Should we set some Hamm’s on his doorstep and see if he drinks it? said Angus.
Anybody would drink free beer, especially you, Starboy, said Cappy. We got to catch him drinking Hamm’s in private. Spy on him.
Look in a priest’s window?
Yes, said Cappy. We’ll bike around back of the church and convent up to the old cemetery. Then we can slip around through the fence, take our bikes down through the graves. The back of the priest’s house faces the cemetery, and the fence is padlocked, but you can slip through. When it’s dark, we’ll sneak up to the house.
Do the priests have a dog? I asked.
No dog, said Angus.
Good, I said. But at the moment I wasn’t actually afraid of getting caught by the priest. It was the cemetery that unnerved me. I had recently seen a ghost. One was enough, and my father had told me how they visited the cemetery when he worked. This cemetery was the place where Mooshum’s father, who had fought at Batoche with Louis Riel, was buried after he was killed years later racing a fast horse. It was where Mooshum’s brother Severine, who had briefly served at the church as a priest, was buried in a plot specially marked off by white-painted brick. One of the three who were lynched by a mob in Hoopdance were also buried there—they’d taken the boy’s body there because he was only thirteen. My age. And hanged. Mooshum remembered it. Mooshum’s brother Shamengwa, whose name meant the Monarch Butterfly, was buried there. Mooshum’s first wife, alongside whom he would be buried, was marked by a gravestone covered with fine gray lichen. His mother was buried in that place, the one who’d stopped talking entirely for ten years after Mooshum’s baby brother died. And there was my father’s family too, my grandmother’s family and her mother’s family, some of whom had converted. The men were buried to the west with the traditionals. They vanished into the earth. Small houses had been built over them to house and feed their spirits, but those had collapsed in advance of everything else, into nothingness. I knew the names of our ancestors from Mooshum and from my mother and father.
Shawanobinesiik, Elizabeth, Southern Thunderbird. Adik, Michael, Caribou. Kwiingwa’aage, Joseph, Wolverine. Mashkiki, Mary, The Medicine. Ombaashi, Albert, Lifted By Wind. Makoons, The Bearling, and Bird Shaking Ice Off Its Wings. They lived and died too quickly in those years that surrounded the making of the reservation, died before they could be recorded and in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth, which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth. And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications.
To approach the cemetery from the back we had to go past an old lady who had dogs. You never knew how many dogs or what kind of dogs. She fed the rez dogs. Therefore her house was unpredictable and we always made a detour around it. As we got near, we prepared. Cappy had his pepper can. I grabbed up a heavy stick, thinking of how Pearl hated it, and why. Angus stripped some willow wands for a whip. We got our battle plan together and decided that I would go first with the stick and Cappy would bring up the rear with the pepper. The woman’s name was Bineshi and she was tiny and hunched as was her rickety little frame house. There were two wrecked cars in the yard where the dogs lounged. We thought we might make it if we had enough speed and zoomed past. But as soon as we turned onto the dirt road that ran along the edge of her yard, the dogs came bounding out of the wrecked cars. Two were gray with short legs, three were big, one was huge. They flashed up to us, barking with a vicious intensity. A small gray dog darted in and seized Angus by the pants cuff. Angus expertly kicked it, lashed its face with his whip, and kept riding.