The peacekeeper, p.2
The Peacekeeper, page 2
Words were meaningless on the best of days, and this day was among the worst.
“Have you eaten yet?”
Chibenashi shook his head as his best friend, Kichewaishke, stepped aside to welcome him into his wigwam. Kichewaishke lived just down the road from Chibenashi and Ashwiyaa, yet Chibenashi’s visits were rare. He always needed to get back to his sister, but tonight he had too much on his mind to sort through before he was prepared to handle someone else.
Kichewaishke was a mashkikiwinini, tending mostly to emergency and urgent-care illnesses and injuries. During the heavy tourist season, he primarily treated alcohol poisoning or severe sunburns. In winter, when just the locals remained in Baawitigong, he also acted as the general healer, often with people simply popping by his wigwam seeking advice. More than once, he had stitched up a cut at his kitchen table while also sharing a cup of coffee and gossip. He always said that between himself and Chibenashi, they knew all of Baawitigong’s secrets. Chibenashi never bothered to tell him that he had none.
“Boozhoo,” said Kichewaishke’s wife, Okimaskew. “Have you eaten yet?”
She had one hand on her very pregnant stomach and held the hand of their four-year-old daughter, Biidaaban, in the other. Biidaaban was small for her age, with wide eyes like black holes. Nothing escaped them.
“Do you like my dress?” Biidaaban asked in greeting. She was wearing her regalia for Manoomin: a dress in deep jewel tones of purples, greens, and splashes of yellow, with flowers embroidered in undulating designs. It was covered in small bells, as were her makizinan. She let go of her mother’s hand to demonstrate a twirl and a few dance moves for him. “I’m making jingling music.”
“It’s very nice,” he said.
“It’s pretty,” she corrected him, still spinning.
“It’s very pretty.”
Suddenly, Biidaaban stopped. “Why are you sad?”
Chibenashi couldn’t help but chuckle at that, ignoring his friend’s tutting at his daughter’s bluntness. He’d always appreciated that about Biidaaban. She scared him a little.
Biidaaban scowled at his reaction, which made Chibenashi only want to laugh harder. “Why are you laughing at me? You are sad,” she said with authority. “You haven’t been this sad since your uncle died.” That had been two years ago.
“I was.”
“But you’re not always sad.”
She didn’t need to know the truth. “No, thankfully.”
“I remember earlier in the summer, when you brought the blackberries over, and we ate them by the fire. You were happy. You laughed a lot. But you haven’t come over since then.”
“Chibenashi has to look after his little sister, remember?” Kichewaishke said. “Just like you’ll have to look after yours once she comes.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. His sister is a grown-up.”
As if Ashwiyaa’s ears were burning, Chibenashi’s phone buzzed with what he knew was a text from her.
Chibenashi touched the phone in his pocket by habit, then took the little girl’s hand. “You’re right,” he said. “She is a grown-up. But that doesn’t mean that I stop taking care of her.”
“Well, I’m not doing it when I’m old like you.”
The adults all laughed, which made Biidaaban scowl. Okimaskew led her daughter toward her room while Chibenashi and Kichewaishke went back outside to the front of the wigwam by way of the kitchen, where Kichewaishke grabbed two bottles of baakwaanaatig lemonade on the way out. This was the good imported stuff, sweetened with honey instead of maple syrup, which everyone in the village used when they made it at home. They settled themselves on two chairs. It was late, but at that time of year, the sun would not set until well after most people would have gone to bed. Kichewaishke animoshan, Waabigwan, perked up at the sight of Chibenashi and followed them outside to lie down between them, tail wagging eagerly.
Chibenashi’s phone buzzed again. This time he checked it. Ashwiyaa wanted to know where he was and when he would be home. He briefly tapped the answers to her questions, then stuffed the phone back in his pocket. He could feel Kichewaishke’s eyes on him as he did so. Kichewaishke didn’t say that Chibenashi didn’t have to answer every single one of his sister’s texts. He’d said it enough in the past.
Neither man spoke nor looked at the other as the sky slowly turned as pink as the drinks they nursed. They both knew what was coming, and why Chibenashi was there, and there was no point in talking about it.
Ashwiyaa texted a few more times, and Chibenashi dutifully responded to each one. He could feel her anxiety radiating from the phone. It made sense; he rarely deviated from his routine and was usually home by now. But he only wanted a few moments, just a few moments, free from responsibility, to sit with his friend in peace.
“You take on too much, you know,” Kichewaishke said eventually. “You’ll flame out if you don’t let some of it go.”
Chibenashi did not respond.
“I know tomorrow’s going to be hard on you. But we’re all here for you. All of us.”
Chibenashi gripped the neck of the bottle tighter. It felt weird, the sweating glass in his hand. Only imported products were packaged in something as indestructible and impractical as glass.
“If you want, I can send something with you for Ashwiyaa?” Kichewaishke offered. Chibenashi shook his head.
Kichewaishke waited a few moments, then spoke again. “It wasn’t your fault, you know. No one thinks that. No one has ever thought that.”
Chibenashi bolted out of the chair as if it were on fire. He did not speak or move once he was on his feet, but he could feel the night closing in on him, though the sun still shone. Flocks of omiimiiwag traversed the sky, blotting out the sun like fast-moving clouds, the distant chittering filling the silence between the two friends. Their shadows crossed his face.
His phone buzzed with another text. He didn’t even have to look to know it was Ashwiyaa. It was always her. No one else ever texted anymore.
Kichewaishke was wrong. Of course it had been his fault. If he hadn’t gotten drunk and stupid at Manoomin—if he had just been there for his sister, she wouldn’t be so dependent on him now. It didn’t matter that he’d been told for twenty years that it hadn’t been his fault. He knew better.
“Thank you for the drink,” he said, not facing his friend. Without releasing the grip on the bottle, he turned and staggered home, anxiety all but gluing his feet to the ground.
“I mean it,” Kichewaishke called after him. But Chibenashi was far enough away that he could ignore him without being rude.
Ashwiyaa had mercifully gone to bed early that night, which was the closest Chibenashi ever got to a vacation. He sat in his living room, alone, in the dark, sipping some iced tea from the fridge, and flipped through the channels of the TV. It was like having company. The news was all about Manoomin, interviewing families for their plans. Not what he wanted to hear. He briefly landed on a show set in Shikaakwa and changed the channel as fast as he could. He saw an old movie, a love story, he’d once watched in a theater—a period piece involving an arranged marriage that had led to the two leads falling in love. It was the wedding scene, and the blanket was being draped over the nervous couple. He remembered when he’d first seen the film, and whom he’d seen it with. The reminder that once upon a time he hadn’t been so alone led him to mash the buttons on the remote in hopes of quashing the memory. He knew it was pathetic to let a twenty-year-old film dredge up memories of a relationship that had been over almost as long, and that awareness made it even worse. He didn’t often miss alcohol, but in this moment, it might have helped.
He flipped to a documentary; a European man was speaking, and the subtitles revealed he was discussing wars fought between kings who all claimed absolute power over the same patch of beach. They had been fighting this battle for hundreds of years. Chibenashi snorted, shook his head, and changed the channel. As if any person could actually claim to “own” the earth or any part of it. He knew about the attitudes that other backward cultures had—they drew invisible lines around the land, claiming it for their own, and those lines were worth both living and dying for. Mino-Aki had no defined borders like that. No nation in Mishmak did. Such lines were not theirs to draw. You lived on the land; you didn’t own it. You knew where lands roughly changed hands, but that was it. If you traveled internationally within Mishmak, your passport wasn’t checked until you arrived at your destination, if it was checked at all.
The next channel stopped him short. It was a travel show, talking about the lush beaches of Abyssinia on the east coast of Africa. He paused with the cup of tea halfway to his lips as his eyes drank in the scenery. He gulped without swallowing anything. Abyssinia was so far away in every sense; it might as well be on another planet. Chibenashi knew of people who had traveled so far away, some even on a regular basis, and Baawitigong had a large influx of tourists, especially at this time of year. But the idea of being the one to go, to experience the sights and smells and tastes of another nation, walk on a different patch of the earth and truly appreciate how vast and diverse it was . . . he didn’t dare dream he could actually do it. It was impossible. Ashwiyaa could never go. So he could never go. And watching it through the screen only made that feel more real.
He shut off the TV and stalked off to bed, downing the rest of the tea as he did. He was crashing. He figured he might as well go to sleep and get the misery of Manoomin over with.
Chapter Two
According to the stories the elders told to children in school, at bedtime, and around fires, it was prophesied, back when the Anishinaabe lived along the great ocean, that they should head westward. They would stop when they saw the food growing on the water. That food was manoomin, wild rice growing in thick paddies on the lakes—bountiful enough to feed entire tribes, healthy enough to be the staple of nearly every meal. So the Anishinaabe stopped, and they’d stayed ever since.
Many tourists came to Baawitigong specifically to view the harvest and celebration to follow. They were kept at a respectful distance, with a sea of smartphones and cameras capturing the odyssey of canoes that entered the lake at the same time.
The families of Baawitigong piled into the village’s traditional birchbark canoes, waiting for them in the reeds. Kichewaishke stepped into his behind his wife and daughter. He took hold of a long birch pole and pushed the canoe forward into the small lake. In front of him, Okimaskew held two long cedar sticks. The canoe made its way into the thicket of manoomin stalks, which grew as thick as a virgin forest. Okimaskew bent the stalks and whacked them with her sticks. All the other families in their canoes did the same. Husk-covered grains began raining down into the canoes, creating a loud swish-swish. It could be heard across the lake amid the hum of traditional songs from the locals along the shore and in the canoes.
Chibenashi stood along the side—one eye on the locals, the other on the tourists, taking it all in. Officially he was on patrol, working security at this event rather than attending it. Not that it ever needed protection from anything.
Chibenashi had not participated in the harvest since the night of his mother’s murder. He remembered her soft hands and gentle voice instructing them how to tap the stalks—not too hard, not too soft—to get the greatest yield of rice. It was a tradition handed down to her by her parents and grandparents, going back hundreds of years to when the ancient prophecy was first fulfilled. So much was automated these days, as the world grew smaller and technology eased the workload. But harvesting manoomin had been untouched by so-called progress and likely always would be.
Even if he’d wanted to participate, it wasn’t like he could. People were kind to his face but not behind his back, making comments among themselves when they thought he couldn’t hear. Or maybe when they just did not care about whether he could. “The prisoner’s son,” they’d mutter. “His father was locked away,” they’d explain to their visiting relatives, who would be sure to keep their distance from Chibenashi after that. In the beginning, after it had happened, people were supportive—at least outwardly. They wanted to help, tried to help. But Ashwiyaa had responded badly to it, and eventually they all stopped coming. Then they stopped sending food. Stopped asking after his sister, after him. His father’s stain had been tattooed on him, the mark so indelible that nothing could ever wash it off. Going to prison meant the system had failed all involved, that the person was beyond saving, and nothing could be done to make the family of his victims whole. No one else in Baawitigong had been locked away in recent memory. Chibenashi and Ashwiyaa were part of the community but only to the extent basic politeness required. Outside of that, he was the black fly on their otherwise idyllic bouquet.
“No Ashwiyaa today?” Meoquanee’s voice was quiet but still managed to jar Chibenashi out of his thoughts. He hadn’t even heard her approach.
He shook his head. “No, and if I weren’t on duty . . .”
“She’s stronger than you think, you know,” she said.
Meoquanee knew better than most how bad things had gotten, and even she didn’t have a full appreciation for how bad it was.
“No harvest for you this year?” he asked instead.
She snorted with laughter. “Of course not,” she said. “And I am completely fine with that.”
In Shikaakwa, where her husband and son had settled, such community harvests weren’t likely to happen. People left the big cities to go home to their families for the first day of Manoomin, one of the largest holiday migrations in the world, rivaled only by the Lunar New Year in China in terms of the sheer proportion of people traveling. Meoquanee’s family, however, never came to be with her. Her ex-husband’s absence was to be expected, but Chibenashi knew that their son’s refusal cut her like a knife. Baawitigong was the home of her son’s ancestors on both sides; turning his back on her had been the same as turning his back on his heritage. It was unthinkable.
Others had not returned for the harvest, though they likely had their own nonfamily reasons for doing so. Chibenashi had not gone out of his way to notice absences, but it was apparent all the same.
Chibenashi’s phone pinged. Officially, he wasn’t supposed to check his phone while on duty, but like many rules in the Baawitigong dakoniwewigamig, this was loosely followed at best. He glanced around, saw that no one was watching him. All were watching the canoes return to the shore with their spoils. He could look.
Ashwiyaa. Of course.
Where are you?
Working.
Ashwiyaa replied almost immediately. He pictured her staring at the screen, her knuckles white as she held her phone in a vise grip, so desperate for his response that she was hardly blinking.
How much longer?
Chibenashi worried his lip a bit between his teeth.
It’s Manoomin. Probably will be late.
I need you to come home.
He sighed, typed quickly, barely looking at his phone as muscle memory took over.
You know I can’t.
He thought for a moment, then added:
I can ask Meoquanee to come by.
Chibenashi almost smiled at his own cleverness. Meoquanee would have a surrogate child to attend to during this large family-oriented holiday, and Ashwiyaa could be with someone she knew and trusted during a difficult day. Meanwhile, he could finish out his shift in peace, maybe even be able to take his mind off the heaviness of the day. A win all around.
His phone remained silent for what felt like a long time. He’d almost begun to worry when the response came.
No.
You.
And then, after a moment’s hesitation:
Please.
Chibenashi felt the pull. He wanted nothing more than to give his little sister what she wanted. But today, he couldn’t.
I’m sorry.
Then he stuffed the phone in his pocket. It vibrated once, twice, three times. Then three more in quick succession as his sister was no doubt pleading with him to cut his shift short. He understood. He should have been home with her—today of all days.
The phone buzzed, longer this time, meaning that Ashwiyaa was now calling him. He silenced it without removing it from his pocket. He felt it vibrate a moment later with a voice mail, which he ignored.
It killed him to do it.
People were now dancing the rice.
It was one of those beautiful summer nights where the land and the people and the feeling in the air were just so beautiful that the sky itself would fight off the darkness longer and longer each day. Just a few more moments to enjoy this splendor, it beseeched like a child trying to avoid bedtime. One more peek. I don’t want to miss a thing.
Everyone had migrated from the lakeshore to the wide field near the medicine lodge. Around a large sacred fire, huge iron pots had been filled with rice and heated up, just until the seeds began to pop open. After the rice had been parched, removed, and left to cool, it was ready to be danced.
All over, large tarps were laid out with two long cedar or birch logs, one end on the ground, the other elevated and leaning against a bench or another tree or even held up by people. The dancers, ranging from elders to children to mothers to young men, tied soft deerskin makizinan on their feet. The newly harvested rice was poured onto the tarps under the logs, and the dancers stepped in between them. When the music began, people sang as the dancers held on to the logs and began stepping in a slow heel-to-toe motion, twisting from side to side as they did. This ancient tradition was how their ancestors separated the pale husk from the dark edible grain inside. The piles of manoomin grew darker as the pointy black grains began to emerge from the husks. Alcohol had been flowing for many all day, and as the evening progressed, the dances became more and more clumsy and less and less rhythmic.
