Early in the nineteenth century, Hudson’s Bay traders used Tsimshian guides to show them around, which is when the names began to get confusing. “Kitamaat” is a Tsimshian word that means people of the falling snow, and that was their name for the main Haisla village. So when Hudson’s Bay traders asked their guides, “Hey, what’s that village called?” and the Tsimshian guides said, “Oh, that’s Kitamaat.” The name got stuck on the official records and the village has been called Kitamaat ever since, even though it should really be called Haisla. There are about four or five different spellings of Kitamaat in the historical writings, but the Haisla decided on Kitamaat. To add to the confusion, when Alcan Aluminum moved into the area in the 1950s, it built a “city of the future” for its workers and named it Kitmat too, but spelled it differently.
In front of him were more than twenty very hairy men. They looked as surprised as he was. They were tall, with thick brown fur on their chests, arms and legs. Their heads were shaped oddly, very large and slanted back sharply from the brow. One of them growled and started towards him. He panicked and bolted back into the bushes, and they began to chase him.
They were fast. He was quickly cornered at the foot of a cliff. He climbed up. They gathered at the bottom in a semicircle and roared. When they followed him up, he raised his gun and, knowing he’d probably have only one shot, picked the leader. The trapper shot him in the head, and the creature landed with a heavy thump at the bottom of the cliff. As the other sasquatches let out howls of grief, the trapper ran.
Now that I think back, the pattern of the little man’s visits seems unwelcomely obvious, but at the time, his arrivals and departures had no meaning. As I grew older, he became a variation of the monster under the bed or the thing in the closet, a nightmare that faded with morning. He liked to sit on the top of my dresser when he came to visit, and he had a shock of bright red hair which stood up in messy, tangled puffs that he sometimes hid under a black top hat. When he was in a mean mood, he did a jerky little dance and pretended to poke at my eyes. The night before the hawks came, he drooped his head and blew me sad kisses that sparkled silver and gold in the dark and fell as soft as confetti.
I plugged my nose and jumped.
Although the ocean around Kitamaat warms up by August, this means that it’s no longer ice water but isn’t exactly tropical. Given a choice, I like to move in up to my ankles. Wait until my body adjusts. Up to the knees. Wait. Up to the thighs. Wait. And on and on, slowly, until I am dog-paddling around. Even then, I never enjoyed the first icy shock as much as Jimmy. I always felt panic, felt my heart stutter until I reached the surface.
I got brave and dived, opening my eyes under water. Colours changed. Dark brown skin looked pale. Bright swimsuits looked dull. I surfaced. The blue of the sky was dark cobalt at its height, but became milky turquoise as it neared the mountains. I floated on my back until horseflies started to buzz around my head. I dived. Sounds changed too. The sounds of boats bumping against the docks and the docks creaking in the waves magnified, but the yelling and tinny radio music were muted. My ears began to ache, but I felt light. I lifted my arms over my head and kicked my leg out so that I spun like the plastic ballerina in my jewellery box.
“This is for Sherman,” she said, placing it carefully near the centre of the flames. “You’d better appreciate that. Say hi to your ba-ba-oo, Lisa.”
“But he’s not here,” I said.
“Yes, he is,” she said. “You just can’t see him, because he’s dead.”
I frowned. “Can you see him?”
“She gets it from you,” Ma-ma-oo said to the air again. “No, I can’t see him. He’s dead. He can come to you only in dreams. Be polite and say hello when you give him food.” She handed me a Twinkie and told me to throw it in the fire.
“Hello,” I said. I looked at the Twinkie thoughtfully. “Will he share?”
“Say his name. If you don’t say his name, another ghost will snatch it up.”
Ba-ba-oo had lost his arm in the Second World War, at Verrières Ridge. When he came home, he couldn’t get the money he thought he should get form Veterans Affairs because they said Indian Affairs were taking care of him. Indian Affairs said if he wanted the same benefits as a white vet, he should move off reserve and give up his status. If he did that, they’d lose their house and by this time, they had three children and my dad, Albert, was on the way.
“Geordie and Edith helped as much as they could,” Mick had told me […] “But they had their own family. My father worked hard all his life, and now he would say things like, ‘Agnes, I’m useless.’ She didn’t know what to do.”
The greengage tree was covered with a fishing net. The greengages were almost ripe, so Dad had put the net on to keep the crows from raiding our tree. Crows are clever, though, and find the holes or simply go under the net. I don’t like ripe greengages, anyway. I like them tart and green, hard enough to scrape the roof of my mouth.
White feathers tumbled down from the half-eaten chickens caught near the top of the tree, where the hawks had dropped them. The chickens were still alive. They flapped wings, kicked feet, struggled against the net. Their heads had fallen to the ground like ripe fruit. Their beaks opened and closed soundlessly, and their eyes blinked rapidly, puzzled and frightened.
“Watch this,” Jimmy said to me. “She’s going to haul it up in the air, then drop it until it busts open. They do that with clams, too.”
Spotty did no such thing. She waited patiently by the side of the road, preening in the early-morning sunlight and occasionally screeching. Jimmy tried not to look disappointed. I was about to go inside when a car drove by, missing the pocket watch completely. Spotty hopped over and moved it two feet to the left, so that when the next car came along, it ran right over the watch. Jimmy and I looked at each other, then back at Spotty, who picked up the exposed innards of the pocket watch. She gathered some of the pieces and flew away.
Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game, or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.
“Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one—guess she was fourteen then—this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, bitch, and I’m proud of it.’” He laughed and shook his head “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”
“Oxasuli,” she said. “Powerful medicine. Very dangerous. It can kill you, do you understand? You have to respect it.” She handed me the root and I put it in the bucket. There were some more oxasuli bushes around, but she said to let them be. We slogged some more, found two suitable plants, then Ma-ma-oo declared we had enough. “You put these on your windowsill, and it keeps ghosts away.”
“How?”
“Ghosts hate the smell. It protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine. Here, you break off this much and you burn it on your stove—”
“Like incense?”
“What’s incense?”
“Like cedar and sweetgrass bundles.”
“Oh. Yes, yes like that. Smoke your house. Smoke your corners. When someone dies, you have to be careful.”
“Why?”
She paused again, frowning. “Hard to explain.”
“He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”
“What about Mom?”
“When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on […] She used to know who was going to die next […]”
“Mom doesn’t see anything” […]
“She doesn’t tell you […] Or she’s forgotten how […] Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more […]”
“[…] How do you do medicine?”
“All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.
Food is dust in my mouth without you.
I see you in my dreams and all I want to do is sleep.
If my house was filled with gold, it would still be empty.
If I was king of the world, I’d still be alone.
If breath was all that was between us, I would stop breathing to be with you again.
The memory of you is my shadow and all my days are dark, but I hold on to these memories until I can be with you again.
Only your laughter will make them light; only your smile will make them shine.
We are apart so that I will know the joy of being with you again.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
Early explorers traveling through the Douglas Channel were probably daunted by both the terrain and the new languages they encountered. Haisla has many sounds that don’t exist in English, so it is not possible to spell the words using English conventions […] To say Xa’isla, touch your throat. Say the German “ach” of Scottish “loch.” When you say the first part, the “Xa,” say it from far back in your throat. The apostrophe between the syllables signals both an emphasis and a pause […] Haisla is difficult for English speakers to learn partly because most English sounds are formed by using the front of your mouth, while Haisla uses mainly the back.
In a time distant and vague from the one we know now, she told me, flesh was less rigid. Animals and humans could switch shapes simply by putting on each other’s skins. Animals could talk, and often shared their knowledge with the newcomers that humans were then. When this age ended, flesh solidified. People were people, and animals lost their ability to speak in words. Except for medicine men, who could become animals, and sea otters and seals, who had medicine men too. They loved to play tricks on people. Once, a woman was walking along the shore and she met a handsome man. She fell in love and went walking with him every night. Eventually, they made love and she found out what he really was when she gave birth to an otter.
Most people only learn about their body when something goes wrong with it. Mom could tell you anything about skin when she got her first deep wrinkle. Dad could talk for hours about the stomach after he got a hiatus hernia. After she had her first attack, Ma-ma-oo read everything she could about the human heart.
The doctors gave her pamphlets, a slew of nurses sat patiently by her bed and drew her pictures of what had gone wrong, and Mom tried to translate the jargon into something that made sense […] When she came back to the Kitimat hospital, I would visit her after school, catching the late bus home after we had looked at my picture book describing the heart. Even in the kids’ books, the technical words were confusing.
The footsteps stopped a few feet away from me. I shook Ma-ma-oo’s shoulder and she grunted, unwilling to wake up. I turned my head slowly, but nothing and no one was there. As I was pulling the sleeping bag up over my head, something bright streaked across the sky. I paused. The clouds had cleared, the moon was down, and the stars shone hard and unwinking white against the late-night sky. Another frantic streak seared its afterimage against the darkness. I closed my eyes and made a wish. When I opened my eyes, three falling stars, one after another, raced across the tops of the mountains. The frequency built until the sky was lit by silent fireworks.
When we got back to Kitamaat, I told Ma-ma-oo about the footsteps on the beach. She raised an eyebrow at me. “You don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand. They’re just ghosts.”
“Good, hey?” she said, pleased with the way I’d demolished her dish.
I nodded. She picked up my bowl, but instead of putting it in the sink, added more uh’s. I kept smiling. I had no idea how I was going to finish it. Ma-ma-oo practically licked her bowl clean. She waited for me to finish, sipping her tea. I hoped she would go to the bathroom, so I could pour it down the sink, but she sat and looked mildly into the distance. I made my way through the second bowl. I ate slower. Ma-ma-oo patted my hand. “We have enough for the whole winter,” she said.
“Oh, good,” I said.
By the end of the week, I had become used to the taste. I didn’t even notice the bitterness any more. It was like whipped cream, but not as nauseatingly sweet as the canned stuff Mom bought.
Weegit the raven has mellowed in his old age. He’s still a confirmed bachelor, but he’s not the womanizer he once was. Playing the stock market—instead of spending his time as a trickster—has paid off and he has a comfortable condo downtown. He plays up the angle about creating the world and humans, conveniently forgetting he did it out of boredom. Yes, he admits, he did steal the sun and the moon, but he insists he did it to bring light to humankind even though he did it so it would be easier for him to find food. After doing some spin control on the crazy pranks of his youth, he’s become respectable. As he sips his low-fat mocha and reads yet another sanitized version of his earlier exploits, only his small, sly smile reveals how much he enjoys pulling the wool over everyone else’s eyes.
“Alberni? Really? There’s a treatment centre where the residential school used to be?” one of the women said to Aunt Trudy.
Another woman laughed, then said, “Hey, how many priests does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
“How many?”
“Three. One to screw it, one to beat it for being screwed and one to tell the lawyers that no screwing took place.”
“That’s not funny,” Josh said.
“That’s the point,” the woman said.
“Well,” I said. “You’re talking to the queen of fuckups and you’d have to do a lot more to take my crown away.”
He reached over and kept giving me nudges until I looked at him. “You weren’t that bad.”
“You weren’t the one that ran away.”
“You’re back now. You’re dealing with things. I didn’t understand what it was like to lose something. Now that I do, I think you’re doing fine. I mean, Karaoke didn’t die on me. She just dumped me and I flipped. I don’t know what I’d do if someone actually died on me.”
I laughed. “You call that flipping? That was a little spaz.”
“Yeah, well…”
We drifted off in a comfortable silence.
It came then, a light touch on my shoulder. No one was near me. Out on the water, a dark head bobbed. The seal rolled twice, creating ripples that distorted the reflections of the mountains. Then it dived and the water smoothed. I was walking down to the beach. Something in the water was drifting out with the tide and I didn’t want the seal to get it. I thought it might be a cat, but the closer I got I knew it wasn’t. For a moment, it looked like a baby in a christening outfit. But when I was a few feet from it, it was just a bucket […] I reached for the bucket, felt it bump against my legs. My arm went numb as I plunged it under the surface. I had trouble grasping the handle. Something caught my ankle then and yanked me under.
Remove yourself from the next sound you hear, the breathing that isn’t your own. It glides beneath the bushes like someone’s shadow, a creature with no bones, arms, or legs, a rolling, shifting, worm-shaped thing that hugs the darkness. It wraps its pale body around yours and feeds. Push yourself away when your vision dims. Ignore the confused, painful contractions in your chest as your heart trip-hammers to life, struggles to pump blood. Ignore the tingling sensations and weakness in your arms and legs, which make you want to lie down and never get up.
