The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer Read online

Prairie soil

  Watched branches drift by

  On the Red River

  “I married a sauvage,” he laughed

  “I made four Métis.

  Beware the sauvages!” he’d say

  Wagging his finger at the kids.

  I made green onion soup

  And told them to beware white men, black tobacco, and

  Grain whiskey

  “Where are your parents?” they asked their mother

  But I laughed, too

  Said, “My children will be my parents

  You, daughter, will remember me as a sauvage,

  As a child of the long grass

  And you will be a mother

  Of a brave people”

  But I wished I could touch

  The stone walls

  And two old French people

  Looking in a mirror

  For a long-lost son.

  Belief

  (Conflict of beliefs in Métis country)

  “I would appreciate,”

  Said the Jesuit

  “If you would not cross yourself

  When talking of the Wind Spirit

  As if you believed. You cannot

  Have God and this pagan spirit

  Both in your mind.”

  “I would appreciate,”

  Said my husband, watching the wall,

  That those castrés in Montreal

  Spend a few days on the grasslands

  Hunting buffalo. Or maybe

  A very big hour in a very small canoe

  On the Big Sea Water.”

  He puffed at his pipe. The wind

  Blew smoke down the chimney

  Tapped on the one glass pane

  Jean had spent his best on.

  “I think God knows the Wind Spirit

  A lot better than you, my friend.”

  Dark Clothes began again, but

  The wind snatched the door open,

  Took the hat off the young priest

  And slammed the door again.

  Outside, thunderclouds ranted.

  Inside, Jean poured wine

  For both of them.

  “I think,” said the man in black afterwards,

  “That I’ll check The Book again.

  I probably missed a passage somewhere.”

  I surely missed a passage somewhere.”

  When You are Not With Me

  (Jean’s poem for his Heron Feathers the first summer he goes to the buffalo hunt without her)

  When you are not with me, he said, I am become old

  Like a forgotten ring of stones

  And yellow weeds

  Far out on the prairies

  When you are not with me I am become silent

  As a coulee

  Where the fingers of the wind

  Cannot reach, and the creek

  Is become dust.

  Out of a Prairie Thunderstorm

  (Every badly treated group can use a savior)

  In the Holy Mide huts in our village

  Mostly men

  Singing songs

  To the Grandfather winds

  That berries might ripen

  And the world might be kind

  In the church

  Men, all men

  Chanting to the Old Guy

  That the skies might open, and

  The world disappear

  Someday, out on the prairie

  Where the sky holds seven eagles

  In the hour of that terrible silence

  Before the thunderstorm

  The whirlwind will make the one

  Who’ll set us free

  Her pure right hand

  Reaching out to

  Caress the forehead

  Of the world.

  Heron Feathers and Rabbit Trails

  (Jean has learned to love Heron Feathers.)

  Across the landscape of my mind you

  Plodded steadily, and though

  Your feet hurt, you watched the horizon, for

  What storm the purple hills beyond

  Might lurk.

  But no, in the bright sunlight you only found the

  Grass longer than you had thought

  And this was in the first year of our marriage.

  Though you followed rabbit trails

  There were bushes, there were brambles

  Growing hanging over, where warm creatures

  Laughed and spied

  Not so simple, you thought, but you must know

  The horizon, the hills, the maybe storm

  And that was at the end of

  The second year of our marriage

  And then your eyes grew watchful, wake

  And the underbrush, the trees that hid

  What you should know, after, just after

  The time you sat on the open hill

  O, but you could not find, you could not

  Your way, and while you tried, you knew, you did

  Of eyes that watched

  And then you turned

  And then you stopped

  From in the dark of forest

  Were eyes

  My eyes

  A wink

  Ah!

  I had you!

  The Reason Why

  (Love sometimes waits )

  He always wondered why. Looking into obsidian

  Eyes did not answer, though he certainly

  Remained grateful for the

  Oblivion I granted when the grandfather

  North wind shook his Catholic soul some nights.

  Ferociously we followed purple horizons

  Every buffalo run taking us further west

  And those days I loved more than him

  The first years. Yet the

  Heart of woman has no real way to

  End and finally along the

  Red River Valley I took his

  Smile into my woodland woman soul.

  The Church

  (The first church comes to the Red River Community)

  I told the kids that surely

  They built the new church because

  They could not find their God

  And

  That they built it on a hill

  So they could be the first to see God coming

  Striding, I suppose, proudly

  Between the cart tracks

  And out of the poplar bushes

  I said they built it solidly

  To keep out the manitous

  And to say this small patch of

  Endless steppe will have no spirits

  Till God comes.

  The young priest, half his fingers lost to frostbite

  Prays in the easy morning

  But when the kids put the prairies at their backs

  - That monstrous sky, the endless wind -

  And opened the door

  There was only a bent man

  Mumbling, trying not to tell God

  To hurry up just a bit.

  A Remarriage

  (Heron Feathers signs on to Jean’s faith.)

  Jean insisted we get married in the new church

  Fine, I thought, better that his God be on our side

  Just in case.

  How can one have too many Gods?

  I told the priest he had a face like

  A moose’s afterbirth

  But it was in Cree, and quiet so he thought

  I was saying “I do.”

  Jean nearly choked, but

  I figured if Jesus was any good He’d have seen us

  Married by the lake two years before.

  I’ve often wondered since if Jesus

  Is a lonesome spirit that wanders around

  The insides of churches hoping

  Someone will come visit

  Occasionally

  And just how much Cree He knows.

  Part 6: The Red River Valley

  Lollie drives south to Notre Dame du Portage, a c
ommunity along the Red River Valley in Manitoba. She likes what she sees of the prairies. Looking for Métis, Lollie meets Lucy Bonneau and Lucy’s brother George, and learns of the bitterness of the Métis. Nonetheless, she finds the beginnings of a sense of community there.

  Precipice

  (The vast and tumbling prairie sky awes Lollie)

  In the stockyards of heart

  In a night prairie rain

  Are all the good-byes of a lifetime

  Are all the mornings of years

  The drops on my glasses

  Make a carnival of the streetlights

  I become the wind in the wheatfields

  Rider of the western stars

  In the glass vaults of possibility

  In the fragile winds of memory

  My brain links vertical rock to horizon

  In the rhythm of animate breathing

  I stand transfixed by falling water

  Don’t blame me for seeing

  Further than I’ve ever seen

  In the tumult of prairie sky

  I find the precipice of my being

  The Transformation

  (Just an observation in a highway diner)

  There's a warm wind through the poplars

  The cashier exists only in her own mind

  18-wheelers grind into the parking lot

  In a flatulence of tired hissing.

  This truck stop's

  On the border of the prairie

  Somebody's heart is singing

  Outside this cafeteria

  In the morning light

  A child leads two adults in

  They're tired

  Probably drove all night

  From Thunder Bay

  Faces expressionless as

  Cheyenne at breakfast

  Howdy Toronto people

  Just out of the woods

  And you're starting to look

  Like the natives.

  Not Far Enough

  (Lollie stops in at a small town along the Red River)

  “Long way from Toronto,” I said

  Watching the two drunks

  In the doorway

  “Not far enough,” he said

  Handing me a plate of fries

  “Not nearly far enough.”

  “Long time since the buffalo,” I said

  Watching the man parking a pickup

  “Not long enough,” he said

  Snaffling the vinegar from the next table for me

  “Not nearly long enough.”

  Rivers

  (Looking at the Red River in the moonlight)

  Red River flows like gold

  Under a midnight moon

  From Indian lands

  Through Métis lands

  To white man’s land

  This is not geography

  It is history

  All the years the drums of woman hearts

  Impelled a more living red river

  In Indian tipis

  In Métis shacks

  Among white men’s cruel cities

  This is not biology

  This is the warmth of woman’s body.

  Shopworn

  (Lollie’s wonderful quest continues)

  It rained at dawn, the day

  Edging in slowly like a bag lady

  Dragging shopworn clothes.

  I hunched over an arborite table

  At Whiteman’s Motel

  Listening to tractor-trailers rampage

  Along the highway, spitting water like

  Mad robotic hippopotami.

  Forty gazillion trees

  And I’m stuck with imitation wood.

  The waitress looked like me

  A thousand years old

  Give or take a week

  So I asked her,

  “Where do I find some Métis?”

  Startled. “Not me. Not here.”

  A long pause. Two old people put off

  Their Winnebego world for another

  Bowl of cornflakes.

  “Down the highway a mile.

  Turn left. Ask for Lucy

  At the Quick Stop.”

  Then embarrassed, she left to check

  The cornflakes couple

  Leaving me watching puddles

  On the pavement, and

  Playing with a small white feather.

  I Guess I’m a Métis

  (Lollie meets Lucy)

  “I guess I’m a Métis ,” I said

  Trying to dance around the subject a bit.

  “My grandmother...”

  She silenced me with a raised hand

  Put her fingers on my forehead

  “Yup,” she said, “you sure are. I can feel it.

  It’s strong, like the movement of Mother Earth.

  Hang loose, babe, we’ll find you

  A plug of bannock and sell you a sash

  But you’ll have to leave tobacco

  At the foot of a cross, then

  Baptize a moose.”

  “Been there,” I said, “Done it.

  Didn’t get the T-shirt, though. Say

  Any more Métis around, or are we

  The only two left in this province?”

  “You’re a bear for punishment,” she sighed

  “There’s a Métis band playing tonight at the Legion.

  You can buy me a beer.”

  Then she hugged me.

  Fiddlesticks

  (Lollie at the Legion hall by the Red River)

  I was a clarinet

  At the corner of Bay and Dundas

  Playing for charity coins

  Now I believe I’m a violin

  In an old prairie hall

  I am happy to be sitting in a corner

  Local women watching me

  Cautiously

  My ancestor, I wanted to say

  Lived on this land

  Watched the sunsets

  Heard the fiddles

  Now you’re stuck with me

  In this hall, in the rain

  Late in September.

  Second Sight

  (Lollie thinks about her lost marriage)

  If he could see me, now

  Dancing in this native hall

  I don’t think he saw me

  For years before he left.

  Actually, I like to think

  He never did.

  I know he’d wonder who this woman is

  And what tiger created her

  Burning bright.

  To Birches

  (Lollie sort of takes to being part of a group for a change.)

  Next life

  I would be a tree.

  Not the open-field oak

  Not the solitary pine:

  I would be a birch

  One among many

  Birches grow after fires

  I would grow

  After this fire

  Beside the black stumps

  When the woods are gold

  And alive

  With the rustling of squirrels

  My one white line

  Leaning down the slope a bit

  Tracing the edge

  Of happiness

  Taking a Trip to the Past

  (Lucy disapproves of Lollie’s mucking with the past)

  “Bad disease,” she told me

  “You walk around

  With your head facing back

  Do that, you’ll trip

  Over the future.

  Let There Be Pencil

  (Perhaps she’s not as naive as I thought she was.)

  Lucy read my poems, twice.

  She nodded and we walked

  To a graveyard

  The stones were warm in the late summer sun

  The river far away, the big steeple

  Very near

  It’s okay;

  I was Catholic, once

  “Cree,” she said, showing me

  An ivy branch carved into an old stone.
/>   I sat on it and watched the river.

  “This one died at thirty-three,” Lucy noted

  With four of her kids next to her.

  How does your Heron Feathers do so well?”

  I kept my back to the Church.

  “Because I made her better.

  Oh, I was going to give her a bit of tragedy

  But

  I guess I lost my pencil about then.

  The sunshine felt good and I could see that

  The river would roll on, one way or another

  Till God finishes Her book

  Or, if we’re lucky

  Loses Her pencil.

  If There Were No Death

  (Dream on, but dream quickly)

  If there were no death

  I would fill the churches

  With homeless people

  And teach them bawdy songs

  If there were no death

  I would grow cabbages

  In old churchyards

  Anoint them as they grow

  Put crowns on their heads

  If there were no death

  I would spit in God’s eye.

  I would live long enough

  To dream a good universe

  Words

  (Lollie, at Lucy’s urging, visits the local church. Once inside, our heroine discovers she’s losing faith in words. A bad sign for a would-be poet.)

  Across the skies of doom and dawn

  The angels vend their wares

  Across the skies of doom and dawn

  The people buy

  And all the angels sell are words

  Same as I

  Same as I

  Across the lands of seas and sands

  The prophets dance and sing

  Across the lands of seas and sands

  The people listen, carefully

  And all the prophets sell are words

  Same as I

  Same as I

  When God comes at last

  You will know

  You will know this sign

  There will be

  (Thankfully)

  There will be

  (Gratefully)

  No words.

  Reaching for Heaven

  (You can take the girl out of the church, but it’s a bit tricky getting the church out of the girl.)

  How far into the darkness can you go

  And still come running

  Towards a candle

  Reaching for heaven,

  The long arm of Jesus

  Or at least

  One warm hand in a church

  Empty but for bats

  And you are inspired to applaud

  The shadows?

  People should not have a childhood

  Until they are old enough

  To protect themselves

  And to tell

  Fact from God’s

  Mafioso protection racket.

  Jesus forgive me, I have sunned.

  She’s determined to believe

  (Lollie notices that most of the people in the church are women.)

  Mop and broom were all that God

  Ever gave to Eve

  But she left that garden trapped in life

  Still wanting to believe

  Running through the hills, she

  Tried for bone on bone

  But reaching for His turning eye

  She found herself alone

  From the bucket that she bore

  The serpent tried to say

  That tears and duty were all she'd have

  Throughout her mortal stay

  Later in the day, she

  Tried for heart and heart, but

  "You are woman," the serpent said

  You'll always be apart"

  Mop and broom were all that God

  Ever gave to Eve

  But in some prairie parish church

  She’s determined to believe.

  When They Hanged Him