An unsigned document in the moccasin box says that Makovski earned a lot of royalties from Johnson’s legends. He was a member of the trust that gathered them into a book to raise funds for her living and medical care. More than ten thousand copies were printed at that time, and the book remains in print. Johnson left Makovski the copyright to Legends following her death in 1913, as well as the moccasins she wore on her first trip to England, he perhaps then leaving them to the library.
She left her pens and the copyrights to Shagganappi and The Moccasin Maker to her manager and stage companion, Walter McRaye, who had started his career reciting Drummond’s habitant verses and who later did hilarious impersonations of celebrities. Dink, she nicknamed him. During their long journeys on boats and trains and stagecoaches, they invented together a family of travelling companions: “the boys” — four of them — who took their mattresses along and slept on the hat racks, and from there played tricks and commented on their friends. At Steinway Hall in London, the boys bought four tickets for Pauline and Dink. They amused themselves with a cat called Dave Dougherty, who slept in Johnson’s dressing bag; a bug called Felix Joggins, with his very trying wife, Jerusha; and a mongoose called Baraboo Montelius.
In 1915 the balance of the proceeds from Legends, after paying Johnson’s debts, was divided between McRaye and Johnson’s sister, Eva, who then divided her share between the cities of Brantford, Ontario (near Johnson’s ancestral home), and Vancouver, sending $225 to the World newspaper to spend on something of assistance to the arts or literary life of the city. Mr. Nelson, the manager at the World, was puzzled as to what to do, but at length hit on the idea of purchasing a Pauline Johnson room at the hospital which could be devoted to care of artists, actors, poets, newspaper people, and “others of allied interests who might be in hard circumstances (a not unusual condition in these occupations).” He was then “very much moved” by reading about the city’s 29th Battalion at the front, who were “lamentably short of machine guns where the enemy was well equipped with them.” The Vancouver boys seemed to be fighting with their bare fists. Why not buy a gun?
How very easy it is to rouse individuals around a sentimental cause. Only to suffer slow and miserable deaths or violent and brutal ones in the Great Ongoing Wars of humanity against humanity and humanity against the earth. Buoyed up by inner spirit or driven by drugged imaginations, people launch into their ventures with little idea of where they’ll lead. Or they launch in knowing all too well where it will end: their fate. Yet boundless and unpredictable beginnings save the world from its normal and natural ruin. Thus writes Hannah Arendt: in the fact of natality lies the root and faculty of action. We act, we speak, and each time make a beginning toward the possible, just as we entered the world from our mothers’ wombs.
The World launched a subscription. The money poured in. Children walked the thirteen miles from New Westminster to Vancouver and gave their carfare for the Pauline Johnson machine gun. By August 1915 the World had $1,000 (more than the annual wages of most working men), which it sent to Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes. The manager of the World was delighted that Lt. Col. Tobin of the 29th Battalion would receive a gun for his “gallant corps.” Would Tobin see that the gun bore the name Tekahionwake? Tobin wrote that American munitions manufacturers could not deliver the gun before January 1916; the Russian and Canadian governments took the firm’s total output, but he hoped to obtain two guns before the battalion left for the front or certainly shortly afterward. He promised to engrave Tekahionwake on one and send a photo, but in December 1916 the battalion was still without its Tekahionwake. In December 1918, the manager of the World wrote to Tobin wondering whether “the Tekahionwake which we gave to the 29th” could be returned to the World? “We are all so proud of our British Columbian men,” he wrote, “that I am hoping the story of the war, from the British Columbia standpoint — and with special reference to the exploits of the BC units — will be collected and become a textbook in our schools.” In July 1920 the World regained possession of the gun, and showed it with a poster saying it was first fired at Kemmel Hill, Belgium. During a raid, it jammed and Corp. Snowden tore the red-hot gun apart, fixed the feed-wheel pin, reassembled the gun, and fired again in less than ninety seconds. At St. Eloi, the Tekahionwake was manned by Ptes. McGir, Owen, Bourke, Annandale, Cooke, Davidson, and Williams (all killed later). At Ypres, three tripods were shot from under her.
I lay out my scraps of research — the haunting trees, Johnson’s walks to Siwash Rock, the things she left in her will, her stories (from Skwxwú7mesh Chief Capilano) of the Sagalie Tyee, the strange spellings of words in the Skwxwú7mesh dictionary, the 7 to be sounded as a glottal stop like oh-oh, the xw sounded like whispered wh in what. Puzzling over how the Skwxwú7mesh language might talk about the Sagalie Tyee, I find wa lh7áy’nexw is a Skwxwú7mesh word for spirit. The dictionary gives no English pronunciation. I’m left to imagine what sounds I can. Kwelh7áy’nexw translates as spirit of the water. Spirit touches one and one goes numb: from the word tení7i7. To go on a spiritual quest for power: ts’iyíwen. Nexwslhich’álhxa is a spirit who cuts people’s throats, whereas ch’awtn is a spirit helper. Siw’ín’ is a spiritual power exercised through words, while sna7m is a spiritual power exercised through dancing and singing. I let the words figure my tongue. As though words were boxes, and, lifting their wriggling lids, I could find moccasins to slip on, become other than what I am: a taster of letters, a chaser of whiffs humming with threads to other alphabets, echoing glimpses beyond words, always a beyond — an end to a rainbow that flits away to a creak or a moan, a chortle, a rattle, a knocking heartbeat, gutwrench, the thousand bitmaps wired in my eyes from born-into wars owners ancestors conquerors cities. As though I could wear them like masks. Tree — Spirit — I tie with tongue taps, certain they exist somewhere with Forest Skwxwú7mesh Self Moccasin. Laces evaporate leaving foot tied to ear, mouth to armpit, eyes all knees and elbows adrift in my house of mirrors. Tap tap tap along the rhythms. Anyone there?