A Short History of Indians in Canada: Stories

Noah’s Ark

Noah’s Ark After Papa and William and Mary died, Mum took me and Luke to live with Granny. She had a squat, white stucco house hedged in by white and pink hydrangea bushes that leaned on the windows and blocked the light. There was a pasture behind the house and a creek, and, beyond the creek, Mr. Noah and the zoo. At night, you could hear the screaming, far away and in the dark. On weekends, before Granny and Mum got up, Luke and I would slip out of the house and climb the fence into Mr. Thompson’s pasture. There were cows in the field, brown ones with curly hair, and they would watch us, their big, stupid eyes rolled up and white, their heavy bodies leaning, ready to scuttle sideways or lurch off with their tails in the air down into the scrub and willow along the creek. They kept an instinctual distance, these cows. Most of the time, I ignored them. The creek was brown and thick with oily weeds, and the high bank fell away to the bottom. The only place to cross was at the tree cut down by the spring floods. It lay completely on its side, but it hadn’t died. Its roots were 112 still buried deep in the earth, and the trunk bristled and twisted with new branches and soft layers of green sticky leaves. The zoo was on the flat above the creek, and we would scramble up to the grove of cottonwoods that stood near the bear pen and hang on the cyclone fence and watch the animals get fed. Mr. Noah’s red beard crackled and smoked in the morning frost, and his bald head glistened with sweat as he strode up and down between the cages, a metal bucket swinging from each arm. Back and forth between the iron cages and the zookeeper’s house he went, the buckets filled to the top with chunks of bleeding meat or vegetables or grain or the dark, black-brown, foaming sludge that slopped over the lips of the buckets and fell in trailing pools behind him. In the morning, the zoo was a riot of noise. The bears swayed and growled. The macaques stuck to the wire and then exploded, ricocheting around and around their cages. The geese and the ducks stampeded to the corner of their pen, honking and quacking, their necks craned in anticipation. The gibbons whistled, and the wild pigs howled and banged their teeth together. “You think he’d kill us if he caught us looking?” Luke wanted to know. I was older. “No, silly. They don’t kill people for looking.” “Papa said they killed people in the war for looking.” “Those were spies.” “So?” “We’re not spying. We’re just looking.” Noah’s Ark 113 “They could still put you in jail or something,” said Luke. “Are you scared?” It was a mysterious place, the zoo. “You know,” I told Luke, “if any of those animals escaped, they would kill you. Every one of them is a dangerous killer. Mr. Noah is lucky to be alive.” “They like Mr. Noah. He feeds them.” “The bears would eat him so fast.” “What about the ducks? What about the monkeys? Monkeys don’t eat people.” “Some do,” I said. “You know what Papa said about liars, Caroline.” “I’m not lying.” “They go straight to hell and rot.” Luke liked the cows. “The cows are nice. They don’t eat anyone. They just eat grass.” “Cows are dumb.” “I think they are beautiful. They look real soft. Jimmy says if you put salt on your hand, they’ll lick it.” “The bears would eat those cows in a second.” Papa was a preacher. He preached for the Nazareens and then he preached for the Baptists. The year before the accident, he went to preach for the Methodists in Loomis. The church gave us an old, two-storey house in the trees near the river. It had been newly painted—sky blue with yellow trim—and the kitchen had shiny pink linoleum squares filled with green and white flowers. 114 A Short History of Indians in Canada Mum said the cupboards were solid wood. Mary crawled into the stone fireplace in the parlour and said you could see all the way to the sky. We took turns looking up that chimney. It...