Fly by Night Read online

  “Nice Wiigwaasi-mitig you got there.” Whitedeer ran his hand along the birch tree’s bark. “Where’d it find you?” The old man eyed TJ.

  “Laying not fifty feet from the woods near my breakfast nook,” TJ gestured toward the direction of his house as if seeing the back windows.

  “You put tobacco down?”

  TJ didn’t answer.

  The old man rolled his eyes and shook his head as he said. In a teasing voice he said, “Of course not. Ma’iingan Ninde, why would I think you’d do the right thing. You of all people, the protector.” The old man laughed as he watched TJ fidget. “Way to teach your boys to give thanks, whatcha think lads?” The old man opened his arms wide and turned toward them. Neither spoke.

  TJ had no comeback either. He was no protector. He’d been powerless against the courts, the special interests, he hadn’t even stayed with his mother as she was dying. He shook his head slowly and shrugged. Little did the old man know that he was right for completely different reasons.

  TJ glanced over to Skye and Gavin and each shrugged and turned, chuckling to see their father humbled and busted by an elder for tobacco blessings, where years ago it had been one of them.

  “I’ll give you tobacco,” the old man said to him. “Do it when you get back.”

  “I will.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Whitedeer mumbled under his breath and turned to Gavin and Skye. “Do it for your stubborn-ass Nindede.” The old man threw up his hands in mock disgust. He then began to examine the birch trunk. “Been down at least six months or so, I’ll bet,” the old man said, his eye still on TJ. “Given the underside rot.”

  Old Whitedeer smiled in a knowing way.

  “Your mom’s spirit tree.” The old man looked at TJ as he touched the shaggy bark. “Laughing Eyes was special alright. Didn’t believe a word of the old ones but I’m old enough to remember back to the time when she did.” He held TJ’s eye. “But it don’t matter what a person believes.” He grinned in a secretive way. “What is is what is.” He waved for them to follow him into his shop.

  TJ and his sons carried the trunk, following the old man along to his sawmill, his slippers making scuff marks in the dirt without so much as lifting his feet.

  “Bring ’er in.” Whitedeer kept motioning with his hand as he held open the door, waving them in as if they were backing up a trailer. He then held up a hand to stop. His long white ponytail was snaked up around the nape of his neck. He reached and flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights of the shop.

  He motioned for them to pivot the birch trunk as he studied it.

  “Hmm,” Whitedeer said, seeing things in the wood. His callused hands made swishing noises over the shaggy bark. “You limbed it clean. Most don’t bother. Lay ’er down there.”

  Whitedeer pulled his hands back and clapped with a decisiveness that spoke of a plan. “Alright.” He motioned with one clawlike finger that was more clawlike than human.

  They set it down exactly where he’d indicated on the table near the saw blade.

  “Now go wait by the door, all of yas.” The old man waved them away. “I’ll call if I need you or when I’m done,” he said. “Go, get outta here.” He shooed the three of them out like a black fly swarm. “I ain’t responsible for no lost fingers and parts,” old man Whitedeer muttered.

  His whole operation was rickety; the saw blade looked precarious if not lethal, the old wooden bed was wobbly. There’d been talk in the community of shutting him down before he hurt himself, like adult children take car keys away from elderly parents. But no one dared since they marveled at how the old man still had a full set of digits. Yet with each job, people held their breath, not wanting it to be their project that broke the old man’s lucky streak.

  As the birch made several passes through Whitedeer’s hands to debark and be flattened on all four sides, the sweet minty scent of wintergreen infused the air; the three of them inhaled the pungent fragrance of birch. After several more passes, the tree was cut into more than enough boards to build Gloria’s Spirit House.

  Whitedeer stopped cutting and shouted to TJ over the noise. “Asphalt or shake roof?”

  “Uh—shake.”

  “For Laughing Eyes,” the old man said, and then worked the boards into smaller and finer pieces.

  Whitedeer switched off the power and said, “For the one who’d lost faith though we’d all believed in her.”

  The shop was disturbingly quiet. The silence was like another person in the room. Gavin and Skye were somber. The old man had stacked the wood into two piles, motioning TJ over.

  The old man searched TJ’s face as if wanting to ask something but then forgot.

  TJ reached for his wallet from his back pocket.

  The old man held up both hands, powdered with sawdust. “No charge for Spirit Houses. Especially this one.”

  The rough-cut boards had been trimmed to the exact length. All TJ needed to do was assemble.

  “This stack is her house. I’m numbering ’em all.” The old man touched the pile of freshly cut wood, winking at Gavin and Skye in such a way that made them smile. “You kids call it idiot-proof.”

  Then he turned to TJ. “The other is leftover.” He touched it with the toe of his slipper. “It’s important to take this pile out first before anything else. Leave Laughing Eyes’s wood in your truck. Bring the extra to the exact spot where you found the tree. You following me?” he asked, waiting for TJ to nod. “It’s important,” the old man said. “Clear all around it, put down tobacco, and then burn it like we do—ask Charlotte. She knows the prayers.” His eyes stayed on TJ until he nodded and then he turned to Gavin and Skye. “Help Laughing Eyes make the journey. Her spirit came to you in this tree,” he said as he touched the stack of wood. The old man seemed to choke up. “Now she needs release. Sprinkle tobacco around where you found it to give thanks. You, her only blood, can do it.”

  * * *

  Later that afternoon Charlotte had joined to witness the burning, pulling the sides of her sweater close around her ribs in the chilly September air before the fire caught. Once it did, the wood had been so dry it was ablaze, the heat so intense that the four of them stepped back as if pushed. Charlotte, slipping her arm through both her sons’, watched as the smoke rose up through the trees, up into the blue sky that Gloria had so loved that she’d painted all the walls of her house the same color.

  It didn’t take long before the stack was reduced to white ash. The words purification and free drifted through TJ’s mind.

  They’d worked late into the night in the garage, assembling and nailing together Gloria’s Spirit House. By midnight it was finished and they’d all stood watching, imagining it in place over his mother’s final resting place.

  * * *

  Gloria’s funeral was held on Tuesday, on one of those September days when the sky is so blue it doesn’t look real and its reflection on Lake Superior even less so.

  Golden birches flourished the tops of the red rock cliffs for which the reservation was named. They cast images onto a lake so glassy calm that you’d have blinked and strained your eyes, thinking it a mirage. Hard to believe in only a month angry Superior would be tossing up boulders the size of small cars.

  Someone had tied tobacco pouches of blue and green in tree branches toward the eastern doorway. Giving thanks for his mother’s long life. She’d helped and touched so many as a nurse, as a friend, and all stood facing the east where spirits begin to journey—the east, which breathes life and then takes our last exhale to complete the circle.

  As TJ stood graveside his brow furrowed, watching how upset the others were. He hoped no one would notice he wasn’t. Gavin and Skye huddled next to him, solemn as they watched their Nokomis’s body being lowered into the shallow grave in the quiet cemetery tucked away on Blueberry Road.

  “She lived a long and good life,” Charlotte whispered into the collar of TJ’s shirt.

  He grunted back. “It wasn’t a good life.” He resente
d the stab at revisionist history. There’d been enough of that around for centuries.

  “It was her life, her way, her fate,” Charlotte said. “It was what happened.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Some had come out in their finery; others from an interrupted workday, the health-care workers in uniform from the Tribal Health Clinic that Gloria had helped establish.

  Even fleets of fish tugboats had taken a momentary pause during high gill net fishing season as captains and multigenerational fisherman had shown up, having had Gloria treat them for simple wounds, removing fishhooks from delicate areas over the years.

  TJ had even heard that Petersen Foods, the reservation grocery store, had locked its doors for an hour so that staff could attend and the Spirit gas station a block away had stuck a note on the door, Be back in an hour.

  Tears finally stung his eyes. For the life his mother almost had but didn’t and for both of their fires that may have burned brighter had his father kept his promise. Sadness radiated down into his fingertips—a woman with a broken heart who by proxy had broken his for the better part of his life. And he’d been powerless to unbreak it though there’d been nothing more that he’d wanted to do—an unbreakable love that had broken her.

  Gloria had carried her sadness quietly for the rest of her life, hoping that no one would notice. Wrapped around her like a blanket for all of her eighty-six years, wanting neither pity nor remembrance, but TJ knew. He could see it by the turn of her head or in the motion of her hand to brush away a wisp of hair from her eyes.

  After the funeral he’d said to Charlotte, “I feel cleansed, at peace—like after a downdraft blows the ground clean.”

  “You mean the downdraft that comes right before the storm?” Charlotte had laughed in a menacing way.

  A flare of anger had clutched at his chest—a little boy’s undefended heart—as they’d driven out of the cemetery. A surge of dread followed in the form of a whisper, saying that all he’d been hiding would soon be exposed. She whom his father had preferred. And before getting out of the truck at home, he was a seven-year-old boy again. Running after his father’s car in the red cloud of road dust, yelling for him to come back.

  “Don’t leave it to the attorneys,” Charlotte had said, staring at him as he glanced away. “You know what you have to do. Find her. Do it or I will.” His wife climbed out of the truck and closed the door. “I’m sick of living with ghosts.”

  TJ sat for a few moments longer.

  Just then a gust of noodin, or wind, blew through the needles of a white pine, making clacking noises like chattering disembodied voices. Another breeze blew through the drying leaves of an oak tree, tricking him to look for the sound of rushing water.

  TJ looked up. It was only the tree. He’d lived there all his to know there was no running water. His mother’s spirit breathed into the wind and was gone.

  “Bye, Mom.” He mouthed the English words; there were no words for good-bye in Ojibwe.

  5

  Her nose was always in a book. Amelia would sort through the different species of dolphins and squid, and riffle through the piles of library books that littered her childhood bedroom floor as she contemplated the composition of seawater vs. brackish water. Thick glasses from second grade on had made two semipermanent dents on either side of her nose. Well into adulthood she would smile through closed lips, concealing teeth that were slightly bucked, noticeable enough to elicit “Uhh, what’s up, doc?” Braces had been out of reach.

  And while Amelia hated the mall, she’d beg to be taken back to the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn.

  “Can we go again, please, Mom?” she’d bargain. “I’ll even clean the toilet.”

  “Tell your father to take you on his day off.” Pen would push back her bangs as Amelia sensed her mother’s patience was shot after a long day.

  Then a teacher of Amelia’s called one day after school.

  “Is this Mrs. Drakos? Amelia’s mom?”

  “What’d she do?” Pen put the dishrag down and sat at the kitchen table primed for a good story.

  “Nothing—I mean everything’s fine,” the teacher reassured. “I want to talk about Amelia.”

  Pen paused. “So what about her?” she asked, hoping to hear some juicy story about Amelia getting caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom or with makeup, anything to peg her daughter as normal.

  “Amelia has a very keen mind.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  The teacher was quiet.

  “With your permission, I’d like to put her in the school science club with some of the older children.”

  “How much older?”

  “Seventh graders. Two years older.”

  Pen imagined her underdeveloped daughter, always on the low end of the pediatrician’s growth charts, surrounded by older children. Amelia was vulnerable, yet impenetrable. How could a child be both?

  “Umm … will there be boys?”

  “It’s all boys.”

  There was a long pause. It might not be bad, depending on the type of boys who would be in a science club.

  “I’ll have to talk to my husband about it,” Pen said.

  “But she’ll be able to learn more,” the teacher advocated. “Plus the New York Aquarium is running their annual contest for students to win a spot in their four-week summer camp.”

  “I said I’ll talk to my husband,” Penny said.

  “Alright, Mrs. Drakos,” the teacher said. “Can I speak to Amelia about it?”

  “I told you I’ll talk with my husband first.”

  “Alright then.”

  Each of Amelia’s childhood friends was just like her. Amelia’s mother would sigh and shake her head, at a loss as to how to spice up the life of a child who found her own birthday embarrassing. Who would marry such a girl?

  “Jesus, she’s that smart?” Ted asked later that night after Amelia had gone to bed. “Sure she’s mine?”

  Pen punched him hard in the arm as he feigned having the wind knocked out him.

  “Let her do the science club for Christ’s sake, Pen.”

  “But don’t you think it’ll make her—weirder?”

  He chuckled. “Hey—Amelia’s Amelia. She’s not you.” He got up and reached for her, pinching Penny’s buttocks on the chair until she squirmed, playfully slapping away his hand, acting disgusted yet still delighted after all these years.

  “You were probably sexy even at that age.” Ted moved to pinch her inner thigh.

  “Oh, stop already.” She slapped his arm again, this time with a different meaning.

  * * *

  At eighteen years old Amelia was awarded a full scholarship to State University of New York at Stony Brook’s prestigious School of Atmospheric and Marine Sciences. To her parents’ delight they could instead spend their savings for her education on a trip to Greece.

  “We’re taking our second honeymoon,” Penelope announced while driving Amelia to the freshman dorm that fall. In reality they’d never taken a first. The couple had gotten married on the fly with Amelia well on the way—her mother’s growing abdomen camouflaged by creative fabric draping on the bodice of her wedding gown.

  Amelia’s father, Ted, had worked as a pressman, running building-sized machines that spun rolls of newsprint into daily newspapers. Penelope, or Pen as they called her, worked as a product assistant in a pillow factory in Long Island City typing, filing, and placing orders for fabric.

  Amelia was quiet like her father, an anomaly to an ebullient mother who frequently exploded into tears, laughter, or fighting words. Often, her mother wouldn’t even know if her daughter was home.

  “Am?” Her mother would pause, calling after hearing a few indiscriminate noises. “That you?”

  “Yeah, Ma, it’s me.”

  Amelia did everything she was told without complaint, though often her mother would try to provoke a reaction, just to check that her daughter was human.

  “What can I say?” her mother would remark t
o Ted, throwing up her hands in response to a daughter who coveted the Encyclopedia of Marine Life more than experimenting with makeup or getting her ears pierced. “All this kid does is read,” she whispered.

  “So what, Pen?” Ted would say over the top of the Long Island Press newspaper. “It’s not heroin.”

  “I know I couldn’t ask for a better daughter,” Pen would qualify, murmuring just loud enough for him to hear. “Dear God, help me raise this strange child.”

  “Hey—we’re all different.” Ted would raise his voice. “You wanna believe the stork fucked up, then go ahead and believe it.”

  * * *

  Before her parents’ trip to Greece in November, they’d let Amelia use the car while they were gone, providing she came home to drive them to JFK Airport. What luck to take other students along to the more obscure saltwater tributaries along the easternmost sections of Long Island’s South Shore to look for puffer fish.

  Amelia had never seen her mother as happy as the day she dropped them off at Kennedy Airport. The day before they’d left, Penny had come in and sat down on Amelia’s bed, smiling eagerly as she nodded. “You want a gold bracelet from Greece? A necklace?”

  Instead Amelia had handed over a detailed list complete with descriptions and drawings of seashells from the Aegean Islands where they were headed.

  “Look for this one.” Amelia pointed to one drawing as her father listened in the doorway.

  Her mother had already lost interest and stood to leave.

  “This is the important one.”

  “What’s so important about it?” he asked, replacing Penny in the spot on her bed.

  She began to read. “‘The Tyrian purple snail has long been prized for its dye dating all the way back to the Phoenicians and Hebrews.’” She’d looked up. “Dad. You listening?”

  “Uh-huh,” he hummed.

  “‘Long prized for its purple color that does not fade,’” she looked up again, “‘… but rather becomes brighter with sun exposure.’”

  “Okay,” her father said. “So where do I find them?”

  “Low tide. Near caves.”

  “Can’t promise, but I’ll look.”