Keeper'n Me Read online

  Actually, White Dog’s not the only reserve up here’s got their own open-lake telephone. This northern part of Ontario’s full of lakes and we Ojibways always seem to be finding ourselves settling down on the shores of one. Once you’ve seen one of our long summer sunsets from across a northern lake, well, you start to get a better idea of why the old people would settle down there.

  Anyway, I’d been back here about four months. My ma had cut my Afro off about three days after I was home and around about that time I was one scruffy-looking Indian. Funny how fate turns things around, eh? I told Ma about the old Pancho Santilla gaffe I used to run on people before I became a black man and she just looked at me and laughed.

  “Good thing you don’ try that now, my boy,” she said. “People see you like this with no hair now they be callin’ you one a them Mexican hairlesses!”

  Funny lady, that Ma.

  Making White Dog my home wasn’t as easy as maybe I make it sound. For days on end I still wanted to hightail it back to familiar streets. I felt like a very big fish out of water for the longest time and to tell the truth, it was scary. But the White Dog folks and the feeling that was seeping into me from this land all started getting me to feeling more and more comfortable the longer I hung around. In fact, I don’t remember ever making the decision to stay. It was more like one day I was walking around and it was already made. Nobody was coaxing the answer out of me all that time either. I took to feeling like I’d just been a part of the place forever and like Stanley had told me those first few days, everyone just seemed to want to treat me like a little kid. The little kid they’d never got a chance to know. Pretty hard to think of leaving a place when everyone’s feeding you, giving you things and making you feel all special all the time. Anyway, I fell into the idea of being home long before I even knew that’s where I was. Took some getting used to though.

  See, there wasn’t much to do except hang out with my brothers and their friends and try to fit in and not stick out all at the same time. Which is kinda hard when you don’t speak the language, never done any of the things people like to do around here like hunt and fish and all and you’re running around with a heada hair looks like a bad scalping job by a near-sighted Cree. But I was slowly getting comfortable. Most folks knew who I was, where I’d been, some of the things I’d done out there, and were pretty hip to the fact that I hadn’t been around my own people for a long, long time. They’d kid me about it but generally they tried to help me get feeling I was home again. It happened over the course of that first summer, but slowly. Living with Ma helped the most.

  Anyway, there was a big bunch of us sitting around on the other side of the bay one evening. We had a fire going and were listening to Wally Red Sky singing all his favorite country-and-western songs. Wally’s okay, I suppose, but I always figured someone should have told him back then that there was a few good tunes written after 1952. See, Wally’s always been the big dreamer around here. His family goes back a long way in the local history. What with his great-grandfather being one a the main signers of Treaty Three back in the 1870s and every Red Sky after that somehow getting into the politics, making big plans has been a Red Sky mainstay for as long as most can remember according to Ma. He’d got hold of his daddy’s guitar when he was eight and ever since then has dreamed of being the biggest Indian country singer ever. Trouble is, his high notes sound like what you hear in the bush during rutting season and his low notes sound like a moose four hours after a feeding frenzy on skunk cabbage. But a nicer guy can’t be found. He was right in the middle of some sappy ballad about some long-haired gal named Sal who lived in the middle of the wide open spaces when we heard it.

  See, the open-lake telephone system can be kind of spooky when you’re not ready for it. Voices have a habit of floating up at you outta nowhere. My cousin Connie Otter just about jumped right outta her skin when we heard this voice go, “Hoo!” That’s all, just “Hoo!”

  Whenever Ma’n me head out blueberry picking she’s always hooing away when I pick my way outta her sight. One good hoo can carry a long way by itself even without the benefit of a reflecting lake. Ma says it’s the way the old people used to locate each other in the bush.

  So we hear this hoo and all the rest got lost in the roar of laughing that erupted when Connie Otter hightailed it into the bush so fast she ran clear out of her gumboots. We could hear her crashing through the timber and someone finally had the sense to yell back over, “Hoo!”

  Now it generally takes a while for a good hoo to travel across so it was a moment or two before we got a reply.

  “GAR … NET … RA … VEN … THERE?”

  “YEAH … I’M … HERE!”

  “ ’KAY THEN … KEE … PER … WANTS … YOU!”

  “WHAT? … KEE … PER … WANTS … ME?”

  “YEAH … KEE … PER!”

  “ ’KAY THEN … BE … O … VER … SOOOOON!”

  “ ’KAY THEN.”

  Wally Red Sky bumped against me in the darkness. I could tell it was Wally because no one else on this reserve still uses Brylcreem. Or at least they don’t use as much of it as Wally Red Sky.

  “Keeper? Wonder what that old fart wants with you?”

  “Don’t know, Wally, maybe he needs help finding one a his bottles.”

  This got quite a laugh because Keeper’d been the local drunk around here for a long time. Well, there used to be a lot of local drunks but old Keeper’d been the one most people talked about most of the time. One of the things you could count on from Keeper was to find him stumbling around in the mornings turning over rocks’n logs and stuff trying to remember where he’d hid his bottle. I remember wondering how anybody could be called Keeper when they couldn’t seem to keep anything.

  Anyway, he surprised everyone when he went away. Guess he just one day up and walked in and asked chief and council to send him off to the Smith Clinic in Thunder Bay to dry out. This was about three weeks after I got here and no one expected him to really go, so it was an even bigger surprise for folks when old Keeper asked to stay an extra coupla weeks because he figured he needed it.

  His best drinking buddies had been wandering around pretty confused about all of it. My uncle Buddy wasn’t buying any of it.

  “Ah, that old fart’s just restin’ up,” he said. “Been drunk as long as me’n Keeper been drunk, you stay that way!”

  He was the one to know. Uncle Buddy used to say that when he’s “whistled over” as he calls it, they won’t have to waste any money on embalming fluid on accounta he’s drunk enough in one lifetime to keep him pickled forever. And there’s those around who agree.

  Anyway, there was a lotta differing opinion on whether old Keeper meant what he said about having enough. I thought about this all across the lake. Keeper was one of the people who were there in Stanley’s cabin to meet me that first day. I hadn’t seen too much of him after that, being so busy getting to know folks and visiting around like I was then. I remember carrying him outta the bush once when he’d passed out in there and was getting rained on real good and I remember catching his eye one night on the shoreline staring out across the lake while I was sitting there doing the same, but we weren’t exactly buddies or anything. Still, one of the things you learn around here first is that you gotta respect what the old folks either tell you or ask you to do. It’s part of the way we are. So I headed over to find out what the old guy wanted.

  I stopped by home to grab a warmer jacket and found my ma sitting at the table. Ma’s one a the best moccasin makers in the area and she was hard at it again that night. She was trying to teach me how to do things like beadwork and stuff but my fingers never went the way they were supposed to and I was always leaving little piles of half-done things lying around for her to fix up. Anyway, she was sitting there sewing away like her hands don’t need help from her eyes and she was smiling.

  “Ah-ha. Got holda you, eh? Keeper’s lookin’ for you.”

  “What for? That old guy doesn’t even hardly
know me.”

  “Well, that ol’ guy’s got somethin’ he wantsta tell you. Might help you find your way around.”

  “You talk to him?”

  “Hey-yuh,” she said. “We been friends long time, Keeper’n me. We were in the residential school together for a while and we even been drunk a few times too.”

  “Oh, I get it. Maybe now that he’s all sobered up and got his memory back he wants to tell me some juicy stories about him and you!”

  “Hmmpfh,” Ma said, but smiling all the while. “Ain’t no juicy stories! Even if there were, that old guy couldn’t do any real good stories proper justice anyhow!”

  “So where is he?”

  “ ’Member the old cabin we showed you round the bay?”

  “Where my grampa lived?”

  “Hey-yuh. He’s stayin’ there now.”

  “ ’Kay then. I’ll be back soon.”

  “ ‘’Kay then. Careful walkin’ through that bush.”

  “ ’Kay then.”

  My grampa was the oldest person on this reserve when he died. He’d have been about ninety-eight and passed on about three years before I made it home. He’d never ever learned English and from what my ma and other people told me, he was the last of the real traditional Ojibway around here. He had a sweat lodge near the cabin where I was headed, made tobacco offerings, tried to help people and held pipe ceremonies at his place now and again. Real traditional man. I never knew anything about all that when I went out to meet Keeper that night and frankly all the talk I’d heard about it freaked me out. Sometimes it was hard to shake those old images of my people out of my head, and when I heard talk about spirits and ceremonies and stuff I always envisioned big fires with drums going crazy, people dancing around in strange get-ups, war whoops and planning a raid on the unsuspecting settlers. It was spooky on accounta life around here was nothing like that.

  It was always the hidden parts of my people that worried me the most. It was fine to wander around the reserve learning bits of the language and how to hunt and stuff, but all the talk of ceremony and ritual bothered me. I remember watching my uncle Gilbert praying and sprinkling tobacco by the base of a big pine tree when he took me out deer hunting one day. Gilbert said it was what we were supposed to do before we went out. Making that offering of tobacco showed respect for the animal we were gonna take and was also a prayer for our hunt to be good. My ma was always singing and praying and covering herself with the smoke from smoldering cedar, moss and something called sweetgrass, but she never tried to force me into doing any of it.

  I was never a religious guy. I’d been forced to go to Sunday school in some of the homes I was in and I liked some of the stories about Jesus and how he always looked after kids on accounta I wasn’t getting to much looking after as a kid. But I never followed it up. I got old enough to not go to Sunday school anymore. A couple of times me’n Delma went to the church she attended occasionally and I really dug that on accounta the choir was really funky and alive but I didn’t really listen to the preacher at all. Praying and church-going were just something you did when you had to and I didn’t see what it had to do with being Indian. Besides, all the ritual I saw around me was far different from what I was used to seeing from people who were supposed to be praying. It all struck me as being pretty close to voodoo.

  But Grampa was a big believer. He belonged to a society that called themselves Midewewin. Some of our people called them medicine men and when I heard that I really wanted no part of it. To me medicine men were large painted-up guys with the scary faces shaking rattles and small dead animals around people’s heads and sending them off on the warpath. I remember thinking that if I had to go and see one just to stick around White Dog it was gonna be back to black for me.

  Stanley tried to explain it all to me one night but it got to be so complicated that I just shut him off in my mind. I figured all I really needed to do to be an Indian was learn to do what everyone else was doing and I’d be okay. I didn’t see anybody doing any big ceremonies so I figured it was okay for me to leave it alone. But heading through the dark bush towards the cabin where my grampa lived out his last days got me to thinking about him and his beliefs and the amount of stuff I had to learn about my own people and my own history still.

  I could see the lights of the cabin from a long way off. It’s a heavy darkness around here. It almost seems like the rocks and trees and even the water sometimes all soak up whatever light there might be. It kind of explains why the Ojibway got to be such a superstitious bunch and why their legends are filled with all kinds of monsters and spirits.

  He was sitting in the doorway smoking his pipe when I walked up.

  “Ahnee, Garnet,” he said, “ahnee” being the way we Ojibways greet each other, means howdy and all that.

  “Ahnee, Keeper. Boy, you sure look good!”

  “Oh, meegwetch, meegwetch,” he said and stuck his hand out. “Feel pretty good now too!”

  I watched as he paused to relight his pipe and noticed how his hands didn’t shake like I remembered.

  “Pretty steady, eh? First thing people notice ’bout us ex-drunks.”

  “Must feel good.”

  “Hey-yuh. Haven’t felt like this in a long, long time.”

  Around here the old people, even the women, take to smoking pipes and you have to wait a long time sometimes before they seem to recall they’re talking with you and get around to it again. What with smoking their pipes and staring away across the sky like they do, there’s always huge holes in the line of talk. Not like black people who keep up the patter nonstop. Indians stare at the sky lots between words. Waiting for the words to fall, I guess. So I waited awhile before he got around to talking again.

  “Used to spend lotsa time here once. Old man an’ I did lotsa talkin’ here.”

  “Old man? My grampa you mean?”

  “Hey-yuh. Harold. Your grampa. Knew him a long time. Since I was a small boy. He was the lasta the people round here really knew about Midewewin. You heard about that?”

  “Not lots. Heard they were medicine men, did lots of ceremonies, stuff like that.”

  He laughed just then. It was good to hear. It came from somewhere deep inside him and echoed across the bay.

  “Stuff like that. Stuff like that. Well, Midewewin were the people’s guardians. All kindsa people gotta have someone lookin’ out over the world for ’em, teach em how to walk around in it, show ’em where they gotta go, how to get there. Midewewin did that. Other Indyuns got their teachers an’ protectors too, but us, we had Midewewin.

  “They used their ceremonies an’ rituals to keep the people healthy. Knew all about plants and animals, all the teachin’s that come from there. Knew the world. Knew the universe. Knew about everything an’ did lotsa prayin’ for the people.

  “Had a real natchrel way. Made stories an’ legends for the people to learn from. Made rules for behavin’ meant to keep the people together through anything. Used the pipe, sweat lodge an’ prayer. Lotsa prayer.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Hmmpfh,” Keeper said, and stared away across the lake for a while before he continued. “Times changed. Times changed an’ the people changed too. When the whiteman came here with all his shiny things the people got distracted. Started lookin’ more at the whiteman’s world than their own. Pretty soon work an’ money an’ gettin’ those shiny things got to mean more than prayer an’ ceremony. See, you look too long at the shiny an’ your eyes go funny. Can’t see the world like you used to. People didn’t see that the ones who carried the knowledge were startin’ to die. No one was coming around to ask an’ learn. Pretty soon the old ones were all gone and mosta what they knew went with ’em. Works that way sometimes in this world. Gotta starve awhile before you learn to recognize your hunger. People are just now startin’ to get the idea they’re missin’ something. The old ones who knew are gone from here though. There’s still teachers around other places though. Still someone to go see.”


  He paused to thump his pipe against the cabin wall, and it echoed across the lake like someone beating a small drum way off in the darkness.

  “You mean there’s no one around here anymore who knows those things?”

  There was another long silence. I could hear him breathing deep and long and he started nodding his head up and down.

  “Almost no one.” He got up slowly and went into the cabin. I could hear things being moved around and finally the first faint glow of the fire flickered through the door as he opened it and gestured to me.

  “Peen-dig-en. Peen-dig-en. Come in. Got somethin’ to show you.”

  We sat by the fire and he reached down to cradle a large hand drum in his arms. A hand drum is just what the name says. A drum you hold in your hand to play. Ours are made of rounded wood frames from the trunk of a tree and covered with deer hide or moose hide stretched across it and tied all together on the underneath side. Most of the ones I’d seen were plain but the one Keeper held was painted with a bright, intricate design.

  “This was your grampa’s. Before that it was his grampa’s. Been around long time this drum. Maybe three, four hundred years.”

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked respectfully, nervous that if he dropped it it might just shatter.

  “Harold. He passed it on to me. But it don’t belong to me.”

  “Who’s it belong to?”

  “Drum like this always belongs to the people. Same as the songs you sing with it. Old man taught me some of those songs, told me about their meanin’. When he died he left a message with your mother that I was responsible for the drum. Learnin’ those things meant I had a responsibility. See, the drum’s always gotta have a keeper. Called a drum keeper really.”

  “Is that why everyone calls you Keeper?”

  “Well, yes, but that’s not really why.”

  He took his time reloading his pipe and I watched as his face got softer and softer in the flickering light of the fire. It reminded me of the look on my ma’s face when she told me about my dad. He looked over at me for a while before he started to explain.