Birdie Read online

  In the city, you could smell earth, but it was the disposable and compostable earth (mould, mildew and dust) that she found suffused her clothes, her hair and the stuff she carried in her cart. The smellmemory competes with the yeasty richness of the bakery and she feels it in the room. Her home. Her old home. Her notional home. Living in Edmonton, around Edmonton, about Edmonton, under Edmonton was the same as living in and about the rez. Living next to the reserve in a house at the outskirts of town was no different than living under the pedestrian bridge next to the Kinsmen Centre. There were woods, a river, she didn’t fit in, and she had to rely on herself for protection.

  It was a life she chose, or that chose her, once she was in the city. When her auntie lost her job. When she was left alone. She was old enough. After the Academy, care, and when she came back to Edmonton before the San, she made her way just fine – for a long time she appreciated and lived off the goodwill of friends, then friends of friends, and eventually strangers. Inevitably, when the goodwill ran out, so did she. Much of that time is perfectly clear in her head. She had moments of perfection living on the streets. Philosophical discussions, arguments about Indian rights, and exchanges about the old ways and how to live them in a new time. Of course, those were tempered by lost times. Times that are not so perfectly clear, even with the clarity she seems to possess on the Sealy, where she was flanked by harsh words, cruelties and fights. Then, she escaped and changed herself. She has little memory of Then, but when she came back from wherever her spirit spirited her she liked to imagine she was a wolf, living in the green and watching the city through wolf eyes. Until one night. She didn’t know how long she had been gone before she slept. Didn’t know how long she slept.

  The next morning. She had a crow feather between her lips when she woke up.

  When she allows herself to think of the past, it is a past that was safe and from which she had taken pieces to construct a manageable present. Most often, she thinks of who she was then in terms of what she could see and smell around her.

  There is a cacophonous noise in the bakery below her. She can hear Lola enjoying the busy work of preparation. Thump thump thump. Murmur. Dull thud dull thud dull thud. Laugh. Bernice imagines she can smell yeast and butter in the waves of rising heat. The ovens make a low hummmm and ground the cooking in something solid and permanent.

  “Can you imagine?” Lola cackles, and a new cadence answers. Chops and softens, rises and lilts, with no discernible word pattern. For some reason, Bernice is struck with a thought: that sounds happy.

  True, she has the smell of loss on her and is anxious in her demeanour and stares too long but she knows this feeling.

  She can feel Freda’s bones, tired and sad, curving so much like her own, below her.

  acimowin

  Crow sat down and lit herself a cigarette.

  She had flown an awfully long way and she neededwanted a cigarette.

  So she

  had one.

  Crow had come a long way to learn big words and to make her voice more beautiful. No one told Crow a crow is always a crow, and that their voices would always be

  an undignified cawwww!

  She had decided that she wanted

  a certain lifestyle, as many crows do,

  and that she was willing to transform herself to do it. Crow had learned a good trick,

  Crow could make herself beautiful and pleasant.

  When she wanted to, Crow could look sleek and exotic.

  Crow looked at herself in the mirror

  and she liked what she saw.

  She had sleek black feathers, the blackest of eyes, and a lean long shape.

  Crow thought that it was a pity that not everyone could experience her beauty.

  A pity, but a blessing!

  She, Crow, cawlaughed to herself.

  Crow wore the tightest and most revealing of outfits.

  If it was backless, sleeveless, sheer, high cut, and black Crow would pour herself into it and out of it to please her many admirers.

  She was not blessed with thick,

  luxurious feathers but she had learned tricks to make them look thick.

  No one told Crow that a scavenger’s breath always smells like death.

  pawatamowin

  In that dream, then, she has written in someone else’s hand:

  Muskeg

  Lavender

  Gelatin

  Beneath it, in her own:

  Stop.

  Then. She remembers Then. Her body steel. Her mind closed. She does not feel changed. She feels afraid. Wants Lola or Freda to come up. To stop this one.

  She had woken up. This time. In a room. That was clearly. Not her home.

  She woke up.

  In a room.

  And could not move.

  She woke up.

  In a room.

  And was tied to herself.

  She woke up.

  In a room.

  And was herself tied.

  She woke up.

  In a room.

  And found.

  She was not changed.

  She woke up.

  In a room.

  And learned.

  She was crazy.

  6

  NOWHERE

  anisinowin: lost. the act of losing one’s way or being lost

  IT SEEMED, WHEN THEY FOUND HER, that Bernice was sleeping in a dumpster behind a Lebanese place on Whyte Avenue. She had been in the city for years at that point, having left the Ingelsons’ foster home so long before. One year interwove and wrapped around another. The owners of the place had seen her there upon occasion but had decided to let her sleep. After a while, when they thought she had not changed position for some time (if they only knew), the owners called the fire department. That they should do this, instead of calling the police, was understandable. Homeless people, in fact an Indian woman (or, that’s what they called her in the paper), had been set on fire in their dumpsters before (and, really, to think Bernice oblivious to that fact was to seriously misinterpret her circumstance).

  However, officials are officials and they took Bernice and put her in a late-arriving ambulance, the attendants clearly disappointed (That she was not in pain? That she was alive? That she appeared to be the indigent Indigenous?). She had no idea how long ago they took her from that dumpster. It had been her sometimes home since she ran from the Ingelsons’. Years. Four? Five? She was pissed after being rustled out of it, angry at the police, and then enraged at the attendants. And. Then. She skipped. She skipped ahead to this place – no idea how long she had been here within the cheerless minty green walls, no idea how long she has been wearing the hospital gown and robe she was wearing (by the smell of it, not too long). Or where those moccasins came from. There, in the San (Alberta Regional Psychiatric Services – formerly “The Sanatorium”), she led a quiet life. Read books. Thought. Seldom spoke. And. Every so often. Went under. Shifted. It was not like Now, Now being so intertwined with Then that her heartbeat seems not to be within her and her senses are alive to Then more than Now. Thinkdreaming of the San, she knows that she developed something. Something like cognizance. A sort of stormy harmony. Where licking flames coexisted with the coolness of metal. Words with noiselessness. Freedom within a straitjacket.

  If she could have seen outside of herself then, she would have seen the stream of doctors and nurses who walked by her each day. When she first got there, still crusty wounds and all, she was open as a window – smiling and talking. If she was asked something that she did not want to answer, she would smile and await the next question. Eventually, she was left to her own devices, and didn’t have to talk to anyone anymore. She preferred it that way. Happiest when she is alone, Bernice wore her need for quiet like a veil. What she found was that the ritual of that place, or the ceremony if you will, was soothing in its repetition. The San was no safer than living outside in Edmonton, no more peaceful than the house she had to share with dangerous uncles. In fact, the hospital was in so
me ways much more dangerous. The caw caw caw crowing of madwomen and madmen ruptures the silence around her, perforating quiet, gaining space and fading away. That noise had disturbed her then and it antagonizes her now. If Freda or Lola were in the room, they might see her brow set and lips pursed; toughened and ready for fight. She knew, though, that in that place there was ceremony all around her, and that within that she had padded her home at the San. She washed her hands four times, repeated certain words (peace peace peace peace) (mother mother mother mother) four times, and patted herself four times (bless yourself, bless yourself, bless yourself, bless yourself). And late at night, when the inmates truly went wild and when she thought of Loon and found herself agitated, she let the pain burn up, the ashwords falling around her in groups of four.

  As days rubbed the edges of the nights smooth, Bernice would find that time danced around her, sidestepping bedpans and sashaying by orderlies. Always forward, but sometimes it was a jingle dance – pronounced and melodic. Some months would pass like a traditional dancer’s dance at a pow wow, slow and steady, even and smooth. One whole year disappeared like a fancy dance – you had to watch real careful before it was gone. And Bernice would smile, and talk, sleep, sit quiet and wait. She wasn’t looking for an opportune time to escape or anything like that. And it’s not that she trusted the San staff to tell her when she was “better.” With the same acute sense that told her when to shift, Bernice knew when she was done. With a place. It was when she ignored that voice that told her she was finished that she got into trouble. Who would she have been if there had been more women in the house than men that night? What would have happened if her dad had not left for good with Terry Badger (well, with Terry Badger, eventually he found another Terry-like woman, and another)?

  Her blood bubbles and her head swoons a bit. She is tired. Waiting. Tired of waiting. And feels. Her pillow. Wet with tears.

  7

  WHO WILL LOVE YOU

  awîyak ka kehnipat: someone who slept

  pawatamowin

  dirt.

  BERNICE FINDS HERSELF ANNOYED BY LOLA. Lola of the lovely meals, Lola of the cooing that doesn’t sound right coming from her mouth, Lola of the language she can’t quite understand. Her skin, desensitized and disassociated with herself for so long, feels alive even while she is motionless under the nubby and starting-to-smell-like-damp-moss pink sheet. The flow of memories washes over her like the cold water washes over a stone during spring runoff. She feels unafraid to sleep for the first time in her adult life. Also. For the first time. She comes to understand that “Cross your heart and hope to die” is an oath, not a prayer, and she has stopped saying it before she goes to sleep.

  She is so hungry. Not for food, not for drink, not for foreign skin. This appetite that sits next to her now is relatively unknown and persistent. She is hungry for family. For the women she loves. For the sounds of her language. For the peace of no introduction, no backstory, no explanation. She misses her aunties, her cousins and her mom. She thinks that she maybe misses who her dad was, too, but isn’t sure. She wouldn’t know what that felt like. She misses the Cree sense of humour. She misses her Auntie Val. Misses the production of her auntie getting ready.

  “I dunno why these fundamentalists have to look at a guy to know that he’s dead,” Auntie Val had frowned to herself, and anyone who was within earshot of the bathroom mirror, one hot summer years ago on the rez. She had been trimming her hair, actually evening it out, for well over an hour.

  “There!” she had pronounced, standing back and swinging her head back and forth at Bernice.

  “How do I look? No, move and let me see, honey.”

  She pushed Bernice out of her way, put her hands on her hips and said, “I look just like that big girl that Madonna hangs around with.”

  “You mean Rosie O’Donnell?”

  Wow. Valene didn’t watch television or go to movies. She looked closely at her auntie.

  “Kind of, I guess,” she lied.

  “Thought so.” She paused for a second. “Crazy Marie used to do their makeup at the funeral home in Lac La Biche.”

  She didn’t pause or wait for discussion, pulled on lamé sandals, oblivious to the rules of fashion. Val knew no one noticed her feet, and it was a shame, too. Valene’s feet are quite thick and heavy feet, corns and calluses everywhere, earth where there should be none, and grass stains where brown skin should prevail. They are beautiful and decrepit, animal and lifefull. Too used and too magnificent to peek out from under slacks or long skirts like those stuck-in-a-cave-too-long feet that skinny girls have.

  “Did they feel, I don’t know, strange?” Bernice summons that moment again and recalls that she had felt no revulsion, just disjointedness between body and spirit.

  “A job’s a job, Birdie. No one does anything like that for free, I bet.” She started to paint her fingernails a bright pink.

  The talk soon returned to the funeral Bernice had attended the day before.

  “Did you get to see Blanche’s girls?” Auntie Val asked, eyeliner-encased sad eyes momentarily flicking in her direction.

  “Only for a second, Winona had Bad Boy with her – do you know when he was in B.C. he threw a butt out near Pimatisewin?”

  “Hhhhmph.” Her auntie never tore anyone down. “And Winona is such a pretty girl.” She pinned her dark hair up on her head and sucked in her cheeks.

  “How did it look?”

  She and her auntie often checked the progress of the tree, in the same way many people spoke quietly of a sacred white buffalo born in the States. Bernice thought a minute before speaking.

  “It looked okay, the leaves maybe looked a little brown, but it’s not like everybody’s saying. I don’t know what the big deal is.”

  “Oops, I dropped some of that hair goop on your mom’s carpet.” Val wiped it with her toe and pushed it into the rug.

  “It’s okay, leave it.” Bernice watched as her auntie ignored her and bustled out from Bernice’s under-the-stair room to the kitchen to get a cloth. She was surprisingly fast for a big woman and in no time at all was back and dabbing at the rug.

  Bernice took the hair gel from her auntie, sat her on the bed and began to pin piles of curls on her head, carefully massaging the gel onto each piece of hair. They sat together for a half-hour, wordless, enjoying the radio and each other’s company. Val put on her outfit – a lilac satin pantsuit cinched at the waist, part of what she calls her “Saan Store Sexy” collection. A horn honked outside. Her auntie hugged her warmly and kissed her, leaving a trace of “Ever So Peachy” on her cheek.

  “Don’t wait up, eh? Might be someone’s lucky night!”

  She had winked and sashayed down the hall, slamming the front door and teetering, Bernice had imagined, all the way to Vince Thunderchild’s pickup truck.

  And. Now. Thinking. About Then. Her senses dance in the little room above the bakery. She can smell her, all of her – from her moosehide moccasins to her Chanel No. 5 knock-off perfume. She smells the wild and the womanly; fullness and ferocity of her little mother. She thinks she may have shifted and memory brought her auntie into the room, for she can sense her.

  Auntie Val filled the room, fought the light for brilliance in her mind. And. Now. Stands, waiting, over her favourite niece. Bernice’s skin flushes, her stomach growls and a small vein on the left side of her forehead pulses. In her state of near-consciousness and semi-alertness, she thinks she hears a ghost from Then Now. “Well, looky here!” says a familiar voice in the unfamiliar room at the top of the stairs. “My gosh, Bernice, you are a shallow of your former self!”

  Auntie Val has come at last.

  In the gentle space between wake and sleep, Bernice knows that those three downstairs are stewing in something, trying to come up with a plan. If she could speak, if she still had English, she would tell them to just leave her be. To find her family and bring them to Gibsons. To find that Frugal Gourmet and get him to tell them his secrets. To dreambake and dreamcook. To
find her aunties and bring them to her.

  She cannot look at Auntie Val. In her head, she yells at her to keep it down and warns her not to talk to her during the Frugal Gourmet’s third show of the day. “I’m going to miss my show,” she hisses inside.

  Her auntie points at the TV with her lips and talks to Bernice without speaking.

  “Your show? It’s some cookin’ show. The same cookin’ show that you watch every day in your torn pants and stinky pyjamas.” She creates a space for herself on the mattress, which no one else would dare to do, by shifting her buttocks left and right until she is seated next to Bernice.

  “Birdie, Bernice honey, what’s goin’ on? Are you all right?”

  She tells Auntie to get out and memorizes one cup of mayonnaise and a teaspoon of lemon juice. It won’t be until later, after her ceremony, after her brain/some spirit summons these ingredients weeks from now, that she will remember her meanness. Still, even though she feels bad she feels it in a detached way. Sort of like a photograph of what her nastiness looks like in the distance.