One Native Life by Richard Wagamese Read Free Book Online

parts of yourself you never knew existed. In that we’re all the same.
    And the reward is that one day, when my eyes close for the last time, there will be the voice of a blue-eyed kid shouting at me from the finish line. “Come on, Rich, it’s the bottom of the ninth and we need you home!”

Taking Flight
    . . .
    THE SKY THAT TRACES the curve of mountain today is an impossible blue. Cloudless, it is at once near enough to touch and as distant as a star. You could fall into it. That’s how it feels. Perhaps there are cosmic particles deep inside us that make us one with sky and space. I wonder if, as my people say, Star People graced us with teachings once and part of us recalls that.
    When I was thirteen my adopted family moved to the city of St. Catharines, Ontario. The move there was fraught with anxiety for me. It would be my fourth move with them in four years. I never got the chance to settle, to experience the measure of refuge that comes when you can wrap a home, a place, a geography around you. Leaving our farm was a tragedy of acute proportions, and there was nothing I could say about it.
    What saved me was writing. I don’t know how many stories and poems I committed to paper those first months. It was summer, and school was out. Without a circle of friends, I was incredibly lonely and sad. But I had writing.
    My adopted parents were pragmatic, concrete thinkers. For them, there were no grey areas. There was no room for flights of fancy or imagination. Everything was regimen. Everything was obdurate discipline. For them my poetry was “flowery.” Cause for a giggle, a boy penning silly verse. My stories were wild, they said, not worthy of consideration beyond a belly laugh.
    They never got that I found freedom in writing. In my wild stories and flowery verse, I could capture the feelings of worthiness and equality I experienced on the land and under the sky. They never got that what was left of the Indian in me had its expression in creativity, or that if I could imagine permanence, I could believe it existed.
    When I entered Grade Eight that fall, I was ushered into the world of city teens. The farm kids I’d known had had little use for fashion, pose or attitude. Their world was simple and straightforward. But here life was a jumble of motion, of necessity, of learning the code and adopting it.
    So I did what every lonely, scared kid does in order to fit in. I did what everyone else was doing. I hung out on the corner and smoked cigarettes. I talked trash and acted hip. I paid more attention to the acceptance of my peers than to my marks. But the more I worked at fitting in, the greater the trouble that brewed at home.
    My life became the walk to school and back. Then it was four hours in my room each night to study. Except that I didn’t study. I wrote. I wrote stories and plays and poems about the kind of life I imagined every other kid was having, a life that wasn’t restricted to the cloister of a small room. My stories were filled with hopes, dreams, happy endings and skies.
    And I never showed them to anybody.
    But my teacher that year was a man named Leo Rozema. He was Dutch and still held a smidgen of the accent. He had a big nose and grey hair and all the kids made fun of him. His white shirts leaned to dingy. His ties were out of fashion and he smelled of cigarettes. But there was something about Mr. Rozema that I trusted. Maybe it was because he had to work so hard at being accepted. He had to fight to be himself, too. So I showed him my stories.
    One day there was a brown envelope on my desk. When I opened it there was a letter. Mr. Rozema had written out in longhand a poem called “High Flight.” It described a pilot’s fascination with the sky.
    “And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod / The high untrespassed sanctity of space / Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.” That’s how the poem went, and Mr. Rozema’s letter said my writing reminded him of that. He