Liar by Joanna Gosse Read Free Book Online Page B

Sam’s life could run more smoothly. She walked over to Norman’s Groceries to check if they had enough paper plates and cups for Sam’s Thunder Ceremony on October 4 th when he would become Chief of the Eagle Clan. His mother had sent many boxes of gifts for the invited guests and their house was filled to overflowing. China wondered if Anita could send over a new couch and a chair or two. She decided it was time for a trip to Halifax to buy some furniture and resolved to broach the subject with Sam immediately.
    The locals jokingly called the store Norman’s Gas because it was also the only place on the reserve that had a gas pump. They only charged tax to the white people who preferred filling up their tanks at Norman’s because even with the added tax it was still cheaper than the gas at the garage in town.
    This morning Carrie Deer Norman, proprietress, wife of the famous carver, Frank Beaver Norman, and mother of three rascal sons and one daughter, the beautiful Lily Deer, was behind the counter, dressed in a bright yellow tunic that brought out the gold flecks in her light brown eyes. She wore matching leggings on slim legs and China was quite sure that Carrie didn’t do her shopping on Grimshaw Island. Nor did she get her highlighted and carefully cut hairdo done by the barber shop in the white part of town. She was wearing at least five gold and silver bracelets on each arm, no doubt carved by her famous husband. She smiled and China was disarmed by the warmth radiating from Carrie’s eyes. Most Grimshaws had relatively impassive faces and were very suspicious of newcomers.
    Sam swore that Carrie was pure Grimshaw but China had heard local legends of the ancient Grimshaw women coupling with a lost fisherman or two. These fisherman never seemed to survive for very long after their rescue. The Grimshaw women had probably sensed the need for fresh blood long before their men went looking for it on the mainland.
    When the Grimshaw men deemed it was once again safe to venture into the white world, they journeyed to Halifax and dragged home the seemingly willing white women, some of whom managed to survive quite nicely, probably because they insisted their husbands live with them in the white town, away from the nasty stares of the elderly, full-blooded Grimshaw women. Necessity is often jealous of change.
    Actually several mixed race families lived in the white town but China could only think of one other white woman who lived on the reserve. The thought of Bonnie Graham’s story did not reassure her. Bonnie used to have flame coloured hair and bright blue eyes, but age and a hard life had faded her once famous hair to yellowy white and her eyes to a dull pewter. She was now a tough, wiry, seventy-year-old, but she’d once been a looker and had cut quite a swath through the male aboriginal community. Her eldest son, who she had dragged to Grimshaw Island with her, had blond hair, a red beard, blue eyes and the kind of very white skin that always turned bright red when exposed to the sun. He had grown into a strapping born again criminal, who had reformed several times but always relapsed right into the waiting arms of the law. He was a status Indian despite all appearances to the contrary. That was because years ago, some idiot in Ottawa decided that if a white woman married an aboriginal, she automatically received Indian status and so did her children, with or without a drop of Indian blood. However if a full-blooded aboriginal woman married a white man, she and her children, immediately lost all Indian status. Reverse discrimination took on a new dimension in the aboriginal world.
    Bonnie eventually settled on one Grimshaw Indian, Ted Moose Graham, and they married and produced three handsome dark-haired boys. Bonnie also adopted, or fostered, two other motherless Grimshaw boys. She’d turned her girlhood passion for aboriginal males into motherly concern, which unfortunately didn’t stop all of her brood