go to the big city. I live on street, no money, no trees, no song of laughing bird. It was very hard. I wanna go home, back to my Mooti, but didn’t know how. Finally, Dorothy’s mother find me and bring me home. I never leave my people again.”
By the end of her story, I was feeling no little amount of shame and wondering how I could make up for my own people’s misguided ethnocentrism.
Marie did it for me by simply saying, “For long time I angry with the sisters and the white man. I also want my Mooti to stop working for Miz Agatta. But Miz Agatta change me. She teach me not every white man bad. She show me the good in the white man’s ways can work with the good in my people’s ways. So now I just feel sorry for the sisters. Their eyes were blinded.”
As I remembered Marie’s words, I realized the depth of inner strength they revealed, an inner strength that probably helped her to face other hurdles in her life, like Louis.
An elderly woman in a purple dream scarf took over from Charlie. She began by saying, “Marie so young, so pretty when she come home. But she was cursed.” And that set the tone for her continuation of Marie’s story.
After Marie’s return from the streets of Montreal, she had moved in with her mother into the small cabin, which Whispering Pine shared with Charlie’s family. But there were too many people and too few rooms. Fights were frequent.
“And some mens were bad.” The woman turned to Charlie, who offhandedly shrugged his shoulders.
So Marie had moved in with Dorothy’s family. For a time, everything went well. She found work, was able to bring a bit of money into the household. And then tragedy struck. Someone left some socks to dry on the wood stove overnight. They caught fire and ignited nearby curtains. Within minutes the house was gone. Marie was forced to move back with her mother and the Cardinal family.
“Terrible time she had,” said the woman, sadly shaking her head. “I told her come live with me all alone in my small cabin, but she say she can’t. Poor girl.”
A deer skin covered arm slapped Charlie on the back, while another face snickered.
The elder, shaking her head, glanced in their direction. The smiles disappeared from the men’s faces. Their gaze dropped to the floor.
Eric continued, “Snake Woman’s right. What happened was wrong. Still is. I was only a boy at the time, ten or eleven, but I haven’t forgotten the snickering. ‘Marie had better keep her legs clamped shut,’ many whispered. ‘Old Man Cardinal is trying his damnedest to pry them open.’ We thought it funny, not caring how it hurt Marie. We forgot that in Marie’s eyes, Charlie’s father was her father too.”
The smirk on Charlie’s face changed to stone. “So my old man wouldn’t leave her alone, but I never touched her, never. What about you? Don’t say you never wanted a go at her.”
I could almost see the blushing under Eric’s tan. “Okay, I admit, as a boy I had a crush on her too,” he said. “She was one gorgeous chick. In fact, my friends and I used to follow her through the village. But it was innocent fun. She’d laugh and throw stones to chase us away, and then she’d signal us to come join her, play tag, go fishing. But in the end, you know what happened.”
He paused to look at the now still faces around the circle, then he continued, “She ran to Louis because we wouldn’t leave her alone.”
No one smirked. Several nodded sadly.
“Remember how he arrived twenty-five years ago? Right after kije nòdin, the great wind, which destroyed half the village,” Eric said. “I can still feel the terror of that shrieking wind which uprooted trees and sent our homes flying into the air. We were cleaning up the mess when Louis arrived one day from the south.
“Remember his shiny new red Chev? The kind of car few of us had ever seen, much less owned. He said he’d help us, make us rich. We believed him. In fact, we made him our administrator. How naïvely stupid we were. We gave him the keys to the kitty and never once thought it might be at risk.
“And I’m sure those of you old enough can recall the riches he promised.” Eric paused.
Some grizzled heads nodded knowingly. A few turned their glances towards Charlie, who puffed his chest out and said, “Okay, so Louis said there was gold on our land. But that was different.”
“Only difference this time, Charlie,” replied a small, wizened man with his eagle feather attached to his headband, “us elders are a lot smarter. We learned good. So don’t bring your little white rocks with gold in ’em like Louis done and ask for money to get your mine goin’, ’cause we ain’t givin’ ya one red cent.”
“I don’t need your money,” growled Charlie. “Whether you like it, or not, this mine’s going to happen. This time there really is gold. I seen it.”
“Enough,” Eric said. “For now we’re talking about Marie. I don’t blame her for being deceived as much as the rest of us. Louis was sure one cool customer back then, before drink got to him, especially with those white man eyes. And I supposed she probably thought of him as a means of getting out of here. But it didn’t happen. By the time Louis’s fraud was discovered, she was pregnant and the money gone. She once told me that she moved in with Louis because she wanted her child to grow up with its real father.”
All eyes turned towards Tommy, but his gaze remained fixed on the elder’s medicine bundle in the centre of the circle.
“Not the best choice in husbands,” Dorothy added. “All loving sweetness until she moved in with him. Then she started sporting black eyes and swollen cheeks. I ignored it at first, thinking the abuse wasn’t that different from the other relationships I knew. But then it got serious. She turned up at my house, clutching her arm. It was broken in three places. Marie told me she’d fallen from a chair while cleaning windows. This time I didn’t believe her. Eventually, she owned up that Louis had come home angry and drunk.”
Dorothy brushed a tear from her cheek. “I tried, as I tried on several later occasions, to convince her to leave him. But she refused to listen. Said she loved him, couldn’t leave him to fend for himself. Besides, she believed he didn’t mean to hurt her. He loved her. It was only the drink that had taken over.
“Maybe it was, but she sure put up with more living hell than blissful love, right up until her bitter end. If only I’d been more forceful, maybe she’d still be alive today.” And the tears began coursing down Dorothy’s chiselled face.
A large woman with a kindly smile wrapped her arm around Dorothy, while another said, “Don’t blame yourself, widigik. We all knew, and none of us did a thing about it.”
I silently agreed as I thought of the time, only days before her death, when I had meekly let Louis drag Marie away.
Wiping the tears from her face, Dorothy said, “But despite all the years of abuse, I never thought it would end this way. I find it very hard to believe she finally turned on Louis and killed him. Why? You know she was a gentle person. Not once did I ever see her respond in anger to Louis’s abuse. She just accepted it as her lot in life, as she did anything else, good or bad. In fact, Louis had calmed down in recent years, more shouting than actual physical abuse.”
Dorothy ran her eyes over the cheerless faces and asked, “So why now? What did Louis do that was so terrible Marie could no longer endure it?”
A hushed silence
