Kathy Little Bird by Nancy Freedman, Benedict Freedman Read Free Book Online Page A

you’ll have to step into her place, try to fill it. That will mean being a mother to the boys.”
    “Then they’ll have to go to school,” I snapped. “I can’t teach them.”
    “That’s for me to decide,” he said.
    I ignored this and went on. “I’ll need help in the house too. A Mennonite girl for a few hours a day.”
    “What do you think I am, a bank?”
    “It won’t cost much. I’ll talk to them.”
    “You’ll do no such thing.”
    I was amazed to hear myself stand up to him. “You’re not going to make a workhorse out of me.”
    “Your mother not cold in her grave, and back talk from you already?”
    “I don’t mean it as back talk. There’s a limit to what I can do.”
    “What you’re
willing
to do,” he blustered.
    “Yes.” I had stood up to him, but had I won concessions? The first test would be Monday.
    I walked the boys to school, talked to the teacher, and got them properly registered. On the way back I hummed to keep up my resolve. Jellet would be furious. But done is done.

    E LK Woman slipped in the back door. She hadn’t been at the funeral. Jellet and his buddies would have run her off and enjoyed it. But she was Mum’s only friend, and she had nursed her to the end. Her herb medicines had soothed Mum’s cough, and her other potions, who knows, perhaps dulled the pain.
    Elk Woman told me that she had known the day Mum would die. Mum had known too. The voices of the Grandmothers always came to a Cree, and that’s what my mother was, a Cree, born of a Cree mother and a Metis father.
    Elk Woman had come to take me to the res. “Your grandfather, Jonathan Forquet, is here. He is an old man, a sick old man, but he walked across Alberta to be here.”
    Mum hardly ever spoke of Jonathan Forquet, and then not as her father but as a wise man who had helped herthrough a difficult time. I remembered her saying, “I was his daughter, but he was never my parent. He chose to be a parent to the Indian nations from Nunavut to the Yukon.”
    “Why didn’t he come in time…to be with her?”
    “It’s not necessary,” Elk Woman said. “He’ll be with her on the other side. What is necessary is to walk beside her a little way on her journey.”
    Jonathan Forquet.
    I squeezed my eyes closed trying to remember. As a young man he’d been a hunter and trapper. Then he heard of the teachings of the prophet Handsome Lake and for him the words of Manitou and Christ blended. From this time forward he was called to officiate at longhouse rituals. And now he’d come to hold the ceremony that closed his daughter’s life.

    I WAS amazed to see the entire res assembled to honor my Mum.
    Elk Woman, in her ratty coat out at the elbows and holes in her shoes, had tied a wind-band across her forehead and seemed to command large shadowy forces, reaching from the mystical Grandmothers themselves to the shaman around whom they gathered.
    My grandfather.
    He leaned on a cane, and the hand that held it trembled. His hair was white and very fine. It fell to his shoulders. But it was the eyes that held me. They burned with a mysticcharge. He stretched out a thin, almost transparent hand. “Child of my child. I am your mother’s father. Let us sit and talk a moment.”
    He crouched down where he was, and I did the same.
    He sat quietly, staring into space. Just when I thought he had forgotten about me, he began to speak.
    “Among the Cree, grandparents have a large responsibility in rearing children. I wasn’t able to be that kind of grandfather to you. But I come now from across Canada, all the way from Quebec province so you would know my face, and I yours.”
    “So we could trade shadows.” The old words were reborn in me, and I said them.
    “Ayiii!” He brought me to his breast and held me there. His breath brushed my cheek. “Elk Woman tells me you will be a singer. But first you must be a person. You must breathe, walk, love, suffer, hope—and mostly you must dream. We are a people of dreams.