Questing for a Dream, page 31
Mouse had said she should do a vision quest. Normally, it was something she would have asked the Elders for guidance on, but she was far from home and any of the Elders. She hadn’t yet found a spiritual guide like Jeremy had recommended. It seemed like medicine men and women were few and far between in the city. She prayed instead for guidance from the spirits. Surrounded by Mother Earth, her heart was close to the spirit plane.
Nadie found a dry log and sat down. She slid her backpack off and rolled her shoulders. Reaching into the side pocket of her pack, Nadie pulled out the few spiritual tools she had been able to gather. A pipe she had found at the Salvation Army thrift store. It wasn’t like the pipes the elders had, but it did the job. Pipe tobacco and sage had not been hard for her to beg from others. She didn’t need much, just a couple of pinches. Cedar had been a little more difficult until the Step Up Center started mulching their trees with cedar chips. But she hadn’t managed to find any source for sweetgrass. Nadie had been tempted to go back to the rehab center to ask Jeremy, but she wanted to be independent and do it on her own. And she didn’t want to go back to the rehab center, even to see Jeremy.
Nadie wasn’t sure of the proper protocol for a vision quest ceremony, so she burned the sacred plants in the same order and formula as for the ceremony honoring the dead. The smokes mingled in the air so she couldn’t differentiate one from the other.
Then she sat, eyes closed, and just listened to the sounds around her. Once or twice, she could hear voices in the distance, but none of them came near. As the temperature started to fall, there was a train whistle and she could hear the rumble of the train wheels going over the tracks. When it was too cold to sit in shirt sleeves any longer, Nadie got out her sleeping bag and lay down. Once Nadie had been inside for a few minutes, she warmed up and was comfortable. They’d be wondering where she was at the Step Up Center. But they had enough other people to worry about; they wouldn’t waste much time fussing about her.
When she woke up in the morning, her stomach was rumbling hungrily. She’d become accustomed to eating breakfast every morning and her body complained bitterly about her decision to fast. Nadie sat on the log, still wrapped up in her sleeping bag, and concentrated on her breathing and on the sounds around her. The spirits had a plan for her. A direction she was supposed to go. But she didn’t know what it was. She needed to watch and to listen for their guidance.
It was difficult to do nothing but sit or stand and wait. The sun took its journey across the sky more slowly than ever. But she knew she was where she was supposed to be. This was where her heart had led her and she just needed to wait for her vision.
Evening came again, and she didn’t sleep as comfortably as the previous night. She could feel the ground through her sleeping bag. She was hungry and thirsty, her lips chapped and peeling. The sleeping bag didn’t seem to provide the same heat as it had the previous night. She shivered. Nadie breathed slowly and listened to the night sounds. If she focused, she could hear the river. The trains in the distance sounded mournful. Owls hooted occasionally and dogs or coyotes howled.
The third night, she couldn’t sleep at all. Eventually, she got up and wandered down to the river, where she cupped water in her hands and wet her lips and face. She turned and tried to retrace her path but couldn’t find the clearing again.
It was amazing how much she could see by the light of the stars and the full moon. She hiked through the trees, hoping the movement would warm her up. Even with the sleeping bag wrapped around her, Nadie couldn’t seem to get warm.
An owl swooped down, so close Nadie could feel the wind from its wings. She watched in fascination as the ghostly shape alighted on the branch of a tree. The owl’s head turned toward Nadie and it regarded her.
“Ôhô. Owl spirit,” Nadie whispered. “Do you have a vision for me?”
Neither of them moved.
Nadie watched the owl closely, listening to the night sounds around them. There was another owl hooting in the distance. Leaves rustled in the wind or with the movement of other small animals. She opened her heart to all of them, waiting for guidance.
The owl bent over and bit at the branch it was standing on. Nadie wasn’t sure if it was grooming its beak or had some other purpose. She stood like a statue watching the bird’s movements.
There was the snap of a twig, and something fell at Nadie’s feet. She bent down to see what it was, feeling where she had heard it land. Her touch was light and tentative, not really wanting to find a dead mouse or fresh owl pellet. But whatever the gift was, she would not refuse it. Her fingers found something dry and round.
Nadie picked up an acorn and studied it in the darkness. It was warm in her hand, radiating heat. She looked back at the owl and bowed her head slightly.
“Ay-hay, ôhô.”
The owl took flight and vanished into the night with a whoosh of wings.
Nadie stood there for a long time, pondering on the visitation and the gift she had received. The small nut warmed her chilled hands. As the sky began to brighten and the stars dimmed, she carefully put the acorn into her pocket.
Going back down to the river, she drank until she was full.
Nadie knew what she was supposed to do.
Chapter Thirty-One
Hitchhiking back to Winnipeg had not been hard. But Nadie wasn’t planning to stay in Winnipeg. It took longer to find a way to get back to the reservation. There was not a lot of traffic headed that way. Once she got to the town, Nadie wasn’t sure what to do next. The only people who went out to the reservation were the Nehiyaw, and occasionally social workers or other government employees. There was no regular traffic.
Nadie sat on a bench in the little Centennial Park and looked at the green shoots poking out of the soil. She closed her eyes and said a little prayer to Mother Earth and the plant and animal spirits. She touched the acorn nestled warmly in her pocket, stroking the smooth surface. When she opened her eyes next, she knew what to do.
She walked to the police station and asked the uniformed woman sitting at the front desk to talk to Mac. The woman looked Nadie over, her eyes twinkling with curiosity.
“Mac is out right now. He may not be back for an hour or two. Would you like to set up a time to see him?”
Nadie looked around the small reception room. It didn’t have many chairs, like a doctor’s office waiting room, but there were a couple of hard plastic chairs against the wall in case someone needed to sit.
“I will wait here for him.”
“He might be a couple of hours,” the woman warned again.
“Yes. I will wait.”
“Well… okay,” she allowed.
Nadie went over to the chairs. She put down her backpack and she put down the heavy sports bag she had kept in a paid locker over the winter to avoid having to carry it with her. She sat and waited. It would probably have made sense to have gone to the library before the police station so she would have something to read while waiting. But she had felt compelled to go to the police station and had followed the urge. Sitting and waiting with nothing to do for a couple of hours was nothing, compared to three days of waiting for her vision.
It didn’t take Mac two hours to get back. The policewoman kept looking anxiously at Nadie and had probably sent out several messages to track her boss down and have him return as soon as possible. Mac stepped in the front door and paused for a moment, blinking, for the time it took for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight outside to the artificial light inside the building. He looked at Nadie questioningly, but before she could say anything, his mouth dropped open and she knew he had placed her. It had been months, and he had only met her a couple of times, so she was impressed he had recognized her so quickly. She probably looked a lot different from when they had seen each other last. Her journey had taken her a long way.
“You are…” Mac trailed off.
“My name is Nadie Laplante.” Nadie announced herself boldly so the spirits would know her. She didn’t want there to be any confusion over who she really was. She stood up.
“But you were supposed to be… oh hell!” Mac’s voice was filled with what Nadie figured was the realization of all of the trouble this was going to cause him. Burying the wrong person. Or burying the right person in the wrong place, under the wrong name. His whole investigation—the white man valued investigations—had produced the wrong results.
“Uh… yeah. I’m not dead,” she confirmed.
“You knew?”
“I saw it in the paper.”
“You didn’t think to maybe give us a call and let us know the body had been misidentified?”
Nadie looked down at her feet. “I didn’t want to be alive. I wanted Nadie to be gone. So I didn’t say anything.”
Mac looked at his receptionist. He motioned to Nadie to follow him to his office in the back.
“Please pull the Nadie Laplante file,” he told the woman.
She nodded, eyebrows raised questioningly. Mac just shook his head in response.
In his office, Nadie again put her bags down and sat in the chair across the desk from Mac’s. Where she’d sat while he’d asked her questions about Luyu and the social worker had made her accusations. Mac sat down and studied her grumpily for a moment.
“So, where have you been?” he asked. “And how have you been?”
“I went to Winnipeg and then to Calgary. Now I’m back.”
“What made you change your mind? Homesick?”
“I had a vision.”
“A vision of something on the reservation?”
“I can’t explain it to you. I need to talk to the Elders about it.”
“I see. Have you been back to the reservation yet?”
“No. I need to get a ride there.”
“And that’s why you came here?”
Nadie nodded.
The woman police officer came into Mac’s office and put a file down in front of him. He made a motion dismissing her. He was silent for a few minutes as he looked through the contents of the files to refresh his memory of the case. He tipped his big office chair back, making it creak in protest.
“The young woman we found had your possessions with her,” he said. “They were identified by your Grandfather.”
Nadie felt heartsick for him. First losing Luyu and then losing Nadie, so close together. Looking at her possessions and confirming his granddaughter was dead would have been devastating to him. And the condition of the body… Nadie hoped he hadn’t had to look at the body.
“She stole them from me. While I was sleeping.”
“And your raft? Your friend told us you had taken your raft when you ran away.”
Nadie nodded. “She stole that too. And I guess… she didn’t know how to raft safely on the river.”
“There’s quite a bit of whitewater in the area where the body was found. She must have capsized.”
“You have to portage around the whitewater. It wasn’t one of those big air-filled rafts that stay up on top of the water.”
“Even those won’t make it through some of the rapids.”
Nadie nodded.
“Do you know anything about her? Name? Where she came from?”
“Her name was Annie. That’s what she said, anyway. She was Ojibwe. I don’t know what happened, why she was out in the middle of the wilderness, all alone. She’d been there a long time. She didn’t know how to get to where people were… until she saw my raft. She knew there were towns downriver.”
“I’ll see if there’s anything that matches her description in missing persons.”
Nadie waited. Mac sighed.
“I suppose you would like to see your family.”
Nadie nodded. “If you know anyone who’s going out that way anytime soon.”
“Well, considering I have an accidental death investigation to reopen, I guess I’m going to have to, aren’t I?”
Nadie suppressed a smile. She was happy he was going to take her back to the reservation, but she didn’t want him to think that she thought a death was funny or that she was mocking him.
Mac gave a visible shudder. “I hope I’m not going to have to disinter the body. How are your people going to feel about a stranger’s body in your burial ground? Will they be offended?”
Nadie considered it. “I don’t think so… she was buried properly, and she is one of our people. It’s not desecration. As long as her family doesn’t want her moved…”
“If we ever find her family.” Mac levered himself up from his chair and leaned his hands on the table. Looking over his desk, he picked up the investigation file and put on his black cap. He opened his drawer and pulled out an identification card on a lanyard he put around his neck.
Nadie looked at the card. “Native Liaison Officer?” she read aloud. She frowned. “That’s new. Isn’t a Native Liaison Officer usually… Native?”
Mac nodded and gave her a self-conscious smile. He led the way to his truck and they both got in before Mac spoke. “Whenever a Cree from the reservation leaves to get a college education, and trains to be a police officer, and goes back in his role as a police officer… he’s shunned. He’s considered a sell-out. Someone who wasn’t really Cree inside.”
He turned on his engine and put the police pick-up into drive while Nadie thought about that and had to admit to herself that it was true.
“Me, on the other hand, my roots are Polish, not Indian, and if I show an interest in the Native traditions and culture and show respect for the Elders in my investigations and dealings… then I’m not a sell-out, I’m a white man who is showing more respect than the average Joe Schmoe. I’m not ostracized like a Cree cop would be.”
“Sort of backward,” Nadie observed. “We’re supposed to be self-governing, but we won’t allow a Nehiyaw to do the job.”
Mac nodded.
“It’s a little weird they’d rather let me do it, but if that’s what it takes… It’s better to have a single point of contact.”
Nadie watched out the window as they drove down the familiar highway.
Home.
She was going home.
She felt like she had been living on a strange planet, and now was finally coming back to the familiar. She touched the acorn in her pocket, breathing in a conscious rhythm to keep herself calm.
When they drove up the last little stretch to the gate that marked the beginning of the reservation, Nadie found she could barely breathe. This was it. She was home. With all of the happiness and sadness home entailed. But this time, it was a choice.
“To your Grandfather’s house first?” Mac asked, glancing aside at her.
“Yes… if you would.”
He nodded his agreement and drove over the rutted roads to pull into Grandfather’s worn driveway.
Nadie was slow to get out, letting Mac climb out of the truck first. She wiped her sweaty hands on her pants and slowly climbed down.
Melinda had come to the door upon hearing the truck drive up and was watching Mac’s approach warily. When her eyes moved to Nadie, she gasped and held onto the door frame.
“Father!” she croaked. “Father!”
The Nose came to the door. Horatio. He held Melinda to keep her on her feet. “Mel? What’s wrong?” His eyes turned first to Mac, who was nearly to the door, and then to Nadie, further away. His mouth opened, and he swore. “Nadie?”
Mac got up to the door. The Nose tried to move Mel out of the doorway. “Let’s sit back down, Mel.”
Melinda refused to move. Nadie moved faster to greet her. She didn’t want Melinda fainting in the doorway, and the sooner Nadie greeted her, the sooner she’d sit down.
“Mel. Tân’si. It’s me.”
“It’s really you?” Mel asked as they embraced. She breathed in Nadie’s ear. “Tân’si.”
Her arms were shaking. When they released each other, Mel allowed herself to be escorted back into the house, where Horatio helped her to sit down on the couch. What had made her so frail? Was she sick? Had the Nose hurt her?
Grandfather came into the room, his feet dragging along the floor. “What’s going on?”
None of them said anything. Grandfather looked around the room, frowning. He saw Mel and the Nose. And then Mac in his uniform. And finally, his eyes turned to Nadie.
“Tân’si, Nimosôm.”
At first she feared he was going to have a heart attack and die right there on the spot. His eyes widened, he swayed, and his arms went out looking for support. His face took on a paleness like death, and he opened his mouth, gasping loudly. Nadie hurried to him and took him in her arms. “Nimosôm, it’s me. It’s Nadie. Please, it’s okay. Say something!”
He didn’t say anything but a burbled laugh, but he clutched at her, pulling her close to himself with much stronger arms than she had anticipated. “Nadie! Oh, Nadie, my baby!”
“I’m not a baby,” Nadie protested, squirming in his tight grip. She managed to pull away from him slightly, though he was still holding onto her. “And… I’m not dead. I’m back, Grandfather. I’m sorry I ran away like that.”
“Sorry! We thought you were dead!”
“I know. It was wrong of me. I ran away instead of dealing with my problems. But I promise I’ll never do that again.”
He squeezed her to him again. “You’d better not. It might just kill me next time.”
A baby started to wail. Nadie froze and looked around at the faces of the others. “Who—?”
Mel patted her belly. It was not big and round, but Nadie remembered noticing Melinda’s weight gain when she and Horatio had first moved into the house. That had been many months ago. Mel moved to get up.
“No, you sit. I’ll get it,” Nadie offered.
She went to the baby room and looked into the crib. The baby was very small and, judging by her face, only a few days old. Nadie assumed by the band around the baby’s head that it was a baby girl. She carefully picked the swaddled infant up, and the baby stopped crying and stared up at her with shiny, very dark brown eyes.
