THE HAMPTON PLACE ISN’T neat and tidy like ours. There is no tilled garden waiting to be planted. The shack is surrounded by brambles. The walls are of logs and the roof of deer skin, making it look half Indian tepee and half a white man’s cabin. The cooking fire is outside. A big cast iron pot is propped up over the red-hot embers with something that smells like porridge cooking in it. Joe has got a newly killed buck hanging from a tree branch. He’s got the carcass split open and he’s putting the guts into a bucket—so fresh they’re steaming. He tells me to take a load off, so I take a seat on a stump of wood set up for that purpose near the fire.
“You were right about Louie Sam,” I tell him. “I know he didn’t shoot Mr. Bell.”
“Did you come over here to tell me what I already know?”
I falter at that. Why did I come here? What is it I want from Joe? Maybe I want reminding that there’s a wrong that must be righted, no matter how much risk it brings down on the heads of us Gillies. I find myself saying, “Some of the settlers are holding a meeting. We’re sending a letter to the governor to tell him who led the lynch mob, so they’ll be arrested and sent to Canada to face justice.”
Joe finishes gutting the deer. He carries the bucket to the pot over the fire and, fishing out the kidneys and the liver and the heart, tosses them into it. He does all of this without speaking a word in response to what I’ve just told him. At last I say, “I thought you’d be happy to hear that.”
“My cousin is still dead,” says Joe. “But maybe you sleep better at night now, without him in your dreams, so that’s good.”
His voice isn’t angry, but his words are. I feel bad that he thinks I’m fighting for justice just to make myself feel better, to ease my guilty conscience. Maybe that’s why I find myself telling him what I have told no one else.
“I saw him on the telegraph trail, south of the river,” I say. “He came to me.”
When I say it out loud, it sounds crazy. But Joe doesn’t seem to think so.
“What was he doing?”
“He was walking through the woods, alongside me. I was in rough shape at the time. I fell and broke my arm and I was all alone. It was a comfort to see him, even though I knew he had no cause to be friendly to me.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“No. But I thought he was smiling.”
“He was like that. He liked a good joke. He had a temper on him, too, though. Like his pa.” Then he adds, glancing at my cast, “Maybe he was smiling because he saw your arm was broke.”
That hadn’t occurred to me before.
I ask, “You reckon it was really him?”
“You got to be careful with the spirit world,” says Joe. “They don’t like loose talk about them from the living. I heard about a man who told a missionary about the river spirit, and he wound up drowning.”
That’s no kind of answer—just superstition.
“That isn’t a Christian way of looking at it,” I tell him. “You can tell God anything. He knows everything.”
Joe looks over at me across the fire. Now there’s anger in his eyes.
“Does he know why the People of the River are dying?”
This takes me aback.
“What people?” I say. “Besides Louie Sam?”
He shakes his head.
“The whites brought sickness with them. Consumption. The pox. Whole families are dying, on both sides of the border. Ten years ago when the government tried to put the Nooksack on a reservation out by the bay, they came right back to the river, where they belong. Now … everything’s changing. Settlers are stringing nets so the salmon can’t get upstream. Fences are going up everywhere. I hunt for deer worrying I’ll shoot somebody’s cow instead and get strung up as a thief—on our land.”
Their land. Their ways. I’d like to tell him that it’s our land now, and that our ways are making a living and a future out of what was just wilderness. Still, I think about how Agnes knew better than Dr. Thompson—with all his learning—what to do for Teddy. I don’t know what to say, so I wind up saying something dumb.
“Do you pray like we do?” I ask him.
He simmers down at that.
“Of course I pray,” he says. “I prayed for this mowitsh to come and feed us.”
So mowitsh means deer. That’s what the Indian girl was saying to me about the twigs in my hair that day on the telegraph trail. Now I get the joke—she was saying the twigs made it look like I had antlers, like a deer.
“What are you smiling at?” says Joe. “You think praying is funny?”
“I don’t mean offense, Joe,” I tell him, serious again. “I reckon sometimes all we can do is pray.”
I get to my feet, readying to take my leave, when Agnes comes out from the shack. She goes to the fire to give the cast iron pot a stir, nodding to me.
“Baby good?” she asks me.
“Teddy is good,” I tell her. “Mam says he’s like a little piglet grunting for his food.”
“No páht-lum,” she says.
“No, he’s not drunk anymore. Thank you, Agnes. You saved him.”
She straightens up and smiles at me. Reaching her hand up to my face, she pats my cheek like I’m a little kid, even though I’m a good foot taller than her. Her palm is tough as cowhide. Her eyes are sad and so tired they make me tired just looking into them.
“Where’s your brother?” I ask Joe.
“Over at the residential school in Lynden. Learning to be white.”
Agnes frowns at Joe and says something harsh to him in their language. He talks back to her. Whatever they’re saying, I can tell this is an argument they’ve had before.
“What’s she saying?” I ask Joe.
He laughs, “She’s says I’m jealous because Billy knows how to read and write.”
“I could teach you,” I tell him. Joe gives me a cold look with those blue eyes, like he thinks I’m calling him stupid. “That is,” I add, “if you ever wanted to learn.”
He turns away and goes back to cleaning out the deer. Agnes sits down by the fire and stirs the pot. It seems neither one of them has anything left to say to me, or to each other.
“I guess I’ll be going,” I tell them.
Just as I’m on my way, Joe says, “The people will be glad to know there’s whites who are sorry for what happened.”
It’s not much, but it’s all the reassuring I’m going to get from him.
I WALK BACK ALONG the creek the way I came, thinking about my talk with Joe. There’s a lot that’s mysterious about the Indian way of thinking, and Joe is a particular curiosity. Sometimes he talks like a white man, and other times like an Indian. He’ll always look like an Indian, though, except for his blue eyes, so I guess that decides the question as far as white folks are concerned. But it seems that everybody on this earth—whites and natives alike—suffers in one way or another. And, in one way or another, all of us are praying for that suffering to be eased.