Dream Wheels Read Online Free PDF Page B

They’d danced the Owl Dance together that night and the Rabbit Dance, and as Victoria looked out at the faces watching the couples step proudly by, she saw only joy and love and acceptance in their faces and on Lionel’s too. By the time Birch came around in 1950 they both spoke a smattering of Ojibway and knew various prayer songs like the one the old man sang now with his face raised to the darkening sky. They didn’t do so much ceremony anymore. The old bones couldn’t take the cramp of the sweat lodge and they’d settled for some time now on smudging with the sacred medicines, prayers and meditation in the morning and the songs they’d sing sometimes with the old hand drum that graced the wall of their living room. She stood on the veranda steps and listened to him sing. The syllables, rich and healing, seeping into the air, the grass and the mountains like blessings.
    When he finished he put one foot back onto the low rail of the fence and put his hat back on. She walked down the steps and along the crushed-stone pathway. He heard the crunch of her footsteps and turned. When she reached him she took his hand wordlessly and began to stroll along the fence line. She felt his gaze and his anxiety.
    “Geezhee-go-kway is happy tonight,” she said.
    “Sky Woman?” he asked, looking up and around at the sky. “Yes. I guess she is. It’s beautiful.”
    “I never tire of it. This land, this sky, the mountains.”
    “No. Me neither,” he said.
    “We’ve grown strong here, Lionel.”
    “Grown pretty damn old too.”
    “Nice when it happens at the same time, isn’t it?”
    “What are you telling me, woman?” He looked down at her.
    “Joe Willie’s bad,” she said, turning to him and taking both his hands in hers. “He won’t ever ride again. The bull destroyed his shoulder and crushed his thigh.”
    She watched his eyes change. He looked up across the valley and heaved a deep sigh. Then he looked at her and nodded.
    “He’ll mend here,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “Gonna need a lot of mending.”
    “Yes,” she said again.
    “Bones’ll set,” he said. “Hard work to mend a busted life.”
    They walked together back to the house to make a room ready for their grandchild.
    He sat on the edge of the bed and watched himself in the mirror. He practised lowering and raising his head, keeping the eyes firm on themselves, then turning slightly to the right and to the left, the eyes, even in the narrowed peripheral field, cold, flat, emotionless, empty of everything but the idle threat, the danger lurking just beneath the surface. When it got so he could sweep the look across the room and not break the intensity he stood and practised leaning. All the weight on the flat of one foot, a hip thrust out and the shoulders canted at an angle to match the hip and the arms dangling loose, casual, andthe hands just slightly to the front of the hip pockets with the fingers cupped inward slightly, just so, the thumbs angled toward each other, giving the impression of fists forming in readiness, the will slouched and insouciant, prepared for battle. Then he walked. He ambled slowly toward the mirror, watching. He kept his eyes flat, his head tilted slightly and walked, rolling the shoulders easily with each step, the hands never moving from their position. The plant of each foot was resolute, as if he was going somewhere important but a place of his own choosing, at his own time, his own tempo, the laziness of it a measure of his purpose.
    He walked until he perfected it. Over and over, back and forth, watching himself, the look cast back across his shoulder as he spun slowly toward himself again, catching his own eye and seeing the warrior there, the unyielding ambivalence he needed to carry to the street. He was fifteen but he walked nineteen. That was important. In the neighbourhood she’d moved him to this time he couldn’t afford to be mistaken for a slacker, a mark, an easy number. The boys played rough here.