Five October 1966 #3
While the stew simmered on the stove, Kiju was in the garden explaining the medicinal value of beet greens to someone from the camp, so I was able to sneak into the bathroom unobserved.
When I sat down at the dinner table, the murmur of the apple pickers drifting in through the open window, Kiju glanced down at the makeshift bandage I had fashioned out of her old cleaning rags stinking of iodine.
I smiled and picked up my fork with my other hand. I spilled food everywhere.
“Seeing as though you seem to be injured, I guess you don’t have to help with the dishes tonight,” she said as she cleared the table.
I rocketed out of my chair so fast that it tipped over, crashing to the floor. “Sorry,” I said as I righted the chair and turned to flee the house before Kiju could change her mind.
The sun had started its early descent, the crown of it peeking out over the small hills we liked to call mountains, setting the clouds ablaze, a patchwork of red, orange and purple.
I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders against the chill as I walked up and down the narrow aisles and between the tents, moving to avoid playing children, breathing in the smell of bread fried in pork fat over an open fire.
But it wasn’t the food I was interested in; it was the faces, always the faces.
I’d always wondered about my father’s identity, but I didn’t miss him the way I missed my mother.
I’ve been told that you can’t miss something you’ve never had, but I don’t think that is true.
For a moment, my mother and I had known each other.
We had existed together in this world. But my father, he had never existed, at least not for me.
He was as real to me as the tooth fairy.
But that night, with the swelling of my hand under the bandage, the memory of how great it felt to punch Kenneth in the face, I felt an urgency to know, a keen desire to prove Kenneth wrong, to prove that I was every bit as Indian as he was.
But I didn’t see anyone who had the same freckles that stretched across my nose, and to my dismay, only Kenneth had green eyes.
Sometimes, when Kenneth was too much on my mind, I forgot that Ben also had green eyes.
Those were the eyes I wanted to remember, that I wanted to be my own.
Upset at my failure to identify a single feature that matched mine, I headed home.
The moment I stepped in the door, I could tell something was not right.
It wasn’t anything specific, just a heavy feeling in the air, the quiet of a house that usually had singing or boiling water, the clang of pots or silverware, the echo of clucking chickens, the clack clack of knitting needles.
But the table was bare, nothing sizzled on the stove, and my grandmother’s knitting sat on the seat of her chair, untouched.
“Kiju?” I half called, half whispered.
Silence.
I walked around to her bedroom door and there she was, hunched over, sitting on the edge of her bed, crying.
“Kiju! What’s wrong?” I hurried over and knelt in front of her.
“It’s nothing, just me being a silly old woman.”
“You are not silly.”
She reached down and took my cheek in her hand. “I’m afraid I am. Crying because one of the young girls at the camp had a baby a couple days ago.”
“Well, that’s good news. Isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“She went into town, to the hospital.”
“Oh.”
I still wasn’t entirely sure why this brought tears, so I stayed quiet, waiting for her to explain.
“She didn’t want to have her child under the tree. She told Sally she didn’t think it was safe. Her doctor told her it was barbaric. Can you imagine giving such a word to birth, barbaric?”
“Well, that’s silly. Lots of ladies have their babies under the tree.”
Yet it was true that we hadn’t had as many women in the last few years.
Kiju had assumed it was because women were having fewer children now.
When she was young, it wasn’t uncommon for a woman to have ten children.
Now, that was a rarity. I don’t think she or I ever considered that the women would feel unsafe and choose not to come to us, to give life under the tree.
“She didn’t even come and talk to me about it,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. I moved up to sit beside her and rubbed her back until her sighs began to soften.
She was wiping the last of her tears off her face when there was a knock at the door. Ben’s deep voice boomed throughout our little house.
“It’s Sally. She’s ready, Kiju. Sally says she’s ready to go.”
Kiju looked to me and smiled. The tears, so recent, forgotten in an instant. The timing could not have been better. I often thought, and still do think, that Sally must be a saint.
“Gather the herbs, the leather to wrap the baby in and the rest of the supplies, and meet me at Sally and Ben’s tent,” Kiju instructed as she put on her shoes to follow Ben across the grass, wet with evening dew.
I quickly gathered the herbs we needed, a packet of tobacco to lay down, two small kettles, a few clean cloths, a book of matches to light the fire, a metal cup and a new moss bag ready to carry the little one once the baby arrived.
Sally was at the campsite, lying on the ground on a blanket, and Ben was sitting with her head in the cross of his legs.
He was using his fingers to rub the sides of her head, and she hummed quietly, her eyes closed.
Kiju knelt beside her and pressed on her belly, checking her breathing, while humming the same tune.
Loaded down with supplies, I stood at the edge of the scene and watched, excitement growing in my belly.
Excitement for a new soul to join us, and excitement because surely a new baby for Sally and Ben would let Kiju know that she was still needed, that many more babies would be born under the ancient tree, nature’s midwife who bore witness to our continued existence.
A short older woman with white hair, a relation of Sally’s, appeared out of the approaching dark and took one of Sally’s arms, with Kiju under the other. With a nod from Kiju, Ben took the two boys, kissed Sally and disappeared to his brothers’ fire.
“I love you, woman,” he said as he walked away. Sally winked.
As we walked, the hum emanating from the throats of all three women grew loud and deep.
The song seemed to help Sally rise above the pain.
She swayed and they swayed with her, she slowed and they slowed, she bent over in pain and they held her.
I followed, carrying the supplies, the clank of the kettle against the cup keeping rhythm.
The path to the birthing tree wasn’t long, a five-minute walk when there wasn’t a woman in labour.
“It’s these big swollen feet,” Sally said.
“I think it might be that baby that is trying to be born,” Kiju replied.
As the moon replaced the sun, its white light flickered through the crooked branches and remaining leaves of early October.
The splintered light reflected off the surface of the pond that only moments before was alive with frog song but now sat silent, waiting.
It felt as though the entire world was holding its breath.
Sally found herself a comfortable spot, one arm draped over each of the two roots, and I wondered—the same as every time the tree cradled a woman—if it was the same place my mother had chosen.
I lit the fire while Kiju checked on the position of the baby.
“Head first, Sally, nothing to worry about. Aliet’s getting the tea ready that’s going to help you keep your strength. For now, just hum along with us.”
I gathered some water from the pond and placed a handful of partridge stems and leaves in the kettle to steep. The tea would help Sally during the birthing process. Kiju kept all the medicines we needed in tin jars above the sink in our little kitchen.
In spring, summer and fall, we wandered the woods and the nearby meadows to collect herbs and mushrooms, flowers and roots, with the occasional trip to the water’s edge along the bay for seaweed to calm an angry belly.
Kiju showed me the best ways to harvest to ensure the plants we needed would grow again, and with each one she explained its purpose and how to properly prepare it for use: pussy willow steeped in hot water to treat a cold, the bark of yellow birch to ease indigestion, cherry bark for high blood pressure, cedar to welcome a baby.
These were the things she tried to teach me when I was too young to appreciate them.
I was too fixated on the colour of my eyes, the smile of one boy and the cruel words of another, when I should have been learning.
These were the things she knew I would need to know someday, the things she wrote on recipe cards, her immaculate cursive reminding me how to heal.
I feel foolish now as I look back and see the things I worried about when I was a child.
And I think about the things I missed while I focused all my attention on holding a grudge, on proving someone wrong, someone who never deserved my time.
But the past is just that, the past, and dwelling on it will never change it.
But that does nothing to quell my regret.
On some of the cards there were sketches.
I needed to know the difference between hemlock and balsam.
This and the song she sang while babies were being born were her legacies, both of which I left behind at eighteen.
But that night, I breathed the scent of the steeping tea and the sounds of women, their hum in harmony.