Nations Apart

Old Man continued to sing as he dipped a spruce bough into a galvanized pail of water and shook it over the red hot lava rocks. White steam exploded from the rocks like a shot of magic smoke uniting all the elements in life. Leonard pressed the fresh sage against his lips in search of cool air. Everything had meaning. Old Man had specially chosen and placed each rock in the depression at the centre. Four rocks were placed in the four directions and sprinkled with sage and sweet grass. Old Man’s singing took on higher and louder notes as the air in the sweat lodge became wavy with the rising hot steam.
   The searing heat expanded in Leonard’s chest. Sweat rolled freely down his face and its salt burned his lips. He closed his eyes and felt lightness. He accepted the intense heat and drifted with Old Man’s singing. The Cree words were not unlike his native tongue, the Carrier language, and he allowed his soul to ride with the sound waves and his body to flow with the heat waves. The energy current, strong and swift, quickly took him to another place, to the underworld of dreams.
    He found himself standing on a dirt road, holding his little sister’s hand. Behind them were the red brick buildings of the school, rising from the landscape like terracotta tombstones. They were looking through a wire fence, watching a car drive slowly away. Their older sister, Rosie, was in the back seat and turned to look at them. She seemed sad, but she wasn’t crying. Rosie never cried. She never had a reason to cry before the residential school.
   She simply looked like a bug on a leaf, floating helplessly downstream.
   The car seemed to take forever to drive away. It wasn’t getting further down the road. It was just slowly disappearing in the wake of lifting brown dust.
   Leonard felt helpless, as if he didn’t exist.
   He didn’t want to exist.
   He felt guilt freezing the blood in his veins.
   He had let his sister be taken away. He had failed her.
   Just before the car had completely disappeared in the rising cloud of dust, the driver turned. Leonard could see his silhouette.
   It was the priest.
   Leonard cried out, “No!”
   His sudden outburst startled the others, stopped Old Man in mid-song and immediately brought Leonard back to the sweat lodge and the here and now. Old Man continued singing as the air cooled. Leonard relaxed, closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing.
   When Old Man’s medicine song came to an end, Bobby lifted the canvas flap for the fourth and final exit, and each person crawled out acknowledging “all my relations” while passing through the flap.
   “All my relations,” Leonard echoed as he crawled out through the flap last.
   The morning sun was just peeking over the horizon, and the first light turned a layer of clouds red from the bottom up. The brightly painted reserve houses, with their active chimneys, looked like smoking flowers sprouting through the snow-covered yards. Two ravens, their feathers puffed out to insulate against the subzero air, squawked from the back of an abandoned pickup truck.
   “That was great,” Leonard said as he slipped into his parka. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
   Old Man stood by the fire used to heat the rocks, his hands held out to the rising warmth, his eyes on the sunrise. Steam lifting from his wet silver hair gave the impression that he was present in the spirit world and the physical world at the same time. “Healing is like the river, Lenny. It’s always moving and cleansing. Every once in awhile you have to jump right in, get wet and move along. Get clean.”
   “Hey, sorry about the sudden outburst in there. I kind of had a bad dream.”
   Old Man shrugged. “Happens all the time,” he said. “And it scares the crap out of me every time.”
   The six other participants of the sweat giggled at the remark.
   “Well, I have to get to work. I’m late already.”
   Old Man let out a soft chuckle and indicated the winter environment around them. “Yes, we wouldn’t want any wildfires to get out of control today.”
   “Life is one wildfire after another,” Leonard said with a grin.
    “Seek and ye shall find,” Old Man chuckled.
   “Hey, I don’t go looking for problems,” Leonard protested. “Other people create problems. The government creates problems.”
   Old man held up a finger, “But you are the one that holds the problem.”
   “That’s right,” Leonard agreed. “And there lies my problem.”
   Old Man smiled and rubbed his hands together. “If you can hold it,” he said, opening his hands with the palms down, “then you can let it go.”