The Lesser Blessed

  “One of the most truthful, painful, powerful novels I’ve ever read.”—JOSEPH BRUCHAC

  “The Lesser Blessed charts new territory on the literary map, and for this we must be thankful.”—THE VANCOUVER SUN

  “Van Camp penetrates the lives of his characters with compassion and empathy that transcends the fights, drugs, music and sex that characterize the stereotypical high school experience.”—BOOKS IN CANADA

  “Van Camp writes with a real honest connection. It’s that honesty that makes his first novel such an achievement.”—ABORIGINAL VOICES

  “[Van Camp] does not stumble over nostalgia or romanticism or careless diction. He loves words “his own, his Nation’s, rock and roll’s” and slips perfect ones into atrociously profane and perfect sentences.... Van Camp captures the hilarious pitch and putt of adolescent dialogue.”—MALAHAT REVIEW

  “The Lesser Blessed seems like a novel for adults, but one that might be both accessible and of interest to adolescent readers, who might well be especially attracted to its gritty subject matter and realistic representation of language and point of view...”—LETTERS IN CANADA

  “Van Camp’s novel introduces a new terrain and language that nonetheless has roots in the fiction of Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch, while simultaneously exploring the same subject matter as the contemporary stories of Sherman Alexie, Adrian Louis, and Lome Simon... The Lesser Blessed is also a harbinger of a sophisticated Arctic Literature, and of a bold new direction for contemporary Native Literature.”—GEARY HOBSON

  The Lesser Blessed

  RICHARD VAN CAMP

  Copyright © 1996 by Richard Van Camp

  First U.S. edition published in 2004

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & Mclntyre

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Van Camp, Richard

  The lesser blessed

  ISBN 1-55054-525-6

  1. Title.

  PS8593.A536L47 1996 C8I3’-54 C96-910437-5

  PR9199.3.V356L47 1996

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  Cover design by Jessica Sullivan

  Cover photograph by Ben Rector/Getty Images

  Text design and typesetting by

  Vancouver Desktop Publishing Company

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

  Printed on acid-free paper

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities.

  This book is dedicated to

  the memory of Lome Joseph Simon,

  author of Stone and Switches

  (1960-1994)

  I remember...

  “For the lesser blessed

  it’s all promises

  And you”ll turn

  but, lady, you’ll burn.

  FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM

  “He accepted them as a holocaust”

  THE BOOK OF WISDOM

  Me

  I remember. It is the summer of my crucifixion. I try so hard to be pure; I take two baths a day. At least underwater, I can hear my heart beat. The skin on my back dries. Cracks. I make the noise of splitting wood when I walk and my scent is of something crumbling.

  I scratch with a knife the word NO a hundred million times on the back of all the mirrors in our house, so my mother sees that I say NO to her, so my mother sees that I say NO to my father, so my mother sees that I say NO to the world, and to the acts unforgivable.

  I walk out to the road that leads to Edzo and Yellowknife. I stand daringly close. I wave to the truckers who blare their horns. I am still a child and comfortable waving to strangers.

  I see a therapist who asks me to draw how I see myself. I hand in a picture of a forest.

  He looks closely, says there is no one. I say, “Look, there. I am already buried.”

  There is NO a hundred million times on every rock, tree and leaf...

  Them

  “Firefighters Find Rae Man in Burning House, Fort Rae, N.W.T.”

  —The Northern Perspective

  “A Dogrib man died in a smoky blaze Wednesday after fire engulfed his home. Firefighters retrieved the victim’s body after the building had burned to the ground. The man died of smoke inhalation and contusions to his skull. Firefighters speculate he fell down while trying to flee the inferno at approximately 10:30 p.m. He was taken to Stanton Yellowknife Hospital by ambulance, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. RCMP and fire department investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the blaze. The victim’s name has been withheld until the next of kin have been notified.”

  Johnny

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw Johnny Beck. It was in the high school foyer, the first day of school. He was Metis, a half-breed. He wore blue jeans, a jean jacket and white high tops. His hair was feathered and long, his eyes piercing and blue. He had on a black AC/DC shirt. It was the “Who Made Who” one, where this guy is being operated on by aliens. This probably sounds like any typical teen-ager but the thing I remember about Johnny was the look on his face. He looked like he didn’t give a white lab rat’s ass about anything or anybody. He sat in the foyer next to Darcy McMannus. Darcy was cracking jokes but Johnny wasn’t laughing. Johnny had this guarded look about him, like he was carrying the weight of Hell. All the girls were saying, “What’s his name? Find out his name!”

  I didn’t do a thing. I was too busy looking for Juliet Hope. I was also trying to keep a lookout for Jazz the Jackal.

  I’m Indian and I gotta watch it.

  Mom

  “Larry, Jed’s going to be coming in soon,” my mom said from the living room. She had her glasses on so I knew she was studying. “Something happened to him this summer. He sounded kind of shaken up when he called.”

  “Is he okay?”

  (Don’t look at me)

  “I hope so,” she said.

  Jed was the best. He was my mom’s boyfriend in a weird sort of way. He’d come into town for a few months and he’d get us all settled as a “family,” then he’d leave because of arguments—he’d say it was because he had a job, but I knew the truth. My mom wouldn’t marry him. He loved her, he really did, but she was still scared, I guess, of men. Jed was a firefighter, a bush cook, a Ranger, a tour guide and a whole lot of other things as well. He’d been around the world and he always had a story to tell. He was Slavey and proud of it. I wanted him and my mom to get together. I really needed some stability. I know that sounds lame, but it’s true.

  “When will he get here?” I inquired.

  (And listen to my black teeth scream)

  “As soon as he can. Hunting season’s just beginning.”

  “Hmph,” I mumbled. “I hope he stays for a while.”

  “He’s coming in to inspect the water bombers for the next fire season,” she said.

  I could see my mom was pretty excited about Jed, so I left her alone. She was cranking CCR and Patsy Cline. That was a good sign. Mostly she just studied, studied, studied
. She wanted to be a teacher. She took day and night courses at Arctic College. We had been in Fort Simmer since my accident. It was okay, not much to do if you’re not into booze or sports. I mostly read and listened for stories.

  I have this lousy memory because of my accident, but if you were to tell me a neat story, I’d be able to tell it back to you years from now, word for word. For example, the last time Jed was here, he told us about a trip to India. I’ll tell it to you. It goes like this:

  The Blue Monkeys of Corruption

  “Well, I was in India one time, eh ...

  “It was just a regular day and, urn, I was smoking up. We were having tea and toast and a pipe. I was passing it around with my buddies and, like, in India every animal is sacred but at the same time there are monkeys in the city that steal. The monkeys were crippled. For punishment, somebody hacked off the hands or arms from the monkey bodies because the monkeys were thieves; they were elegant yet clumsy thieves.

  “The monkeys have their own tribes in the city, and I guess the monkeys had been studying me and my buddies. They knew we were stoned happy cripples and monkeys smile like God smiles when the crippled are happy and even more so do the monkeys smile when the crippled are paralyzed. At the time, we were pretty stoned and kept passing the pipe.

  “I mean, the tea and the toast were great but the pipe was even better. We were sitting there and we weren’t talking because we didn’t need to talk. We had reached a new state in our friendship where our speaking was half murdered by the time we got to wrapping our mouths around our words. And these eight monkeys just hopped up on this balcony. They surrounded us.

  “I remember thinking if ever I wanted a postcard, I wanted a postcard right then and there. I would have bought a box of twelve pictures of these eight monkeys on this balcony surrounding us as we passed the pipe. They watched us. I think five of them were missing an arm or a hand, and they had these mean eyes. That was the only thing that gave this postcard away. Those eyes. It seemed as if some of these monkeys had killed before in an elevator and the elevator had never been blessed, you know, and the people in India would ride in this elevator all day and they would think: ‘Why does this elevator feel so spooky? Is it haunted? Why does it stink?’

  “But the monkeys, what they did was they attacked us. They swarmed around us, and this wasn’t an unchoreographed attack; this was a very well-thought-out, well-planned manoeuvre. It was timed and it was a postcard nightmare. The eight wonderful monkeys turned into the Blue Monkeys. They scared us and they screamed in these rasps with these carnivorous teeth, these fibula-crunching teeth. I was paralyzed but I realized that if I didn’t get out of there, like immediately, these monkeys were in fact going to bite me, and I didn’t want shots in India because you don’t know what they do to those needles—they could be free-basing Javex with those needles! I don’t know! So I ran, because I feared the doctors more than I feared the bite of the Blue Monkeys. We ran into this storm cellar and we locked ourselves in this basement. Those monkeys were hammering on the door even though some of them didn’t have hands! They still found ways to hammer this door so it sounded like a million drums on the streets of India. It was awful. It was scary. I screamed like I had never screamed since I was seven. I feared for my life! And we waited and we waited for an hour, a good clean hour, for the Blue Monkeys to go about their business and get whatever they wanted. We just hoped they’d leave us alone because we were tourists in India, for chrissakes. The Blue Monkeys had no right to turn this postcard into something angry or greedy, so I prayed like mad. I meant every inch of that prayer and, if I remember correctly, there were tears flowing down my face.

  “So the circle was complete, because not only had I screamed but I had prayed. And that’s fine, that was release for me, and I guess I needed that at that particular point in my life. An hour later we walked out very carefully to our picnic of tea and toast and the pipe. Everything was gone: our clothes on the hangers were gone; the toast was gone; the butter was gone; the pipe was gone. And, like, I don’t know what the monkeys wanted with our pipe but they took it. Perhaps that was the greatest tragedy of all, because we had some great, great hash in that pipe and I was quite upset about the whole thing. I realized at that moment that I had to get out of India.

  “If the Blue Monkeys had followed me that far—especially if they could get that far missing hands and arms, I realized I had to go to Africa, the dark continent. I had a feeling the Blue Monkeys would not follow me there.”

  That’s the story he told me. It’s yours now. Tell anyone you want.

  Mom

  My mom sat at her work table watching me. I was in the kitchen. The house was looking good. We had been here for two years and there was a new secondhand shelf for her books. She picked up her coffee and eyed me over her cup.

  “Are you going to make banana bread, or what?” I asked.

  My mother shrugged, so I carried on. “Well, it’s been ages since we’ve had some.”

  “Why don’t you make bannock? Jed showed you how, didn’t he?”

  “Do we have raisins?”

  She shrugged again, so I got up and started to make bannock. I got my ingredients—flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, lard, water (it has to be luke-warm, that’s what Jed taught me) and raisins. My mom went back to typing. While I was sifting the dry ingredients and heating up the lard, I looked at my mom. She’d cut her hair the last time Jed split and it hadn’t grown back to its original length. My dad would’ve called her a dizzy shit for doing that, but I could see why.

  Jed told me that if a Dogrib woman cuts her hair she has to burn it. If not, when she dies, she has to go back all through her life and pick up every single hair she ever dropped before going up to heaven. My mom’s hair was usually black, but in summer it turned kind of red. She had dark brown eyes that turned black when she got mad. When her and Jed argued, my mom’s eyes got so they could incinerate you if you said the wrong thing. These days they were a hazel brown, like the pelt of a cinnamon bear. She was short, about five foot two. I heard Jed once say that out of all the tribes in the Northwest Territories, the Dogrib had the sweetest feet and the softest hands. I’m not psycho or anything, but I had to admit my mom had nice feet.

  “You know,” she said, “in the olden days, the Dogrib used to put fish eggs in their bannock.”

  “Oh yummmm,” I mimicked and rolled my eyes. “Oh wow.” I started rubbing my belly in mock pleasure (watching you) and moaning all around the kitchen. My mom ignored me.

  “I’ll pass,” I sang and plopped an egg in the water.

  My mom went back to typing, so I left her alone. After kneading |the dough and greasing the baking pan, I placed the bannock in the oven and put the timer on for thirty minutes. Then I blasted some Iron Maiden in my room, and after that some Judas Priest, some Slayer, some Ozzy and more Maiden.

  Every song for me was a beautiful forest to get lost in, and every forest reminded me of both Juliet and Jed.

  Mister Harris

  School had taken off. We were three weeks into September. I had settled into my classes and was used to the stench of lockers and to my new teachers. Mister Harris had come from Hay River. He and Johnny locked horns right away. On the first day, Mister Harris, during roll call, looked at Johnny and said, “Mister Beck, you look familiar. Do I know you?”

  Johnny retorted, “Yeah, Mister Harris, I’m the guy who passed out on your lawn.” Mister Harris glared at him while we all laughed.

  Mister Harris was a sad excuse of a man. He had a shark’s smile right below his round little nose. His pot belly and bubble butt made him look sadly ballerina-ish as he arched his form to and fro around the classroom. While we read, he would sit quietly stroking his balding head, patting it like a baby’s ass or rolling his fingers across it as if it were a delicate pie crust about to crumble. His absent-minded caresses only drew attention to his protruding forehead. He also had that disease where your head shimmy, shimmy, shimmies.

  The s
ad thing about our school was that we were so far behind the system. It’s true, and as a result, the students in our school were baby birds falling to their deaths while the school was guilty of failure to breathe. The teachers often sent their own kids down south to get an education. I don’t want to mention any names, but Mister Harris was a classic example. He was a blown-human tire. There was this cool thing about him: his index finger. I watched it. It was actually a magic wand that cast the spell of human blush around the room. Whoever he’d point to, they’d blush. He’d point to me, I’d blush.

  One day we were having this huge debate about whether it was environment or upbringing that creates a criminal. I looked around. Wasn’t it fucking obvious ? With the quiet bleeding labour of shellfish in our lockers. The sweet rotting flesh of our feet. The fluorescent lights making me weakdizzydemented. The crab cream two desks over. The gum under my desk. The spits on the floor. The silverfish. The crunch under my runners. The bleeding badge of the sun. The crunch under my runners. My father’s teeth. The crunch under my runners. Kevin Garner was selling drugs in the back row. Clarence Jarome was jamming his HB pencil into the primer of a 12-gauge slug. Everybody in the room, as their bodies cooled out, had their eyes fusing shut, and Juliet was nowhere to be found. Johnny Beck had been sighing out loud and roaring his yawns all throughout the class readings. Mister Harris sighed too, and asked Johnny several times to be quiet. Finally, after Johnny had done everything but start bawling out of boredom, Mister Harris stood up and yelled, “Mister Beck. Is there any way that we, as a class, can accommodate you in making this a more enjoyable learning experience?”

  Johnny sat up and looked around. He thought about it for a minute; he put his hand to his chin and rubbed an invisible beard. He cocked one brow and everybody giggled.