Black Bird

  Odawa Territory (Modern-day Northern Michigan)

  Black Bird’s hometown was an eight day walk from White Sky’s, but for him and his uncle Ettawageszhig, it took ten. They meandered on the way—it had been five years since they spoke, after all, and there was a lot to catch up on. Ettawageszhig was the one that saw Black Bird off when he left the village back then, but truth be told, it was not Black Bird’s choice. Up until then, he had been staying under his uncle’s roof, since his father would drift in and out of the village every few years, and was an unreliable guardian.

  But there was one problem. Ettawageszhig had his own children—four daughters, each of them born in a different season, and subsequently named for them. Five children was a great burden to bear, even in a village where neighbors shared their food. Their village was off the beaten path, far from any of the major trade routes, despite their tribe’s namesake, and the whole village had been poor for as long as Black Bird could remember. Those last two years had borne meek harvests, and Black Bird would return from hunting parties with the other men empty-handed. In the end, his uncle and aunt were forced to make a decision, and they did. He was cast out from under their roof at the age of fifteen, left to wander and find his own way.

  In hindsight, he could have perhaps sought refuge with another of the families, or wandered to another Trade-keeper village and asked for help there. But he was young, and aimless, and most of all resentful. He resented his uncle and aunt for making the decision, resented his mother for dying and leaving him alone, and his father for causing all of this in the first place. His village was a monument to all he had suffered, a place that brought him nothing but pain, so he could think of no other option but to run as far away from it as he could. And he did.

  Their conversations were spent mostly with Black Bird recounting his time since he left. The first two years were the hardest, and he could see his uncle’s eyes well with sympathy and regret as he spoke of his struggles—the nights spent alone in the wild, the days spent hungry and lost. He had faced death more than once—from starvation, from Snakes. Worse than these brushes with death perhaps was his attitude towards them at the time.

  “I remember once,” he said. “I was hiding from a group of white men on Manidoowaaling—brigands who would rob traders on their routes. It was the early winter, and I had stumbled across their path as they were returning to their trading post. I lay underneath the gnarled root of a large oak, and covered myself with snow, so they could not see me. I remember lying there, freezing as they passed over me, and a strange thought made its way into my mind. Why was I doing any of this? Why didn’t I just stand up, and make myself seen? For a year at that point I had been suffering on my own. I had no family, no friends, no food. Hell, no future. I was just wandering around, waiting for something to happen to me, to find some purpose. And in that moment, I thought: why did it matter? If I just stood up, what would they do? Kill me? Who would care?”

  “I would have,” his uncle replied.

  “I know that now. But you must understand how I felt at the time, the way I thought about things. I thought I was truly alone in this world, and nothing would ever change that.”

  “I blame myself for that,” Both Sides of the Sky said. “Anwaatin and I would argue so much after you left. I told her it was cruel, what we did to you. She told me life was cruel, and that sacrifices had to be made for the good of the family.”

  “That’s not why she did it. You know she’s never liked me. She never approved of her sister marrying my father, and she’s always been cruel to me. You knew she did it out of spite, and you allowed it anyway.”

  “I… I didn’t. Not fully. I am guilty of many sins, but that is not one of them. Ignorance, perhaps. Turning a blind eye to things. I… I was either unwilling or unable to see things as they were. I have spent these five years trying to figure out which it is.”

  “It happened under your roof. How could you not know?”

  “I… I’m not sure. A few weeks after you left… Spring came to me. She told me the things Anwaatin would say to you, the way she treated you when I wasn’t around. I had no idea the extent of it. I was furious. I screamed at her, said things to her I now regret… hell, the neighbors whispered that I would divorce her.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, of course not. It’s not something that is done. It just… it doesn’t happen. And so I had to make my peace with her, a wife who deceived me, who abandoned her own sister’s child and threw him out into the wilderness. But I didn’t have to do it on her terms. I ran out of the village. I wanted to find you, to apologize, to tell you I was wrong. I searched for you for a month, but I couldn’t find you. I asked around in each village I stayed at, but no one had seen or heard of you. I thought you were dead, for a time.”

  “I was, pretty much. Or close to it. I drifted in and out of life and death those two years, and I never stayed in any of the villages for long. I tried my luck with the trading posts, trying to make it in with the white traders. It didn’t work out—at least, until I met Waabigiizhig.”

  “And I am glad you met him,” his uncle said, smiling. “When I first heard that you were alive and well, and not only that, that you had made a friend among the Firekeepers… you don’t know how happy it made me. I know most of the boys in the village weren’t your age… you were born in a strange season, the wabunowin say.”

  “There were some my age,” Black Bird replied. “We just didn’t really get along. I wasn’t all that interested in making friends, anyway… looking back on it, I was an angry child.”

  “And you had every right to be. But, if you don’t mind me saying so, I have never seen you look so calm. You are different now, grown and changed. You look like you could bear the weight of the world on your shoulders, and carry it to the sunset.”

  “Is that not what I must do now, Nizhishenh? The weight of the world is on my shoulders.”

  “Hmph. True.”

  Soon enough, they were home. Though what ‘home’ meant had always been confusing to Black Bird. Home was what people spoke fondly of, what they missed to the point of sickness when they were away. Home was a hearth to kindle nostalgia, a safe place that always welcomed you back. This place, then, could not be his home. Home to Black Bird was a canoe on the river, passing the time lazily with his best friend.

  This place, this village, these people—they were all strangers to him, now more than ever before. Perhaps that was what haunted him as he and his uncle made their way into the village. For they were not truly strangers—as he passed his old neighbors, things would come back to him—names, faces, old memories from his childhood. The only difference, he realized, was that none of his memories were fond ones. Nor were all of them painful, or traumatic. Most were just… there. They reawakened in his subconscious, declaring themselves like unwanted guests, and then they departed, leaving no mark, no indication that they were there in the first place. That was what this village was to him: no sanctuary of great joy, no prison of indelible sorrow. Just a village, one of thousands. One that left no impression.

  “Anwaatin,” his uncle called as he rapped the outside of his wigwam. “I’m home.”

  Soon enough, his wife emerged, and with three of her four daughters, Black Bird’s cousins.

  “Welcome back,” Anwaatin said with a smile, hugging her husband. She saw Black Bird, and nodded to acknowledge him. That’s the best I’m going to get, I guess.

  “Welcome back, Memeskoniinisi,” Summer said to him. She was the second oldest (a year older than he was), and to him, the most beautiful of the four.

  “Thank you, Niibin,” he replied. “Where’s Dagwaagin?”

  “Oh, she’s off in another village,” Winter said casually. “Don’t you know? She’s gotten herself married to a Faith-keeper way up in the north. I think she wanted to get away from us.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Is she now? I guess a lot has changed.”

  “And what about you, Ndawemaaw*?” Winter pried, as she liked to do. “Have you married yet?”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid. Perhaps I’m destined to be a bachelor forever.”

  At his admission, Winter groaned, and Summer and Spring giggled.

  “What? Why? What’s going on?”

  “We had a wager,” Spring, the youngest, explained. “Winter and Summer both bet you’d be wed off to a white woman by now.”

  “A white woman?”

  “Of course,” Winter shrugged. “You’re just that kind of guy, you know? You just…”

  She looked to her older sister.

  “How do the wabunowin describe it?” She asked.

  “They say some men are discontent with the crops of their own fields,” Summer said with a smile. “That they must wander to foreign lands to feel at home.”

  “Well, I have been wandering foreign lands,” Black Bird said. “And here I am, still wifeless, white or not. Perhaps I’ll ask the wabunowin for some tips. Then again, I’ve never seen a wabunow marry, either. Maybe they’re just full of shit.”

  “Language!” Anwaatin hissed, and the girls just laughed.

  Black Bird felt a hand on his shoulder—his uncle’s.

  “I’m sure you could entertain my daughters with your stories until the sun went down,” he said. “But you are here for a reason.”

  Black Bird’s heart sunk into his stomach. He had almost forgotten.

  “We will leave you to it,” Both Sides of the Sky said. “Once you’re done, come by our place. We’ll have a nice meal ready for you, and a bed if you’d like.”

  “Thank you,” Black Bird replied. “Better hurry with that meal—I can’t imagine I’ll be long.”

  Then he turned, jogging towards his father’s wigwam. He could feel the others watch him go, but he tried his best to ignore it. He stood at the entrance to his childhood home. It felt foreign to him. It was not exactly unexpected—he had spent more time under his uncle’s roof than his own, ever since his mother passed. Still, he could have sworn it looked different as a child than it did now. He rapped on the outside.

  “Ha’setsa’on?” He called. “Are you in? It’s me.”

  Nothing.

  “Ha’setsa’on,” he tried again. Though he hated saying his father’s name, he would hate calling him ‘Father’ even more. He would not hate his father’s name so much, he thought, if it was not a complete and utter betrayal of a name. In his father’s tongue, it meant “He Has Courage,” but his father was the biggest coward he’d ever met.

  “I’m coming in,” Black Bird said. He stepped into the wigwam and looked around. Sure enough, his father was there, lying in the corner of the room, in the same bed his mother died in. One look at him, and Black Bird knew—he really was dying. He wasn’t covered in boils or blisters, wasn’t coughing or hacking. He was just laying there in a languid stupor, his eyes half-glazed over.

  “Who’s there?” He called out from his bed. He turned around, and frowned upon seeing his son.

  “Oh. It’s you.”

  He turned back, facing the wall of the wigwam again. Black Bird sighed, and took a seat near him.

  “That’s it?” Black Bird asked. “That’s all you have to say?”

  A grumble was his father’s only reply. Black Bird could feel his chest tighten, the anger rising in him again. But he was older now, better equipped to deal with this than he ever had been as a child. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and tried again.

  “Your brother-in-law told me you’re dying,” he said.

  “Of course I’m dying,” his father returned. “What are you supposed to do about it?”

  “I… I don’t know. Am I supposed to do something about it?”

  “Sure. After all, that’s what they’re calling you, isn’t it? The savior of these people. He will herald the end of death, a new beginning, the rise of a new grand empire!”

  “These people? How many years have you leeched off of these people? And you can’t even consider them your own, like they’re beneath you somehow. You married into this tribe, this village, this community. Take some fucking responsibility and own your decisions for once.”

  “Bah,” his father said. “You don’t know anything.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. I don’t know anything. I’m just a stupid boy who doesn’t understand the world.”

  “That’s right. You don’t understand. You think you do, but you don’t. You don’t know how ugly this world is. How bad things really are.”

  “Oh, please. I’m twenty years old. I was kicked out at fifteen, thanks to you, and I’ve survived on my own ever since. I’ve seen the Snakes that haunt your dreams—I’ve killed them. I’ve watched men bleed out in my arms, and you still treat me like I’m wrapped in swaddling cloth.”

  Silence from his father. Black Bird rolled his eyes, and kept going.

  “You know, she told me everything before she went. She knew you never would. You think I don’t know why you’re such a coward? Why you can never settle down, why you spend years roaming the earth, hopeful that this is all some bad dream, that things will go back to the way they were when you were a child. She told me everything, dammit. You, a poor young boy of the Island folk, whose world turned upside-down the day the Snakes came. They burned and pillaged and stole away your sister, and you ran away, like you always do. Only they followed you, didn’t they? To every village you ran to, to every home you sought refuge in, until your whole nation lay in ruin.”

  “And still you are determined to hate me.”

  Vitriol burned like acid in Black Bird’s chest and throat, and he could contain himself no longer.

  “I hate you because I know,” he spat. “I hate you because you think it absolves all your wrongs, excuses your pathetic existence.

  “You speak this way to your dying father?”

  “Ha! A joke so unfunny it hurts. You are no father of mine. You never wanted to be. You are a wanderer with no drive, no purpose, no spine. You think you’ll find some meaning out there, and never once in all these years have you thought to look within. You had a wife, a son, a community who could care for you, who you chose! You could have gone anywhere, but you came here, and fell in love! And yet you resolved to make yourself alien to your own neighbors, just to chase the fraying threads of your lost people! And you didn’t even try at that!”

  Black Bird stood, pointing an angry finger at his father, who just stared back at him.

  “I have seen the remnants of the Wendat,” he bellowed. “I have seen the slums outside the French cities! I have heard whispers of a coalition forming, of a grand rebuilding at Michilimackinac! And I haven’t even been looking for them! There is no doubt in my mind—unless your eyes were gouged and your ears were cleft, you would know these things too. With all the time you spent away, all those years you spent looking, there’s no way you haven’t found them.”

  As he said those words, he saw an emotion spread across his father’s face for the first time since he came here—fear, sorrow, guilt. And it only caused the anger in him to burn hotter—it was the look a man gave when he’d been caught in a lie. Only, this lie was not told to deceive Black Bird—it was a lie his father had told himself, all these years, one he had maybe believed until just this moment.

  “You did find them, didn’t you?” Black Bird asked him. “Maybe you did more than that. Maybe you even entreated it—stayed with them a season or two. But then you ran, like you always do. It’s the only thing you know. And I’m sorry that’s what they turned you into. I’m sorry your childhood was filled with sleepless nights, waiting to hear if Snakes would hiss in the distance. But I’m even more sorry that you’re stupid, and heartless. You could’ve prevented another boy from the same fate. You chose not to. And now I’ve survived it, and worse—I’ve turned out different than you. Better than you. And you know what that tells me, the only lesson you’ve ever taught me? That whatever traumas I have suffered, whatever trials I might face tomorrow, they will not define me, not fully. Each of us chooses the extent the horrors of this world affect us, every single day. You just gave up on trying.”

  With that, Black Bird turned, and started out of the wigwam.

  “Wait,” his father called, his voice hoarse. “Where... where are you going?”

  “To the wabunowin,” Black Bird replied. “I need an elder’s guidance, and I can get none from you. Besides, despite what everyone says, I don’t believe whatever ails you is incurable. The pox was incurable, and now I’m immune. So I’ll go find a cure for you, and save your life. No thanks needed. Oh, and once you’re healed, I never want to see your face again.”

  End Notes: