Wake The Stone Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

out. I waited until it was silent, then I waited a few moments longer before moving out into the bright sun of the afternoon.
    Standing at the corner of Main Street I could see both theatres. The marquee of the Odeon Theatre read Night and Fog and the marquee of the Capital Theatre read A Hard Day’s Night .
    I dreamt about the Stone Man that night. He was standing in the harbour holding the hand of a little girl. The girl I’d seen on the train before the door slid shut. The girl with the scarf over her head and big white scared eyes. I could see her lips open just a bit, like she was trying to say something to me, but before I could hear what she was saying the Stone Man let go of her hand, and she sank slowly into Lake Superior. I woke up screaming and when I finally got back to sleep I dreamt I saw the Stone Man again, holding a bucket towards me. I looked in the bucket and saw a bunch of heads, some of them with black holes where their eyes should have been. The faces smiled and started singing, “It’s been a hard day’s night.”
    I never told mom and dad about the movie. Don’t know why. Just didn’t, or couldn’t. Just went on with the same old, same old. We ate dinner on TV tables watching new stuff burn on the five o’clock news: burning bras, burning draft cards and Quakers, who started burning themselves on the streets like the Buddhist monks. Toasted Quaker Oats.
    I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV. I liked his big sad head. After a while the nightmares went away.

chapter four
    I stepped off the curb and stood in the middle of First Avenue holding my brownie camera in front of my face. “Nakina!”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI said watch for cars.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause I’m trying to take a freakin photo and I don’t want to get run over.”
    I was creating my masterpiece. It was 4 p.m. on March 25, 1968 , and I was capturing Fort McKay for posterity. Well, maybe not posterity — I just wanted to freeze-frame what I was looking at right there the way it was. No smoke and mirrors, just the main street of the town in the raw. I shot in black and white and tried to keep everything simple. I took a photo of the clock in the Empire tower and the basket man pushing a baby carriage full of wicker baskets in front of the hardware store. I took a photo of Mary Christmas.
    I never knew what her real name was, but everyone called her Mary Christmas because she wore these red and green ribbons in her hair. She was pretty festive with her make-up too. She painted bright red circles on her cheeks and when she put on her ruby red lipstick she drew outside the lines. She was old and wore a ratty fur coat that almost touched the ground. She was always wandering up and down the street talking to people or just talking away to herself. Seemed happy. Everybody knew her.
    The story was she came over from the Ukraine when she was just a kid, and she was supposed to marry some guy who was waiting for her in Canada. It was all arranged like that back then. Problem was, when she got to the dock in Fort McKay — no husband. No one ever showed up to get her. That was in about nineteen twenty-something, and this poor kid was standing on the dock with her Ukrainian bride’s ribbons in her hair going nuts and screaming in Ukrainian because she didn’t speak any English. No one knew what to do with her, so they took her to the nuthouse. No kidding. She stayed there most of her life too. Eventually some Ukrainian folks helped her find a place to stay — but by then she was old. Well anyway, that’s the story.
    I took the photos in black and white and planned to paint them like that too. I was thinking about that movie Night and Fog and how it was mostly black and white, so when there was anything in colour you knew it was important. For the photo of Mary Christmas, when I painted her I would paint her lips and cheeks red.
    I took a photo of