, Armstrong, Sandy Lake. I wondered where they were now. I wondered how many had found their way home. How many families were broken forever?

When Nakina was taken from her family the thread of her life story was broken. Who was her mother? Her father? Did she have brothers or sisters? If she had a sister was she tough and smart like Nakina? Did they work the trap lines? What did her grandmother look like? Were they funny? Were they serious? Were they religious — what did they believe?