Medicine River Read online

  THE AUTHOR

  Thomas King, who is of Cherokee and Greek descent, is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, scriptwriter, and photographer. His first novel, Medicine River, won several awards, including the PEN/Josephine Miles Award and the Writers Guild of Alberta Award, and was shortlisted for the 1991 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It was also made into a CBC television movie. Green Grass, Running Water, his second novel, was shortlisted for the 1993 Governor General’s Award. His highly praised short story collections, One Good Story, That One and A Short History of Indians in Canada, were Canadian bestsellers, and his collection of Massey Lectures, The Truth about Stories, won the 2003 Trillium Book Award. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America won the RBC Taylor Prize and the B.C National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. King has also written four acclaimed children’s books: A Coyote Columbus Story, Coyote Sings to the Moon, Coyote’s New Suit, and A Coyote Solstice Tale. Writing as Hartley GoodWeather, he has created two detective novels featuring detective-turned-photographer Thumps DreadfulWater. King’s satiric CBC radio drama, The Dead Dog Café, which ran from 1996 to 2000 and again in 2006 (as Dead Dog in the City), was a favourite with devoted listeners. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph (where he taught Native literature and creative writing) and lives in Guelph, Ontario. King is a member of the Order of Canada.

  ALSO BY THOMAS KING

  NOVELS

  Green Grass, Running Water

  Truth and Bright Water

  The Back of the Turtle

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  One Good Story, That One

  A Short History of Indians in Canada

  AS HARTLEY GOODWEATHER

  DreadfulWater Shows Up

  The Red Power Murders: A DreadfulWater Mystery

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Native in Literature (co-editor)

  All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary

  Canadian Native Fiction (editor)

  CHILDREN’S FICTION

  A Coyote Columbus Story

  Coyotes Sing to the Moon

  Coyote’s New Suit

  A Coyote Solstice Tale

  NON-FICTION

  The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

  The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS EDITION, © 2017

  Copyright © 1989 Thomas King

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780143191148

  Ebook ISBN 9780735237834

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: mysticenergy/Getty Images

  Front cover design: Colin Jaworski

  Penguin Modern Canadian Classics

  Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  The Author

  Also by Thomas King

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  For

  Helen, Christian and Benjamin.

  Just in case.

  My thanks to the Ucross Foundation,

  Ucross, Wyoming for the writer’s residency

  which allowed me to complete the final

  draft of Medicine River.

  1

  Dear Rose,

  I’ll bet you never thought you’d hear from me again. I’ve thought about calling or writing, but you know how it is. How are you and the boys? Bet they’re getting big. Bet you’re probably mad at me, and I don’t blame you. I’m going to be in Calgary for a rodeo. Thought I might drop in and see you….

  Medicine river sat on the broad back of the prairies. It was an unpretentious community of buildings banked low against the weather that slid off the eastern face of the Rockies. Summer was hot in Medicine River and filled with grasshoppers and mosquitoes. Winter was cold and long. Autumn was the best season. It wasn’t good, just better than the other three. Then there was the wind. I generally tried to keep my mouth shut about the wind in Medicine River.

  Harlen Bigbear was like the prairie wind. You never knew when he was coming or when he was going to leave. Most times I was happy to see him. Today I wasn’t. I had other things to do. There were photographs in the wash and three strips of negatives that had to be printed. But that didn’t stop the wind from blowing, and it didn’t stop Harlen.

  “Hey-uh,” said Harlen, which is not the way Harlen normally says hello.

  “What?”

  “Hey-uh…what do you think, Will?”

  “Real busy, Harlen. Somebody in trouble?”

  Harlen had a strong sense of survival, not just for himself but for other people as well. He took on a lot of weight, and the one thing he enjoyed more than helping someone out with their burden was sharing it with others. “If you pass misery around and get everyone to take a piece,” Harlen liked to say, “you won’t throw up from the taste of too much grief.” It wasn’t something I went around repeating.

  “Nobody’s in trouble, Will. Hey-uh…time I took you out to lunch. Thought we could go on over to that new place with all the posters and plants.”

  “Harlen, it’s ten o’clock.”

  “Beat the crowd. Give us a chance to talk. Hey-uh, good friends should do that, you know.”

  Dear Rose,

  Boy, you should see the weather around here. Snowed like the blazes last night. How’s the weather down south? Sorry I didn’t stop in. I called a couple of times, but you must have stepped out. I want to come down and see you and the boys, maybe take you out to dinner and a show. Write if you can, chick. If you have someone else, you should let me know….

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE in Casey’s. The woman at the counter told us that lunch hadn’t started and that all we could get was coffee or tea.

  “Tea’s fine. Just had breakfast. How about you, Will? Not hungry yet, are you?”

  She put us at a window table. Casey’s was on the third floor of the old Merchants’ Bank Building. You could see the Medicine River Fire Station across the street. The fire-engines had moved to the new fire house on Sixth Avenue, leaving the station with its turn-of-the-century round bell tower to the pigeons and the seagulls.

  “Say,” said Harlen, “what a great view. What do you think? If we stood on the table, we could probably see the river. Reserve is just over there.”

  It was going to take Harlen until noon just to get to what he wanted to tell me. The tea arri
ved, and Harlen dipped the bag up and down in the pot, long easy strokes, like he figured on staying through until supper.

  “Will, you remember Wilma Whiteman? Hey-uh, she passed away last week.”

  I nodded.

  “Wilma used to look after Granny Pete all those years. You know, everybody used to leave their stuff at Granny’s house, whenever they went somewhere. Reserve storage. Should have seen the folks come by when Granny died. Those who were still around picked their stuff up, and Wilma took and stored the things that were left over.”

  “I remember.”

  “Lots of memories. Louie Frank’s wife went over to help Wilma’s family. One of her girls found them, in a cardboard box. Edith gave them to Bertha over at the centre, and Bertha gave them to Big John, and Big John gave them to me.”

  Harlen reached into a coat pocket and pulled out a package. It was a thick rectangle wrapped round with blue velvet and tied with yellow yarn.

  “Letters,” said Harlen, “hey-uh…from your father.”

  Dear Rose,

  I’m going to stop by and see you and the boys soon. Sorry you had to leave the reserve, but Calgary’s a better place for a swell girl like you. Stupid rule, anyway. I’d send some money, but I’m short right now. Got to save up for a new saddle. Man’s got to work, you know. Hey, could you send me a picture of the boys. Yourself, too….

  I had seen the letters before. My mother used to keep them in a wooden chest in her closet. The chest was always locked, but that’s what bobby pins were for. James and me had listened to countless detectives pick countless locks with bobby pins. I found the key and the bobby pins in the same drawer.

  There was a box of photographs in the chest. Most of the photographs were of groups of men and women standing against the prairie and the sky. The men were tall and dark in white shirts and cowboy hats. The women wore long dresses. There were several pictures of George Harley on a horse. I recognized him. There was one of an old man with braids sitting in a straight-backed chair on the edge of a coulee. Years later, Granny Pete showed me a picture of the same man and said he was my grandfather.

  My mother was in most of the pictures, and while I didn’t know who the rest of the people were, I supposed they were family. There was one picture of my mother. She had on a pleated skirt that was fanned out like a blanket on the ground in front of her. Kneeling behind her with his hand on her shoulder was a man in a uniform.

  Dear Rose,

  I got a new job with a real-estate company. Nothing to it. Beats the hell out of rodeo, and it pays better, too. Figured I’d try it for a while till my leg heals. If I like it, I may just give up the circuit and settle down. You know, my boss drives one of those big Chevrolets. You got to have money to buy one of those things.

  Thanks for the pictures of the boys. Good-looking boys. I didn’t know I had such good-looking boys. Well, you had something to do with it, too, chick. Maybe you could send me one of our wedding pictures….

  The letters were in the trunk under the photographs. I was reading them when my mother came home.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “I was just reading.”

  She stood there, and I could see her hands clench and tremble. “Those are my letters,” she said.

  “I was just reading.”

  “I don’t want you in my things.”

  “They’re from…my father…the letters.”

  “Just put them down. Damn! You keep out of my things.”

  And she slapped me. Hard. “Stop reading those letters! You hear me!” And she began to cry. “They’re private. You never heard of private?”

  Then she slapped me again. I tried to jerk out of the way, and I scattered the letters on the floor. I lay beside the bed, my tongue clamped between my teeth to keep my lips from shaking. I remember her on her knees, crying and trying to gather up the letters and the blue velvet cloth and the yarn.

  I ran past her and down the stairs.

  “Will!”

  I spent the rest of the day at the river. She had never hit me. Never. James found me that evening.

  “You better come home. Mom’s real upset. She’s been crying, Will.”

  “Let her cry. I’ll come home when I feel like it.”

  “She said I was supposed to bring you home.”

  “Tell her you couldn’t find me.”

  “What’d you do to get her so mad?”

  “I just read some of her dumb old letters.”

  We ate dinner in silence that night, my mother, my brother and me. Afterwards, she took me into her bedroom. “I don’t want you ever to go in my chest again. Those things in there are mine. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t say anything. I kept my eyes on the yellow throw rug beside the bed.

  “I don’t want you reading those things.”

  I could feel my lip begin to shake. “I don’t see what’s so wrong,” I said. “The letters were to me and James, too. They’re not just yours!”

  My mother sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. I knew I was to sit there, not move. And I did. I thought she was going to hit me again for talking back like that, but she didn’t.

  “Do I have to burn them?” she said very quietly, almost a whisper. Her eyes were hard, and her face didn’t move. “Do I have to burn them before you’ll leave my things alone? Is that what I have to do?”

  “Those are my letters, too.”

  “Go to bed,” she said, in that same quiet voice. “Just go to bed.”

  I ran home from school the next day. The letters were still there. I opened the blue velvet wrap just to make sure. Then I got some tape from the kitchen and taped them to the bottom of the chest.

  Dear Rose,

  Merry Christmas. I would have sent a cheque, but real estate sort of drops off round Christmas. The leg is one hundred percent. Soon as the season comes around, I may do a little rodeo on the weekends just to keep in shape.

  How old are the boys now? Maybe I could come on down and visit. I could take the boys out for the day and give you a break. I bought one of those musical tops at Zellers. You think the boys would like it? I think about you and the boys. They’ve probably forgotten me by now.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU EVER SEE your father rodeo, Will?”

  “No, he took off when I was about four.”

  “He and George Harley were good friends. George says your father was a real good bronc rider.” Harlen looked out the window towards the river. “You know, it was Harley introduced your mother to your father. Caught hell for it too, from Granny Pete.”

  “Harlen, I don’t even remember what my father looked like.”

  “George says he was real good.”

  * * *

  —

  I MUST HAVE SEEN my father, heard his voice. But there was nothing. No vague recollections, no stories, no impressions, nothing. He was from Edmonton. I knew that. Granny Pete blamed George for the marriage, because he got them together and stood up as best man at the wedding. “Damn bottle Indian,” she said. “Just got to show off his relations to whites. No more sense than a horseshoe.”

  But George was only trying to be polite. Years later he told me, “Your mother was real pretty, and Bob just wanted to meet her, so I said okay. Granny was awful mad with me, especially when they got married. I didn’t know they’d do that. Your mother had a mind of her own.”

  We grew up in Calgary, James and me. Granny Pete came over by bus every month or so, but none of my mother’s brothers ever came by. Granny talked about the rest of the family, so James and me knew we had relations. We knew about Uncle Tony and Uncle Rupert and Uncle Frank, but I never met them until the day my mother came home from work and began packing. “Get your things together,” she said. “We’re going home.”

  My uncles all showed up the next day in their trucks to help us move. They shook hands with James and me and talked like we had never been away. “You’re the man of the house, Will,” Uncle Frank said, and h
e offered me a cigarette. “Look after your mother and brother. You got to do that now.”

  “I can look after Mom, too,” said James.

  “Bet you can,” said Uncle Frank.

  We didn’t have much, and Uncle Tony’s pick-up went back empty, except for me and James and Uncle Tony’s boy, Maxwell. The three of us rode in the back wrapped up in a tarp.

  “We going back to the reserve?” James asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “No,” said Maxwell, “you can’t. You guys have to live in town cause you’re not Indian any more.”

  “Sure we are,” I said. “Same as you.”

  “Your mother married a white.”

  “Our father’s dead.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  I could feel my face get hot. “We can go to the reserve whenever we want. We can get in a car and go right out to Standoff.”

  “Sure,” said Maxwell. “You can do that. But you can’t stay. It’s the law.”

  I pulled the tarp around me and told myself that we were going back to the reserve. But I guess I wasn’t surprised when we stopped at Medicine River. It wasn’t so much the law as it was pride, I think, that let my mother go as far as the town and no farther.

  Dear Rose,

  Things are going swell up here. How about you? I called the post office, and they’ve put a trace on that top I sent. Boy, doesn’t the mail drive you nuts. They’re always losing things. If they can’t find it, I’ll try to buy another one. It was a red one with those cute animals along the side. It had a real nice sound, too. I’ve got some bills to pay off first, so it may have to wait a bit. Hope the boys had a good Christmas. I sure miss you all….

  * * *