Celia's Song Read online

  One spike can kill you.

  The men move on to harvest another tree while Joey and Sam whip up their saws and go into action, skinning her of her branches. Steve thinks he can hear the tree scream.

  From seven in the morning to noon the crew chokes, fells, and skins. They fell a truckload’s worth by morning’s end.

  Steve looks at the bald patch on the mountain and feels the selfloathing rising again. It isn’t just the dust, the camp, the company, or the rain he hates. He hates the wasting of the hillside that their handiwork contributes to; the melancholy he feels after seeing the devastation they have inflicted gnaws at his nerves. He hates knowing that he helped strip this mountain bare. He knows the dirt will be caught by the rain and dragged to the sea to be lost in her depths. Alternating flood and drought plague the thin valley floors of clearcut mountains; drought in the rainforest poses a danger to the water table. Exposed by the absence of trees, the mammals leave, the land becomes a ludicrous desert in the middle of a rainforest, and summer temperatures rise — not just here, but everywhere. He feels like a criminal held hostage by his dreams.

  Hostages first trap themselves, but Steve has no way of knowing this. He is a newcomer and they have a whole different way of seeing things. I want to sleep this story off, but I can’t.

  V

  THE BONES IN THE longhouse are not very old. The ones under the house are older. They are the ones who fell from the sky when this world first began. The oldest bones buried deeper in the soil rattle and sing the oldest songs they know as they work their way to the surface. They call out to the other bones, hoping the younger ones will join them in the song. The newer bones answer and the echo is magnificent. The ancient dead roll over, keep wiggling and singing their way to the surface. The song gains volume and Steve thinks he hears it.

  Something is going to happen here.

  “There are consequences for negligence,” the newer bones sigh to the old bones. Steve shakes his head, thinking he must be dehydrated, and reaches for his Thermos. As he sits on a log eating his lunch, he wonders about the things he thinks he’s heard. A murder of crows lands on the trees not yet harvested and they caw. Steve jerks his head in the sound’s direction. Amos laughs.

  THE SERPENT CRAWLS OUT of the sea and lolls in the crevice of two mountains. Both heads stare at the men below. They are different from the people they knew before. What is that big yellow thing that squats nearby? Why are there no trees but for a thin patch next to the men? Loyal has no interest in doing them harm, but Restless is excited. He surmises that these men have murdered the trees; this means they lack a conscience, and so they are full of the kind of spirit food Restless craves. Below is a spiritual banquet just waiting to be devoured. Restless readies himself for his first meal.

  “Antsy in the bush, se’manh?” Amos’s fork clatters against his blue enamel camp plate.

  “No, I’m just not deaf. I hear voices in the wind.”

  Amos glares at Steve. Hate tangles his insides. The arrogance of this se’manh twists Amos into knots. Steve’s people spent a century and a half alienating him and his family from their knowledge, banning his people from using it. They took pains to lock the remnants of his culture in their museums, archives, and universities, and then barred him from entering. And this white man who has access to everything Amos has been denied flaunts it.

  Of course, Steve did not know his people had done this. It was orchestrated so that no one understood what was going on. It would have been beautiful, if the result were not so ugly.

  Restless curls about Amos’s feet. “Bastard, kill him,” Restless whispers to Amos and Amos swallows the words. They poison his guts. Restless smiles at Amos. The other head sighs, consumed by his sadness, he lies helpless; it is not his turn. Steve says nothing, just pulls his sandwich out of his lunchbox and eats. After he swallows the last bite of his sandwich, he heads for the sound.

  “Don’t get lost,” Amos chuckles. He’s trying hard to laugh away the shame he feels, to suppress the desire to kill Steve. The others join his laughter and this takes the edge off the burning rage inside Amos. After a short while, the foreman follows Steve into a clearing not far from camp; he sees the longhouse that has sunk into the ground. It is missing its roof, but the opening hole is still there, boarded up. Steve draws closer.

  “Don’t go any closer,” the foreman warns. Steve shrinks back and turns toward the foreman, who points at the boarding. “They must have died of sickness. Who knows how long the illness survives? Who knows how long the house stood roofless or how long bacteria live inside dead bodies?”

  They both retreat, but Steve stares at the house front as he backs away. Something is wrong with it and he is trying to figure out what it is. He gives up trying and he turns around, following the foreman back to camp.

  I scamper after them. Don’t even have to try to be quiet.

  “So? What you find?” Amos asks, his mouth full of food. He is perched on an old stump. Steve stands downwind from Amos and wishes he had the nerve to tell Amos to wash once in a while. Amos has no manners, and lacks the decency to maintain any level of cleanliness. Steve resents him for it. His hair hasn’t seen a comb or brush for weeks, is uncut and tied into a dark, tangled mass that hangs down the middle of his back. A dirty red rag tied across his forehead and a single elastic is all the care and attention Amos gives it. It irritates Steve, and he fights to ignore his own irritation. The derision in Amos’s voice is ill-disguised, but Steve feigns apathy on hearing it. Amos is about to find out that Steve can toy with people too.

  “Longhouse.” He drops the word flatly and every man among them squirms and stops eating.

  “You didn’t go in there, did you?” Joey asks. The rest of the men stare, waiting for the answer, hoping it is one they can live with. Amos taps his feet like he wants to run. Steve doesn’t answer right away.

  “No,” he says flatly. Relieved, they relax and resume eating.

  The foreman signals lunch break is over. Steve strolls up the hill to choke off another tree. At the top, he glances back at Joey. It dawns on him: there was no sea serpent on the house front. He shudders.

  Steve knows something.

  SCREAMS COME AT CELIA again through the veil of sleep. They are soft, but insist upon being heard. She awakes, swings her legs off the bed, heads toward her bedroom window. The voices retreat as she approaches the windowsill. She peers outside at the poplars, which now hang limp, waiting for something to happen. Through the leaves, the same shape she had witnessed the night before twists itself up into a ball, unravels, stands up, and then thumps as it hits the ground. She is not sure what it is at first when, for the briefest moment, it stops and slithers back and forth. Then it looks as though it is trying to move but can’t, as though something has a hold on it from the inside. Celia bobs side to side, like an old bear trying to get a better look.

  No stars backlight the trees and it is too early for the sun. The dark is thick, too dense for her to see through. Behind the shape’s movements, as though quarrelling with something within, Celia sees Steve’s outline. Her breath catches and she moves her head back and forth. It doesn’t help. Finally, the strain of peering into the dark becomes too much. She pulls the curtains closed and climbs back into bed.

  Arms folded behind her head, Celia talks to herself. “I am thirtyeight and don’t have a lover, a husband, or even prospects. I see things going bump in the night and have no one to comfort me or explain them away.” She rolls over and returns to sleep.

  I don’t get Celia sometimes, but I am not alone. Her people don’t get her either.

  Much later in the morning, as she scrambles together some eggs and fried sausages, Celia dismisses the experience as a bad dream, even as she wonders why Steve was in it. He is white — Stacey’s former schoolmate and now Stacey’s secret lover. She laughs as she stirs the eggs and flips the sausages. There are too many sausages,
but she is past the point of minding how much she eats.

  “Guess he’s not too big a secret, since I know about him.” Stacey believes no one knows about him. Maybe that’s the secret: Stacey doesn’t know we all know about him. On the other hand, maybe she knows we know and are all pretending not to know, and she is pretending she doesn’t while we actually don’t know she knows. Celia stuffs the scrambled eggs and sausages into the oven and sets it at one-hundred-fifty degrees to keep warm while she mixes up a batch of pancakes. She flaps the last jack, wipes her hands on her apron, and serves herself a plate of eggs, sausages, and pancakes. For a brief moment, she stares at the plate of food and thinks it an awful lot considering she isn’t all that active or hard-working. “Hell with it, I like eating,” she says, and ignores the little voice cautioning her.

  Her kitchen faces the right edge of her property on the road to town. The river saunters next to her house on the left side, after weaving back toward the reserve from the bridge. The bridge is not far from her house. Her old gramma chose this spot to build her house so that she could see the comings and goings of all the villagers. Like her gramma, Celia knows who’s visiting who, who’s keeping company with who, all based on who’s riding with who in whose car. This amuses her: she’s part of the reason people in small towns feel like they live in a fishbowl. Tony from the other end of the reserve passes by in his old car and the noisiness of it is comic. The river looks a little jerky today, like it isn’t all that happy. The fork stills in her hand, she licks it, plunges it into a sausage, then a piece of flapjack, rolls it in syrup, sticks the sticky mess in her mouth. The curtains shift. Celia arches her back. “Whoever you are, you are starting to piss me off.” There is no one there. The windows are closed. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” Celia’s gramma is now standing to her right.

  “Ok, Alice.” Celia stuffs her rage. Waiflike and thin, dead Alice sits down in a chair next to her. Celia serves her a plate of syrup and flapjacks.

  “The house front fell forward. The heads of the serpent fought. The snake’s body grew larger with each twist and turn. The heads thrashed their way from the old village to the sea. In the sea, the water roiled under it whipping, lashing, twisting and writhing and engorging the double-headed serpent.”

  “You saw it?”

  Gramma Alice had seen the serpent and she fictioned up a story just as her ancestors would have. “The serpent has two heads, one bit the other head clean off.” Celia isn’t sure what to make of this, but she knows her gramma likes telling stretchers, so she decides to listen. Humans are suited for fiction, Celia decides. The earth and its children are subjects and not objects, nothing is solid, everything is space. We are all just space between imperceptibly small moving particles; molecules, electrons, protons, neutrons. Maybe this is why we desire solidity. Solid facts, solid futures, solid relationships, solid stories. Celia chuckles at her own joke. Alice arches her eyebrows, suspicious of what Celia is laughing at. Celia knows that the space between moving particles is actually immense, yet the eyes of humans fill in the blanks to fiction up solid shapes. It must take days after birth for this fictional point of view to develop. Newborns must feel so heavy; they must feel solid. Maybe they would die of shock if they did not see their mothers as solid powerful masses. Celia sips her tea.

  “He is so much bigger than the house front portrays him. His tail extends nearly three hundred feet. He tore the sea shore up, dug a trench a mile long, before heading out to sea,” says Gramma Alice. Celia listens to her gramma’s story of the day the serpent fought itself. “Both heads set out toward deep water. Once near an underground volcano they tangled. The volcano fired up. The fight sparked the fire in the volcano. It pulled them toward its vortex. One head caught fire and screamed. The volcano erupted and spit the snake onto the shore. The serpent had only one head left. It was the hungry head.”

  “What happened after that?” Celia asks and fetches herself a glass of orange juice.

  “Don’t know, stopped watching, came straight here.” Gramma Alice bites into her flapjack. She repeats the business of how the serpent lost its head: “The one head bit the burnt head right off. Just bit it clean off.”

  Celia listens to Alice quietly without investing too much belief in her story; she thinks Alice has jumped to conclusions before she saw clearly what was happening, so she doesn’t fuss much over what she says. Still, the images Celia saw the night before seem to corroborate Alice’s story.

  “Free from its conscience and its house front duties, the serpent will slide along the shore looking for something to eat. You be careful, girl,” Alice admonishes as she finishes eating. She leaves. Celia stops breathing, but just for a second. No sense being scared of your own daymares. She finishes her breakfast and sets about cleaning up her kitchen.

  VI

  I HEAD FOR AMOS’S tent. I squat outside, listening and watching.

  The tent shakes. Amos shakes inside along with it. He is alone. No one wants to share a space with him until he washes on some kind of regular basis. Amos knows this and so deliberately declines to wash because he does not want to share space with anyone.

  Amos saw the serpent in his sleep. He screamed, but no sound came. Like all other humans, Amos indulges in fiction, but he has different reasons for doing so. His stories run in a different direction, toward absurd and hopeless murder. He fears sober sleep. Sober, his dreams become nightmares of knives plunging into his own body, blades withdrawing covered in blood, bits of flesh attached to the blades. Drunk, his dreams are of him stabbing other humans, mostly adults. Drunk, his dreams are sometimes of children’s screams. These render him powerful, but they strike terror into him when he awakes. He reaches for the bottle again.

  Amos is dislocated from himself. I can’t change his story, so I watch.

  The restless head of the serpent heads for Amos. It crawls about the camp, excited; it swallows every sound Amos makes. The hungry head of the serpent invades every corner, every second of Amos’s night. It moves Amos to dream of the day the serpent fought itself.

  He sees it swell, sees it try to bite off one of its own heads, watches it as it arches its back. Amos listens to it howl. The howl paralyzes his scream. The serpent’s face twists. His eyes redden. Amos sits up. Sweat pours down his face, his back; his legs are soaked with sweat. He feels awake, but continues to dream. His conscience comes into view. He sees it. Bold and black typed words rail at him. The words kink, stretch, and whirl in front of his face. They rush at his face, enter his mouth, and disappear into his mind. Inside his mind, they take on a kind of spidery form. The serpent’s head jerks. The insane behaviour of Amos’s conscience attracts him. From inside the tent, in that old camp, Amos writhes, desperate for something he cannot name. His conscience bangs inside his head, its feathery web spins itself into knots. Every time Amos opens his mouth to scream the knot chokes off the sound. Finally the knot settles at the bottom of his belly in a ball. One powerful push of breath and it flies out his mouth.

  The serpent had got inside him, swallowed his warped conscience, wrapped its wicked breath of horrific permission around it, spat it out and sent it back toward Amos’s open mouth as Amos fought hard to scream out loud. Amos gulps and swallows his own scream before it makes a sound, just as the serpent returns his conscience now filled with the shark spirit, the barracuda, and the hunger of the serpent all wrapped around a perverse sense of morality and entitlement. It roots itself to the wall of his stomach, a toxic ulcer.

  The serpent turns, smiles, and slides down the coastal mountains toward civilization. The last time he had been here there were three-hundred-thirty-seven longhouses in thirty-three villages, each house inset at least a mile from the ocean on the banks of the rivers. It’s different now, there are no longhouses. He is stunned by what he sees. Rows of buildings, hundreds of thousands of humans, all shapes, sizes, and colours, some speaking the sparrow talk of the white ones; others, smaller, but look
ing almost like the original people, speaking in a stop-stop quick language; still others speaking in nasal rapid-fire rhythm, none of which the serpent understands. He hunts for the original people, but it will be a long time before he finds any.

  The land surrounding one old woman’s house reeks of pig dung. The serpent does not have a way of recognizing the animals living on the land next door, except that the old woman complains about them to the old man and when she does she calls them “pigs.” Restless stares at them for days, watches their movements as these strange men throw slop at them. The pigs smell too. They smell of something they consumed. Restless studies them before doing anything, which is okay with Loyal. Each night, the men drink something that reeks. After a while they grow loud, fight each other, and finally beat the women who live there with them. At night they sleep with their mouths open like they are trying to catch flies, just like Amos.

  Restless thinks he recognizes the mind-changer they are drinking. He lies in wait, and then enters the gaping mouth of one of them. The next night the man kills one of the women, chops her to bits, and feeds her to the pigs. Loyal is stunned at what Restless has done, but Restless sleeps a deep and satisfying sleep that night. These strangers are easy. As Restless sleeps, Loyal decides he has to find someone who can stop Restless without killing them both.

  The new bones rattle happily. It is about time someone did something to wake these people up. The old bones groan, sing the oldest healing song they know, but to no avail. Mink determines to leave Nuu’chalnulth territory. After this, the story at the place where everyone died will be the one to witness.