Birdie (7 page)

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.

She knows that they did not talk.

Once they were done and got outside, Maggie had asked Bernice if she was full. She answered that she was because even if she was hungry then there was nothing that could be done about it and she didn’t want her mom to feel bad. Auntie Val offered her a cough drop, they walked across the street to the rundown apartment block (no security door or lock to impede their progress) and walked up the rickety stairs to Valene’s apartment in the Pecker Palace. It was, she remembers, a room with many doors. Instead of walls, the apartment had doors that led directly to the main hallway. She used to pretend that the doors led to exotic places: islands with palm trees, castles with hidden rooms, or caves with treasure buried within. This was hard to sustain when drunks pounded on the door mistakenly. Those times she had just wished the doors led to other rooms. Rooms with locks.

She remembers her mom hugging her and telling her to be good. To be a good helper to her auntie. To try to fit in. In her little room at Lola’s, she knows she has never and will likely never fit in anywhere. She can feel that hug. The warmth. Resignation. There was no finality in that hug. Her mom took a last look around the apartment before leaving and said, “I’m going to make you some curtains.” Bernice had wondered anxiously when they would get the window coverings, when her mom would come again, when she would come to get her
for good. So she could go with her. To. Someplace. Some new place. Some home.

Once she moved in with her aunt, the apartment seemed no less forlorn, but she got used to it. Every school day she walked down the hill and then turned left at the Sears store at the base of the hill. There were never exhibits in the Sears store windows, but she often saw people milling about, even during the week, looking for a bargain. No one looked at her and she had begun to feel happily invisible.

When she walked the last four blocks to school, she began to count her steps. Almost always, she walked eight hundred and seventy-four steps, but some days she would take tiny steps to see how many it would take if she was smaller or older. At eight hundred and seventy she reached the sidewalk before the walkway leading to the school. She was at Christ’s Academy for three years. Someday, her mom had told her, she would go to a school where there were boys. She never minded their absence but couldn’t tell her mom that. She remembers dragging her feet up the stairs and hearing the grandmothers telling her to go straight to class. Some days she had wanted to ignore them, wanted to walk straight past the Academy. With her blue blazer and plaid skirt, though, she knew she was likely to be spotted. Instead, each day she went to her locker, opened it and put her
maskihky
*
bag inside. She took care to wrap the leather thong gently around the small rectangular leather bag and place it in the corner.

One day Sister Marie Thérèse had asked her what was in the bag, in front of the entire history class. She told the Sister
that it was a sacred bag – that’s what the grandmothers told her – and Sister Marie Thérèse sent her to Sister Mary Margaret’s office. The stern principal demanded an explanation for the bag.

*
Medicine.

She remembers the grandmothers telling her to keep quiet.

Be still, Birdie, they told her as she wriggled in her chair. She wriggles in her bed at the memory. At the discomfort. At the detainment.

They used to cut our hair, they reminded each other.

Remember when they beat us for speaking our language, they whispered to each other in Cree. Sometimes, Bernice still hears them whispering to each other.

She sees herself as she was then, a chubby fine-boned Halfbreed girl, nervously swinging her legs and brushing her long hair out of her eyes. In her mind’s eye, she sees her legs abruptly stop moving, her features become sharper and a subtle ruffling of her arms. The new plaid skirt cutting the air with its tightly pressed edges.

“Take that bag off!” Sister had ordered.

Run! the grandmothers told her. Don’t let her touch the medicine! they reminded her.

She had run all the way to the apartment. It was only 10:30 in the morning and she wasn’t allowed to have a key. She sat still in the scorching summer sun, her uniform becoming drenched and heavy with perspiration, until her aunt came home.

She was semi-delirious by that point.

Auntie Val had, with the dignity the Creator placed in big wimmins, marched to the “Jesus Christly school” muttering
something about humility, charity and nunbitches. Bernice ate a box of fake Honeycombs, a row of crackers and a half-jar of generic Cheez Whiz before her auntie came back.

After that, the Sisters had been really nice to her.

One day, on that most particular of days, Bernice had walked into her classroom and looked at the clock. It was 8:53. Class started at 8:55 and she was almost never late. She was almost too early. When the bell rang, she remembers, the other twelve-year-old girls skipped gaily to the front of the class to hold hands and pray.

“Oh Heavenly Father,” the classroom intoned.

Creator of all, the grandmothers prayed serenely.

The white girls continued, “We ask you for forgiveness for our sins …”

She could not hear them over the grandmothers who reminded her to say thank you for this beautiful day. She thinks now that this was a lovely way to start the day, if you left out all the Jesus and fear and just talked to your Creator about thankfulness. She learned to pray in her own way in that room. Something tweaks in her now, her heels imperceptibly undig from the foot of the bed, and Bernice knows that something in her shifted at Christ’s Academy. She doesn’t know what it was, but she does know that in time, all she could hear was the quiet murmur of
iskwewak.
*

When they were done their prayers, the school children settled in for a day of lessons taught by the Sisters. She listened carefully to their teachings because the old ones told her this would be important to her and her family someday.

At recess she took her lunch and wandered to the highest
point of the schoolyard where a few girls seated themselves, two by two. She got to the very top and sat down, making sure that she did not wrinkle her skirt or dirty her white socks. She had pride in that uniform. Most girls had two, but she had one. Before she moved Bernice to the city, her mother had been very quiet when she read the card that had the prices for uniform rentals. The Academy had recommended that each student rent three uniforms. She knew she would only have one. She heard her auntie on the phone at the laundromat beside their apartment one afternoon. She knew by the wrinkle in Val’s forehead that she was talking to her uncles. They had not spoken for some time and Bernice knew it was hard for her to ask them for anything.

*
Cree women, Indian women.

“For Chrissake, Larry, there is no one else,” Valene had hissed. Her long black hair was piled on her head and she was wearing a big turquoise T-shirt, Bernice remembers. There is one just like it in her little closet. Lola told her, last time she wore it, that she was swimming in it.

“No. No. No. I don’t know, Larry. No one knows. She said she would come to visit the next long weekend.” Bernice had wondered at the time if Auntie was talking about her mom. Now, she knows.

Valene looked angry, annoyed, a little hungover and something else that Bernice does not know yet, in her little room over the bakery, and she will not be able to identify that piece of her auntie for years. “Just send the fucking money, Larry.” Bernice imagines her eyebrows must have flown off her little-girl face. Gritted teeth and set jaw displaying a fierceness she wished she’d known when her daughterniece was young. When she
thought she knew. When she could have done something. One thing. “You fuckers owe her that.”

Two weeks later, three crumpled twenty-dollar bills came in a dirty white envelope addressed to Bernice at her auntie’s. There was no note from her mom. She had wondered at the time if that money came from her uncle but quickly put it out of her mind. She had folded the envelope carefully and placed it in her underwear drawer where no one would find it. They had cared for that uniform like it was a precious stone, cleaning it frequently and looking at it in something like wonder. For this reason, and not because she only had one, Bernice had always been careful to sit like a lady when she wore the uniform.

When she would sit on the hill, she pretended she was in the woods up north. She had a favourite spot about a mile from their home; a place directly between the town and Loon Lake. She would walk through a field thick with wild grass, weeds and the sweetest-smelling flowers. She had to go through the Williers’ yard to get there and was afraid of the rez dogs that hid from the sun under the trampoline. Sometimes they would follow her amiably, but one time they eyed her warily and curved their lips in a smilesnarl. After that she carried a walking stick with her in case she needed to shoo them away. In the fall, shots would ring out as the men from the community hunted for moose. The cacophonous noise was at once nerve-racking and soothing to her with its power and familiarity. From that hill, how she missed that hill now, she could see the Williers’ and their relations’ homes to the south, the Omeasoos’ to the north and the Cardinals’ to the east. Her family’s home and a few others were scattered (back to back where that
could happen) about the west end of the reserve but not on it. With only one of their family members entitled to a house on the tiny reserve (an uncle who lived in the city) the Meetoos family made no complaints about the house or the land they were effectively squatting on until the only legal Indian in their family decided he wanted his house back. Her vantage point from the hill up north told a story of belonging and intolerance that she could not quite understand yet. The hill dwarfed the one at the school, but when she was there she would try to generate that same feeling of belonging/alienation that was familiar enough to resonate with home.