Читать книгу Meg Harris Mysteries 7-Book Bundle - R.J. Harlick - Страница 66

All night long I tossed and turned while Yves’s damning information about John-Joe festered. By the time I rose in the morning, I knew I had to lay my doubts to rest. Although I didn’t want to believe that John-Joe had lied to me about his involvement with drugs, I couldn’t readily dismiss what Yvette had witnessed. I also knew that if Sergeant LaFramboise learned of this, he’d believe Yvette long before he’d believe anything John-Joe would tell him. And he’d use this as further evidence of his suspect’s criminal behaviour. I had to do something. But what?

I could verify the story directly with Yvette, but if she remained convinced she’d seen John-Joe sell Pierre drugs, there was little I could do other than to try to come up with a way to minimize the damage to John-Joe’s case.

He’d vehemently denied selling drugs to those kids in my shack, and I still believed him. Perhaps if I could prove that someone else was the drug dealer in the area, the police would place less weight on Yvette’s evidence. The trick was how to get this information.

Obviously, the kids knew. But they weren’t talking; otherwise the dealer would be in police custody. And if the kids were refusing to tell the police, it was hardly likely they’d give me the name.

There was, however, one person who might tell me, Ajidàmo. But would he? After all I was off-reserve and white. But perhaps my role as his rescuer might persuade him to open up. It wouldn’t hurt to at least try. A call to the nurse at the Migiskan Health Centre soon confirmed he was safely at home with his grandmother.

Figuring Sergei would make a good silence-breaker, I hustled him into my rusted-out pickup along with a pot of freesia I’d bought in Somerset with just such a visit in mind. Even if Ajidàmo’s grandmother couldn’t see the pale yellow blooms, she would be able to smell their penetrating fragrance. For her grandson, I’d picked up a game guaranteed to capture a young boy’s interest, Jenga, a skill-testing game with wooden blocks.

As my truck bumped along the road to the Migiskan Reserve, the dog, ever hopeful for a deer sighting, perched alertly on the seat beside me. Although I’d never been to Ajidàmo’s house, the nurse’s instructions were clear enough to get me to the extreme end of the inhabited part of the reserve, where the white plain of an unplowed lane dipped down to the edge of the forest. Afraid my truck would get stuck, I left it on the main road and followed a well-trodden trench down the hill to the last two houses on the lane. Unfortunately, her description of an old log squat applied to both buildings. I looked for signs of a child and saw a sled propped against the side of the most dilapidated house. Smoke curled from its blackened metal chimney.

I walked towards the front steps, but Sergei knew better. He bounded to the side of the other house, to a small snowsuited figure emerging from behind the house, rolling a giant snowball. With a yelp of recognition, the dog tumbled into the boy and was lost in a turmoil of flying snow and gleeful shrieks.

The noise brought Ajidàmo’s grandmother to the door. Clad in a thin cotton dress and ragged wool sweater, she stood silently in the cold air, her clouded eyes directed towards the sound. Her stooped but solid frame displayed no unease with the sudden ruckus, only a waiting alertness like a mother bear confronted by the unknown. Finally she said something in Algonquin, but her grandson, too intent on playing with the dog, didn’t hear her.

Not wishing to keep her in ignorance of my presence, I said hello to her in my limited Algonquin, “Kwey Kòkomis,” then switched to English. “It is me, Meg Harris. We met the other day at the Health Centre.”

Silence greeted me. I started to call out again when a slow smile crept over her ancient face, and she nodded knowingly. She gestured me inside, then called out once more to her grandson. Thankfully, Ajidàmo, our would-be translator, obeyed his grandmother, otherwise our conversation wouldn’t have gone beyond hopeful nods and smiles.

She led me into the heat of an unlit room made darker by a boarded-up broken window. The darkness at first surprised me, until I remembered the old woman had no need of light. Ajidàmo, familiar with his grandmother’s ways, ignited an oil lamp, which brought the extent of their poverty into stark reality.

The long, narrow room stretched across the front of the house. With a small kitchen at one end and a sagging sofa and a potbelly stove at the other, it appeared to be the focal point for all aspects of daily living, except sleeping. And even that was a possibility, given the pillows and neatly folded Hudson Bay blankets that were piled on a low table. Perhaps in this cold it was warmer to sleep next to the stove than in one of the back rooms, which were likely unheated. I assumed that the two closed doors on the back wall led to bedrooms and possibly a bathroom, though I doubted the latter. The lack of a sink in the kitchen apart from a metal washbasin suggested no indoor plumbing, the same way the oil lamp and battered Coleman stove spoke of no electricity.

Although I was aware that such poor living conditions were prevalent in some of the more northern reserves, this was the first time I’d encountered it on the Migiskan Reserve, and it came as a shock. It only served to make me angrier at Eric that he hadn’t done anything about it. After all, he’d been instrumental in getting new housing for the reserve. Why hadn’t he given these two unfortunate souls, who clearly needed it, one of the new bungalows?

Muttering what I took to mean “May I?”, the old woman ran her gnarled fingers enquiringly over my face. She tugged at my hair and said something to Ajidàmo, whose response made her chuckle. Smiling, she fingered my hat-crushed locks, then patted me on the head, as if comforting a child.

“What did you say?” I asked Ajidàmo. “I told her your hair was so bright, it would burn her fingers,” he replied with a mischievous glint to his eye.

He stood almost protectively beside his grandmother, a wraith of a child with large brown eyes, who looked younger and more defenseless than his eight years.

On our one and only encounter, he’d been groggy and disoriented from the drug overdose. “Remember me?”

He nodded gravely. His grandmother must have also understood my question, for she clasped her grandson to her ample bosom and repeated “Migwech” several times, which I took to be her way of thanking me for saving him.

I then passed her the pot of freesia. “Goood, goood,” she said as she breathed in their perfume. With the confidence of the sighted, she carried the flowers to a large formica-topped stainless steel table occupying the centre of the room. Meanwhile, Ajidàmo, with the intentness of a kid who knew what was what, placed the tower of Jenga blocks on the floor and began slowly extracting his first wooden block.

After placing the flowers squarely in the middle of the table, Kòkomis turned her blind gaze towards me, as if to say, “It’s your turn. Why are you here?”, a question I was beginning to ask myself.

Now that I was faced with their vulnerability, I hesitated diving in with my questions. I worried that asking the boy to squeal on someone who could very well be a member of his community would place them in a difficult position, even a dangerous one. Given the language constraints, light chit-chat seemed impossible. Besides, what common ground did we have to talk about other than the weather. Sergei solved my dilemma.

The dog’s whining at the door lit up Ajidàmo’s face. With a word from his grandmother, he rushed to the door, and in sprang the dog, sprinkling snow in his wake. The old woman clapped her hands and spoke softly. The dog careened to a stop at her feet. Unbelievable. He sure wouldn’t do that for me.

“Goood, goood,” she mumbled, as she stroked his curly head. I wasn’t sure if she was commenting on his stellar behaviour or expressing pleasure over his presence.

Words tumbled out of the excited boy, who was displaying the squirrel-like energy of his name. “He’s so big and curly. What kind of dog is he? What’s his name? Can he shake hands?”

I answered each in succession. “A standard poodle. Sergei. But I’m not sure about the shaking hands. He’s never done it for me. Why don’t you try?”

“Right on,” he replied, sounding like any kid trying to emulate the latest expression he’d heard on TV .

He clapped his hands the way his grandmother did to get the dog’s attention. Then, while I watched in amazement, he had the dog sit down and extend his paw to his outstretched hand. All of this in Algonquin, a language Sergei had never heard before.

“How did you do that?” I asked. He grinned.

“Easy.” And he got the dog to do it again.

“Kòkomis taught me. This is the way a hunter talks to his prey, so the animal won’t be afraid. He looks the animal in the eye and talks like this.” He dropped his voice to almost a whisper. “Then he tells the animal what to do, and it does it, like this.” He spoke again in the soft but confident undertone accompanied by a slight downward motion with his hand, and Sergei promptly lay down.

“Wow, I’m impressed. I’m afraid I haven’t been too good at training Sergei, so I’d really appreciate it if you could give me a few pointers.”

While Ajidàmo and I had been talking, his grandmother had taken a couple of mugs and a stained teapot from a cupboard. “Tea,” she said more as a statement than a request, and held out the teapot to her grandson, who filled it from the tarnished copper kettle boiling on top of the wood stove.

She ordered me to sit, and I promptly sat down on the closest chair, landing on something sharp, which proved to be a needle inserted into a moccasin. Fortunately, it was the blunt end.

The moccasin had been expertly crafted by hand from soft but sturdy moose hide. Only the beading on top, where the needle was inserted, remained to be completed. A tuft of dense moose hair created a centre from which a design of red and yellow beads radiated. It looked as if it needed only a couple more spokes of beads, and the moccasin would be finished.

“This is beautiful,” I said.

“Kòkomis made it,” Ajidàmo replied to my amazement.

“But how can she?” I asked without thinking and immediately regretted my insensitivity.

But Ajidàmo didn’t seem to mind. “Easy. She’s very smart,” he said, with all the pride of a grandson. “She’s been making moccasins, so long she can do it in her sleep.”

His grandmother must’ve realized what we were discussing, for she held up its completed mate and said, “You want?” And before I could reply, she continued via Ajidàmo, the translator, “Try them on.”

The supple leather hugged my stocking feet as if the moccasins had been made for them. “How much?” I said, reaching for my wallet.

Kòkomis shook her silvered head. “No, no. It’s a gift. You brought this joyful flower and saved my grandson.” The boy dropped his eyes as he translated this last remark and became quiet.

After offering my thanks, I inquired about his health. “No bad effects from the drugs or the frostbite?”

“Nope.”

“That was a close call, wasn’t it?”

He nodded and left the table to play on the floor with the dog. I didn’t bother to voice my next thought. It was clear he didn’t want a lecture on the dangers of drugs.

I sipped my tea and watched the old woman finish the beading on my moccasin. Despite the arthritis in her fingers, she was able to pick up the tiny beads, which had been sorted by colour into different shaped boxes. She then slipped the needle through their imperceptible holes and sewed them correctly into the design. Amazing. I, with my almost twenty/twenty vision, couldn’t even sew on a button properly.

“When I was little, Kòkomis could see,” Ajidàmo said. “The doctor says she got carrot cats.”

“Cataracts?”

“Yeah, that’s it. He says he can get rid of them, but she says no. She’s got a medicine tea she makes from mashkìgwàtig.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a tree. I don’t know its name in English, but it’s like a pine tree, ’cept it loses its needles like a maple tree.”

“I think it could be a tamarack. How does she make it?”

“She boils the bark in water and lets it sit for a very long time.”

“Well, I suppose it might work.”

“Yeah, maybe… But if the doctor gets rid of them, it’ll make the spirits angry, and then something terrible will happen, like it did with Noshenj.”

“Noshenj?”

“Auntie, John-Joe’s mom.”

My ears perked up at the mention of John-Joe. Perhaps I could use this as an opening. “What happened to your auntie?”

“She went to the hospital for osipation and died.”

“You mean operation.” He nodded vigorously. I continued, “I’m sorry to hear that, but your Auntie was probably very sick, not like your Kòkomis, who looks pretty healthy to me. Don’t you think the doctor would only suggest the operation if it was going to make her better?”

Ajidàmo acknowledged my suggestion with a slow thoughtful nod, but kept his eyes locked onto the floor. His grandmother had been listening intently. It was difficult to tell if she’d understood any part of our conversation. I decided to take the plunge. “So you and John-Joe are cousins?”

He glanced back at me and grinned. “Yup, my nìtàwis.”

“You like him?”

“You bet. Takes me fishing and hunting. Let’s me play games on his computer. And he gives me stuff, lots of stuff.”

“But he doesn’t give you drugs, does he?” He shot me a startled glance, then whistled to the dog and raced outside.

I remained fixed to my chair, not wanting to believe what his silence could mean, while across from me his grandmother announced, “Goood dog. Ajidàmo happy.”