Kathy Little Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

during the day and coughed most of the night. Her movements slowed, so that one felt her think about doing something before asking it of her body. I didn’t want to sing her anymore because the little runs and trills weren’t there.
    There was no holding back Alberta’s climate. Housebound most of the time, there was nothing for it but to resurrect the old fantasy world. The one I liked to relive was when my father came back. He got lonesome for Mum and wanted to be with her again.
    And there was I, a daughter he didn’t know he had. In some of these daydreams I rushed into his arms and he hugged and kissed me, and said he would never go away again. Sometimes he’d pack us up, Mum and me, and take us back to Austria. Just for a visit of course. It wasn’t a castle anymore, but a nice snug house. He taught me to sail on the Bodensee. We hiked forest trails and searched for sprigs of edelweiss. He loved me so much that he wanted me to stay with him forever.
    Observing me, Mum would frequently say, “You’re so quiet, Kathy. What are you thinking?”
    I’d laugh and shake my head—out loud it would sound stupid.
    Snow gusted against the house, blown high by wind. Wolves howled. In mockery I sang back at them. I sang the quiet, I sang the storms. I didn’t sing Abram anymore. I didn’t know him as well as I had. When I was fifteen I had known him. When I was eight I’d known him best of all. Now that I was seventeen I didn’t know him at all.
    Warm winds, springtime chinook. I began to think it would be all right, that the family had made it through another year.
    With the thaw came comforting buds, light new foliage, and Elk Woman. Saskatoon berry jam, freshly baked bread, stalks of wild asparagus. She took to coming by with these and other gifts produced from her voluminous skirt. She would look around for the pail in which she made tea, start the water boiling, draw up a chair, and sit with Mum. They were old friends. They had gone to school together, and she had given my Mum a wolf tail to remind her she belonged to the First Nation people. Elk Woman always slipped a small packet of herbs under Mum’s pillow. “Good medicine.” Mum would smile and say she thought the last one had helped her. I thought that was good of Mum, being a nurse, to pretend so outrageously for Elk Woman.
    One day, a bright, sunny, blue-sky day, Elk Woman motioned me to the porch. “You’re a strong girl, Kathy. And you’ve strength in you that you don’t know about yet.”
    I had an intimation that I wouldn’t like this conversation. I didn’t want to hear what Elk Woman was about to say.
    “Mum feels better today. She sat up in the rocker for a while. Now that the weather has changed…”
    “My little bird, Loki the Trickster has made up this dream for you. I, your friend, tell you your mother makes the long canoe trip.”
    The top of my head was blown off, as though Jellet had aimed his shotgun at me and pressed the trigger. “Get off this porch,” I spoke quite steadily, looking Elk Woman inthe eye. “My dad’s asleep in the back bedroom. He doesn’t allow Indians on our porch. I’ll wake him up and he’ll run you off.”
    “Oh little bird,” Elk Woman said sadly, “don’t pull away from your friends in bad times.”
    I threw my arms around her. She was a power woman, a wind shifter. “God won’t let her die, will He?”
    “When you come to the end of your life, you got to die.”
    “But she’s not at the end.”
    “The best you can do for her, Little Bird, is to let her know you’ll be all right. It’s you she’s worried about.”
    I looked at her hard, trying to see into her. “Why should she worry about me?” I asked. “I’m grown up.”
    She returned my glance speculatively, as though testing the validity of my statement, then said, “Have you talked to your brother?”
    “To Jas? No. I can’t. I can’t talk to him, not about Mum.”
    “You should. More important than giving him dinner, is