You can’t fool kids. Especially not the mouthy fists-first, piss-and-spit Hamilton kids who told me straight out that I looked like an Indian. I was called a wahoo, a chief and a savage. Later the insults became uglier: “You big ugly fuckin’ Indian.” In gym class, kids put two fingers behind their heads as feathers, and they slapped their hands against their mouths going “Awe-wa-wa-wa…Awe-wa-wa-wa-wa,” dancing around me in old cartoon style. I asked Bunny if I had Indian blood. She told me to stop being so foolish. “How could you ask such a question in front of your father who fought in the war and got blinded, just to come home and face a question like this?”
Turns out you really can’t fool kids. I am a Mohawk. The son of a skywalker. From Janie’s story, I knew just enough about Rudy West to research him online. I discovered that he was already dead. Good, I thought, fuck him. I would never know him, but I did know John Lazare, and through him was connected to the legends of my Mohawk ancestors.
I used to spend some Christmases at John Lazare’s house. He was Uncle John to me then. He’d pull money from behind my ears like a grandfather would. He told me his stories. He was an immaculately dressed man and always kept his shoes polished and neatly lined up on the staircase in his home. One morning, Janie noticed that all his left shoes were missing from the staircase order. They were gathered in a pile at the bottom of the stairs, as if a hand from the underworld had taken them all out. Later that same day a pickup rammed into the oil-delivery truck John was unloading. As a result of the accident, his left leg was amputated. Whenever I saw him he’d get me to punch his wooden leg so my knuckles hurt.
He told me that, one night, walking across the Mercier Bridge after work in Lasalle, he noticed a ball of fire dancing on the water below him. He thought he was seeing things. He got closer until he was standing on the bridge directly above the fireball. He was certain what he saw was real. So certain that he went straight home and told his father.
His father, Peter Lazare, explained it was a premonition. The fire of a burning soul. The soul of someone who was not dead yet. He told his son to return to the river the next night to see if the ball of fire would reappear.
John went back to the river and stood under the Mercier Bridge. He saw a barge and police and a crane pulling a car out of the river. He looked up to where he had been standing the night before and saw the guard rail was broken. A car had sped through it and down into the cold Saint Lawrence River.
I remember John Lazare told this story with unbreakable concentration; it had obviously affected him deeply. Even then I was honoured that he would share it with me. Now I know it was my grandfather who told me the story as part of a Mohawk tradition of passing on the legends of our ancestors and our community.
When I was growing up, John’s brother Sonny Lazare was a living legend to me. He was an ironworker, one of the wild daredevils who rolled with the clouds and swung from the stars. People thought the skywalkers were fearless, but they were just as afraid of falling as the next guy. They just didn’t talk about it. Under the Quebec bridge on the eastern side there’s a steel cross erected in memory of the men who fell to their deaths when the bridge collapsed in 1907. Thirty-three men from Kahnawake died working on that bridge. After that, the women got together and told the men they didn’t want such a large group of Mohawk men working together on one job ever again. But time passed, and the men did what they felt they needed to do.
Every Sunday the men ate their dinner at six and were in bed at seven p.m. At midnight they were up again, and while their families slept, they’d stumble into cars with four other guys and hit the road. The weekly drives back to New York were like high-speed funeral processions, with the passengers sitting mouths agape, heads bowed into chests, while the driver made the five-hour journey. They were sleeping cars, and when everyone woke up, they were in Brooklyn, just in time for work.
Sonny Lazare was an ironworker in Detroit. His name was often mentioned in Bunny’s kitchen during long-distance phone calls or in conversations at the table with Janie. In fact, news from “back home” was at the centre of most conversations when I was a kid. I’d sit under the kitchen table playing with Dinky and Matchbox cars while the tales rolled out. I heard the many theories discussed about the murder of wrestler Don Eagle, an American Wrestling Association champ. The news reported a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. My kitchen experts thought the mob had killed Don Eagle, or that his wife, Jean, had. It was said that she had suffered one beating too many at the hands of Eagle. She mysteriously disappeared to Florida, where she was murdered and burned in a torched car and later found by a chief of Kahnawake.
I was quiet while they spoke, chilled by the details of the torched car, burned body and wrestling star. I imagined it as an episode of The Twilight Zone, the headlines bold in black and white. The mystic reserve and its secrets captured my imagination by the time I was five or six years old. The world Janie and Bunny talked about was thousands of dark nights away from mine on East 36th Street, but the stories got inside me. I swear I walked those dirt roads in my dreams, in visions just before the voices in the kitchen faded to black and my mind dropped into the sleep hole. Down into a world of shape-shifters, dogs and men chasing me, and hoofed women calling out to me, where I was led by my ancestors through the trees. I was safe in those visions, protected and guided from danger by a great bear that I felt behind me at all times. I stood there looking up at car crashes on the Mercier Bridge, the midnight trains blowing their tops and rattling the town’s windows as they passed. I rode to safety on the backs of giant turtles that turned into relatives, and ghosts that showed themselves to remind me where I was going and where I was from, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway screamed as it rushed past.