Celia's Song Read online

  Instead I was there motioning for her to follow. Finally she saw me and trundled along behind me as though following a shapeshifting mink storyteller were as normal as can be.

  “She must have been young once,” Celia said to me. She leaned against a tree. She landed in some other place with old Salish names and a language that sounded foreign to her ear not because she didn’t recognize the words, but because they slid off the people’s tongues so easy and plain. Today’s speakers are either teachers or students, so the language sounds serious and strained, bereft of humour. It is painful to listen to, much less participate in.

  Bush surrounded Celia.

  I sat on a rock and watched as Celia waited for the sight of humans.

  Laughter wafted from behind bushes of blackberries, between snippets of song and story. Celia rounded the bush. A half dozen young girls picked berries, their cone-shaped cedar baskets strapped to their foreheads and hanging down their backs to the waist, swishing with every movement. Neither song nor voice nor laughter interrupted the steady rhythm of the picking. In the distance, a young man stood watching the land in front of them, his back to the girls. He was positioned on the hillside to see what was coming.

  Celia recognized her gramma’s grandmother: the first Alice. The other girls called her “Alice.” Every time they said “Alice” they laughed as though it were the most ridiculous and meaningless sound they had ever heard. It seemed preposterous to the girls that this sound should become this girl’s name. The name “Alice” did not suit this girl who told stories of exquisite quality while they picked berries. Not this girl who could shrink time and enrich even the most ordinary moments with stories of such alacrity that the picking hardly felt like work at all. Celia’s Gramma Alice must have been named for her gramma.

  They were rolling around the story of Alice’s name between fits of laughter. “This man Father McKilty runs about naming the world, naming himself ‘Father,’” and they laughed harder, as though some man naming his world were about the funniest thing they had ever heard. Today they had all received new names. “Christian names,” McKilty called them. He threw water at them, and then named them. The girls took water from their gourds, threw it at one another, and renamed themselves even more ridiculous things, like “See-yah,” “Schokem,” “Hoschem,” and other berries. They mimicked the sound the priest made, Alice became “eh-ternal,” Mary became “for-effer,” and they laughed some more. Alice had to run off behind a bush and squat someplace far from where they picked, unable to hold the water from her body as the laughter shook it loose. This caused more squeals from the girls. Picking finally stopped as each emptied her water. All the while, the young man stood unmoving; with his eyes he swept the hillside, watching for any possible threat to the girls.

  Alice’s grandpa sat still on a bench outside his longhouse, talking to the interpreter who was standing next to the black robe. He wanted to know what the names meant before he let McKilty in the house. The priest had no idea what he was asking and the interpreter had no way to make the old man understand the priest. McKilty kept telling him the names meant the girls would be saved, they would enjoy eternal life, they would live forever in the lap of Jesus Christ. Grandpa thought McKilty quite mad. He could not picture any of his daughters living forever on some man’s lap, much less all of them. He said as much to the translator. The translator told him that he thought McKilty meant the men too. Grandpa doubted any of the men would want to sit on a man’s lap at all. Well, maybe Lilt. Besides, humans have to leave. They can’t stay here forever.

  Maybe that’s why these people had to leave their home: there was no room there. He pictured a land of useless old men and women sitting on some guy’s lap — well, surely they took turns. What kind of a man wants to have women sitting on his lap forever? And what kind of men and women would want to stay on anyone’s lap for all eternity? How big is this Jesus man? He can’t be bigger than Sesquatch. How can he hold so many? Grandpa repeated the words to the translator to be sure he got them right. McKilty answered that they would sit on Jesus’s lap in heaven, next to God. The old man looked around. Who is this God-man? He couldn’t picture anyone wanting such a lazy eternity. The old man was beginning to suspect that the interpreter was not getting it right, that he could not do his job, so he carefully explained to him what he meant and asked the man to have another go at it. McKilty went into some fervent tirade about “fire and damnation,” which was completely off topic in Grandpa’s mind.

  The translator was now red in the face. He had no way to bridge the gap between the vastly disconnected meanings each man held around the same words. Grandpa wasn’t satisfied and the translator told McKilty this. Frustrated, McKilty’s eyes flashed fire and his teeth clenched tighter than usual. “They mean your granddaughters will be baptized,” he said. “Without baptism they cannot have medicine against our diseases.” McKilty then looked oddly at Grandpa. Grandpa thought Father McKilty looked like a foolish boy who had stabbed himself while playing with his father’s fish hook and lacked the courage to thread it through and remove it quietly without saying anything to anyone — and especially lacked the courage to tell his father. Grandpa couldn’t figure out what such a look was doing on a grown man’s face, but he recognized the word “medicine” and understood the threat.

  He also knew that names committed a person to something or someone and the names being given to the children committed them to this man Jesus who was the Son of God, whoever that was, and this would change them and change their commitment to themselves. Names also meant something in and of themselves; they shaped children in some way. He was uneasy about having his daughters and granddaughters commit their lives to strange names that meant nothing to his people. He was also unsure of committing his children to this man, this arbiter of Jesus and God, who did not seem to be all that mature or sane. But he also knew that the villagers needed medicine to get them through the diseases these white men brought: baptism, names, and medicine or no baptism, no names, and no medicine. He turned all this over in his mind and failed to understand why anyone would put his people in such a position. Why would anyone bring disease and then withhold medicine so they could rename you and then commit you to some stranger who wanted you to sit on his lap?

  He stared at Father McKilty. This man was more than odd. He introduced himself as the old man’s father. He talked nonsense about sitting forever in the lap of Jesus and forever-life in some place the old man did not recognize. Was he going to take the children there? Grandpa wondered at the arrogance it took to name yourself the father of someone who is clearly twice your age. He shrugged; clearly they were not speaking the same language. Grandpa did not know enough about these people to dig up the question whose answer would settle his mind. He finally accepted that he would never understand this father and waved his hand at the priest saying, “Baptize and name who you will.”

  This was the beginning of their own end.

  “There is power in naming,” Grandpa had said to his daughter when she told him she was going to send her daughters to the priest to be named. “Names mean something. They encourage children to travel on a certain path. The sides of character are reflected in a name. If you don’t know the meaning of the names, how will you know what sides having them will show? Meaningless names could reduce them to a meaningless existence.”

  “There is power in their names,” his daughter replied. She had watched the men bury the dead. She had wrapped body after body in the crude blankets they had received in trade from even cruder white men because there was no time to weave their own. They all returned home improperly dressed. The shame of seeing her relatives going home half-naked burned her eyes dry with grief. She could not face another round of death.

  “Both things are true,” Celia’s great-great-grandmother sighed.

  THE CANDLE IN FRONT of Celia jumps at the accidental touch of her hand as she mimics Alice’s Gramma throwing up her hands and
sighing.

  “You all right, Aunt Celia?” Jacob asks. Celia scrambles to come back to reality and find an answer.

  “I was just wondering what happened to Gramma,” is all she can come up with. She twirls a cedar branch between her thumb and baby finger, knowing full well the answer is inadequate.

  “She died,” Rena says as though she thinks Celia is stupid, but she says it with such an endearing flatness that everyone breaks up laughing.

  Busted, Celia thinks to herself, as she picks up the cedar she has just put down. Celia has no clue how to respond to Rena, with her white girl, her Mac shirt, her dry wit, her dramatic performance of every story told. These are too many masks for Celia. Rena’s voice jars Celia and catches her lying. Her words come out wrapped in a sharp-edged mystery, even now when she slops on the endearment. Celia still hears the sharpness. It slices up the possibility of Celia having any kind of relationship with her. It annoys Celia the way it sometimes annoyed her to see the black of the night sky get clouded with an opaque layer of plain blue paint, dimming the stars and ruining the sky’s perfect black. Celia squirms, but just barely.

  All eyes turn to her. She sniffs at the cedar bough in her hand. The room resumes its chatter after a moment of Celia’s silence. Celia withdraws from the room and tries to remember when it was that the houses lost the scent of cedar, yesterday’s pie, or Saturday’s bread baking. Smells that individuated the women’s recipes and defined the very sense of nourishment each woman offered her family. The devotion of the women used to be measured by the scent of their homes, as though the very smell of them marked the caring of the women, detailed the emotion they invested in their children, articulated the special esteem in which they held their men.

  Momma’s home was fussy the way Momma was. Momma put cardamom in her pumpkin pie, crimped the edges, and cut tiny v-shaped nicks in the surface of the pumpkin filling after it was done. While the pies cooled on the counter, Momma would hunt all over the house trying to find spare change. If she found it, she would get Jimmy to cycle to town for whipping cream. That was fussy. No one made fussy pumpkin pie like Momma used to. Now the homes smell of cleaning agents and air fresheners. The old smells seemed to end sometime after the 1970s, about when they got central heating. Celia sniffs the cedar. She closes her eyes.

  “My life doesn’t smell right anymore,” she says as she lays the cedar out carefully on the coffee table.

  Normally, when I hear something as plain and simple as this, I leave. But I got to thinking that something was going to happen, so I stayed. Sometimes it is hard for a mink to hang in there, but I am curious.

  Rena thinks Celia might be on to something. Connecting with Celia is a chore for her. The woman dreams beyond her capacity to keep up. It is rare that Rena feels Celia is on ground solid enough to be engaged in conversation, but this is something she herself has been thinking about. She knows about the loss of aromas in the old kitchens. The old houses were cedar planked — some double-walled, others not, but all of them wood-faced on the inside. The walls soaked up smells, held them, and layered one smell over the next until the smells of the day before and the days after created a unique blend of the family’s favourite foods.

  “Central heating is lonely,” Rena says.

  I begin to get what the agony of their present is all about.

  “That’s it. It is so lonely,” Celia says, with a satisfaction like she’s found her shoe after looking for it all morning and still has time to go to town.

  “Smells identify a home. They say something about a woman.” Stacey puts her paddle in the water.

  Jacob picks up the cedar his aunt put down and lets the lilt of the women’s voices play with the skin on his back. He stares at this branch that had captured his aunt’s attention. It had Celia turning the women down a road he knows nothing about but finds himself hungry to see more of. He feels as though they are telling him something he has always wanted to know but didn’t realize till he heard it. His insides are quiet for a moment, pleasantly still, soft-forest-just-before-you-see-a-doe kind of quiet.

  “It changed the way we cook. We don’t cook with the sun anymore,” Momma says. The glare of the uncased kitchen light bulb emphasizes Momma’s eyes. The white light pushes the tired out from the skin around them and puffs them up. The light is stark and cruel; it deepens the sad lines around Momma’s mouth and thins her lips so that it is hard to tell she was ever young or beautiful.

  “What do you mean, Momma?” Stacey asks, trying not to look too closely at her face.

  “Dinner was always early in winter, on time in fall and spring, and late or never in summer,” Momma laughs. “I don’t know how many times I heard, ‘Go pick berries, I’m weaving today,’ from my Mom or Gramma, and I don’t know how many times I said it to you. ‘Go pick berries …’”

  “‘… I’m sewing today.’” They chorus the finish, even German Judy and Rena sing out along with Stacey and Celia.

  “Food doesn’t taste right on an electric stove. I just can’t bring myself to fuss over it.” Momma winces as she speaks.

  I cannot imagine having my food source altered, but I sympathize.

  “Maybe that’s why we don’t fuss over cooking anymore,” Celia offers. “No one will visit unless the host fusses over the food.”

  Rena doesn’t think so. She looks at the electrified house. It’s because it’s only half like a white woman’s house, she tells herself. The design is right: an island for cutting things stands in the middle of the kitchen, an electric stove squats left of centre, kitty-corner from the island, directly across from which sit double sinks. Apart from this, the rightness changes. None of the dishes match. The pots aren’t good ones from expensive kitchen stores. Half the women here still use cast-iron or aluminum pots. No CorningWare or environmentally friendly stainless steel pots. Mixed-up plates and odd bits of silverware that is definitely not silver. Half the women have additional electrical appliances, most of which do not work. The other half do not have any at all; it was half-annoying for them.

  It strikes me that it is like waking up to find your forest gone, no trees, no food. No sense of place. No opportunity for survival.

  “Maybe matching plates would help. I’m going to get us matching plates, Judy,” Rena says. “The kitchen has got to be an Indian kitchen with a wood stove or a white one with matching plates.”

  “Yeah,” Madeline pipes in. “Right now it’s an old half-breed.”

  “A Métis, a jigger,” Rena says, doing a little dance.

  It occurs to me I could not be any kind of a half-breed. Humans can do that, mix it up with others, adapt, but us minks can’t. Maybe that’s Celia’s problem, she’s like me. Can’t mix it up and survive.

  “No,” Momma says, “It’d be a Métis if everything matched, because we’re in it.”

  The laughter dissipates the tension in the room. It loosens the tongues of the women in the direction of who’s up to what. Sweet gossip, the kind that rolls off the tongue and reminds you of how many loved ones fill the room you’re in. Somehow the soft gossip, the joy of the women, brings the warm glow of Gramma’s bedroom into this room, despite the glare of the uncovered light bulb, despite the absence of old fire flicks, and despite the moonless night. They float down the rivers of their stories, impressing themselves with the sheer numbers of people they are curious about. They laugh about Tony’s old car, coo over the new babies, and chuckle about the secret romances — except for Stacey’s. It makes them feel like everything is going to be all right because they still have so many folks to care to talk about.

  The laughter enlivens the frond in Jacob’s hand. Jacob does not see the humour in all this, but he feels the warmth in the room go up a notch. It warms him enough to cause him to ponder the unity of feeling between his hand and this frond. He thinks he hears the cedar say something. He is lost in the sensation, too lost to see the humour in the banter of th
e women, but not lost enough to commit to the words he is hearing from cedar. He rocks the frond.

  Jacob is like Celia, like me, like those old bones, the ones that cannot be happy in their new state.

  “It worries me some,” Momma says. The laughter stops dead. No one knows what the “it” is that is worrying Momma. They are half-afraid to ask.

  “Why is that?” Stacey asks. The women in the room make mental notes to themselves: Stacey knows what Momma is talking about. They let the story unfold between Momma and Stacey, hoping to get clued in as it does.

  “Sometimes memory gets stuck in some sort of soup inside my mind and only the right scent will dislodge it. Stirring the soup can help you recall the story, the teaching that is going to solve this trouble, this terrible moment, and now those smells are gone. The smells are gone from the roadside, the hillside, and the houses, and I just can’t remember anymore. I just can’t bring myself to the place where my memory sits comfortably. Sometimes I get so tired, trying to remember. Maybe if I could have remembered …” Her voice trails off, the sentence unfinished.

  Rena sits up.

  She is heading straight for Jimmy’s suicide.

  “Don’t go there,” Rena whispers, just the smallest hint of threat in her voice.

  “I know. But you know?” Momma slides from her chair, reaches over for a short stack of coloured cloth, pulls open a kitchen drawer, pulls out some fusible backing and a pair of scissors. She holds the scissors up, challenging them to recall what it is they all knew.

  Stacey, Judy, and Rena nod. Celia wants to know what Momma was about to make, so she watches. The conversation rolls out.

  “Yeah, I know. They even changed the smell of our world. Nothing like oolichan grease to spark up a long trail of salmon stories. You know, you just know that the smell is going to tell you what you need to know next.”

  Rena picks at the corner of the kitchen counter where the Arborite edging is loose. Momma fuses the stiffener to the cloth and begins cutting.