Empire of Wild Read online

  This went on for months.

  Victor held her when she cried about it, gently, like her bones were broken just under the skin. He said, “I’m a stranger to them. Of course, they’re overprotective.” But she knew it was getting to him too. They weren’t being overprotective; they were being assholes. She went back to work with the family contracting crew but was silent while they shingled roofs and sullen when they put in decks. She started calling her mother once a week instead of daily and showing up for dinners and baptisms even less.

  The stalemate ended in their second winter, when Junior got into a fight at Commodore’s over someone calling someone an Indian and then a bottle was broken on the edge of a table. Victor had stopped in at the bar after work with a new guy on his framing crew. When the shouting began, he excused himself and ran toward the fight, shedding layers of flannels as he went. He threw down for Junior without question—popping jaws, taking a kick to the ribs, yanking raised pool cues out of callused hands. Then the police showed up and shooed everyone home.

  He and Junior rolled up in George’s truck at three o’clock on a snowy Saturday morning, then all three staggered to the house, arms around each other. Joan opened the door and Victor beamed so big it was clear he’d lost an incisor to a fist of heavy knuckles. It was also clear that he and her brothers had become buds for life. It was a good thing Mere was down in the Airstream. She would have beat them black and blue again just for getting beat up. All in all, it was worth the cost of the dental implant.

  Victor grew on people, one by one, especially after the wedding when it was clear he intended on sticking around. The first week he didn’t come home, everyone looked for him. Even Marcel, the Québécois logger, went out to help search the woods, even though he was the one who famously carried the tip of Victor’s tooth embedded in his right hand after the fight at Commodore’s. But by the end of the second month, it was only Joan wandering the township like a broken-hearted ghost. There were days she couldn’t remember how she got to her patch of land or out to the dump. She just ended up there, putting one foot in front of the other down narrow paths and over mounds of wrecked furniture and wet newspaper.

  * * *

  Eleven months and six days and she was still a distracted driver, checking out every person walking down the side of the road, looking into each car that passed, or else so lost in thought, so tired, she was prone to drift. Even ferrying Mere and her cousin Zeus to Sunday dinner at her mother’s house, she was caught up in her thoughts.

  “Dieu, Joan. Pull over,” Mere shouted. “We can walk the rest of the way to your mom’s.” She was braced for impact, holding on to the dashboard with two hands, her top-handled purse propped up on her lap like a small, white dog. Her seatbelt was pulled tight over her low breasts, her back straight against the seat. “I’m not ready to see the Jesus just yet. And Zeus, him, his voice hasn’t even cracked.”

  From the back seat Mere’s great-grandson chimed in. “Don’t kill a playa before he even gets to the game, Auntie.”

  “Sorry, guys.” Joan sat up and put both hands on the wheel—ten and two—steering the Jeep back over the yellow line and firmly into their lane. She’d been thinking about the ditch on the side of Highway 11 between Barrie and Orillia. Had she checked both sides? Might be worth another trip out.

  “Long summer this year,” Mere remarked, watching the sailboats in the Bay out her window. They cut slow across the dark water like children gliding on an ice rink, all pastel coats and white toques.

  “They call this Indian summer, Mere, when it goes on into October,” Zeus remarked.

  “Who does?” Mere craned around to frown at him. “Who?”

  “I dunno, they do.” He shrugged.

  “Who’s that, then?” She loosened the belt and shifted so she could turn enough to stare at him.

  “Uhh, just them, Mere. People.”

  “What does that even mean—Indian summer? Can’t be nothing good if they are saying it.” She turned back to the front, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Well,” Joan joked, “there is such a thing as a white Christmas, so maybe fair’s fair.”

  “Hmm.” Mere folded her hands over her purse. “You could be right.” She clucked her tongue and looked back out the passenger window. “Might all be part of this reconciliation thing.”

  Joan caught her little cousin’s eye in the rear-view mirror and they shared a smirk.

  * * *

  Florence Beausoliel’s house was small and tidy, like its owner. Joan’s mother was barely five feet tall in steel toes, but she ran the construction crew herself, each member of which she had given birth to. She didn’t stay in the office either. At sixty, Flo was the fastest on the roof, jumping joists like a jackrabbit through clover. She could eyeball blueprints and see the finished project in three dimensions in the void.

  Flo had renovated her two-storey cabin herself. It wasn’t the house where Joan had grown up; that’s where she, Mere and Victor lived now—well, she and Mere, who had moved back up to the main house from the trailer after Victor went missing. Flo bought this place by the marina after Percy died and the kids moved out. But then Junior got divorced and moved in with her. Shortly after, the youngest, George, got kicked out of university in Waterloo and returned to his mother’s house loaded up with laundry and student debt. Flo had even offered up the living room pullout to Joan, considering what she referred to only as “her situation.”

  Joan would never move back in with her mother. One of them would be dead by the end of the first week, and she wasn’t sure which one it would be. Her mother had serious moves. She’d seen them. The whole town had, that time one of the new elementary school teachers in town tried to dance with Percy at a bush party. People still made karate noises at her when she walked down Main Street. “Hi-yah! Here comes Kung Fu Flo!” Joan thought her mother could have worked a little harder to get them to stop.

  No, Joan had always been Percy’s girl. After her father died, for a lost and sometimes scary time, she’d been anyone’s girl. And then she had been Victor’s girl. And now she was just a girl, a thirty-seven-year-old girl who drank too much and tried to stare into the sun until she went blind as an offering to the universe for the return of her beloved.

  With twelve-year-old Zeus and ancient Mere, along with her two brothers and her energetic mother, converging in one modest space, Joan was claustrophobic as soon as she’d taken her shoes off at the front door.

  She squeezed onto the loveseat beside her older brother in the room left by her mother’s ridiculous collection of overstuffed pillows. He was watching the tiny TV their mother refused to replace, as that might compel her boys to stay in the nest even longer. “Jesus, Junior, when are you getting your own place?”

  “Don’t know. When are you gonna take a shower?”

  She rammed her shoulder into him and he lifted his arm across the back of the couch, pulling her in and dropping a kiss on the top of her head, his eyes never leaving the game.

  “It’s just, it would be nice to be somewhere where we could smoke something other than meat, you know what I’m saying?” Joan tried to speak low, jabbing a finger into his newly soft gut.

  “Weeds are legal now. Why you gotta be all whispery over there? Gladys Trudeau uses it for her bad hip. And Ajean, she’s been smoking pots for years.” Mere said this from the kitchen, where she was peeling carrots with a thin knife and plunking them in the giant enamel stewpot. “I think I might get some next time Junior drives me in to the pharmacy for my pills.”

  “Holy fuck, Junior, you better not get Mere drugs.”

  Her brother just laughed and shrugged. “Like, I can control her?”

  Flo was carving up a thawed slab of moose, frying the cubes in a greased pan. The meat spit and hissed like a quick temper.

  “Hey, did you know it’s Michif summer?” Mere asked her daughter.

  “How’s that?” Flo said.

  “Indian summer, Mere. Indian summer,” Zeus c
orrected. He was at the counter mixing up some Kool-Aid.

  “Well, hell, I gotta have a status card to have a long summer now?” Mere glared at him. “Halfbreeds like the sun too, you know.”

  Zeus stirred the powder crystals into the water in the jug in silence.

  * * *

  When dinner was ready, they crowded around the small table in a nook between the kitchen and the living room, George on the little stool Flo used to reach the high cupboards so that only his head and shoulders were visible when he sat up straight. They ripped off pieces of bannock and used them to soak up the stew broth. Zeus already had a bright orange ring around his lips from the Kool-Aid, and seemed happy just to be at a sit-down dinner. His mom, Bee, rarely cooked and when she did, they ate in front of the TV.

  “You finish the MacIver roof?” Joan asked, between bites of moose.

  Junior nodded. “Just in time for the end of cottage season. It won’t be leaking for next summer, anyways.”

  “We would have been done weeks ago if you showed up once in a while,” George said to Joan.

  “Georgie, shut up, you. You know your sister’s situation.” Flo shook the salt container so hard her trick wrist clicked.

  “Yeah well, it’s been a year. How long do you need for a situation, anyways.”

  Flo slammed the shaker on the table. There was silence, like she’d snapped off the volume.

  “I’ll be around next week,” Joan finally said. “What are we doing?”

  “Marina needs a new tool shed.” Flo went to the fridge to grab the margarine and settled back in her seat at the head of the table. “Shouldn’t take more than two days. Then we start slowing down. A couple decks. An addition on Longlade’s boathouse.”

  “Come November we’ll need to look for winter jobs. Maybe I’ll go north, to the mines.” Junior caught his mistake too late and readied himself for the rebuttal. It didn’t take long.

  Mere dropped her spoon. It rattled against the bowl like a miniature alarm. “The mines? You gonna work for thieves? That’s going from making things all day to taking things all day.”

  Junior stepped soft around his grandmother’s ire. It was slippery and quick and, if you weren’t careful, before you knew it you could find yourself getting soft-shoe stomped. “I’m worried about going from paying my bills to not paying them.”

  “You find something else, not the mines, that’s what you do. You can’t work in town? The Friendship Centre doesn’t need anyone?”

  “The centre doesn’t pay the way the mines do.”

  “It also doesn’t steal from us, ignore our rights and mess up the land. How bad do you need that pay?” She had abandoned her food—never a good sign.

  Zeus tried to be helpful. “I mean, you live with your mom, anyways.”

  Since Zeus was an acceptable target where Mere was not, he bore the brunt of Junior’s frustration.

  “Shut it, Zeus.” It wasn’t enough. Junior was still angry. He looked his cousin up and down. “Fuck, you’re fat.”

  “That’s it.” Flo stood up and leaned over her table. “I’ll have no more of this bullshit at dinner. Mom, relax a bit on the Elder politics, would you? And Junior, apologize to your cousin right now. He’s less than half your age.”

  Junior took a moment to calm himself down, then reached across the table and patted Zeus’s chubby forearm. “I didn’t mean it, buddy. I just got upset. Sorry, little man.”

  Zeus shrugged.

  George was laughing behind his hand so hard his glasses were fogging up. Joan was just trying to concentrate on getting more food into herself before anyone made a comment on how skinny and haggard she looked lately. There had been too many of those kinds of remarks lately.

  Mere had stood up when Flo sat back down and had gone into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer, and the tinny ring of metal on metal filled the small space.

  Flo let her head drop and ran one hand through her hair. “Jesus, what now?” she muttered. Then she spoke louder. “Ma, what are you looking for? Everything should be on the table.”

  No answer. Another minute of clanking metal and then the drawer closed. Mere walked back to the table but didn’t take her seat. She was coming up behind Junior when George yelled, “Yo, she’s got the scissors, bro.”

  Mere reached out, pretty deft for someone legally blind with arthritis in her fingers, and snatched hold of Junior’s braid hanging down the middle of his back.

  “Mom!” Flo yelled.

  “Mere, no!” Joan jumped up so fast her chair tipped over.

  Junior tried to get away but Mere gave his braid such a yank he sat back down, hands up as if he were being robbed at gunpoint. “Mere! What are you doing?”

  “Me? I’m getting you ready for your new job at the mines.” She sounded calm, jovial, even. “You need to fit in with all the others and none of them will wear their hair traditional.” She opened the scissors.

  “Hold on! Hold on a minute.” Flo was almost climbing over the table.

  Joan felt like she was going to throw up what she had managed to eat. Zeus took another sip of juice. He may have even smiled a little.

  “Okay, ma mere, please, s’il vous plaît, let’s talk about this some more. I’m listening. Seriously.”

  Junior was ready to bargain. His grandmother was not. “There’s nothing to talk about. All my seniors group has been doing at shrine on Fridays is talking, mon Dieu. It’s time for action. We can’t support companies that don’t support us right back. We can’t let our young people work for such places. I refuse!” She raised the scissors to the sky like a halfbreed Evita, holding her grown grandson by the hair. Junior looked on the verge of tears.

  “Okay, okay, I won’t go. I promise, I promise.”

  She lowered the weapon and used his braid to pull him close and kissed him on the top of his head. “My boy, you’re too important to lose.”

  Once the scissors were on the table beside his napkin, Junior was much too relieved to be angry. He wrapped his arms around his diminutive mere and took all the petting and kisses she handed out.

  Flo, who didn’t have a braid to lose, was angry. “Great, Mom. Maybe you and the seniors group can come by this winter and help us out with our loan payments and the hydro, eh?” She plunked herself back in her chair and reached for more bannock, but she was not done. “Sometimes we have to do what we have to do, even if that means working in the mines. What are we supposed to do? Stay poor? Would that prove to you that we’re Indian enough?”

  “No, my love.” Mere was serene now that she had successfully made her point. “We are supposed to stay right with community. That’s how we know we’re Indian enough. The companies are out to take it all, you know. We shouldn’t just hand it over.”

  “Oh Christ, can we just finish the damn meal, please.” Flo shook her head. “It’s the goddamn Assembly of First Nations in here every Sunday.”

  “Excuse me.” Joan got up from the table and headed for the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and sat on the closed toilet lid. Maybe if she stayed here long enough, counting the damask patterns on the linoleum floor, picking at her hangnails, bouncing her legs on the balls of her feet until her teeth chattered, people would settle down and she could finish her stew or at least make it look like she had. She wanted a cigarette. She wanted a drink. She wanted to sleep or run away or cry or fall into a coma—she wasn’t sure which, and these days never was. Since Victor had been gone she felt like whatever she was doing wasn’t the thing she was supposed to be doing. Nothing was right. Everything was knocked slightly askew, like a house on a cracked foundation. New tilts and slants made her nauseous at the most mundane times, like grocery shopping. Unexpected fractures threw her completely off balance, like eating Sunday dinner with her argumentative family. She flushed in case anyone was paying attention, splashed her pale face with cold water, smoothed back her long, brown hair with wet hands and opened the bathroom door.

  Her phone vibrated in the front pocket of
her jean shorts. She pulled it out. It was a text from her cousin Travis, who lived two towns over.

  Come and watch Netflix and drink with me and be sad. Joseph and I broke up! Come now SOS

  She sent back a thumbs-up emoji and pocketed the phone. Halfway back to the table, she heard raised voices and realized she hadn’t stayed in the bathroom long enough.

  Her mother’s voice. “If you’re so traditional, why are the seniors meeting at the shrine, anyways? Shouldn’t you be in a lodge or something?”

  As Joan sat down, both her brothers were taking small bites of their food, trying not to be noticed.

  Mere let rip. “We’re Métis, you fool. The church is the lodge. And besides, it’s better to be close to the enemy than far away. Keep an eye on things. I’m tryna organize the old people to take a stand. We’re not letting the community leaders sign no agreements with nobody.”

  “Like agreements for jobs, you mean?” Flo was pissed off her meal was ruined and now her boys would be unemployed for the winter, and she wasn’t going to let it go. “And just how exactly does the church figure into this conspiracy theory of yours?”

  Mere was patient. “The more the people stay off the land, the more vulnerable the land is.” She nudged Zeus, who was fiddling with his old CD player, duct taping the sprung cover back down after switching discs. “Pour your old Mere some juice, there.”

  Joan cleared her throat. “I’m going to head over to Travis’s place for the night. Can someone drive Mere and Zeus home, please?”

  Junior raised his hand, not yet willing to risk speech.

  “Good enough.”