And there was Peter Sel’s fishing smack at the far end of the wharf.
The basket makers began to board the vessel, chattering and laughing, still showing each other bits of finery or foods they had bought at the stores. Aaron, heavy in thought, and mentally rehearsing a variety of pleas to Kuntaw and Etienne to come west to the ruined wikuoms and save the starving people and bring them back to K’taqmkuk, followed. As they left Sydney harbor and entered the grey ocean, Aaron went into the bow and faced east, taking bouquets of spray in the face, staring into the haze of distance. Why had he come back? What had changed him, he who cared for nothing but himself, who acted on fleeting impulse?
• • •
Peter Sel, who owned the boat, called to his son, “Alik, take the rudder. I go talk a little to that Aaron Sel who come back.” He came up and stood beside Aaron for a few minutes looking east, said cautiously, “So you are back here. You are older.”
“Yes, I am older. As are you.”
“I heard that sad news about Jinot. Very sad.”
“What sad news?” He looked at Peter.
“Etienne didn’t find you? That Joe Dogg didn’t find you?”
“Nobody found me. I been to sea on the ships. Years. I just come back now. Joe Dogg from the ax factory? What was he doing here?”
“Lookin for you. That Mr. Bone never come back so Joe Dogg wants to go find out what happen. He wants you to go with him, look for you in Boston but never find you. So he come here. Etienne said to him, ‘I will go. I will find Jinot.’ They go to New Zealand, very damn far. When they come back Etienne and Joe Dogg look for you again in Boston. Then Etienne come back here and said maybe Joe Dogg finds you.”
“He did not find me. What happened?” Aaron knew of course with that much searching and travel that Jinot had to be dead.
“I only know Etienne said Jinot died with bad sickness in that sore leg. Mr. Bone dead, too, by a man in grass clothes.”
There was a long silence. Aaron looked at the horizon. He felt an interior ripping as though something was pulling at his lungs. He forced a breath, looked at Peter Sel. He said, “The death of my father does not surprise me. He went away so many years ago. I grieve. I wish I had gone with him. I was a bad and stupid person before, maybe I still am that person but I think I am different.”
“A man can get better,” said Peter Sel. They stood silent while the sails filled and the boat took its course east. “Alik is my son.”
“He is a good sailor,” said Aaron.
“He is. He has eleven winters but he knows the boat. And the water.” There was a long silence, then Peter said, “Sometimes good men start out very bad. I was bad like that. Wait when we dock. We can talk a little.”
• • •
It was dusk when Peter’s boat came alongside the wharf and the basket women raced ashore with their goods and money, and started the long trek home. Aaron did not follow them but waited. After some minutes Peter was there, lit his pipe, leaned on the rail. His son, Alik, coiled a rope a few feet away.
“You say you are changed,” Peter said. “I, too, changed. Used to drink rum and wine, whiskey, all them poison stuff. Drink and fight. Fight ever night, ever day. I didn’t have no boat then. I kill a man. Fight him very hard, drunk, smash his head. I try to break my own head. Just get headache. If I still live I got to change.” Alik came closer, listened, gazing at his father. Aaron wondered if Peter had ever told him this story. It seemed not. After some minutes Aaron said, “Does Kuntaw still live?”
“Yes. He has too many winters now to count. There are not enough numbers for his winters. But he is my father and he is still very wise and leads us. He no longer hunts but tells stories of hunting.”
“Let us go to Kuntaw and Etienne and the others. I want Etienne to tell me everything about the death of my father. And I have much to tell them.”
“You go ahead. We come later,” said Peter. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Alik and me got to finish clean the boat. Take care the boat, boat take care of you. Me and Etienne and Alik go out early morning catch fish for our celebrate. You want to come fish?”
“I do. I want this work. I help with the boat, too.”
• • •
Old Kuntaw, half-asleep in the predawn pallid darkness when Aaron came into his wikuom, woke and stared, listened with mouth agape, put his hands up to his face and made a sound like a hurt moose. “Come here,” he said, stretching out his stringy arms, “come and be embraced by one whose blood is running in circles with happiness. Call everyone,” he said to his wife, Maudi, who was fumbling with the hide door. “Call everyone. Here is a Mi’kmaw son come home. Prepare food. Tomorrow we make a celebration. We will be happy!”
The next day Maudi built up her fire on the riverbank and dragged out her big cooking pots. In late morning Alik came carrying three big mackerel, Etienne and Peter following with more of the huge fat fish. Etienne embraced Aaron. The basket-making women Aaron had seen on the dock came from their wikuoms to help make the feast.
Aaron sat next to old Kuntaw and tried to explain that he had changed but the old man waved his hand as if driving off flies.
“I know how it is,” he said. “I have felt this. Look you.” He took up an empty wooden bowl, put in a dipper of water, asked Maudi to bring a dipper of mackerel oil from the pot and added it. He stirred the water and oil briskly with a forked twig until it whirled into an amalgam of froth. “Water is whiteman. Oil is Mi’kmaw. In the bowl is mix-up métis,” he said, “whiteman and Mi’kmak. Now watch.” They all stared at the bowl. The glistening mackerel oil rose and floated on top of the water. “That’s how it was with me, long ago. I tried to be whiteman, but Mi’kmaw oil in me come to top. That same oil come up in you. Sometime I hope for this Canada that the Mi’kmaw oil will blend with the water and oil come to the top. We will hold our country again someday,” he said, “but we will be a little bit changed — a little bit watery and the whitemen be a little bit oily.”
• • •
Aaron and Etienne walked away some distance and sat on the ground, drawing strength from contact with the earth. Etienne said, “We look you in Boston. Never find.”
Aaron said, “When I was here before I saw that old Kuntaw and the Sels thought they were making a Mi’kmaw place again, but I did not understand; it felt unsure, as when you take up a cup of tea and put it to your mouth and find that what looked to be tea was only the shadow in the cup.”
“Do you feel this now?” asked Etienne.
“No. I drink the shadow now. I find it good.”
• • •
They passed around the traditional talking stick all day and into the next night before voices slowed and they began to name problems — food, lost territory, the cruelty of whitemen’s laws, the loss of good canoe makers. Suddenly Kuntaw’s young wife, Maudi, very pregnant, who had been listening, said, “You men are foolish. You do not see the greatest problem of all. We need women here.” There was silence for a minute and then Etienne said, “She is right. We need more women. I thought they would come if we made a good place, but they have not come. Why?”
“They have not heard we would welcome them,” said Kuntaw. “In the old days women were important, they were the great deciders. They did everything, some even hunted like men. But over the years Mi’kmaw men begin to act like whitemen, who do not regard women as worthy. It is the old Mi’kmaw way to know women are of equal value as men.”