The House

By Dawn Natelle

This chapter just visits some of the characters in the story and provides some background: Dawn.

Chapter Six – Mum, Dan and Daisy

Just before the ice on the river broke up, Grey headed down to the store for spring supplies. He wanted to know which of the three canoes to bring down first – Sun and he had done three over the winter, along with 18 pairs of snowshoes and some other crafts that Sunflower had made: beadwork and dreamcatchers.

“I have two cedar strip, and one birch bark,” he told Frank. “I can deliver the third one probably a month later.”

“Probably one of each to start, and as many of the snowshoes as you can. They really aren’t a winter item. Mostly Toronto tourists who buy them as wall decorations. I can’t imagine anyone snowshoeing in Toronto, although I guess some are hunters,” Frank said.

“Do you mind if I borrow your computer for a few minutes,” Grey said. “Just for some email.”

“Sure. Just let me log out of my ordering page,” Frank said. “And feel free to print anything you want. There is lots of paper in the laser.” A minute later he put Grey into the Internet Explorer home page. He left, and then Grey signed onto to G-Mail, where he found two incoming messages. One was written minutes after the message he had sent his Mum.

Dear William

I can’t tell you how happy I was to see your e-mail. I was sure you had died somewhere in Canada. Your Dad was even planning to put a memorial up in the family plot. He will be so surprised when he finds you mailed me. Please come home, William. I want to see you again. It has been nearly a year now since when your last summer break would have occurred. I miss you.

Love, Mum

PS – please write back as soon as you can.

The second message was about 10 days later.

Dear William

I have to update what I wrote last week. Your message caused no little concern here at the house. Your father read it, and then took it to your grandfather. Finally there was a meeting with them, I, and your eldest brother Chuck.

Your Grandfather confirmed what you said happened with the fourth Earl’s son. He is our ancestor, of course, and that means that his son, the Indian boy, may be deemed illegitimate. That, of course would mean the estate and title would go off to another branch of the family, and we would be ruined.

Your grandfather said he thought this knowledge would go to the grave with him, and is most interested in knowing how you found out. Please do not share this information with anyone else.

You hold all the cards now. If you love your family you will keep this secret. Your father is nearly 50 now, and doesn’t have any profession beyond managing the estate. And there are no ads in the Times seeking former Earls.

The result of the meeting was that they want you to stay in Canada. If you do come home to visit, it would have to be under another identity. The estate will fund you to any reasonable level. You know that we are land rich, but don’t have a lot of cash. Your grandfather thinks we could scrap together £1500 pounds a week if you need cash. Just please keep things quiet.

We had been using quite a bit of the money that would have gone to tuition at Harrow and college at Cambridge or Oxford to pay for detectives in Toronto searching for you. I understand right now they have some lad in a place called Font Hill, near Niagara Falls, under surveillance. Is that you? Anyway, your grandfather is calling them off the case, and that money will now go into an account for you.

Dear boy, I love you dearly, in spite of all this. Perhaps I can come to Canada and meet you again.

Love, Mum

P.S. You may be an uncle soon. Chuck married Lady Janet Cromwell on Valentine’s Day, and my mother’s intuition says that she may be carrying a child, although they haven’t made an announcement yet. She is the daughter of a Baron, so the marriage is a move up for her. But she is a sweet young thing, and clearly loves Chuck for himself, not his titles. I can’t believe I will be a grannie soon.

Grey leaned back and printed both letters. Then, with Frank still busy in the store, he used Google to search some online stores for a specialty item. He sought a 58B bra. Sun was still wearing the same bra she tried to commit suicide in a half year earlier, and it was getting pretty tattered. She said it was a 44DD, with a chain of things called ‘bra extenders’ across her back. As a result, the cups in the front were too close together, and definitely would not be right when her breasts started coming in.

Grey decided to buy three bras and a few pairs of panties. He had bought her several pairs of panties at the stores in Tweed, but they were cuts for older women. She would like some sexier ones, Grey thought. He called out to Frank asking if he could have the package sent to the store, and for Frank to put it on his credit card. The shopkeeper agreed, and came in to put in his address and credit card details.

He could not help but see what was being ordered, and smiled as he hit the send button.

“I thought you might have a friend up there,” Frank said. “Your production this winter is quite high. I hope things are going well with you.”

“She is my sister,” Grey said. “Sunflower Wolf. When I bring down the new stock, she may agree to meet you. She is pretty shy though. I hope you can open an account for her with the store as well. She should get credit for half of the canoes and snowshoes, and all of the crafts.”

“I can do that. Oh, a friend of yours just came in for a coffee.”

A friend? Who could it be, Grey wondered. He popped his head out of the office and saw it was Dan, the man who had driven him to Tweed several times.

“Hi Grey,” the bearded man said. “Are you busy? Care to go for a little drive?”

“Well, I was planning to head back to camp right away, but I guess a little trip will pay off if we can pick up some bread along the way, and a few groceries.”

Dan paid for his coffee and the two headed out to his old truck. Once buckled in, Dan headed out to the west, a direction Grey hadn’t been since he came that way from Toronto.

“I wanted to tell you a bit about myself,” Dan started. “You probably wonder how someone my age is retired. I am part Ojibwe, like you. My grandfather married a white girl, who moved to the reserve and got her First Nations status. So I am 3/4 Ojibwe. Both my parents worked in corrections facilities near Kingston. They like to have some First Nations staff for prisoners of the people to relate to.”

“The beauty of living in Kingston was that I was able to join the Canadian Forces Reserves when I was in high school at 16. My marks on graduation were high enough that the Canadian Forces put me though the Royal Military College in return for a promise to serve for 10 years after. So when I finished college and my 10 years, I was still 33, but I had 17 years of service. It was a no brainer to do another eight years and be eligible for a full pension at 41.”

“Where did you serve?” Grey asked.

“I became a peacekeeping specialist,” Dan said. “It was a good move. I served in both Somalia missions, from 1992 to 1995. It was hard work, but I moved up from Captain to Major during that time. They dangled a colonelcy in front of me when I mentioned retirement, but I decided that a larger pension was not worth the extra five years. Even as a retired Major I receive more money than most people around here earn.”

“Here is Madoc,” Dan said as they drove into a small town slightly smaller than Tweed. “They have a nice bakery here.”

“Good, let’s stop in and get some bread, and maybe some goodies too.” Grey thought Sunflower would like a treat, if Mimiha would let her break her diet for a day or two.

«Yes, she has been working hard all morning on snowshoes. She can have a treat or two,» Mimiha said in Grey’s head.

After they bought some fruits and vegetables in the local grocery the men got back into the truck, heading south. Dan was especially pleased when Grey offered him a pastry from the bakery.

“These are good,” he mumbled with his mouth full. “I’ll have to make my way to Madoc more often.”

“They are good,” Grey agreed as he ate his.

“Let me continue,” Dan said. “So it was 1999 and my father had passed, and my mother was in a rental place in Kingston. They owned a cottage near Tweed, so my first job on retirement was to renovate and winterize the place. Mom lives there with me now. She spends most days at the senior’s center in Tweed, playing cards, knitting, and mostly gossiping with the other ladies her age.”

“I’m too young to be a senior, so once the renovations were done I started becoming the ‘help guy’ in town. I have about 10 different seniors that I visit each week, morning or afternoon to check if they are okay, and to do any little errands they need done. It started one day when a voice in my head told me an older man was in trouble. I went to his house, and there was no answer at the door. I knew something was wrong, so I broke the window pane next to the knob, and unlocked the door.”

“I found the man inside, lying on the floor, with a broken hip. He was in the kitchen, and the stove was on with something burning in a pot. I called 911 for an ambulance, which were there in minutes. They had him out quickly and headed to the hospital.”

“I stayed in the house, and was cleaning up a bit. Apparently he was making chicken noodle soup, but the water had boiled away, burning the noodles and chicken, making a mess in the pan. I was scrubbing the pot when an OPP officer arrived, gun in hand.”

“I admitted to breaking in, but pointed out that robbers and thieves seldom do the dishes at the house they break into. The officer was Cindy Rohmer. She is about 30 and cute as a button: too old for you, and too young for me, I guess. She would be a catch for someone though. Anyway, I had to go through a long interview with her, mostly because she didn’t understand how I knew the man was hurt from outside the house. Voices in my head didn’t get through her cop filter.”

“She wouldn’t leave until I did, and I had to replace the broken glass in the doorway, so she stayed in the open house while I went to the hardware store for glass. After I fixed the window, she had found the keys to the door on the wall, and we were able to lock the place.”

“That was the start of my visitations. One senior told another and now there are 10. But it is my evenings that are busiest. It started a couple years back, when I offered to take over the local cub pack. One of the requirements is that I had to be a Christian, because the Boy Scouts seem to think that only Christians have any moral fibre. They turned me down, closing the program rather than accepting someone who serves Manidoo.”

“I had done three sessions before they ejected me, and the boys liked me. Eight of them asked me to set up a non-Scout program. I called it the Ojibwe Young Warriors, and we continued on, meeting in a church hall, of all places. I think we had 10 boys when I planned the first campout after getting three fathers to agree to come along.”

“We begged and borrowed, and got eight tents. Two adults in two and two boys in each of another five. The last tent was for cooking. We went into the bush and I had an entire weekend’s activities planned. One thing I wanted to teach them was how to move silently through the bush. It wasn’t working until we had the boys split up in two groups. I had one group and a dad had another. The other two dads were preparing breakfast.”

“In my group, I sent any boy I could hear to the back of the group, and soon they were being very quiet. We came over a rise and saw two does eating the lower branches of a cedar tree. The boys stood and stared for over two minutes, when the other group came up on us. The deer bolted long before the noisy warriors got over the rise, so they were confused why we stopped. When they found out they missed the deer, they were upset, until the boys in the first group chided them for being so noisy and scaring the deer away.”

“The next morning I took the other group of boys first, and trained them to be quiet, and finally led them to the top of the rise where the deer were back at the trees. This time the second group came up silently. Apparently their leader had been the only noisy one, and they made him go to the back until he got quiet. All twelve of us watched the deer eat for nearly 10 minutes, until a boy coughed and they bolted. The other boys were merciless teasing the boy who coughed, and he was nearly in tears when I pointed out that it is hard to be deer-quiet for so long. All the boys drank from their canteens and realized that thirst would have made some else cough if the first boy hadn’t”

“We found the deer nest, where they slept that night, and also an old antler, that was full of little bugs, as well chew marks. It let me teach them how something like an old antler fit into the ecosystem of the forest, with rodents gnawing it for the calcium, and then the bugs using it as a home as it deteriorated.”

“Well, after word of that campout got around at the school, I had 25 boys the next week, and 45 the week after. And there were girls that wanted in on the fun. So now I have three groups of boys with an average of 20 per group, and 15 girls on Mondays. I hold meetings four nights a week. We join together on camps and the fathers and mothers line up to help.”

“That sounds incredible,” Grey said.

“It is very rewarding,” Dan said. “Of course you would know that being out in the bush almost all the time. Flint says you have quite the little setup there.”

Grey felt like he had the wind knocked out of him. How did this man know about Flint? He racked him brain trying to remember if he had inadvertently mentioned the warrior in his head.

“Flint came to me the day after 9-11,” Dan said. “At first I thought it was a dream, until he started coming during the day. It was Flint who told me the man was down with a broken hip. He made sure I was in the store the day a bus came in when a young girl went into a washroom, and a young boy came out 15 minutes later. Flint had me there to distract the staff so you could get to the woods without anyone noticing.”

“I was also 15 minutes away when you rescued Sunflower from the car,” Dan said. “You were gone when I got there, but I would have taken her to the hospital if you couldn’t move her. But it seems that things have worked out much better for her with you than she would have been in a hospital.”

“Wow,” was all Grey could say.

“And did you wonder why I was always at Frank’s store when you came? I don’t spend that much time there, but Flint tells me when you are coming.”

They had passed by Tweed, and were now in Actinolite. Dan stopped at the store, and Grey put his bread and groceries with the goods he had bought from there. He offered pastries from Madoc to Frank, his wife, and his helper. No sense having too many left to tempt Sun.

Grey then walked down the highway from the store, crossing the river and turned into the lane that went to the big house. The house was a half-mile past the river, and another half-mile in from the road. As he walked, Grey spoke with Flint.

“So how many other people do you communicate with?” Grey asked.

«Many. In the numbers your people use, 643.»

Grey came to a complete stop. “You talk to 643 people? How many of them live around here?”

«Oh, there are only 48 still living. The others are in the past … I lived a long time ago,» Flint said. «As for those living around here, there are only the three of you: Sunflower, yourself and Dan. All but two of the others are Ojibwe, one on Lake Huron and one on Gitchie-goomi.»

Lake Superior, Grey translated mentally. “So do you contact the others often?”

«Not really.» Flint said. «Lone Owl, the warrior on Lake Huron needs me quite a bit, but the others rarely contact me.»

Grey walked on in silence, coming to the lane entering the house. There was an old sign that had fallen down and he turned it over to see that it had once said ‘Ridge House’ in faded paint. He set it back down gently, thinking that he and Sun could fix it up again for the owner.

Then the house appeared in his view, and he knew much more needed to be done than fixing a sign. The house was a shambles. A beautiful porch surrounded the building, which was massive. It was 90 feet wide, and 120 feet deep. Behind there were four rather large barns and outbuildings. None of the buildings seemed to have been painted in the past 20 years. An old lady of about 60 sat on the one good area of the porch.

“Good day sir,” she greeted him. “You will have to go around to the east side, I am afraid,” she called out in a healthy voice. “The steps on the west and south sides are not safe.”

As Grey got to the ‘good’ steps he wondered how bad the other steps were: these looked pretty rickety. “Good day madam. My name is Grey Wolf. I would be honored if you called me Grey,” he said. “I understand you own all the land around here.”

“One mile from the easternmost part of the river bank back to the river itself, and four miles from the road allowance to the north,” she said, as though reciting it. “That is what the original deed from 1839 says. It was 2600 acres originally, although my father bought three farms to the east during the depression. Probably 3000 acres now. When we were lumbering, which was until 1984, we were one of the biggest operations in the province. My name is Daisy Ridgemark, and you may call me Daisy.”

“It is about your trees I come, Daisy,” Grey said. “My camp is on the other side of the river, but I came across some Maple Trees at the rear of your property, I think. I would like to tap those trees for Maple syrup next spring, if you give me your permission.”

“That land belongs to you,” Daisy said, surprising Grey. “Those trees were planted on empty land by your people, the Ojibwe tribe that once lived there. All in neat rows, right?” Grey nodded.

“That was the first part of the forest that my family cleared. There was a thought that they would farm the land, but the soil around here is too weak for farming. My great, great grandfather lived in Peterborough, and he was a captain in the militia in 1837 when the rebellion occurred. His company put down any rebels in the area, and there was no rebellion here, like in Toronto, Montreal and some other places.”

“He was allowed to buy this tract of land in 1839 in return for $200 and waiving of several hundred dollars of expenses he claimed from the Rebellion. The province decided that giving him empty land in an uninhabited area was cheaper than paying out cash they didn’t have. My ancestor built a log cabin back by the river, and cleared land. After three years of failing to raise a crop, he decided to use the crop that was already here: the trees. He built a sawmill on the river, and started cutting wood. That was 1845, and most of the wood in the buildings from Tweed to Madoc used his trees.”

“Great Grandfather moved the mill closer to the road in 1867, mainly because the trees had all been harvested from the back half mile of the land. It was my grandfather, in 1898 who gave the empty lands to the Ojibwe’s that lived here: about 18 families. The chief at the time was a very methodical woman, and she ordered the planting of saplings in that row and column pattern that you see today. Most of the trees are a newer generation. When the Indians would see that a tree was past maturity, they would cut it down and haul it to the mill … that big barn beside the house here. The mill paid them, but only about half its worth. Cheating the Indians was pretty common back then.”

“The band suffered badly during the depression, with so many townspeople hunting for food. We offered to help, but your people are proud, and only rarely would the squaws bring the little ones to the house, where we fed them oatmeal. Many died during the depression and most moved out to other reserves before the war. I think there were three left after V-E day, and the last one seemed to disappear around 1960. I was born in 1943, and used to tramp back there in the 50s. I remember a very old man, still tending the trees, and living near a small spring that had the freshest cold water. The last time I was back there his tent had been ripped up, and he was nowhere to be found.”

“Oh my, I am rambling. I seldom get visitors you see. I go to church every Sunday, but it is mostly the reverend who talks then. To make my long story shorter, I still consider that land to be owned by the tribe, even though the deed says it is my land. You can tap the trees, cut them down if you want. That is your land.”

“I thank you for your generosity,” Grey said, “on behalf of myself and my people. There are at least five maples that should be harvested, as well as some oaks. I would like to take down some pine as well. We will transplant new saplings to replace any we harvest. I guess the pine are on your land.”

“No, consider the back half mile of the land to be yours to use and manage, at least as long as I live. If I remember correctly, the planted stands are only half that depth. So you can take as many pine as you want.”

“How many are in your band,” Daisy asked.

“There are only the two of us: my sister and I.”

“So few? Perhaps your people will prosper back there again. I shall have to amend my will to make sure that whoever follows me will not try to take your land. That has happened far too often to your people. Perhaps you can bring your sister to visit. I would dearly love to chat with another woman. Is she older, or younger than you?”

“She is a few years older, nearly 26 now,” Grey said. “But she is very shy. I will tell her you have invited us back.”

Grey left to return to the store, and then on to the camp. Sun loved the pastry, and the fact she could have two slices of the bread. “Mimiha says I have lost over 40 pounds since I came here, and since I started taking the potion it is coming off quicker,” Sun bragged. “No wonder she is allowing me a diet break.”

“Good,” Grey said, “because tonight I am making a feast: potatoes, bread, carrots, onion and some of that venison steak that we froze last month. In a week or two it will warm up and all the remaining steaks will have to be smoked into jerky.”

As he cooked, he told her all about the days activities, and then admired all the work she had done on snowshoes.