My kokum used to babysit me a lot when I was a kid whenever my mom was down at the Royal, celebrating everything from birthdays to just surviving the week. I didn’t mind; I loved sleeping over. She tried to teach me how to bead, but my fingers didn’t have the dexterity to push a needle through something so tiny. We’d bake pies and she’d tell me to take two home, one for me, one for my momma for when she woke up. I loved exploring her basement, my kokum was a hardcore hoarder and kept everything everyone ever gave her. All of our Christmas presents, birthday gifts, all the knick-knacks we gave her were stored down there. And if I didn’t crash on her couch and watch reruns all night, I usually slept in the basement on a mattress, a makeshift bedroom barricaded in by years’ worth of gifts. My kokum had a hilarious way of gift-giving—she’d often re-gift you what you gave her a year or two earlier if she hated it or was mad at you, but on the other hand if you were in her good books, she’d give you something she made herself. She was always knitting pot holders and wash cloths, much to my mom’s annoyance—we had drawers full of them.
One Christmas my mom took us to Selkirk to shop for gifts. I was on the hunt for the perfect present for Kokum and made my way into this Hallmark store which was full of journals, cards, and ornaments. I browsed up and down every aisle with the fifteen dollars I had saved up from three months’ worth of allowance and rolled coins. There were all sorts of random things in there: crystals, rocks, little dream catchers for your car, and a whole row of glass animals. There was one in particular that I liked, this frog in a straw hat lying against a rock, fishing in a little pond. I was eyeing it up when the cashier came over to me.
“Do you want to take a closer look at it?” She bent down and unlocked the glass case it was in, then held it out for me to look at. I looked that glass frog in the eye, and after much deliberation, I decided that this was the one.
“How much?” I asked.
She looked at the tag. “$34.99,” she said. I followed her to the register and pulled out the two fives I had, then spilled the rolls of coins I had saved up all over the counter.
“Is this enough?”
Just then my mom came into the store. “Here you are, heck, I’ve been looking for you for like twenty minutes.”
The cashier laughed. “I’ll let you two talk it over,” she said, and busied herself with another customer.
“Mom, can I buy this?”
“This thing? What for?”
“For Kokum.”
“The hell is she gonna do with this?” She took a closer look, then saw the price. “Thirty-five dollars for a frog? You know how many things we could buy for that?”
“I think she’ll like it,” I said, and tugged on her hand. I had this weird way of lacing myself into my mom whenever she was mad at me. I’d stand on her toes, put my head beneath her shirt, stare up at her breasts, and twine my fingers into hers. When I did it in public, she’d usually get mad.
“Not today, Jonny, put it back—we can’t afford it.”
And I burst into tears, and boy, did I cry. I scooped up my money off the counter, stormed out of the store, and ran to the nearest bathroom, where I locked myself in a stall to sulk. When I came out my mom was waiting for me, keys in hand, with a bag from SAAN.
On our way back to the rez, we stopped in Teulon for a couple cans of pop. Before continuing on, my mom handed me a piece of gum and turned the radio off.
“You know, Jonny, we can’t always get what we want,” she said.
“I know, Momma, it’s just—I saved up all this money to shop.”
“I saw, look at all that cash, good on you.”
“Whatchu think I can get Kokum, then? Can you help me make her something?”
She nodded toward the SAAN bag on the backseat. “Just reach in, for godsakes, don’t go snooping around.” I put my hand inside and pulled out the frog wrapped in bubble wrap. “Don’t tell Rog, okay?” she said.
I cradled the frog for a minute before placing it back inside the bag, then lunged at my mom and hugged her. “I love you, Momma, I just love you!” I said, making her swerve the car across the road.
“Cut the shit, Jonny, you’re gonna make me crash.” I scooched back over to my seat and pulled out my cash.
“Here’s my money,” I said, “to help pay.”
“Nah, m’boy. You earned it, you keep it.”
She pulled me toward her and eventually I fell asleep with her arm around me. When we got home I wrapped that frog in a gym bag I had sewed in home ec and hid it for three weeks, trying my hardest not to go and blab to Kokum that I got her something right nice. And that old frog’s still up in her living room, covered in dust; he’s been sitting there fishing for years now, sitting beside a picture of my kokum and Mush.
Kokum and I did all sorts of crazy shit when she babysat me. She used to tell me scary stories about the wendigo and Nanabush, stories about ghosts and aliens. She had an obsession with horror and was dead set that she would see Bigfoot at least once in her life. Once she took me out into the bush late at night, like she used to do with my uncles, flashlights in hand, to look for him.
“People say they saw him, y’know, right here in these woods,” she said. As we explored the nooks and crannies of the bush, she told me all about how she once saw a UFO, saw it with all of its lights coming straight toward her home before it suddenly took off up and over to the north. “You know,” she said, stopping me and grabbing my hand so our flashlights were pointing up at the sky, “they say there was a UFO crashing that night in Jackhead. Military and all, buncha people got asked to evacuate, weird eh?” We continued on through the bush, forging our own damn paths because my kokum was a bad ass like that. We never did find Bigfoot, but we did find a lot of trap lines and even a lynx that was snared, slowly dying in the night.
Sometimes we listened to her favourite song, “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone. Heck, when we did, we used to throw on her old shawls and dance around as the adults sang. “Hell, what the matter with your head?” they’d sing and Kokum said my dancing looked like the fancy shawl dance, but I thought I looked more like an epileptic groundhog. The shawls were too big for me and the fabric draped beneath my feet, but we danced however the hell the song directed us to—jumping in the middle of the living room, hopping off the couches, spinning in circles with our arms splayed like airplanes, and the fabric twirling so fast that all we saw were brief flashes of our faces through the blur.
And then I guess one time I got too close to the steps and fell down the stairs, face forward down fourteen steps, cracked my collar-bone. But I was still full of endorphins, didn’t feel the pain right away, just sat there looking up at my kokum whose face was full of horror, her hands cupped around her cheeks, her mouth saying “M’boy” over and over beneath the roar of the music, “Come and get your love, come and get your love, come and get your love now” repeating.
When my mom came to pick me up two days later, she freaked out. “The fuck? He did what?” She yelled at my kokum for what seemed like hours.
“You’re good for nothing, you know that? Nothing!” she screamed at her.
“I didn’t mean—he fell.”
“How the hell you let a boy crack his damn neck?”
I tried to intervene. “Mommy, I didn’t crack—”
“Hush up,” she said, then turned back to my kokum. “Boy, I can’t even trust you to watch my boy for one goddamn night.”
And then my kokum was crying with a loud wail that wracked my bones with aches, a vibrato that buzzed on my clavicle, stung me good. I clung to her apron, holding tightly onto her with my good arm, as my mom pulled me off her and forced me up the stairs. She didn’t realize she was pulling on me where my arm was slung. I yelled for Kokum and heard her crying at the bottom of the stairs. As we were about to leave, she ran up.
“You take care of that boy, Karen, you damn well hear me?” She pushed her words out with laboured breath.
“Hmph, you want me to take advice from the woman who broke my baby?”
“Least I was here, Karen. At least I was here.”
My mom glared at her and balled up her fists, but then she just opened the door and we left. For the next two weeks she babied me, made me Cup-a-Soup, rented us scary movies—and saved up all her energy to find a way to apologize to Kokum. I had to wear the sling for a couple weeks; the fall left me with a dent in my clavicle, wide enough to contain both of those women’s many tears.