Summer, 2004. We were sitting in the lobby of the Stanton
Regional Hospital in Yellowknife, my mother weakened by her operation. Mom was on the second floor of the hospital. My grandmother was on the third floor recovering from her first heart attack. From what the doctors told us, Mom’s cancer was the size of a blueberry. We think they got it all. My grandmother, my ehtsi, was upset because she wanted to head back to Rae, but since my grandfather’s passing it was apparent that she could not live on her own anymore. We all wanted her inside the old folks’ home in Rae, not in her old apartment, but there was no room in the main frame so our frustration grew every day.
My grandmother kept saying I want to go home very softly in English and this surprised me. I thought the only English she knew was the swears. Nobody knew how old my grandmother was. She had always been ancient. There was no one left alive who could remember her as a young girl. “She was always old,” they said.
My brothers and I all wished Mom would have taught us Dogrib when we were kids so we could understand their conversations, because it’s all in Tlicho. To speak to my grandparents I’ve always needed translators. This drove me nuts. It never should have been this way.
Standing outside the hospital lobby was Brody having a smoke. The last time I saw him in Fort Smith, which was Christmas Eve, Brody broke my heart. Brody’s got a big belly and skinny legs, like a forty-year-old bloated spider. I didn’t know what kind of Dene he was or why he was here.
Grandma and Mom were talking in Dogrib. I was getting bored because I couldn’t decipher a word. I looked at Brody. At least he could speak English. I looked at him and shook my head. Maybe now was the best time to do this.
I got up and walked outside and approached Brody warily. “How’s it going?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked, surprised to see me.
“Oh. My grandma’s in the hospital.” For some reason I didn’t want to tell him about my mom. Probably because I still couldn’t believe it.
“Sorry to hear that.” He held out his hand.
I shook it once. “Yeah....”
“Yeah,” he looked away and scratched his brown neck. “I got an operation tomorrow.”
“Oh? Everything OK?”
“Yeah, well, I....” he tried but looked down.
I didn’t know what to say. Maybe something in him finally blew and he was dying faster than the rest of us.
“So your granny’s going to be okay?”
“Yeah. She had a heart attack but she’s strong now, wants to go home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Rae.”
“You’re Dogrib?”
I felt his energy change. We were Smithers, fighters, but now was not the time, and I didn’t have the strength to start anything here. “Yup. Are you Chip or Cree?”
“Chip.”
“The caribou eaters.”
“Yup.”
“It’s funny,” I said. “We used to be traditional enemies; now we need each other more than ever.”
His energy calmed. “You’re right.”
“We need each other’s medicine, songs, healing.”
“Yes.”
I felt okay standing there with him. I looked him in the eye. “Do you remember the last time I saw you?”
“No.”
“It was Christmas, December 23rd. I’d just flown into town and my brother wanted to go Christmas shopping but didn’t want to go alone, so we walked uptown. You were passed out on Ducky’s lawn in the snow. You were in track pants and a T-shirt. Puke was all over you.”
“No—”
“Yup,” I read him. He was going to listen for once. “We called an ambulance but they didn’t come. We called the cops but they didn’t come. We waited and rolled you on your side. You swore you’d never drink again. I asked you what you’d been drinking and for how long. You said you’d been drinking for two weeks steady and you’d taken pills.”
Snow had frozen in Brody’s raven-black hair. It was cool out, not too cold, but he’d been lying down for so long that the snow was over him in a light powder. Ducky’s family just stared stupidly from their windows. My brother and I tried waving down trucks and vans but nobody stopped for long. When they did, they’d see it was Brody and see the puke and drive off. We’d all seen Brody like this before and nobody wanted to help someone who’d been drinking for years. His vomit was orange. It looked like liquefied meat and I wondered if it was his stomach lining.
“My brother and I carried you across the potato field to the hospital. We couldn’t wait anymore. You were shivering and you said your stomach was going to burst out.”
My brother put Brody’s jacket on him to cover his vomit and we lugged Brody’s huge arms around us. We half carried, half walked him to the hospital. Thank God he could help but it took forever for three NDNs—two Dogribs and a Chipewyan, traditional enemies—to make our way to the hospital.
“Ooooh, I’ll never drink again. Ooooh, I swear to God,” he moaned over and over.
The snow fell, light as feathers upon us; we walked over the frozen earth of where the old hospital used to be. This was earth we’d all been born on before they knocked the old hospital down ’cause of asbestos, but we made it to the lobby and the cops were waiting. The nurses, receptionist and RCMP didn’t help us. Nobody helped. They all watched and stared like Ducky’s family.
“Bring him,” a nurse motioned, “to the examining room.” Brody wouldn’t fit in a wheelchair—he was too big and his stomach was too bloated—so he motioned for us to help him down the hall. He knew where to go. He huffed and started crying as we helped him. When we got him into the examining room, he collapsed on the table. The nurse came in and spoke to him loud, like an older sister. “How are you, Brody? Drinking again? Okay, what did you drink this time?”
“Everything,” he said. “Everything I could.”
She grabbed a silver bowl and that’s when he started to
get sick.
My brother and I left and walked by a constable.
“We tried calling you,” I said.
“Oh?”
I stopped. “I asked Ducky’s family to call the RCMP because they couldn’t get a hold of an ambulance.”
“Nobody called me.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
“What?”
“Why are you here if nobody called you?”
“What’s your name?” he asked. He did not like me. I gave him my name. He wrote it down. I didn’t care. I used to guard for the RCMP so I could afford the attitude. I walked away, my brother and I shaking our heads. Typical. Typical Fort Smith NDN-hating people. Even the NDNs hated the NDNs sometimes. We walked away and I could smell vomit everywhere.
So, you can imagine how surprised I was to see Brody standing and singing at midnight mass the next night in the front row of the church. He was dressed nice and his hair was combed. He stood straight and he sang to every hymn and prayed along with the priest. He was standing next to a girl I used to go to school with. But she looked weak, like a ghost. What the hell was Norma doing with Brody? Were they family? No way. She was Inuk and he was Dene. Maybe she volunteered at the hospital and agreed to take him to mass.
I was shocked that Brody was standing. How could that be? Where did he get his resiliency? Did he have medicine? I looked at Norma and there were sores all over her face. She looked horrible. I felt sad. She used to be so pretty. This shouldn’t be the way it was. She was the best athlete in high school, had put Smith on the map nationally and she always won awards at Arctic Winter Games. How had she come to this?
I had danced with her many times in high school. Her eyes always sparkled and she always kept her hair short. She was very soft spoken. I’d been away for years but I knew she had a child with someone. Where was her baby? What in the hell had happened to her?
I cleared my head and prayed hard for the town, my family, my friends. I prayed hard for everything. During the end of mass when we wished each other peace, Brody walked around like a humble Indian and shook hands. He came up to me and shook my hand. Then I smelled his breath. Vodka. It blew hot and thick around me.
Gross. Booze was his medicine.
Brody was drinking again and yet he moved completely sober. I looked into his eyes and he looked right through me. Like a zombie. There was no realization or recollection at all of what happened a day earlier. Norma didn’t move. Still too shy,
I guess.
Damned Brody. I was so mad in church that he would drink again after half killing himself that it made my blood fierce for war with him.
The rest of Christmas went fine, went great. Dad spoiled us. My brothers and I laughed. I chopped wood, got strong, breathed fresh air, was around fire again. My folks had split years ago so we made daily phone calls to Mom. Little did we know that the cancer was on its way.
Brody came up to me in the drug store a few days later.
“I need to speak to you,” he said.
“Now?”
“Maybe in an hour.”
“Okay,” I lied. “I’ll be here.” Yeah right, I thought: promise breaker.
I left for the Mary Kaeser Library and deliberately let three hours slide. I didn’t even walk by the drug store when I went home. Why should I go back to Brody when he’s just going to break his word? He can’t be trusted. I’ve seen him drunk my whole life. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sober.
Here, our coolest elders and some of our outstanding youth have passed on and the drunks remain, pickling themselves for decades on misery and booze, non-contributors who live while cancer eats good people from the inside out alive. Why? I left Smith for Yellowknife to be with my mom for New Year’s and tried to forget everything I saw in Smith.
A few months later, my dad and I were at my grandmother’s funeral in Indiana. This was my grandmother on my father’s side.
“Oh,” he said, on the way to the funeral. “Remember Norma, from Smith. You went to school with her?”
I remembered her at the church with Brody. “Yeah, how is she?”
My dad frowned and made a slitting motion with his finger across his throat.
“No....”
He nodded. “In the hospital. She took her own life.”
“Pills or rope?” I asked.
He swung his head back and forth, didn’t know.
“She had a girl….” I said.
“She lost the girl to Social Services.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “Crack.”
We drove on in silence. What happened? NDNs and Inuit on crack cocaine, no less. Who would have thought? Oh I was mad. The truth was I didn’t know the north anymore. I’d lived in BC for so long.
So now here we were, Brody and I, outside the hospital.
“The next time I saw you,” I said, “you were at midnight mass, with Norma.”
“Was I?”
I nodded. “You stood with her. I heard she took her own life.”
He bowed his head the same way he did in church and nodded.
“I don’t understand what happened.”
“She lost her girl, hung herself in the hospital.”
I looked away. What the hell was she doing with you? I wondered.
“Sad.”
“Yeah.”
I could smell the smoke from Fort Smith, a ten-hour drive from Yellowknife. There were forest fires around the town and the wind was blowing north. A ten-hour drive and we could both be at Norma’s grave. We watched a Ram 3500 tow-truck drive by.
“You came to me in the drugstore a few days after we took you to the hospital. You said you wanted to talk to me.”
He nodded. “I remember now.”
“So what did you want to say to me?”
“Why didn’t you come back?” he asked.
“I had to go home and chop wood for my dad,” I lied.
“When you gotta chop wood, you gotta chop wood.”
“Yuh.”
“I wanted to say thank you.” He held out his hand. I shook it. “Where is your grandmother—can I meet her?”
I was surprised. “Sure.”
We went back into the hospital and Brody went humble NDN on us, like in midnight mass, and he was polite as hell. Brody shook my mom’s hand, NDN style, once and gently, and then he took my grandmother’s hand and she looked way up to him and smiled and then he shook my brother’s hand.
My grandfather, Pierre, passed away two Julys ago. We miss him so much and have noticed so much sobriety in our family after his passing. They say the old ones can do more work on the other side and can take a lot of pain and suffering with them when they go.... Maybe he took the pain of our family away once and for all. But why couldn’t he spot Mom’s cancer?
I remembered what my ehtsi said the last time we visited her in Rae. My mom translated for her. My grandma said:
“When you lose your husband, it is the most miserable feeling. You sit. You sit. You think of the fights you had. What does it matter now? You say stupid things when you fight. Now, it doesn’t matter who won, who lost, who was right or who was wrong. What does it matter now?
“I miss him. I miss cooking for him, making his meals. I miss telling stories to him. I keep thinking he is out visiting or shopping for us and that he’ll be home any minute. He could walk through the door any second. But he’s not coming back. So I sit. I sit and I wait.
“He came to me a few nights ago, his spirit, and told me to start wearing colours again. I had to move on. He said I had to let go and move on. We will never do those things that we loved to do together ever again. When we got together, we did not have kids for five years because I knew nothing. He had to show me everything because I was a tomboy. He showed me how to cook, how to sew, how to be. Now I sit alone,” she said. “Now I sit alone.”
Then she burst into tears and we all cried in our own way with her. I remember that beside my grandfather’s grave is my cousin’s. He took his own life in 1990.
I remember after visiting both graves, a golden eagle flew high above Mom’s van. It was so beautiful. I had never seen an eagle fly so hard for so long, alone. We dropped tobacco again. It flew all the way to Yellowknife with us and we called the eagle Grandpa, ehtse. I was in awe of the power of our family.
I was in awe of how polite Brody was right now, talking and laughing with my mom and brothers. The dichotomy of drunks has always floored me: how beautiful and pathetic they can be.
Well, that was it. Grandma wanted to go back to her room. We said goodbye to Brody. I said I’d drop tobacco for his operation tomorrow, and we said goodbye. I looked at my mom. I’ll never forget how scared we were when we had to say goodbye to her before she went for her operation. To think something the size of a blueberry had brought us all to this. We then escorted my grandmother up to her room. “I want to go home,” she said in English.
We’d brought her a bucket of KFC to cheer her up. As we got her settled, I thought about how my grandmother had her own dog team when she was fifteen, and ran twenty miles in one day in snowshoes she’d made herself to go get chewing tobacco for her mother! I saw her now as the last in the line of ancient royalty for our family as she made the sign of the cross three times before the bucket of KFC and got to work….