I drove across town to the reserve. Jerome Charlie’s freshly painted bi-level and neat yard lifted his property a couple of notches above the stubbornly squalid norm, but the Witka Nation was raking in the chips.
The band, consisting of fewer than six hundred souls, was collecting mineral and forest royalties worth millions a year; proceeds from a salmon hatchery that supplied all the fish farms on the peninsula and stocked scores of waterways from Howe Sound to Powell River; shares from a gravel excavation business that had shorn off the entire side of a mountain above Dolphin Inlet, incensing the non-natives who’d built their dream homes facing a now-ruined view; and, most recently, moorage fees from a deep-sea pier used regularly by naval vessels but actually built for docking the merchant freighters needed to load the band’s gravel for shipment around the Pacific Rim. And all this was coming in on top of the standard patrimony, such as it was, doled out by the fat cats in Ottawa.
Chief and council, meanwhile, were investing the income from jacked-up leases on hundreds of properties bordering the reserve to get into the grocery business and open other retail enterprises. Band members got jobs out of the deal, and competitive pricing ensured established local firms like Barlow’s were bleeding market share.
Most of this was the work of Jerome Charlie, who had been chief for ten years prior to his electoral defeat last spring.
I knocked on his front door and looked seaward. Beyond the windswept grass of the graveyard, breakers were running cobalt blue. A rusted-out freighter was loading gravel from the mile-long chute that led from the base of the denuded mountain.
Jerome opened the door and eyeballed me without interest.
“Can I come in?”
“You’re here; you might as well.”
Under the vaulted ceiling, the living room was furnished in best black leather and a glut of carved cedar boxes, some as big as coffins, which doubled as lamp stands and coffee or end tables. Chilkat blankets adorned one of the high oak-panel walls; another was decked out in rows of fabulous masks, many of them ancient, each depicting a spirit of the forest, sea or air; a skookum home entertainment unit took up the wall between. For extra comfort on the gold pile carpet, glossy cougar-skin rugs were scattered in front of the flat-screen TV and the big stone fireplace. In the room’s furthest corner hung a trophy eagle-feather bonnet, a gift from the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs. The great Chief Dan George had once worn it in a movie, I knew, because I’d seen a picture of the presentation in the paper and had read the cutline.
Jerome was medium height and round. He’d been a mill worker for two decades before he’d become chief, and he projected the upright attitude of a man who’s had to work for a living and doesn’t take crap. He was dressed in a red-check work shirt and baggy Levis, and under his black ball cap his greying hair was cropped short; in appearance, only the giant silver belt buckle—a coiled Haida sea serpent—set him apart from the prototypical blue collar. He was clean-shaven, and his full mouth was set hard and sour. He stood facing me.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I’m doing some checking into Albert Sloan’s last movements. I hear he came by Friday to see you. I just wanted to get your impression of him that day and maybe find out what he was here for.”
“What’s your impression of zero?”
“Pardon?”
“Sloan was a zero. Zero doesn’t make an impression.”
“I heard he asked you about doing an interview?”
“He asked something. I had nothing to say to him. I have nothing to say about him.”
“Jan Sloan finds it impossible to believe that her husband took his own life.”
He stepped right up to me and fully bared his upper row of teeth. “You think I might have offed the guy?” he said in my face.
“Come on, Jerome. You’re scaring me.”
“Then you shouldn’t be standing in my house.”
This guy was hard to talk to, but I gave it a try, putting lots of air around my words. “I know you’ve got cause to detest Albert Sloan, deeply. To put it plain, he did a smear job on you. Those stories of nepotism on the reserve and your so-called junket program were designed to hurt you, and I’m sure they did. And I told Sloan when he got that hack editor of his to write them that they weren’t properly sourced or backed up, they were transparently one-sided, and the editorials he wrote to run with them were way out there. A couple weeks later, I stopped working for the guy—and that wasn’t the only reason I walked, but it was one of them. But the man is dead now. Dead. I just want to know what he came to talk about. On the day that he died.”
Jerome’s brown eyes were bright and hot. But he finally took a breath. “I told his wife already, and I told the cops. He came to ask me about doing an interview on the signing ceremony this weekend. On how I felt” He shouted the words. “He wanted my thoughts, and I gave him my thoughts.”
“Which were?”
“I told him to get the hell out of Witka Nation and never set foot here again. Or he might never leave.”
“How did he react?”
“He left immediately.”
“Did he look rattled?”
“I didn’t even look at him.” He wasn’t looking at me either when he said it.
But he surprised me by walking me to my car. As I climbed in, he pointed toward the highway.
“When you drive out, you’ll notice the carvers at work in the shed behind the band office. Those twelve faceless poles we put up four years ago have come down. Faces are being carved into them. Witka Nation is getting its identity back. We had to go to the white man and ask for it to be returned. Now that we have it, we have fools in charge who don’t understand what it means. The new chief and most of the new council were Sloan’s allies. That tells you what fools they are.”
Before walking away, he added: “We get enough suicides around here with our young people that Sloan’s death counts for nothing. Dog control day makes me sadder.”
I slowed down as I passed the carving shed. A jumbo mouth showed near the foot of the pole nearest me, bear teeth bared the way Jerome Charlie’s had been. With no eyes or ornamental lines to frame it, it struck me as demonic. I had a sense of why the Witka, tough as they were, used to fear the forest.