• Chapter 23 •

While the pool players fret in Mac’s basement, Angela is on her way to the Three Crows First Nation. Glen phoned to say that their mother’s plan has Charlotte in a dilemma, and she needs some expert help. One university class in creative drama doesn’t make Angela much of an expert, but at least she can help to instill some common sense in her mother. White Ballplayers Murder Indian Home-run Hitter might not be the most appropriate title to enter into a high-school theatre festival.

The brand-new Three Crows School is an orange-coloured brick building with two white designer stripes. It has a tall centre cone with skylights and three smaller cones like tipis. Angela walks along red tiles patterned in converging circles on her way to the gymnasium and Charlotte’s drama class.

Her students are sitting in a circle on the gym floor.

“Your mother’s unpredictable,” Charlotte says. “I told her about the Métis story we’ve been working on all month, and she told us about your kokum’s willow spoon stirring soup the night your uncle was killed.”

“Hi, Auntie!” River says from where she’s sitting in the circle. “I’m playing Kokum Anne-Marie when she was only eight years old.”

“Where is your Kokum Roseanna?”

“Having a nap, I think,” River says. “Is Kokum at home, Mom?”

“Yes, she’s having a nap. She might be over later.”

Angela’s beginning to wonder why she had to reschedule her willow-craft class to come all this way. Charlotte seems to have everything under control. But since she’s here, she should at least try to make the trip worthwhile.

“You’re going to show me some scenes?”

“See what you think,” Charlotte says. “Places, everyone.”

The gym lights dim, and then slowly the stage lights rise to the early morning chirping of birds. A solitary black box sits at centre stage. Five actors appear, one of them, River, who wipes sleep from her eyes. Two of the players mime riding on horseback, while River and the other two get seated on the box. Charlotte’s son, Tommy, mimes the cracking of a whip, and he holds his hands forward as if hanging onto reins.

“It was better before the railway came,” Tommy says. “We made a decent living hauling freight with our Red River carts. Before the fighting at Batoche we lived well at Round Prairie.”

“Papa,” River says, “yesterday you told the border man that we are French.”

“After the English hanged our Louis Riel, we are better off to be French than to be Métis.”

“Can we be Cree? Like Mama?”

“Better to be Indian than Métis,” Tommy says.

The two on horseback move across the stage and return.

“We have to cross the water, Papa,” one of them says.

Charlotte raises both her hands. “Okay,” she says. “Break, but be ready to start again.”

“They’re really good!” Angela says.

“But here’s where we don’t know what to do. We can’t very well use Glen’s cart and have them take the wheels off to make it look like they’re floating across a river.”

“What if you change the box?” Angela says. “Make it higher than it is wide.”

“The Red River carts were quite high.”

“Then, when you want to remove the wheels, have the boys mime that, and in the process turn the box on its side. Now it’s lower, so it looks as if the wheels are off.”

“And the family rafts across the river, right?” Charlotte says. “The boys can mime paddles. What about the horses? The boys were riding horses. Do they swim across?”

“Have the boys mime that too,” Angela says. “Have them tie the horses’ reins to the raft. I think that’s what the Métis carters must have done. Anyway, we can ask the Elders.”

“That should work,” Charlotte says. “Okay, everybody. Back on. Let’s do the coulee scene.”

The lights dim to dusk. The actors again mime the cart’s movement across the prairie. The riders go forth again, this time separately, and they return separately.

“A deep coulee ahead of us,” the first one says. “Too steep to get down.”

The second rider appears. “Follow me,” he says. “We can enter the valley from the south end.”

Coyotes yip, ravens croak, crows caw. A cougar screams, and Papa and the boys mime the settling down of the spooked horses. By now the cart is in the coulee.

“Many have camped here,” Mama says from the back of the cart. “There are many tipi rings.”

“And many buffalo bones,” Papa says. “We will build a cabin and live right here.”

Roseanna wheels into the gym, and she shouts as loudly as her weakened lungs will allow: “I thought of just the thing! We can paint the killers’ faces white, and have them beat on Thomas with baseball bats!”