The Marrow Thieves Read online

  I started back north, keeping my eyes to the ground for animal tracks with no idea of what I would do if I actually saw some, or if I would even recognize what animal made them.

  By the time the sun reached center stage, a punctuation mark in the cloud-lined sky, I was miles into the woods. The trees were denser, the ground less manageable, and the wildlife — judging by the sounds and smells around me — had changed. I stopped in a small clearing filled with tall grasses and low bushes. It was the thud of my heart against the hollow bowl of my stomach that made me eat a cluster of dandelion weeds grown to waist height. They weren’t bad. I added them to my “available and edible” list and clomped on, the plastic compass pressed into my palm now like a toy talisman. I kept trudging north.

  “You have to try to keep the goal in your head. You can’t let what’s not here, what’s missing, you can’t let that slow you down.” Mom was trying hard to give us a pep talk on top of the seniors’ home in a small city on our last night as a trio. But with a monotone voice and that far-off look she’d taken on since Dad had left with the lost Council, it was hard to take in the message. Her words fell in between the sheets of rain like downed planes: defeated, useless.

  “Mom, here.” Mitch held an on open can of artichoke hearts he’d just grilled with a lighter. “You need to eat.”

  She ignored him. “There were generations in our family where all we did was move. First by choice, then every time the black cars came from town and burned out our homes along the roadside. Now the cars are here again. Only now, they’re white vans. And I can’t run that fast. Not fast enough. Never fast enough.”

  “Mom,” Mitch spoke louder but still gently. I was huddled against the side of the gazebo, peering through the wooden lattice, on the lookout for Recruiters. “You haven’t eaten all day. You need to eat.”

  Her eyes stayed fixed, away from her eldest. The smell from the lake here was nauseating. Once this was a popular city, being right on the water. Now this lake, like all the industry-plundered Great Lakes, was poison, and a tall fence blocked it off from the overgrown streets. We hadn’t been here more than a day, so the smell was pungent for us. We breathed into bandanas and built shelter from the stench with plywood and a tarp.

  Mitch tried a different tactic with Mom. “If you don’t eat you won’t have the strength to take second shift tonight.”

  Something flickered on her face and she reached out, removed one pale heart from the cluster, and inserted it into her mouth like a chore. It was a few minutes before she spoke again.

  “We have to move, my boys. Tomorrow we move, after I do one last forage in the old Friendship Center.”

  “Mom, no! That place is a hot spot for Recruiters. It’s a pretty obvious Nish-magnet.”

  She squinted her eyes. “Oh now, the officers are long done with that place. There’s no Indians left in this part of the city anyway. I’m just going to look for a few things we’ll need once we get past the city and into the bush. It’ll only take me a minute.” She reached for our hands and squeezed them, breathing deep and full like a prayer, chewing her bottom lip like penance.

  The next day she left before we reheated artichoke for breakfast. And then Mitch and I were on our own.

  I was stumbling. Another night asleep in the open. This time I didn’t have enough strength to rebuild the fire that had been rained out while I fitfully slept. My muscles ached, my belly rumbled, my heart hurt. I’d tripped over an aboveground root bent like an arthritic finger and picked up a limp. The rain started again just after noon, and I sat under a dense pine nursing my last tin of meal replacement, the last-resort tin with the expiry dated for the previous year. There was a sour current through the frothy top notes, but it was all that was left; I hadn’t even seen any more damn dandelions. My molar screamed every time a swallow of liquid passed over it. Just this morning I had started contemplating dentistry with a rock. Or maybe I could just fall out of a tree, cheek first. I fell asleep biting a piece of shoelace, leaning against the pine trunk, wishing Mom would find me.

  A shiver woke me up. It was almost full dark, and my tooth hurt and my ankle throbbed and I’d spilled what was left of the tin on the ground beside my legs.

  “Oh no.” I righted the tin and shook it. Not even a mouthful left. “Damn it!”

  I tried to throw it into the woods, to make that damn tin pay for my own carelessness. It arched up and hit the ceiling of pine branches above me, slamming back to the ground not a foot in front of me. I kicked it instead.

  “Jesus!” My ankle sang a terrible song like my toothache had sunk to my foot. Rot and damp and hopelessness and hunger and fear and anger twisted up in a clamp around my ribcage.

  I sat back down, picked up the can, and rubbed it across my greasy forehead, back and forth, back and forth. No one to take care of me now. No one to make me move. Where the hell was I going anyway? Where the hell was my mom? Why did she have to go to the Friendship Center? Her eyes that night: hollow like an old stump. Like the hole in my molar, a true ache.

  “I’m going to die.”

  Saying it out loud was like hearing it from another person’s mouth. It made my head well up with tears. I held onto them; precious water. I decided then that if I was going to die, I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for the truancy dicks to come get me. I’d die fighting wild animals, or swan diving from one of these pines, or of starvation half buried in the drying earth like a partially cremated corpse floating down the old Ganges, before the Ganges became a footpath for heartbroken pilgrims.

  I stood back up, dropped the can, and shouldered my pack.

  Onward.

  I fell a couple of times, tripping over roots sticking out from ground that was ashy and loose in the thinning earth, washed out from the endless rain. I split my lip on the last tumble and tasted wet pennies and heavy perfume. Shoulda turned my head to hit my tooth, I thought. I laughed out loud, a desperate sound that made me laugh harder so that I had to stop, hands on my shaking knees, and wait out the wave of giggles that made it impossible to trudge on.

  The cough was near constant, stiff and phlegmy like a sack of bricks slamming against my insides. It made me double over and drool. I broke a blood vessel in my right eye with the hack. The walk was slow with sickness and the limp. I didn’t even notice my stomach had pulled itself into a fist until I was being punched by it, nauseous and cold. And now, night was falling.

  “Nooooo.” I couldn’t do anything to protect myself from it, so I whined. “Shit, no.”

  I leaned against a knobbly pine sticky with sap that matted the back of my head to the bark and watched the sky betray me into navy. I slid then, slow and painful, ripping out my hair so that a clump of me stayed pinned to the tree — nesting material for low-flying buzzards. The stars began to rip through the hard skin of dark like the sharp points of silver needles through velvet. I watched them appear and wink and fade, and I smiled. This wasn’t going to be so bad. Maybe the end is just a dream. That made me feel sorry for a minute for the others, the dreamless ones. What happened when they died? I imagined them just shutting off like factory machines at the end of a shift: functioning, purposeful, and then just out.

  I closed my eyes. Just for a minute. The dream came for me right away. Later, I couldn’t recall what it had been or for how long I’d been asleep. But when I woke, it was reluctantly.

  “Put him down over there, right close to the fire.”

  “He’s breathing all funny.”

  “Never mind now, just prop up his head. Wab, go grab that quilt from my bedroll. Zheegwon, heat up some water. We’ll need to get some liquid into him.”

  Voices. Voices with the pulled vowels and cut lilt of my father. Voices with the low music of my mother. I couldn’t open my eyes. Not yet. This was too beautiful a dream, even just in audio.

  “All right now, pull off his shoes and get his feet close to the pit.”

>   I felt tugging and then the relief of a good swell allowed to spread out, then heat.

  “Hey, boy, can you hear me? You’ll need to drink some of this water.” A metal edge split my broken lips and clear, warm water poured into my mouth. I sputtered at first, a reaction to the intrusion, then the fist in my guts demanded it and my throat opened up in compliance. The need was so great, the satisfaction so complete, I grasped for the vessel, lest it be pulled away.

  “Easy now, easy now.”

  I managed to open one eye.

  There was a man holding the tin, not my father, but a man with the same crease around his eyes. His hair was long down the middle and shaved close on the sides. He looked to be about my father’s age. Over his right shoulder a girl stared at me with one round, dark eye, her long hair draped around her face, flickering in tandem with the flames of the large fire. She handed a blanket to the man, who tucked it in around me.

  “Zheegwon, get some soup over here. This boy is starved.”

  The man spoon-fed me broth with sweet corn mush until the fist unclenched just enough for me to rest, then he put it beside me on a flat rock. “When you can hold it yourself, that’s when you know it’s okay for you to eat more without getting sick.”

  I opened both eyes and looked around. There were more people now. There was the man, and the older girl who’d brought the blanket, who I saw was wearing an eye patch and had an angry red slash down her cheek. There was a child, not much older than a baby, sleeping in a nest of blankets like a puppy beside an old lady dozing in her kerchief. Then there was a small, round boy, two taller boys who looked like they must be twins, and another tall boy whose face was hidden by the shadow of a hood. They all sat around a roaring fire on blankets and sleeping bags and they seemed to all be Native, like me. Behind them were two canvas tents shut tight against the cold air and the new bugs that had found the blood around my mouth interesting.

  “Who are you?” It wasn’t more than a whisper.

  It was the man who answered, standing to poke at the branches in the fire. “I’m Miigwans, and this is my family. But not now. There’ll be time for that tomorrow. You need to eat some more of that soup and then sleep. Tomorrow we move. Probably got some Recruiters nearby with the racket you were kicking up by yourself out there.”

  Miigwans. I’d heard that name before. I could see my father’s mouth pronouncing it with reverence, like he did for everything that had a touch of the old about it, the words from our language; like a prayer.

  “North.”

  He turned his face to me, flames animating the shadows that fell there under his eyes, along his cheekbones. “Yeah, that’s right, north. We seem to be heading in the same direction. Might as well trudge on together then, eh?”

  I didn’t answer. The tears cleared away the dirt from my eyes, stinging as they crossed my split lips. Sobs rocked me, open and closed, until I was fetal. I was embarrassed to be so broken in front of all these new Indians. If they were embarrassed for me, no one made a motion or mouthed a reproach. They just let me be broken, because soon I wouldn’t be anymore. Eventually, I wouldn’t be alone, either. And maybe tomorrow I’d wake up and find myself closer to home.

  THE FIRE

  Miig explained it one night at the fire.

  “Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.” He poked at the crackling wood with a pointy stick till the shadows were frenetic against his tan face, till they slid into the longer shoots of hair near the front of his mohawk, the tendrils he swept up and patted into place atop the shorter brush with the care of a pageant queen. He didn’t make eye contact with us, the motley group seated in a loose semicircle around the fire, beneath the trees where he commanded place.

  I imagined spiderwebs in my bones and turned my palm towards the moon, watching the ballet of bones between my elbow and wrist twist to make it so. I saw webs clotted with dreams like fat flies. I wondered if the horses I’d ridden into this dawn were still caught in there like bugs, whinnying at the shift.

  Miig nudged the rounded stones placed around the perimeter of the fire with his boot. You could see where the holes in his sole had been patched up with sap and scavenged leather.

  “How do they get in there?” RiRi, now seven, was always curious and not shy with her questions.

  “You are born with them. Your DNA weaves them into the marrow like spinners,” Miig answered. The flames tried to settle, and he prodded them to dance again. He added, “That’s where they pluck them from.”

  I pulled each one of my fingers into my palm and made a fist silhouetted against the fire, flames licking around the tight ball of brown and bone. I imagined my brother tied to a chair at the school, a flock of grey-hooded villains tightening his beaded chains while they recited Hail Mary like synchronized swimmers.

  Miig sat, satisfied that we were all at attention, that we were listening with every cell. He leaned against a felled tree beside Minerva, who woke up with his rustling. He rolled a smoke out of his precious tobacco stores and plucked a twig out of the fire with a burning ember at the tip to light it with. Old Minerva, nearsighted to squinting, lifted her nose at the smell. Her lips fell slack and she sighed. Those first few exhales were big and wasteful as Miig tried to get the damp paper to light, and smoke billowed across the clearing like messages. Everything was always damp, so we were trained to sniff out mould to keep that sickness at bay. Minerva made her hands into shallow cups and pulled the air over her head and face, making prayers out of ashes and smoke. Real old-timey, that Minerva.

  Miig and Minerva were the only grown-ups in our group. Miig wore his hair shaved to the skull except down the middle and had a moustache that only grew on the left side of his top lip. He was tall but bent like a walking question mark, and he was short with words and patience. Miig wore army pants, alternating between two identical pairs, and layers of brown and green sweaters. He kept a small pouch hung on a shoelace around his neck and tucked into those sweaters. Once, when I’d asked him, he’d told me that was where he kept his heart, because it was too dangerous to keep it in his chest, what with the sharp edges of bones so easily broken. I never asked again. Too many metaphors and stories wrapped in stories. It could be exhausting, talking to Miig.

  Minerva was dark, round, and tiny like a tree stump. She kept her long grey hair in two braids like a little girl with a flowered kerchief tied over her head and under her round chin. She had old-timey ways, but you couldn’t get much from her, either. She didn’t talk, and when she did it was in bursts accompanied by laughter and maybe a scream or two. Mostly she watched … everything: us kids playing in the river, the way the trees tilted to the north towards what was left of the natural landscape beyond the clear-cuts stripped of topsoil. She watched the birds on their perpetual migration to anywhere, the fire at end of day, and the way we clapped each other’s backs when trading off on the traplines.

  There were seven of us in the group: five boys and two girls, not including the Elders. Not one of us was related by blood, which was a good thing for those closer in age, since, in the old days when our families were huge and sprawling, accidently dating a second or third cousin had meant you had ask about genealogy right off the bat. But it was also lonely, not having the common connection of grandparents or aunties like we used to have so often. There was Chi-Boy, who at seventeen was the oldest boy and taller than anyone else. He was quiet almost to the point of being mute and as skinny as a doe. He never seemed to sleep as long as the rest of us or need as much food, and he stuck close to Miig so that when he was needed he was no more than one syllable away. He came from the west, from the Cree lands.

  After Chi-Boy there was me, sixteen. I was nicknamed Frenchie as much for my name as for my people — the Metis. I came from a long line of hunters, trappers, and voyageurs. But now, with most of the rivers cut into pieces and lakes left as grey sludge puckers on th
e landscape, my own history seemed like a myth along the lines of dragons. Compared to Chi-Boy’s six-plus feet, I wasn’t the tallest, but I did have the longest hair of any of the boys, almost to my waist, burnt ombré at the untrimmed edges. I braided it myself each morning, to keep it out of the way and to remind myself of things I couldn’t quite remember but that, nevertheless, I knew to be true. My clothes were also burnt from the sun and wear, a mottled brown from their original tones of black.

  Then there were the twelve-year-old twins, Tree and Zheegwon, whose matched green eyes communicated without words between them. They were broader than the rest of us, with wide shoulders and heavy hands that hung from ropey arms. They were dotted with scars I couldn’t bring myself to ask about. They shared one baseball cap between the two of them, changing it from head to head, one day to the next.

  Slopper was next, the nine-year-old with the belly of a fifty-year-old diabetic. His family came from the East Coast.

  The girls had Wab, who at eighteen was practically a woman. She had a vicious keloid slash that split her face nearly in two. Then there was RiRi, who came from a Metis community close to where my father had said ours used to be, who was old enough to piss in the bush and swear when we played Red Ass on abandoned brick walls, but who was still a child.

  Us kids, we longed for the old-timey. We wore our hair in braids to show it. We made sweat lodges out of broken branches dug back into the earth, covered over with our shirts tied together at the buttonholes. Those lodges weren’t very hot, but we sat in them for hours and willed the sweat to pop over our willowy arms and hairless cheeks.