Born with a Tooth Read Online Free PDF Page A

isn’t to win, it’s to win big!” Roddy tells the Palace workers at our meetings. “You either lead, or you follow, or you get out of the way.” It’s a good scare tactic but doesn’t leave much room to argue. I sometimes take a walk and look around the rez and wonder.
    I was out walking with Little Ollie and Rachel when I heard about Ollie. Ernest, the band’s police chief, roared up in a dust cloud. When he got out of his Bronco, he looked sad and red-eyed.
    â€œI got bad news, Mary,” he said. “Come here away from the little ones for a minute.” I remember thanking him for telling me, and walking the kids down the dirt road to the pond Ollie always took them to.
    â€œDaddy can’t take you fishing here no more,” I said. “Or to school or out in the bush.” Their deer eyes looked up at me. Little Ollie figured it out fast and ran away on his skinny legs, his sneakers slapping up puffs of dust on the road. Rachel cried and wanted her brother to come back.
    Little Ollie isn’t so little anymore. He’s eleven now and he blames Roddy but can’t reason it out exactly why. I tell my boy that it was his father’s time to go to Gitchi-Manitou , that he’s up in the sky as a twinkling star now, looking down at us. The few rumours are just rumours. But my boy fights it. He’s not named after his dad for nothing, I figure.
    I start in the thirteenth game with one of my favourites, Telephone Pole, where you’ve got to fill in the right numbers to make the design on your card look like one. The next game, Picnic Table, goes along the same lines. “Buy extra jackpot cards soon,” I remind everyone. “Jackpot is five games away.” I glance at my watch. Tonight’s going to be a late one for sure. The kids are long asleep.
    My mother watches the kids on bingo nights. She tries to refuse my money, but I pay for her time anyways.
    â€œWe take care of our own,” she says to me. “We’ve always taken care of our own. We’re Ojibwe.”
    After Ollie died and I started working, Mom and me started fighting. One night I got out of work real late, and she got angry when I went to pick up the kids. “Ollie wouldn’t want you working there,” she said. That got me mad. “He thought bingo wasn’t Indian. It’s a white man’s game.”
    I knew that already. It got me madder. “Indian?” I said. “Indian? We’re Ojibwe and you don’t even know our language.” I tried to pass her to get the kids, but she stopped me and wrestled me to the ground by my hair. I began to cry and shouted, “Where were all the Indians when Ollie fell out of a tree?” She had me pinned beneath her, her cheeks shaking and her chest against mine.
    â€œWhere were all the Indians when Ollie fell out of a tree?” she asked. Our eyes got big at the same time. And then we started laughing at what I’d said until my sides were about to burst. We just lay beside one another on the floor and laughed. It felt good. We’ve been tight ever since.
    I’ve asked Mom to come out and play bingo. “I’ll find another sitter,” I tell her. But she doesn’t like the thought of a room packed with quiet, serious people and smoke.
    â€œI could go to a sweat lodge if I want to see that,” she always tells me. But I can see the question in her eyes, whether it doesn’t bother me to be working for something Ollie hated.
    I don’t think it bothers me.
    Really, I don’t.
    Roddy puts the word out that there are professional gamblers up from Toronto tonight.
    â€œYou just call those balls, Mary,” he says. “You call ’em during the last game and pray hard. I don’t want to see you call out the big one tonight.”
    As if I got a say. If somebody wins, Roddy loses the council money, not his backers’. That’s the truth. If someone wins the