Birdie Read online

  Flesh folded on flesh.

  A man, an invisible and too near her man, was passing the pipe to her. She had to reach over the empty space in front of the door. Her arms felt heavy and dough-like and she had to heave her weighted self towards him to grasp, too roughly, the offered pipe.

  She is seated by her Auntie Val and Skinny Freda. There was a moniaskwew* seated right beside them, but the woman didn’t look like anyone she knows. Everyone was real quiet, listening to a Storyteller.

  * White woman.

  THINKFEELING IT NOW, Bernice would have to say that the change had started in Edmonton. She went there after she left the San. She didn’t sink; she skipped on the water. First, she started to dream in black-and-white. Not just any black-and-white, but Charlie Chaplin, old film new machine black-and-white. Stilted motions and pantomimed facial expressions, she could never quite understand what was being said as there was no sound in these dreams. No piano player to indicate the action is intensifying or that the emotion has deepened. Each morning since the movies started, well, every afternoon if truth be told, she had awakened with a too-familiar ache in her chest; the pain below her breastbone felt nothing like a bird. She couldn’t discern if it was her conscience or her feelings that hurt, so she ignored it.

  In the time before she truly sank, the dreams would linger with her throughout the day, almost forgotten, as she rushed to get out of her pyjamas and into whatever clothes were sitting nearest to the bed. Although they started when she was in Edmonton when she left the San, those dreams fill her now, floating in and out of the room whether she is awake or not. Now, she suspects that not inviting the dreams in made her a bit wonky in Alberta. (Wonky and wonkier, she often thought to herself, stifling a laugh.) But it was in Edmonton that her dream life and her waking life had begun to fold over each other, seamlessly, like dough in a pan. In order to maintain what she understood as normal, she found that she had to be very quiet. She stifled a lot, then. It is strange, while immobile now, she feels more awake, aware and engaged than she ever has. She stifles nothing. But then. Then: loud laughs, too-big smiles and inappropriate questions at people on the street. She swallowed frank stares at, crazy thoughts about, and unsuitable gestures towards any person who happened to pass by her. The “trouble,” as near as she could figure it, began almost as soon as she left the San. One day, she decided she was going to visit her Auntie Val. She had planned to stay with her, initially, but found the space between her dream and waking life too precarious and did not want to take that to her auntie’s place. Her auntie had given her a key for her apartment the last time she visited Bernice at the San and she remembered it that morning. On that day, when she was changed, she walked down Jasper Avenue, waited at the bus stop and was sitting there when the line between dreaming and waking life seemed to blur – she became someone else. At first, she thought that she had made herself scarce, but on the second day of no eye contact and no acknowledgment, she knew the truth: she had made the change.

  Her kohkom* used to be able to do the change. When she got to the city and told people who her kohkom was, someone gave her a book about that. It was called Shapeshifters and it was filled with a whole bunch of phony-baloney stuff. There was, however, a picture of Rose Calliou, her kohkom, on page seventy-seven. Kohkom was squinting like she couldn’t quite make out who was taking her picture. She had her hair in an ever-present braid, and if the sepia page had been in colour, she knows that the skirt, shirt and shawl would have matched only in their brightness and not their colour scheme. Rich purples, oranges and pinks filled Kohkom’s wardrobe. Seeing her flat and two-dimensional on the page had upset her and she felt like crying but didn’t need to – by then, and not since she sank, she had cried so often that when she wasn’t crying the space occupied by where the tears used to be felt like a phantom limb. So disconnected is she from her body, or perhaps so intertwined are emotion and body, that she is not sure she would know if she was crying. Pain currently registers in her skin and sorrow in her breasts. Whether that translates to tears or not is still something of which she is not aware. She knows, as well as she knows the indentation of that knife beneath her, that it could mean she is detached. She also thinks that she is registering and responding to the change in a way that lets her shroud and feel things as she needs to. It reminds her of cocooning – and the thought at once soothes her.

  * Kohkom means “your/her/his grandmother.” (Nohkom means “my grandmother.”)

  In Edmonton, still numb from the incessant thrum and howl of the San, she used to try and try to turn herself into a bug. She thought about wandering through the treacherous orange shag rug that Auntie Val had in her living room. She imagined she would be able to climb up the door jamb and out the window. Then she would imagine doing the change and becoming a butterfly and flying high high high until her breath was hard to find. She never imagined coming back. Auntie Val’s apartment, unkindly regarded as “Pecker Palace” by the people who knew such things, was on a busy street between a convenience store that always smelled of spoiled hamburger (although they did not sell meat) and a halfway house for men. It served as a post house. Post-marriage, post–skid apartment, post–last bad job. What kept them from thinking of their home, their lives, their jobs as pre-anything was also something understood by those in the know. Now she thinks often about how much she hated going there, thinking of it as home. Then, she could not afford the luxury of disdain.

  When she felt the change coming on that time, she found herself oddly teary all week. There was a sense of alteration, of movement, but she couldn’t tell if it was that she had lost something or found something. Keeping her head up, interacting with the world in small ways made it clearer: something had shifted. It wasn’t as if she needed it quantified, but a general animal, vegetable or mineral categorization might have helped. Something about the San had altered her; it was like being amongst so many crazies had allowed her one crazy thought of her own: I can shift. With so many skewed, altered and created realities around her, Bernice no longer felt her foot tethered. To Here. Now. By the time she left for Edmonton she had a comfort in her that she had never known. It was Edmonton where she learned how to skip on the water. Presently, it is not hard to imagine how she got Here. It is infinitely more difficult to understand what Here is. It is not the soiled Sealy, the smell of sweatsadness or Freda and Lola’s endless “pop ins” to see if she has moved. Eaten. Changed. She wants to tell them that the change is precisely the thing. She knew she could change by the time she left the San, but the story of the change started in Edmonton, is too much to tell, and can’t possibly be translated to there. That bed, that room, that bakery. Here started on Edmonton public transit.

  On that day, the day when she shifted entirely, she got on the Edmonton City Centre bus, its exhaust pouring out like the steam from a dragon’s mouth. She was the last one to get on. Walking unevenly to the back of the bus, and trying to balance her bigself as the city bus pulled away from the curb, her skin, she remembers, felt alive and ancient. She sat across from two old women who were speaking a language she didn’t recognize. It sounded throaty and nasally like Blackfoot but the language also felt liquid and had the rich cadence of Dene, so she couldn’t place it. Every so often the old women would pepper their conversation with terminology for which there must not be translations. “Microwave,” one woman said between a rush of other words. The other old woman nodded and smiled, smiled and nodded. There was comfort in their familiarity with each other. She felt the longing for the women in her family so acutely that it gnawed at her like a presence.

  Back home, sometimes the grandmothers would gather for tea and whatever they were working on together. They would talk about their children and grandchildren in Cree. Every so often words would come out that had no Cree translation. “Satellite dish!” one of her grandmothers would pronounce. Kohkom would smile and nod, nod and smile. Those children and grandchildren who had moved to the city got special mention and a firmness in the lips when
they were discussed. Back then, she believed that this was an indication that moving away from home – be it the rez or the town next to it – was a failure of sorts. Once she had made the move to the big city and become a big shot (the only two times when “big” had a pejorative meaning) she re-wrote the firm lips and the deliberate mention of relocation. She equated the city, once she lived there, with jobs and resources that don’t exist in Little Loon.

  That day on the bus, when it lurched to a stop and picked up a family, she watched as a young mom had difficulty getting her stroller up the steps. One of The Kids was a short and pudgy boy about three years old. His face was smeared with grape something and he seemed to be still enjoying it. Another of the children was a little older, but not by much, she thought, with two long black braids hanging to his waist. There were four kids in all. Every one of them had a runny nose.

  Cluck cluck cluck said an old woman with her tongue against the roof of her mouth but without opening it. Nod and frown, frown and nod said the other. Bernice realized without surprise that she was becoming someone else, someone who could speak without talking. The change took her voice and gave her a new talk (that this new talk could include old white woman Ukrainian did not give her pause).

  The woman with The Kids had sat next to her and said, Oh it’s cold on here! Her lips didn’t move and Bernice had wondered how she had learned to talk this way.

  Yeah, the newer ones have heaters all the way to the back though, Bernice answered her.

  Just as well, they need to keep bundled anyhow, the mother said, pointing in her kids’ direction with her lips.

  Must be Cree, Bernice thought.

  You from the city? the woman asked her.

  No, up north, Bernice answered.

  I thought so, did I see you at Little Loon?

  Probably, my mom lives there, well, in Big Valley.

  Bernice looked her in the eye. You from here?

  Woman with four kids laughed a big laugh, so hard her belly shook a little. No my old man and I moved here from Poundmaker’s in the spring, he hopes to find work. She shifted her ample bottom on the seat to half-face Bernice. I told him there wasn’t no use – nobody in Edmonton’s gonna hire one of us. Bernice smiled and nodded.

  You got a job? She pointed at Bernice.

  No, I am going to visit my aunt.

  The two old white women looked at Bernice distrustfully, she thought. Maybe they thought she had deceived them by not being Indian with them right away. She looked at her reflection in the half-window of the bus that was closed. Long brown hair, high cheekbones and medium tone. She was medium. At least, that’s what she had been told at the cop shop. Why do they want your colour listed, anyhow? she had thought. Old ladies whispered with lips moving to themselves, now afraid to let even a little of their secret language be shared with the other women on the bus.

  The cold air whistling through the bus was quite unbearable. She wished she had worn a hat and scarf. Her threadbare gloves were no match for the biting cold. She pulled the cord, the effort of raising her arm through her heavy coat and sweater draining the last of her energy. She pulled her purse to her side, picked up her Thermos and got off the bus. She gathered the last remnant of her strength and readied herself for the three-block walk to the Pecker Palace.

  There were no trees to shield her from the wind. She cut through a back alley, it was shorter that way, and was surprised to see another woman taking the alley shortcut. It was late now and it was dark. One thought crossed her mind: What is the big awful, so terrible that walking through a putrid alley alone, at night, seems safe? It was thirty below and her breath formed a foggy halo above her head as she walked. She was going full speed when she tripped over them. Deer legs. Finding them in the city surprised her. Finding them unused and discarded surprised her even more. At home the legs would be used for sausage. In the big city, they were litter. Although it was cold, she thought she could smell the hide smell.

  She had tanned hides with Kohkom as long as she could remember. Kohkom would speak to her only in Cree, even though her mom had told the old lady not to. It seemed to Bernice that she could understand everything Kohkom said, although today she could not remember a word of Cree. They would scrape scrape scrape the remaining tissue, meat and fat from the hide, Kohkom with a deer bone, Bernice with a fashioned bed leg. The smell of the fat on her hands was strong and almost putrid. Nowadays, they had to keep the hides in a freezer and then thaw them out. Kind of like killing them twice, Kohkom told her. The smell was from freezing, thawing and freezing, not like the old days, Kohkom said in Cree. Bernice wondered silently if in the old days Kohkom used a wringer washer to soak the hides in like she did now. Wisely, she kept her mouth shut.

  When she walked by that family’s house, the family who had the legs, she wondered what they did with the rest of the deer. She wondered if they ate any of it, or if they tanned the hide. Most likely, they sent the hide to a taxidermist and didn’t eat the meat. Bernice and her aunt could have used the meat.

  Auntie Val made a lot of rice, noodle or potato casseroles. She ate bannock every day, and not always with jam. “This is nothing,” Auntie told her, unapologetically, the last time they visited. “We used to take bannock and lard to school and that’s all we had. Your uncle Larry,” she would always lower her voice at this point, “used to skip his meal and give it to the younger ones.”

  As she walked up the path and then steps of Val’s apartment she glanced around to make sure that no one saw her enter with her own key. Twenty of the Pecker Palace apartments were owned by the Native Co-op, and if they thought that Bernice lived there, Auntie Val’s rent would go up by one. The Co-op conducted periodic inspections, the stated purpose being making sure that the wiring and heating were okay, but every so often when she visited, Bernice would have to pack fast and leave. It was annoying, but Val paid only ninety dollars a month in rent for a pretty good place.

  She walked in and the smell of fresh bread and buns wrapped around her and hugged her. Auntie Val always baked on nights as cold as that one.

  When she opened the door, she spoke to her auntie in her new, non-voice. Auntie, I’m home, she whispered, brushing deer fur off her pants.

  “Is someone there?” Auntie Val asked.

  Auntie Val, Bernice had understood, could no longer see or hear her.

  She remembers going to the living room and sitting there for the night, the sounds of sirens, which usually bothered her, became a sweet low cadence. Even now, wide awake and eyes closed, she can remember thinking that nothing in her had altered, that something outside of her had. If she were able to speak of it now, she would say that the world shifted, not she. That colours felt like tastes and sounds poured like liquid. It was something that started There and which became Here. At that time, in the city, she had no idea what she looked like or where she was when she changed. It didn’t occur to her that the day held any special meaning.

  Now, with the luxury of being here, she understands that the change may have happened completely that night, but pieces of it started earlier. Those changes started in her body. When she was sixteen Bernice first began to feel the dissonance between her active life and her inner life. She had no body knowledge, and no one but her cousin Freda talked to her once she left home, so she had no barometer for normal. She remembers feeling this disconnected before, when she was little and in the same apartment. Her auntie had taken her to live with her in Grandetowne. Every day Bernice would walk from the south hill of Big Valley to the north flats, spending her days in a religious all-white girls’ school and her nights in a (then) all-white neighbourhood. Just a few hours’ drive from the relative quiet of her community, she felt estranged from familiar faces and sounds. Felt that she would die if she went to Loon but that she was not living there either.

  When Freda moved out, first from Maggie’s place and then from Val’s, a spark of something left the house at Little Loon. Once her mom had left, it felt like there was no air left in
the house. So, she went to live with her auntie, for the first time. Auntie Val was still partying then and Bernice remembers doing most things alone in Grandetowne. Shopping for groceries. Getting smokes for Val. Making her lunches. Walking to school.

  What is her normal, that which sits in the bed with her, was once foreign to Bernice. Her heels dig into the frayed sheets, almost imperceptibly, as she sees herself trying to make the transition from There to Here. Often, she recalls, she could hear the grandmothers whispering to her as she walked along the path to that school. For a long time she thought she was crazy, hearing voices and all, but she came to know that this was regular and normal for her. She remembers that she had stopped to buy a Coke from Lou’s! corner store. Lou, or some Lou-looking man, as always, eyed her warily. No big deal, she was used to it. Still, she is certain she had to stifle the urge to stick her tongue out at him.

  Cutting through the courthouse parking lot and looking towards the steps (where busy-looking men in business-looking suits walk quickly in and out of the doors) Bernice had always felt an increasing sense of dread every time she took a step closer to school. The courthouse was perched on top of the hill. When she reached the top she looked down at Big Valley with all of its varied splendour. The heat rose with purpose from the blackened asphalt urged forcefully into the potholes along the road.

  She could see the A&W sign to the north peeking up from behind the mall. At that time, her Auntie Val lived across the street from the restaurant. It was a drive-in then. When Bernice’s mom left she had dropped her off to live with Val, and the three of them walked over and sat in the one booth located inside of the restaurant and ordered cheap hamburgers and coffee. The memory is fat with meaning that she can’t decipher, and as she captures the moment in her mind she hears a bird-like trill come from her throat and compete with the noise of the bakery for a place to land.