Permanent astonishment, p.24
Permanent Astonishment, page 24
“A la main left with the corner maid,” goes Oogeest Zipper. Breaking the circle, Happy Doll Gaazayoo swivels to his right and reaches with his left hand for Maggie Hell’s claw-like left. Chests careening this way and that, both feet stomping, Maggie Hell and Happy Doll slink past each other which gives Happy Doll the chance he needs for his knobby right hand to reach for that of woman-of-honour Suzette Gunpowder-just-turned-Highway.
“Kimoosoom chimasoo, koogoom tapasao,” calls Oogeest Zipper and Suzette jigs off with Happy Doll Gaazayoo.
“Sidlee, sidlee, sidlee,” Rene and I call along with our brother-in-law Oogeest Zipper from a corner of the room where people are jostling. (I don’t remember the exact lineup of this first dance, but Half Ass Sam Well and Modest Loon are somewhere in there; Mom and Dad will join in shortly.) Chests throttling and heaving, feet kicking up a regular storm, Happy Doll and Suzette bounce past each other which gives the Dene Happy Doll the chance he needs to reach with his left hand for that of stick-thin, cockroach-like Ann Kaakaa. For two entire seconds, Ann Kaakaa and Happy Doll jiggle with each other, the mouse-tiny woman laughing enough for three big people. With his right hand, Happy Doll moves on to reach for the right of Check Wheat He, a dusky Dene maiden not yet sixteen. Whipping her fulsome, swarthy figure past the man’s bony right hip, Check Wheat He glides on. Thus does Happy Doll Gaazayoo arrive at the side of his dancing partner, Maggie Hell, who exposes, as she does when worked to a tizzy, her beaverish brown teeth as for a camera. “Swing your partner round and round,” calls Oogeest Zipper. Happy Doll swings the scrawny Maggie Hell round and round with such pagan abandon that all one sees of Chief Albert Hell’s Dene wife is a brownish blur.
“And promenade,” Rene and I call with Oogeest and off we go, two small boys jigging hand in hand and arm in arm, right behind the bride and groom and all the other dancers who, as is usual with promenades, dance in pairs all the way around one great big circle, stomping and jigging and bouncing and jiggling and banging and jangling for this is now some fifteen dances later and dancers have changed at least five times. Rene and I try our best to dance like Suzette, who somehow manages to jiggle like a pudding and look quite stately at the same time. And laugh ourselves blue in the face. The movement is dizzying, the rat-a-tat-tat of Kodiak construction boots on a plywood floor infernal (Norval Wachask’s are the least of it: to come to a skweetaas without such footwear is, for men, a mortal sin).
“A la main left with your left hand, bow to the partner, and there you stand.” It has lasted for four hours. So far. Everyone dances at one point or other, even ninety-year-old Old Dice Chagaazay with her humpy spine, scarlet kerchief, caribou moccasins, and wrinkles so deep she looks like a prune. “Call your dog and grab your gun; let’s keep dancin’, have some fun.” The room is now, to me, one endless, swirling tunnel of colour.
Obert and Apwee-tigwee Gunpowder, who now live behind us, arrive from their fish camp out on the lake some ten hours late—motor trouble, explains Obert Gunpowder, who looks like Gary Cooper, the American movie star—and so are dragged, as they pass by with their bags, paddles, and knots of children, into our house by our generous mother. Her purpose? That they take the last of the lapwachin which she has stashed away for their children, for she, for one, had not lost faith in their eventual arrival. Grabbing the dessert, which is wrapped in brown parcel-paper, and stuffing it into a jacket pocket, Apwee-tigwee Gunpowder flees like a wraith into the moonlit night followed on her heels by her handsome husband and at least eight children (of the thirteen they will have within ten years), for the older ones have scattered to the village like ants in flight. No matter the house, she is off to the dance and hell be damned.
“As you may know,” says Obert Gunpowder by way of apology to Balazee Highway, “when it comes to the skweetaas, Apwee-tigwee Gunpowder cannot control her animal urges.”
“Comb your hair and tie your shoe; promenade home like you always do,” calls Oogeest Zipper back at the dance hall one half-hour after this meeting; his voice is getting raspy. Hand in hand and arm in arm, Obert and Apwee-tigwee Gunpowder come stomping by as part of the circle (and by this time, Mom and Dad, too, are dancing). “Dog in the corner gnawin’ on a bone; meet your girl and promenade.” As Rene and I crouch on the floor against one wall sleepily watching all this activity—it is now past midnight, but who’s keeping an eye on the clock?—I see something pop out of Apwee-tigwee Gunpowder’s coat pocket. It plops to the floor and bounces once, twice, and comes to a stop at my right foot. Unaware of this incident, the woman dances on. I look at the object. Wonder of wonders but it is a slice of lapwachin which, slipped free of its wrapping, looks like cake. “First you whistle and then you sing. All join hands and make one ring.” Wilpaletch Kipawm comes stomping by in his Kodiak boots and, not seeing it, steps on the lapwachin, transforming the cake in one half-second back into a pudding. And with Rene sleeping already across my shoulder, I, too, fall asleep.
35
My grandfather, Joseph Highway, played the fiddle. His son, Joe Highway, played the accordion. And I, grandson to the former and son to the latter, play the piano. It is a natural progression, a God-given legacy.
I never knew my mothers’ parents for both died young, her mother of some unspecified illness in her mid-thirties. My mother, then a girl of eighteen years and wife for two, was already a mother to the first of what would be, in time, twelve children. Her father, for his part, drowned in Mink Lake up north at age just sixty. She just forty that summer, I was born the December that followed, so I never met him, either. Still, neither grandparent was a musician.
Such was not the case with my paternal grandparents. Them I knew, though not much better. Because my dad had left his birthplace of Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan, for the great sub-Arctic at age eighteen, and because technology up there back then was, in essence, non-existent, communication was minimal, so he hardly ever saw his parents again, meaning to say that we hardly ever saw them either. I remember seeing them once when I was five. Having paddled from Pelican Narrows the two hundred miles north to the northern extremity of Reindeer Lake, which is just inside Manitoba, we met them on this island that was, in effect, a gorgeous sandbar with a scattering of trees, a jewel of a place called Sandy Island. Having come to visit the eldest of their five surviving sons and his family, meaning us, we camped there for a week, a family reunion much needed and cherished. I remember Grandma—Josephine Highway-née-Ballantyne—looking an awful lot like her eldest daughter, my Aunt Peechoochee; just as beautiful, she was also just as fierce, just as wicked, or so legend has it. The second time I saw them—and last, as it turned out—was when I was twenty-two. They now in their nineties, I was up for a visit in Pelican Narrows with my brother Daniel, his now deceased wife, Myra, and their first child of two, then just an infant not yet walking. By that time, Granddad sadly no longer had his fiddle so I never heard him play, one of the very few regrets that haunt my life. And no one seems to know where that instrument went. All that is known is that, because Metis blood informed his veins, he had inherited “the voice.” And not just any voice, but that of Metis old-time fiddling. When he played the jig known as “Taatoo-gipi-tamook,” for instance, people aged a hundred years would jump to their feet and scream, is how legend has it.
As for my father, he walks in one day, back in the winter I turn six, with a gramophone. I leap to my feet. My hair stands on end, I gasp for air. An awfully large gramophone, I think, but I jump on the box which, at this point, looks like a suitcase. At my age, I can’t manipulate the clasps so Dad, who is beaming, unclasps them for me. The suitcase opens. My heart plummets. If that’s not a gramophone, then what on Earth is it? All I can tell, at least for now, is that it has, at one end, a keyboard of the kind that K’s’chees-naanis plays on his organ at church on Sundays and, at the other end, rows of small black buttons that look like pills and shine like eyes. Keys and buttons in their rows flank this bright red casing whose sheen deflects light; the casing, in its turn, flanks this section that, when Dad unclasps this black strap of leather, turns out to be a corrugated box. And when Dad lifts the contraption to his chest and wraps these straps that appear from nowhere around his shoulders—and he, in the act of doing this, presses keys and buttons in haphazard fashion—it bleats and meows as the box expands and diminishes, expands and diminishes.
“Kaasee-peegi-piteet kitoochigan,” he calls it (“the musical instrument that is stretched and stretched”). A “titty-tickler,” I hear it called by Lawrence Loon, the Dene interpreter. An “accordion,” I hear it called by Father Cadeau. Whatever its name, Dad got it from Moomoos Perkins in exchange for a dog who showed great promise as a leader—for Dad already had one, and two lead dogs for one man are unnecessary. But Moomoos Perkins was happy, for he’d just lost his “star” at a big game of poker.
Once Dad has learned how to play this box by pumping its bellows which, as it turns out, is what the corrugated section is, and pressing the keys and buttons this way and that, I won’t let him stop. At first, he is terrible, but “persistence” has always been Joe Highway’s middle name.
“Keetawm, keetawm,” I beg him (“Again, again”). For there he sits on a chair in our kitchen, manoeuvring the instrument with a skill that increases by the day. His rib cage swaying, his right foot stomping, his smile is infectious. “Eegee-ginaw-peegan-thik kipaapaa,” “Maaskooch Kimoosoom Paasoo,” “Maagi-teethi-goom,” and “Kaachee-pata-pee-aan, oota mista-sineek,” he plays them all to a rhythm that is jiggy (“Your Father Had a Long One,” “Your Grandpa Has Dried Up for Sure,” “Big Nostrils,” and “As I Sit Perched on This Great Big Rock,” a repertoire loved in old Brochet). When people cross the village to come and listen, they, too, stomp their feet and yell, “Keetawm!”
Still, that isn’t enough. I have to learn to play the instrument myself. The problem is, Dad’s accordion is way too large for a small-for-his-age mere lad of six. When he lays it down to rest for the day, I can’t even budge it much less play it. Even if I press its keys or its buttons, no sound emerges for its “lung”—the corrugated box—isn’t moving and there is nothing I can do about it. So I have to wait until I am big enough. Unfortunately, at one point before this happens, Dad is forced to barter his accordion for a lead dog just as Moomoos Perkins had before him. His current leader, Rich, is aging and ready to be put out to pasture, says Dad. Lead dogs are expensive, and Dad has no money. So he buys one with that accordion from Meat Toss Yazzie, the Dene hunter with a wife so tall it makes your neck bones creak when you look up at her face. That lead dog is Queen, the best we will have. But I am heartbroken. With no accordion in the house, that house is dark, that house is soul-less.
Fortunately, a Ukrainian woman fur trader named Mrs. Permafrost arrives in Brochet at around this time with, among other things, a jukebox. (Her name is actually Permachuk, but we call her “Permafrost” because, of course, we live on permafrost.) At least, “jukebox” is what she calls this pretty machine with lights that flash in the colours magenta, purple, pink, and blue and, behind its glass, a rack of saucer-sized records that change by means of an arm that whirs and clicks. The Ukrainian woman with skin so white it looks like baking powder, eyes that squint, and lips that simper like a fissure in a wall opens a store near Minee-waati-meek (the Point) near where live Filament Mosquito and her husband, Archie, and that’s where she puts it. You put a dime inside this slot and away it goes. I am mesmerized. (A generator outside is its source of power.) There, Ice-keemee Minette with her country voice and her three-hour hourglass figure sits on the counter beside this object swinging her legs like “Hunty-Dunty” and wailing along to the songs that play and whose words, to me at that point in time, are a mystery. Besides, so rarely are we in Brochet that I get to see this jukebox four times only.
Some four years later, my eldest brother, Swanson, marries a woman named Suzette Gunpowder who not only plays an accordion like Dad, but owns one and sings. The difference is that, while Dad has a taste for jigging music, Suzette prefers gospel; she likes singing about Jeezoos.
Also, I am now ten, meaning to say that I am larger and stronger than I was at age six. It helps, of course, that Suzette’s accordion is much more compact than Dad’s. I can actually lift it. I can actually put it on my knees and wind its straps around my shoulders. Dad says that when I wear it, he can just see my forehead behind it, my eyes thus unable to see the keys on the right side of the squeeze box or the buttons on the left. But I can reach them. And I can play them, if by feel only. So after their wedding when she has moved in with Swanson—and us—on Boundary Island, I borrow my new sister-in-law’s accordion when she will let me, which is often.
So here I am at age ten years, strapped to this instrument three sizes too big, waddling off into the forest of spruce behind our camp. A quarter of a mile and I find myself in a meadow. A flat rock to sit on and I am ready. To play. I don’t care what. I reach for those keys and those buttons and make whatever sound I am capable of making. Squeek, squack, bleat. Squeek, squack, bleat. The squirrels scurry off as do the chipmunks as do the rabbits. I even scare the ants. But that doesn’t stop me. I practice and practice and practice and practice, every day, two hours at a stretch, sometimes three. And, note by note, chord by chord, day by day—a snatch of tune here, an interval there, a chord, a rhythm—I start making something that could pass for music. If I start at the beginning of August—that is, right after my brother’s wedding—then by month’s end, I am playing a tune I learned at boarding school. Except that, having grade four already and being ambitious, I “write” my own lyrics as well (that is, inside my head). And lo and behold, the squirrels return, as do the chipmunks as do the rabbits. So good is my music that, before I know it, they have even formed a kick line (in my child’s eyes) and are doing the cancan, a dance I saw in a cowboy movie at school the year before. And as they dance, the animals squeal with piercing delight and join me in singing my song (which is actually “Pop Goes the Weasel” but with a difference): “Round and round the circle, the rabbit wore a weeskits [vest]; when the buttons went diddly-doo, off came the weeskits.” And how we laugh, how we chatter, me and those animals.
And then there is the piano. At the Guy Hill Indian Residential School, my eleven-year-old, pre-pubescent boy soprano stands out in choir. I have a voice. Combine this element with the innate musicality that I have inherited from my progenitors and “you are talking talent,” says Sister St. Clare to Sister St. Aramaa (for I overhear them one day) after choir practice.
On top of this, the choir director keeps catching me looking at Matilda Mitaas, our accompanist, with envy—in fact, I’m not even singing, I’m too busy watching her piano—so she puts me under the charge of this same Sister St. Aramaa. Now we’re talking turkey, for Sister St. Aramaa, who, by the way, looks like a turkey, takes me on—finally!—as a student. “I will be able to play like Melinda Kamaa-magoos,” I say to Rene with untold excitement in the yard that day as we are making a fort in the snow by the seesaw.
The first thing the sixty-ish nun teaches me is to read music—the precise position on the keyboard, for example, of the middle C and the five-note scale that climbs from there to D to E to F to G and back down to C. That takes five fingers precisely; the hand itself does not even have to change position. From there, she teaches me the difference between whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes. She teaches me the difference between a major key and a minor key. From there, I go on to play by reading the score (such as it is, a piece for the right hand only that is written in the key of C-major—all white keys, no black—and travels in quarter and half notes). The piece is called “Loudly Brayed the Donkey.” I hear it to this day. Later, she teaches me the meaning of musical terms that are all in Italian, terms like allegro, allegro con brio, allegretto, andante cantabile, andante sostenuto, largo, presto, presto con fuoco, poco a poco, and so many others, words that will help me immeasurably with my learning of the Italian language decades later. By the end of that year, I have progressed to sonatinas by Italian composers such as Muzio Clementi and Anton Diabelli. And it’s only a matter of time before I move on to Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and a whole world of wonders that will change my life irrevocably.
Most children who are “forced” to take piano lessons by their parents hate the experience; not only do they refuse to practice, they learn to hate their teacher. Me? I love it. Wild moose couldn’t pull me away from that keyboard. I am smitten. I am obsessed. As with Suzette Highway’s accordion, I practice and practice and practice and practice. I sneak into the “lie-berry” where the piano sits off-limits to plebeians—only its students can touch it—and where Sister St. Aramaa gives her lessons; I practice until my fingers hurt. The result? By the end of the year, I do what it takes your normal student five years to accomplish—I reach grade five in the piano syllabus of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music.
