The Visit

 

The frozen lake cracked beneath his feet and the wind blew tiny crystalline snow daggers into his face above where the scarf covered his neck and chin. Still, he thought, it’s a beautiful day for a visit, he loved to just sit and talk with her, though it was mostly a one-way conversation. On the way over to see her he enjoyed the vastness of solitude on the winter lake, there was no one out here, just him, the ice, and the dark water below. He had lived on the shore since childhood, he knew her through all the seasons and he understood her black waters unlike anyone else.

This journey of reunion had taken place annually, since the first Christmas after he lost the children. A black cloud crossed his mind when he looked back at those times, the long days when he was simply frozen by overwhelming grief. He had endured the summer months that year and a lonesome fall as well, by gathering berries, roots and fruit, by fishing for Whitefish, Trout and Pike and by hunting Moose and Caribou, and by working his trapline, but when Christmas came, when all he did was mostly hang around the cabin, his daily routine was not distractive enough to hold his attention very well and he fell ill with sadness. The memories of their simple Christmases haunted him, and he wept continuously, falling deep into depression; there was no one there to talk to, to seek comfort from, to converse with.

They had come for them in early Summer, while he was away at the sanitorium battling Consumption along with so many other Indigenous people. He had no choice but to leave them with her, against his own suspicion that she could not be trusted. She was under strict instruction to leave through the back trails as soon as she saw a boat approaching, especially in the early morning. No Indian Agent, nor Priest, was to be trusted in any way and if they had a police officer with them, she needed to go very quickly. He told her to go out the back door, past the outhouse onto the trail to Dickson portage over to Pancake Lake. Put the twins in the canoe, tow the other boat out to where the wind would take it to another shore, let it loose to float and paddle to Evander’s place on Bony Point. Tell him what was happening, and he would know what to do from there. Him and the old trapper had manufactured a plan long ago, when they first began taking children, to ensure they would be able to escape the kidnapping.

More sudden cracking below his feet startled him and he looked down at his Mukluks as the pings and pops ran off into the distance with threatening gurgles from underneath. The stiff breeze caused him to turn back toward the shore to get some relief from the subzero breeze, looking back his cabin was but a dot in the monotony of the forested shore. The only noise was the constantly crackling ice and the wind as he approached the spot where he could talk to her. He set his bearings like he had from the boat by triangulating the large rock at Caribou Point, the top of Miners Hill and the old Harrison cabin on the south side of Bird Cove; this is it, he thought, right here.

He learned months later after being released from the hospital that she had not done what he had asked of her, that she had taken the children to the Indian Agent’s office over in Burrell, Manitoba, where they were taken into custody with her consent. They were not her children, they were the offspring of his first wife, who had died of tuberculosis when they were just three years old. Twins, a boy and a girl, with beautifully dark skin, long black hair both and the high cheek bones and loving smile of their ancestors. They were patient and playful, full of wonder and question, gifted with boundless energy, they shone like the sun to him. They were as authentic as the land they came from he thought and the anger he felt at their demise had not subsided to the day. Long ago he had realized that he would never understand how people could be so cruel, how they would use their lives in such a way.

But her, the one he loved as deeply as the one before, there was no other for him, so it was that his emotional confusion overwhelmed him when he thought about what she had done. He could not reconcile why she would have done such a thing knowing full well that he was entirely against it. After he found he could not simply retrieve the children, that they were by law confined to the school, she had begged him to understand why the kids were better off at the Residential School. She assured him that she had been told by the authorities that the twins would come home for holidays and the summer months. He held out belief that this would happen but cried daily while waiting. He could not help himself, the foreboding feeling something was wrong and the remoteness of his home on the lake did not easily allow for news to come to him. Then one day in early summer, he saw the white tail wash of the motor launch coming across the lake, his heart began to fill thinking it was the twins coming back at last. In his mind he had planned their escape many times, he knew exactly where to go to hide from the ruthless people who would steal his children. But it was not to be, the boat carried the Indian Agent and a Priest bringing the message that his children would not be coming home, ever again. The pair had succumbed to some form of disease, had died and were now buried in the school graveyard. The Agent informed him that he could not obtain a pass for him to travel to the place of their burial and the Priest had offered to pray with him. He did not answer, the pain was too intense as he did not know what really became of the twins. The woman had tried to console him as well, and appeared distraught, but his hatred for her had driven him to tell her to leave with these men and to not come back, but she did not listen, she stayed on to his great anger.

He walked a couple more steps, surveyed the open ice before him and then sat down on a patch work of white lines in linear confusion throughout the surface. He sat with his back to the wind for a minute, then stretched slowly out to lay prone on the slippery, frozen lake. He used the giant caribou mitts to seal off his face as he pressed down onto the ice and whispered, “I am here.” He turned his head sideways pressing an ear against the ice as if listening for some kind of response to his words, but there would be none and he knew it. He could hear the gurgling of water moving under the ice and the incessant crackling and he imagined her face looking up at him through the murk. The Lake was more than two hundred feet deep directly below him and somewhere on that soft, muddy, bottom was a hundred and ten pound women, long dead and completely wrapped in galvanized chicken wire with her feet wedged into a Berry Bucket along with fifty pounds of small rocks inside the metallic cocoon. Still, she spoke to him inside his twisted mind, in his memories of her, through time lost, wandering the woodlands on these wooded shores in his imagination only. She would never see the light of day again, not know the joy of Christmas nor be enlightened by the laughter or smiles of children. He had done this with no conscience, no remorse, and no matter how many people came to see him about where his wife was, he would never, ever speak a word to anyone about her except to say she had disappeared over by Pancake Lake while picking berries.

This was his twenty second visit and he rolled onto his back to look up into the cold December sky. He lay there for a bit, like he always did, trying to figure out the mystery of life and wondering what misery lay ahead for him for he fully believed that things come back around to you, like it had for her. Looking up into the frigid blue he asked the creator to be gentle with him and to let him know his children again; and her too. Then he carefully stood up, looked around at the barrenness of the lake in winter, and headed for the cabin, the frozen lake cracking beneath his cold, tired feet.