• Chapter 2 •

The least Roseanna can do is visit her brother Thomas’s grave. It seems that is all she has ever done for him, year after year. She’s an old lady already, and nothing has been done. But now that she has a daughter grown-up and educated, they can plan something together.

“Fifty-seven years since Thomas died.” Roseanna gasps for breath. She tugs at Angela’s sleeve, sits down on the seat of her walker and takes two puffs on her inhaler. They are stopped halfway up the hill to the cemetery.

Roseanna sorts through her jumbled thoughts, trying to remember the long-ago night…the dance music, Kokum’s stories at the campfire, the car lights…. The next morning she chopped up her kewpie doll with Thomas’s axe.

Her brother Thomas had been her only solace at the residential school. Going back there in the fall had been like going to hell, she was so lonely. Only after, in Regina, had she learned to use alcohol for her loneliness, and to let any man use her...red man, or white man, it didn’t matter. He could shove her down in the back seat of his car, and she might as well have been split in half like her kewpie doll. Some time in the middle of the mess of those years of her life, she had given birth to a son. If it hadn’t been for Kokum to raise him, who knows what would have happened to her Glen. And only much later came Angela. How this baby survived her birth, healthy and without mental impairments stemming from an alcohol-soaked mother, had to be a miracle. Roseanna had thought she was already too old to have babies, so when Angela was born she took it as a message from the Great Spirit to clean up what was left of her life and do whatever she could to make a decent life for her daughter. And now she is so proud of her Angela; how her daughter can walk so straight and tall and look at other people face to face. Fifty-seven years ago Roseanna had stared at her feet, as if hiding her eyes would keep white people away from the secret wishes that they might laugh at.

“Ready to try and walk some more?” Angela asks.

“A hard climb. It didn’t used to be a hard climb.”

“Kokum’s funeral was a few years ago,” Angela says. “You didn’t need a walker then, or an inhaler.”

Roseanna wants to see the new marker that Glen has placed on her brother Thomas’s grave. In those years there wasn’t money to mark graves, but it is different now, and was different even when Kokum died. Angela was already going to high school when Kokum died. Her funeral was a big celebration. Kokum lived to be a hundred.

Angela follows behind, her hands on her mother’s hips in case she tips over.

“Was Uncle Thomas’s wake the same as Kokum’s?” Angela asks. Her mother breaks into a cough, and Angela has to sit her down on the walker.

“Do you need your inhaler?”

“Too many puffs, no good,” Roseanna gasps. “The doctor said. I’ll just rest here awhile.”

The climb is really not that steep, and not that far. It’s more of a ceremonial final walkway at funerals, from the road to the grave-sites, but it’s a chore now for Roseanna. She waits to talk as her breathing steadies, for there is much to tell Angela, and not much time to do it. Not much time until Roseanna herself will be carried up this path.

“At Thomas’s funeral, there was no new band hall, like there is now, but still we held wake to honour his spirit. Always that has been done, no matter how poor our people. Yet even after all these years, can his spirit journey ever be over until something is done to those murderers? The Elders said that revenge would only slow his journey to the spirit world. But some say now that lawyers paid those Elders to say nothing.”

“Has Glen done anything?”

“Glen is too busy with the land claims.”

“He knows what happened with Uncle Thomas?”

“I don’t know what Kokum told him. I haven’t told him. Our people carry so much shame, as if we are somehow to blame for Thomas’s death.” Roseanna pushes down on the handles of her walker and rises to her feet. “I want to see his grave.”

First they find Kokum Anne-Marie’s grave. Angela deposits shreds of tobacco near the marker, and she chants a prayer in Cree. She does the same at the new marker for Thomas.

“They taught you this at the university?” Roseanna asks.

“An Elder came to our class. He showed us many of our traditions.”

“I just want to sit here, Angela. You probably know more than I do. Remember Kokum’s funeral?”

“Yes,” Angela says.

People came from many reserves, and from Regina. For two days after Christmas people kept arriving for the wake. In the new Three Crows Band Hall, Glen sat the first night with Kokum’s body. Glen was more like Kokum’s own son than he was Roseanna’s.

By the time Angela started school, Glen was already an adult. He married a white woman, Charlotte. They met at the Regina Agribition Rodeo. He was a bull rider and she was a barrel racer. Glen became a band councillor at Three Crows, and Charlotte a school teacher. They have a son and daughter, Tommy and River.

The next day of the wake, Glen battled a snowstorm on the way to Regina, and it was evening by the time he got back with Roseanna and Angela. Outside the hall, little Tommy was helping the older boys feed a bonfire. Inside the hall, children were dashing about, and the adults sat in a large circle of chairs. In the centre was the coffin with Kokum’s body. People were still arriving the second day, coming into the hall, then going out to somebody’s house, and then back again to the circle of chairs.

“Where you been? How was it driving through the snow? Did Santa Claus come to your house?” They shared memories. Could there ever be an Elder as worthy as Kokum?

Chairs were rearranged around tables. Ben Star stood by the coffin. He flicked a lighter and lit a braid of sweetgrass, chanted a prayer in Cree, and then he spoke in both Cree and English.

“She was Kokum. Always she had an Oh Henry! chocolate bar for me. She taught us children what was good, and what was bad. That was a long time ago….”

Ben Star waved his arms in the sweetgrass smoke, chanted another prayer and spoke some more. Several others spoke; younger people who had known Kokum Anne-Marie only in her eighties and nineties. They smudged in the sweetgrass smoke, then said their good things: “She never complained of her stiff and bent-over back. She told the old stories. She made the best hamburger soup.” Some older people nodded, and others smiled and quietly laughed.

A drum beat on and on. Stella, who leaned on a cane, made her way to the coffin. She looked down awhile at Kokum Anne-Marie, and then set a silk scarf alongside the body. Roseanna followed with Angela, whispering to her. “Do you have something? From both of us? Maybe your earrings? They look so nice. Silver eagles.”

“Glen just gave them to me for Christmas.”

“He will understand,” Roseanna said.

People walked four times around the coffin, and then it was slowly carried from the hall. By the bonfire, the bearers lifted the coffin onto the back of a half-ton. The journey wound along the road leading to the cemetery hill. The bearers then took the coffin off the truck and carried Kokum’s body to be buried on top of the hill. Snow fell gently, and beyond the cemetery, high in a tree at the edge of an aspen bluff, a horned owl perched.

“I remember there was an owl hooted when we buried Kokum,” Roseanna says. “I hope it’s not here when you bury me.”

“Don’t say that, Mother.”

Roseanna breaks into another fit of coughing. Angela holds her by the arm and pats her on the back. She searches through her mother’s pockets for the inhaler, but Roseanna finds it herself and shoots the spray into her mouth.

“Maybe this is my last visit here. Or my second last. Next time I visit to stay.”

“Quit talking like that!”

“There are worse places to be than here.”

From the cemetery they can see people’s houses scattered here and there in clearings among the aspen bluffs. The air is a dead calm, but yet up close in an aspen bluff, the leaves tremble. They flutter like wands of feathers on a pow-wow dancer.

“They speak,” Roseanna says.

“Who? What do you hear?”

“The spirits plead with us. The grandmothers and grandfathers. We’ll go there, Angela.”

“Where?”

“To Duncan. We can go there when you start your job at Bad Hills. Rent a cheap house there, and you can drive to work in Bad Hills.” Roseanna stops talking to catch her breath. Her chest heaves, and she coughs some more.

“I was still a teenager when we camped that summer. Younger than you. I should have told you these things before. I saw them kill Thomas, and nobody has paid. Just blood money from crooked lawyers.”

“What can we do?”

“You have a big education, Angela. Bachelor of fine arts. Isn’t that what you call it? None of us had anything like that. What did we know?”

“If we move into a house in Duncan, won’t they be suspicious?”

“In their eyes we are just two more Indians. I look nothing like I did back then. Maybe you are a resemblance of a young me. But that’s all the better. Just enough to make them wonder. Old men might get foolish and slip up if a pretty girl confronts them.”

“You mean I should lure them?”

“Like a worm lures a fish, eh?”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. You took an acting class at the university. You can make something up to do.”

“Can we get Glen to help? Didn’t you tell me that he has business in Duncan?”

“With land claims. Negotiating with some of those men. He can’t bring up Thomas’s murder.”

“But you think I can?”

“Not accuse them. They won’t even know who we are. After a while they may start wondering, and then maybe realize…. Maybe then they will confess.”

“You think so. After all this time.”

“So it might take a little more time.”

“Oh.”

Roseanna doesn’t like how Angela says oh. She makes it sound as if her mother doesn’t know what she is talking about. Does her daughter even care? She is more interested in her new job. Leave everything to Glen, she thinks. It was Glen who told her about the job. Glen even found out how cheap it was to rent a house in Duncan. He had been to the real-estate office in Bad Hills, and had found out about land available near Duncan. He even saw the coulee place that Kokum used to tell of in her stories. “Good willow there for your baskets,” he told Angela. Glen likes to make fun of her education. He calls it BBW, bachelor of basket weaving. A Dakota artist from Minnesota did come to Regina to teach at the First Nations University. He did show Angela how to make things with willow. But that is not all she learned. Among other things, she learned smudging, and the many things to know about the Four Directions. Important things Roseanna missed out on wasting her time in residential school.