Mouse Read online

Suddenly she appears—like a rabbit out of a hat. She stands in my doorway—the Grade Five classroom doorway, a doorway that has become more mine than any I have ever possessed. She fills it. Even though she is less than five feet tall and nowhere close to a hundred pounds heavy, she takes up all that space. Whether it is the bulk of her Grey Nun’s habit or the weight of the bronze rosary and crucifix dangling from her neck, she is far bigger than her tiny self, more imposing than is fair. “Shrimp” is what Watikwan calls her behind her back. (Shrimp? Where does he get that word? Watikwan has never seen a shrimp, never tasted one, I’m sure. Maybe he heard it in a movie, certainly not from a book. More likely Singh or one of the other teachers attached it to him in a moment of anger or frustration.) She smiles. Sr. Theresa always smiles. Whether she leads a hymn at mass or chats up a troubled kindergartener or gives Watikwan the strap, she wears that same beatific countenance that scares the hell out of teachers and students alike. It dries up my words and keeps me from looking her directly in the eye. When I glance up from my students, there she is, and I wonder how long she’s been standing there observing us.

  It’s disconcerting. My class is in chaos, a condition that’s not all that unusual for a Friday afternoon before our two-week hunt break. That all by itself would be enough to get them excited, but Watikwan and Anice are in the middle of a squabble, which has just now escalated into a push, and although I already know what must have come first and what will surely come next, I’m not at all sure what to do about it. Watikwan must have said something, a tease of some sort in Cree. It wouldn’t have been Anice. She has not made a sound (not since the day I took over Suzanne’s class in March and, according to Suzanne, not a word, not one murmur since September.) So the tease had to come from Watikwan. But Anice isn’t timid; no one crosses her. It might have been a poke or a kick in return or a tongue sticking out. And now, right now whether I have an audience or not, if I don’t intervene, one of them will throw a punch and both of them will endure the strap.

  “Api!” The voice is not mine. My throat suddenly feels like it’s coated in chalk dust. The high, thin command belongs to Sr. Theresa Gagnon, our principal. Instantly the room becomes silent. Just as quickly all twenty children shuffle to obey the Cree admonition to sit. It is a word that even those teachers least interested in Native culture or language learn immediately upon arriving in Orkney Post, Ontario. Sit. Go. Be quiet. Come. Hurry up. Now. These commands comprise the essential Cree vocabulary for teachers—as if those were not the very first English words learned by students when they enter the Orkney Post Indian Day School, renamed two years ago from the Orkney Post Mission Residential School.

  “M. Taylor. You will dismiss early today.” Her accent is thickly French. “The goose hunting holiday she will start a few hours earlier than planned. Dey will leave all books and school materials in the classroom over the break. Today you will make sure, absolument, M. Taylor, that everyone leaves the schoolyard promptly. Dis afternoon you will follow your students as far as the bridge across the Rosehip Creek. No fooling around today.” She touches her rosary. Is that gentle caress a prayer that I will follow her instructions? Maybe it’s simply her version of an exclamation point? She fondles the cross in a way that’s sensual, a way that’s beyond my understanding. To the students, she adds, “We will have breakup soon,” as if only the students would know what she is talking about. She's right; I don't. Sister is in her eighth year in Orkney Post. This is my ninth month here, my sixth week in a classroom.

  At the last sentence, books rustle closed and desks crack open. A whisper. A giggle erupts from the back of the room.

  “Kakito!” Her voice penetrates the room again. Silence immediately clamps everyone’s throat—absolute silence—until she turns to me. "Did you get all that, M. Taylor?"

  “Well, yes... I take them to the bridge. What happens after the bridge?”

  She speaks but to the class, not to me. “Dose of you with younger brothers or sisters, make sure dey get home safely. No playing in the creek today. Go home. Listen to your teacher. Go with God.” Then, as mysteriously as she appeared, she evaporates. The room exhales. My heart rate slows.

  I’m in charge again. Unsure as usual who is teacher and who is student in my room, I am at least grateful there will be no strappings today. “You heard the principal. We won’t do art this afternoon. Goose hunting break is next week. Put everything away.” Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a waving arm. Only one student raises a hand in my class; only one has the audacity to ask a question or volunteer a response. I don’t need to look in his direction. “Yes, Watikwan.” I peek at Anice. We make eye contact for less than a second before she hides her face in her arm. She is the real leader here. At times like this when I’m clearly out of my depth, advice from her would be welcome, but she offers me nothing more than a view of the top of her head.

  “Dave.”

  “Yes, Watikwan.”

  “We should have art. We could stay for just a little longer, right?”

  “You heard Sr. Theresa. Now line up. Everyone. Quickly! Kinipi!’ I can’t help myself; I say the worn-out teacher translation as if they didn’t understand “quickly” in English, as if coming from me Cree would have any chance at all of sounding more sincere or imperative.

  Already other children jostle in the hall and gather at the coat hooks, some less disciplined than others. The sound of Cree bubbles through my closed door. Cree is an unfamiliar sound inside our school except for the teacher words from us. This is clearly something new: not quite a fire drill and not an ordinary dismissal either. Faye points her chin at me to tell me she has something to say. Before I quiet them, I squat so she can whisper to me and let her voice be lost in the flutter of tapping socks and heavy breaths that communicate the things that are important to ten-year-old Cree boys and girls.

  “My chapter book,” she says. Then, twisting a hank of her shoulder-length hair with one hand she adds, “Please.”

  I sigh. Students can take books home overnight, over the weekend. Why can’t they take them now? Sweat rises in my armpits. Am I ready to take on Sr. Theresa over Faye and her book? She peeks at me before lowering her eyes. I’m only a supply. The last thing I need is a bigger war with the smiling principal, but she isn’t here right now and Faye is. The child waits, stoic, ready to give up on me any second and join the swaying line of her peers, ready to accept another defeat at the hands of the school. Why do I feel the need to whisper my decision? “Get it, Faye, quickly. Put it under your jacket. Don’t forget to bring it back.”

  She nods which is as close to a thank you as I’ll ever merit. “Off you go. Get your things. Put on your shoes. Make a straight line at the door. No fooling around today.”

  “Don’t look so scared, Dave.” It’s Watikwan again. “You will be on the plane before the breakup even starts.” My class laughs. I laugh too, even though I won’t be on the plane. I laugh because I probably do look scared—about the book though. And now I shiver at the possibility I ought to be afraid of breakup too.

  

  What is missing here, Mouse?

  If this is going to make any sense to you at all, I think you’ll need more background—a better sense of who this Dave person is or was. I bet you never knew I was a Boy Scout and a Cub before that. It was a million years ago. But that was me, a collector of patches my mother carefully sewed onto my sash, a hiker with enough blisters for a purple heart, and a camper (so very homesick my first night sleeping in the woods, but in the end I could start a cooking fire without paper or lighter fluid and just one match.) I was a miniature soldier (no kidding) who took pride in his uniform and actually tried to do a good deed every day. I wasn’t perfect. I was hopeless tying all those knots and memorizing Morse code. I was good at paddling a canoe, though maybe that was because I barely dog-paddled as a swimmer. I guess first aid was my best skill. I liked turning my neckerchief into a sling or a compress or, best of all, a tourniquet. I lived for the day I’d get to splint a br
oken arm or use a pressure point to staunch a bleeding thigh. Don’t laugh. My heroic imaginary life failed to turn me into a surgeon or a paramedic, as you’ll know, of course, but Scouts did shape my future life in one way.

  In Cubs, I discovered a career; more accurately, Cubs was where a career discovered me. Our den met on Saturday afternoons in a basement just down the block from my house. It’s fall. Mrs. O’Malley, our den mother, has us making papier-mâché masks for Halloween. Everyone is laughing at Peewee Ralston’s jokes when Mrs. M comes up behind me and puts her hand on my shoulder. “Look everybody. See what, Davey’s done here!” At first I think I must have done something wrong, but then she gently squeezes my shoulder and adds, “Amazing!”

  I feel shy but proud at the same time, my fingers all slime from the flour and water paste, the strips of newspaper somehow magically clinging to the balloon like they’ve willed themselves into the likeness of Roy Rogers, my idol at the time. I’m speechless. I don’t think there’s anything at all I can say in reply to her compliment. It wasn’t me. It was the paper or maybe the shape of the balloon. It’s luck; that’s my only explanation.

  “He got the nose and the mouth just perfect, didn’t he, boys?”

  For the whole next week, while Roy lies drying in the O’Malley basement, I think of little else than the colours I’ll apply, the way to mix a yellow and a brown to get the perfect flesh tone. Ha. Yes, I know. Back then the Roy I worship is only black and white, of course, but in my mind I know the colour of his eyes and hair and the ruddy texture of his cheeks as he drawls, “Aw shucks,” to Dale Evans or Trigger. By the time Saturday rolls around, I’ve already done my homework. I’ve experimented with crayons and watercolours. Luck is with me once again, and Mrs. O’Malley makes me blush while I coat the mask in varnish.

  I’ve no idea what happened to my finished masterpiece. What is important is what happened to me.

  There is a sign to make for a bake sale. “Let Davey do the lettering. He’s so good at art.” My undeserved reputation spreads to my school. “Who’d like to work on the mural for the front hall? David, I hear you’re pretty good with a brush. Who’d like to help him?” And sometimes it works against me. “Maybe we should let Sarah write the report about our trip to the farm, David. Could you draw us a picture of a cow to go with it?” I’ve found my slot. Maybe some people get to pick who they’re going to be. I don’t know about that. I know some people get picked, maybe not by other people so much as by good fortune or circumstance or changes in the weather.

  Where was I, Mouse? Wasn’t I just about to paint you a picture of Orkney Post, Ontario?

  

  Yes, I do get all my students down through the school yard, past the teachers’ houses, the Hudson’s Bay Store, the hospital, the nurses’ residence, the rectory, and the nunnery—structures perched along the only mainland road, most of them white-washed buildings made from cinder blocks, huddled near the gravel airstrip as if, at the first hint of an Indian war whoop, the nurses and teachers and nuns might take flight on the only mode of transport in and out of here. The Catholic Mission built it all decades ago. There once were barns with fields of hay and potatoes, horses and cattle, but those are gone now. Now the mainland is the domicile for non-Aboriginals, a place to be sick, a place for commerce and travel, a place for public school education. But the mainland is not the only Orkney Post. It’s just the only one I know. I get my students, every one of them, to the bridge this afternoon and watch them cross the boundary onto the Orkney Post Indian Reserve.

  The People, the ininiw, the Human Beings, the Cree live on a large island next to us, across a trickle of water called Rosehip Creek running through a gorge three hundred yards wide, thirty feet deep, joined by a gravel causeway and a short wooden bridge over the stream. Their ramshackle frame houses, the church and the small Orkney Health Centre where one white nurse lives and works, the village freezer, the power plant and a pool hall comprise what we on this side call the Village or the Reserve. The banks of the gorge are steep on both sides of the valley. Sometimes in the fall in the evening after supper, Suzanne and I would walk over to the bank of the creek and sit under the spruce in the long grass, letting our feet hang over the edge of the embankment, watching the sunset colour the little community on the other side, their Orkney Post. We wondered what it must be like over there, what people there did for entertainment besides play pool, what their food was like, what they were saying, since none of us on our side except a couple of the sisters and the priest could understand their language. Flying into Orkney the first time, we’d seen from the air that Rosehip Creek was not a creek at all in the sense we know rivers and streams. It both starts and ends in the Orkney River—a river that stretches halfway to the Rocky Mountains and is more than a couple miles wide where it empties into James Bay not far from here. The creek is a dry channel or an almost dry channel. Maybe the fur traders, the British who landed here in 1670, who sailed up the main river until it stopped being salty and clearly wasn’t the northwest passage, who talked these people into bringing them beaver fur in exchange for flour and sugar and iron tools and beads, maybe they named it before they explored it clear to the end of the island.

  Anyway, I shoo the kids across and watch them up the road and into their side before returning to mine. The tiny creek has risen a bit but not impressively so. I turn around and walk back to the airstrip with the other teachers and wait with them for their charter.

  “You have no valise, Mr. Taylor, do you? You have misplaced it before it can be misplaced? No?” This is Sundara Singh’s idea of humour. I suppose it is also his sense of what is funny when he persistently appeals to Sr. Theresa there should be no tax deducted from his paycheque because he is “Indian.” (“Check it here, Sister, you must.” His smile is almost as constant and annoying as hers as he waves his passport. “Born 1927 June 18, National Capital Territory. Very hot there, Delhi. Very big city, Sister. Not like this. You check my documents. More Indian than these people, I am.”) Today he’s chosen me to be his entertainment.

  “I’m not on the charter, Sundara. I’m not travelling today.” The other teachers probably think there is something strange if not insane that my name is not on the list, and maybe they are right. I haven’t thought it through. I simply feel the need to stay, to relax and take a deep breath before doing anything at all. I could try for something clever: an artist in motion tends to stay in motion; an artist at rest tends to stay at rest. I bow to inertia. In the end I only smile at him and hope it will end our conversation.

  “Not going? Not going to visit Mrs. Taylor?” His face is winched first into incredulity, then sadness. “Staying here alone? All holiday, you are?”

  Two scheduled planes fly each week to Orkney Post, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. There are no roads. A hit and miss skidoo trail stretches a hundred miles across an unforgiving muskeg during winter to a railway line, which two hundred miles later reaches a two-lane highway. A barge along James Bay comes once a year in early summer if the tides and the silt in the river mouth permit it to dock. The teachers have organized a chartered aircraft for today, Friday, rather than wait until next Tuesday’s sched.

  It’s none of Sundara Singh’s business what I am or am not going to do. Bringing up inertia would only confuse both of us. I wish I hadn’t stopped to say goodbye and bon voyage; surely this lack of motion, my failure to flee is on everyone’s mind if not their lips. “I hope you have a pleasant holiday, Mr. Singh. Will you stay over in Toronto tonight or will you connect all the way to India?”

  “You are not coming wit us, no?” Sr. Michelle interrupts to continue the interrogation. She teaches Grade Six; Singh, Four. I can’t imagine trying to learn anything from either of them in English. Not that I’m so much better. Kaminski would chuckle at our motley group; we are all, every one of us, sorry excuses for teachers. Well, Suzanne was not a sorry excuse; she, at least, was fluent in the language of instruction if not the language of her students. She was expe
rienced; she’d had considerable success in Pembroke and Toronto. But she’s no longer here now is she?

  “No, Sister. I’m not on this flight.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why is the terminal locked?” I ask, searching for a different conversation.

  “Does not matter why,” says Sundara. “Only matters that we must carry everything on the plane ourselves. Now nothing will be lost or stolen in their smelly chicken shed.”

  Sr. Michelle looks perplexed. She apparently is having a conversation with herself—clearly about me, my wife, my marriage. Clearly she is interceding on my behalf with her Husband in the sky.

  “Your luggage looks heavy, Sister. Let me help you load it on the plane.”

  As if I have the power to bring an object into being by merely mentioning it, we hear the drone of the DC-3 coming in low over the trees. The short squat beast has wings far too large for its body, each with a propeller that vibrated every cell in my body the times I’ve had the misfortune of riding it. The plane appears, then drops from the sky, lifts, touches down, lifts, touches down again. The massive wings and gravity match each other almost evenly in the seesaw battle to return it to earth. It disappears from view behind some black spruce as it bounces down the runway, only to taxi back in a deafening roar a few minutes later. Its journey puts an abrupt end to our uncomfortable conversations. The best I can muster in conclusion is “Good luck” and “See you,” shouted into ears that will hear little except a white roar for the next hour.

  I don’t wait for the take-off. No one is aboard that would care one way or the other if they saw me standing on the apron smiling and waving good-bye. I turn and walk down the dusty gravel road toward my rented teacherage pondering whether to put paint to canvas or take my sketch book down to the bank and see what this breakup is really all about. As I pass the school, Sr. Theresa appears from a shadow and catches my arm, latches on as if I might try to run away. Perhaps she thinks of me as one of her students; perhaps I really am. “Hurry,” she says. “You have the phone call. The radio she is not so good. You must hurry.”

  Her habit swirls around her like a dust storm moving up the steel-grate steps, her fingers pinching my forearm, her rosary slapping against my jacket. We force-march down the cold dim hall without removing our boots. Failure to remove outdoor footwear is a strap-able offence during school hours. Four teachers are assigned to man the halls at passing times shouting the mantra, “Boots off inside the school. Take those boots off now. Kinipi. Now.” Every day, rain or shine, we police the well-worn linoleum like it is precious hardwood or marble, writing down offenders’ names on detention slips. Now the very cops themselves are tracking dust along the corridor. “Who called, Sister? What’s it about?” I ask as if I don’t already know.

  “Your wife.” That answers both my questions, and I know, of course, why my boss’s grip is as fierce as an angry wolverine’s. She must suspect this is not a call I really want to take.

  Inside her office she grabs the mike and shouts in a monotone, articulating every syllable, "Dis is Sr. Theresa Gagnon, Orkney Post Indian Day School. Over."

  Radio is our only link to the outside world: a Citizens’ Band. No television. No commercial radio. No newspapers. No movies outside of the National Film Board catalogue. No impossible row of telephone poles and wires across the muskeg.

  “Do you read me? Over.”

  I pry the fingers of her left hand off my arm. The fingers of her right grip the mike and press the button so hard it looks as if she is trying to squeeze her words through the cord like toothpaste all the way to Toronto or Pembroke or wherever Suzanne is today.

  “Do you read me? Over.” The only answer is static.

  “She has been going on-and-off all day, dis CB. Dere must be some storm somewhere or— How do you say it? Inference. Interference.” She puts the accent on “ter” and I can barely understand her. “Dat thing from the sun.”

  “I don’t know much about CB radios, Sister, but it doesn’t look like you have a signal. What did she tell you before it failed?” I try to lighten things a little. “We might need something stronger than shouting ‘over’ to get through the fog.”

  “Fog?” She smiles and frowns at the same time. “The sun she is shining, no?”

  “Never mind, Sister. What did Suzanne have to say?”

  “I asked her how she was. She is well. She asks if you will get on the charter. I said I did not think so. She asks me to put you on the phone. I left to find you. I will try to call her back, yes?”

  I look her in the eye. Is that a real question? And if she should get the radio to work, what am I going to say? Will Sister leave the office so Suzanne and I can have a private conversation—as if a private conversation is ever private in Orkney Post? Everyone along the coast with a CB can listen in. But Sister knows that. Suzanne knows that. Maybe something is wrong. “You could try again, Sister. If you don’t mind.”

  She does, but all she gets is static.

  “It did work once this afternoon. I can overhear dat nurse at the health centre in the village. She is calling Cochrane for a helicopter rescue, dat woman. She says she is frightened by the talk about breakup. Her dog, it is frightened of the water. It refuses to go into the boat. That is some rescue, eh?” Her laugh is a whinny. “It was a very funny conversation, M. Taylor.”

  My mind has drifted to possible things to sketch, but I smile at the word “funny.” I have been conditioned. I picture the conversation between the health nurse with her thick Norwegian accent and her boss somewhere in Toronto punctuated, as it surely would have been, by a barking dog and “over.” I nod. Yes, it might have been amusing.

  “I will keep trying to get your wife, M. Taylor.”

  I thank her and head back to my house beside the school where I neither paint nor draw but sit on my couch and pet Diego Rivera and let my mind wander down the labyrinth of lesson plans until hunger finally drags me into the kitchen with dreams of a meatloaf and roasted potatoes for my supper. While I search for the peeler and eye the four small wilting carrots on my counter, a knock on my front door stops me. It’s late afternoon now. Who else is here but Sister and me and the nurses? Again, there is a knock. I put down the peeler. I forget to put the carrots back in the fridge before I leave the kitchen. The voice at the door shouts, “It’s coming!” and by the time I get through the living room and look out onto the flat expanse of “the compound,” what we call the space around our clutch of government residences, the shouter is already running back down the road toward the hospital—a person I don’t recognize. I lock up right then and follow, supper forgotten.

  For the next two hours, I stand with Sister, a few other nuns, and three nurses at the bank, the riverbank—creek bank I would have called it this morning—listening to the haunting sounds of ice.

  I bet you think you know the sound of ice, Mouse. You’re familiar with the crunch of an ice cube tray when the handle is levered to free the frozen cubes. You probably know that sudden pop when walking across a frozen pond or the musical tinkle against a glass of a Cuba Libra. I thought I knew the sounds of ice just like I’d learned the sounds of Orkney Post this spring: the drip of melting snow, the bray of migrating geese flying low over the houses. I’d learned the chatter made by a flock of snow birds, that reversible blanket—white one minute, brown the next—as the whole flock flips in the wind and drifts back to earth in formation. I know the sound of snowmobiles grinding down a muddy road to their place of summer storage. These no longer surprise me. They were new sounds this year, yes, but even those are familiar now. The sound this evening is different from anything I’ve ever experienced, a sound beyond my expertise with words. It’s something I wish I could show you using watercolour or graphite, something requiring a bigger word than “ice.”

  Earlier I’d watched the bridge disappear. It simply floated away as the water rose. The meandering creek that drew a line between them and us gradually, resolutely widened and filled the vast valley with
swirling water, and now it is no longer a line but a wall, an impenetrable barrier. That is something to see all right. But it’s nothing compared to the ice. There are floating icebergs the size of fridges, the size of pickup trucks, bumping and thudding against each other in a race toward the Bay. But the real show is upstream from us. I can hear a rumble something like a distant thunderstorm. At first, I think that’s what it is, a spring storm, until I see it coming. The ice approaches like a slow moving freight train, a train wider than two football fields, as long as I can see, a train rearing its head up to the level of the bank and then peeking above it, a train tossing boulders of muddy ice—the size of houses now—scraping them along its sides, tossing them up onto the bank making a new bank six, then ten feet higher than the real bank. It uproots whole trees along the edge as it moves. It hides my view of the other side. It is bigger and stronger than anything I’ve ever seen in nature except maybe Niagara Falls or the Columbia Glacier. But there is no railing here, no tidy sign: Do Not Go Beyond This Point or simply Danger. And here I am. Here we are open mouthed, too stunned to be terrified. That’s me, at least. No one speaks; there is no sound except the ice right in front of us: grinding, crashing, sliding, slithering toward the frozen Bay.

  Time passes. I don’t know how much. Not much. And then it stops, the ice. It slows just like a real train pulling into a station, sighing its satisfaction at being home. Not the squeal of steel on steel, of course, just silence. It is the final, scariest sound ice can make: dead silence.

  I feel Sister pull my sleeve. “M. Taylor. M. Taylor. The ice she has jammed downstream. It blocks the water. The water, she comes up now. Now is the time to run.”

  And so we run, the rising water right behind us.

  Chapter Two