Dzelarhons: Mythology of the Northwest Coast - Softcover
Magic.
The world is full of magic.
It's everywhere ...
"When I was eight or nine - or maybe ten or eleven - I don't remember for sure now, Klopinum would share her stories with me."
And thus it begins, the long-awaited successor to Anne Cameron's ground-breaking Daughters of Copper Woman. Magic in many incarnations - mischievous, terrifying, benevolent, erotic-suffuses the pages of this extraordinary collection, from the humourous tales of the trickster Raven through the feminist fable of the bearded woman to the myth of the lazy boy who was reared by whales and saved the world, climaxing with the epic story of the mythical superwoman Dzelarhons - First Mother, Frog Mother, Weeping Woman, guardian and teacher of her people.
Praise for Daughters of Copper Woman:
"... an enchanting, uplifting revelation."
-Ottawa Citizen
". . . startling mix of the exotic, the repellent, and the fantastic ... a unique book, a work thick with substance and extraordinary life."
-Vancouver Sun
"... the underlying vision, though tender, has the thrust and the strength of steel."
-Quill & Quire
The world is full of magic.
It's everywhere ...
"When I was eight or nine - or maybe ten or eleven - I don't remember for sure now, Klopinum would share her stories with me."
And thus it begins, the long-awaited successor to Anne Cameron's ground-breaking Daughters of Copper Woman. Magic in many incarnations - mischievous, terrifying, benevolent, erotic-suffuses the pages of this extraordinary collection, from the humourous tales of the trickster Raven through the feminist fable of the bearded woman to the myth of the lazy boy who was reared by whales and saved the world, climaxing with the epic story of the mythical superwoman Dzelarhons - First Mother, Frog Mother, Weeping Woman, guardian and teacher of her people.
Praise for Daughters of Copper Woman:
"... an enchanting, uplifting revelation."
-Ottawa Citizen
". . . startling mix of the exotic, the repellent, and the fantastic ... a unique book, a work thick with substance and extraordinary life."
-Vancouver Sun
"... the underlying vision, though tender, has the thrust and the strength of steel."
-Quill & Quire
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Anne Cameron was born in Nanaimo, BC. She began writing at an early age, starting with theatre scripts and screenplays. In 1979, her film Dreamspeaker, directed by Claude Jutra, won seven Canadian Film Awards, including best script. After being published as a novel, Dreamspeaker went on to win the Gibson Award for Literature. She has published more than 30 books, including the underground classic Daughters of Copper Woman, its sequel, Dzelarhons, novels, stories, poems and legends - for adults and children. Her most recent novels are Family Resemblances, Hardscratch Row, and a new, revised edition of Daughters of Copper Woman. She lives in Tahsis, BC
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
When I was eight -or nine - or maybe ten or eleven - I don't remember for sure now, Klopinum would share her stories with me. My mom was working as an aide in the white hospital at the top of the hill where black-haired kids with eyes like sad holes burned in wool blankets stared through windows at the rolling fields their TB lungs would not allow them to run in, or to jump or yell or chase or ride bikes or do any of the things kids were intended by creation to do.
"You be good now," my mom would say and off she'd go, leaving her own kids at home, walking a mile or so to the job that provided the money there was no other way to get, the money that bought the food that kept us healthy. Sometimes, especially when she was on afternoon shift, Id half waken, and she'd be standing by my bed looking down at me, her eyes glistening damply in the one A.M. moontinted darkness. She had a real thing about those forms they sent home from school; she'd always sign, and they'd jab us in the arm with all this stuff she said would keep us from getting sick. Didn't matter if it was smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, she didn't even look at the form, she signed and we got stuck in the arm. But we didn't get the TB or anything else, except one summer I got undulant fever from cow's milk. She'd tell us, "Stop complaining, the kids where I work would give anything to be able to do what you do." Not much we could say in answer to that, just roll up the sleeve and get jabbed again, and put a good face on it. Life could be worse and for a lot of people it is.
Anyway, she'd go off to work, and Id feed the few scraggly hens I had in a coop under the steps against the front of the house, safe from neighbours' dogs and hungry 'coons. One of my first abortive attempts at capitalism, probably the reason I sympathize with wheat farmers today. Fill their water, gather the occasional egg, take it in the house and wash off the chickenshit, feathers, mud, and who knows what all, clean the sink, wash the dishes, clean the sink again, and the day was mine.
Get the red CCM from where it was leaning against the outside wall, start running with it ' pushing it alongside, then, when everything felt right, jump up on the seat, as close as I could get to the running starts the cowboys took in the Saturday matinees. Even then I wondered how often they fell off before they learned how.
Down the camp road to Fifth Street, then straight down Fifth, all the way to where it turned into Pine. Why two names for one street? Nobody ever explained. To the highway, turn left, then turn right, down, over the tracks to the reserve, past the big building, and you could see the church off to your right, standing in a field of grass, the whitepainted walls and big cross on the black roof sharp in the summer holiday sun. Down the street that ran along the beach; it had no name then, God knows if it has one now.
Dogs, dogs, dogs. Everywhere. With and without puppies tagging along behind. Some friendly, some waiting for the chance to rip your flesh, they'd run and boil around in the soft dusty road, yapping and barking, almost upsetting the bike, until someone would holler, and then the whole mad lot would chase off in search of some other entertainment. Kids yelled, or waved, or grinned, or ignored me. Adults sat on the steps or porches, the men in dark pants and undershirts, the women in cotton dresses, the old women with kerchiefs over their heads, tied at the back of their necks, white hair straying and wisping from under the blue or green cloth. The kids, like me, in old clothes, "play clothes" we called them to distinguish them from "school clothes" which had to be kept clean.
The open doors gaped darkly, even in broad daylight, windows shoved up and held open with a length of kindling stick, no screens in evidence, mosquitoes and flies probably waiting inside, but only the toddlers seemed to have any bites. Nobody ever seemed in a rush, nobody ever seemed to be out of sorts. Oh, once in a while you'd see some guy draped over a fencepost or on his knees by a ditch puking his guts out drunk, and sometimes there'd be a couple of guys sprawled near the steps they hadn't been able to manoeuvre, sleeping it off in the heat, but none of the sober ones seemed to pay attention to it. A lot of the kids had marks like the kind I wore a lot, those hot red blotches where the old man's hand connected with a good one, or those fire red strips where the belt cracked sharply against your skin. But in that town at that time all the kids were marked up like that, it was how they socialized you, making the boys into men and the girls into women, fitting them for the coal mines or the kitchen, the logging slopes or the bedroom.
Where the road, such as it was, ended, the path started. Unless you knew where you were going, you'd think the houses stopped at the place where the road stopped, but two minutes down the path, shoving the CCM through grass and tangleberry and ground blackberry that committed mayhem on your bare ankles, was Klopinum's house. Set all by itself. Small, tidy, if it had ever been painted the salt air and wind had fixed that; the boards were silver gray, grainy where the fine sand had rubbed the soft part and left the harder wood exposed in dry pencil-like strips. Her dog would come down the walk, moving oddly, almost half-curled in a sort of slinky-skulk, and for the first few visits, I was sure the dog was going to bite me. I could see teeth, see its lips wrinkled back in what I was sure was a vicious wolf-like snarl, and then I realized the dog was smiling. I'd never seen a dog smile before in my life' was afraid to mention it in case everyone laughed at me and said I was either making up stories again, or so dumb I didn't know a snarl from a grin. Sort of pale honeybrown splotches on a mostly white body, smiling and whipping its tail in circles. Klopinum insisted it was a border collie, but I never saw one like it before or since, although border collies are known to smile that way.
I suppose that dog had a name, but I can't remember what it was.
For years I didn't even know Klopinum's name; if she'd ever told me, I had forgotten. I just called her "Auntie." If any other Auntie came to visit while I was there, Klopinum would tell her my name and add, "her momma works at our hospital," and the other Auntie would look at me as if I had just been forgiven something. Twenty-five years later, in Alert Bay, on hearing my name, someone, a fisherman who sang country and western, asked "'where you from?", and I said, "Nanaimo." He asked if I was related to the woman with the same name who had worked in the Indian hospital. I said, "She's my mom," and right then and there I had to go to his house, meet his wife, see his kids, hold the baby, and out came the photo album. There was my mom, magically young again, standing by a white painted metal crib, her arm around a boy of five or six, both of them smiling, and another picture, the same boy in pajamas, sitting grinning from ear to ear at a small table, and on the table a stack of presents, a birthday cake, some funny paper hats. And my mom again, laughing, ready to help him blow out his candles. "She was like my own mom when I didn't have one," he said, and his wife told me to stay for supper. Before the meal was over there were brothers and sisters, an uncle and a few aunts, smiling, telling me to please tell my mom thank you for being so nice to Sonny. And when I got home and told her, out came her photo album and there was Sonny with my mom again, and even a picture of him in new clothes, going home to Alert Bay. It never occurred to me as a kid, but I wonder now, if any of that made up to her for the economic desperation that forced her to work such long hard hours, looking after other people's kids while her own ran half wild.
Sometimes Klopinum and I would just walk along the edge of the water on the lip of dampness where the spindrift had dried and crackled under our feet with the stiff brown baked seaweed. Sometimes we followed the path into the bush, stepping from hot bright sunlight to cool shaded dampness, our feet squishing the underlay, sending up scents and smells and tastes it took me years to rediscover.
"Look," she'd say, "yellow vi'lets. Smell," she'd say, "thimbleberry leaves. Here," she'd say, "chew this," and when I did, it tasted like licorice, only sharper, fresher, not as sticky-sweet.
Sometimes we wouldn't talk at all, other times we both yapped and chattered. But the best times were when she told stories.
"Hear that?" she'd ask. "Old Raven sitting up in a snag, minding everyone else's business. Hear her? Bossing and scolding and giving advice nobody wants to hear. That Raven. . . . " And she'd smile, and there would be a story. "Raven is the trickster, she fools and gets fooled, her voice is a sharp stone that breaks the day. And one day, Raven. . . . "
"Sit on this log," she'd say, "and let's watch Snipe working for her dinner. You never see that Snipe wasting her time. But if you watch her long enough you'll see that even though she's working all the time, she's having fun too. Hear her talk talk talkin' to her family? Hear them talk, talk, talkin' right back, everybody out there busy, busy, busy and havin' such a good time. . . ."
"Oh Eagle," she'd shrug, "what's so great about Eagle? Just a big garbage truck is all Eagle is. Just another kind of sea gull except she can't swim like a Gull does. Now, if you want a bird, look at Osprey! She never eats somethin' that's been dead in the sun, never eats a thing she doesn't catch all herself. You don't see Osprey chewin' away on spawn dead salmon. . ."
"Here, you twist the heads off like this, then peel fem. like this, see? I'll show you one more time, and then you can do your own." The prawns, pink with red stripes, still steaming from the boiling sea water, dumped in the colander to drain, dripping onto the bare boards of the porch. We sat on the steps and shelled them, all, ate a few dipped in butter, ate a few more. "All the small ones," she said, "are boys and all the big ones are female. See how they carry their eggs against them, between their legs, cuddled up so's the water won't wash 'em off too soon. The eggs are the best part, but you have to work for them, you have to suck and nibble and make all kinds of noise they wouldn't think polite at the church tea party." And she laughed gently, slurping deliberately loudly. "They all start off the same, they all start off boys, then when they're big enough, they change. Prawn has to be smart to get big. Smart ones get babies. Dumb ones are lunch for the fish. Dogfish are like that too. Start off as males, all the small, fast ones. When they're old enough and big enough, they change. The big females breed with a small male only maybe once every four, five years. Don't know how they manage that. Magic, I guess. The world is full of magic. It's everywhere. Dogfish breeds, but she doesn't have a bunch of eggs at once, not, say, like Frog or Salmon or most other things. Dogfish, her babies come out like blackberries. There's never a bush covered with nothing but ripe ones, you ever notice? Some green, some pink, some red, some maroon, some black. Dogfish, if you catch a female and open 'er up, she has one baby that's all set to be born, you can put it in the water and off it'll go, just a bit of egg sac left, and another almost as big but not quite, it might be able to swim, might not, and one a bit smaller, and smaller yet, right down to where there's just an egg with a little black dot in it. Every coupl'a days Dogfish has a baby. Magic. Lots of magic."
Klopinum wasn't much taller than I was, a round sturdy barrel of a Salish body and I have no idea at all how old she was that first summer. She wore brown lisle stockings and low-heeled shoes, a clean housedress with an apron over top, with pockets full of treasures. Her hair was almost snow white, no yellow streaks like some, and she kept it loosely pinned in a sort of a bun at the base of her neck. It escaped, often, and wisped softly around her head. "Oh, that hair," she'd say, "gettin' as hard to manage as a baby's." Her chubby short-fingered hands would reach back, the hair would tumble loose, briefly, then fingers flashing, she would do magic and the bun would be back, not a hairpin to be seen. Magic, the world is full of magic, it's everywhere. "There, that's better, drive me crazy otherwise. Here, straighten you up, too."
Klopinum had a round, flat face, her eyes almost lost in folds, wrinkles, creases, and her forehead was so prominent her eyes seemed hidden under the shelf of her brow. Her hands were gnarled, the skin wrinkled, and she ought to have been long past the age of running, ought to have been past the age to jump a beach log or clamber up a pile of rocks, but she did all that, and more. Laughing. "People forgot how to live, forgot a whole bunch of stuff, you want a good strong body, you have to teach it what you want it to do, otherwise you wind up livin' in an old wreck of a thing, not able to go anywhere any more. Don't tighten up when you run, you just run loose, and breathe like a dog. Your lungs go all the way down to your bellybutton, so don't breathe with your chest, breathe with your belly, fill up them lungs, use 'em properly. And if you get a bad cold, sniff warm sea water up your nose- and wash all those germs out. It'll hurt, but not as bad as bein' sick hurts."
Everyone was so convinced death was waiting behind every rock, waiting to reach out and grab a kid and break everyone's heart.
My mother with her inoculations and dentists.
Klopinum with her sea water and dried roots.
My grandmother with her North English spring tonic and mustard plasters.
"Eat salmonberries, they're good for you, they're the first berries, they'll clean the winter out of your belly and you won't get sick."
She had made blackberry tarts, I remember that, so it was probably August, and so hot and still the dust hung in the air, the heat waves shimmered above the sea. Klopinurns fingers were stained blue with berry juice and her feet stuck out straight in front of her. We were sitting in the sand, leaning against a bleached log. Her shoes were canvas sneakers, gray, and almost finished.
Most of her stories Id heard four or five or a dozen times and could almost recite word for word with her. "You tell a good story," she told me sometimes, and laughed softly. Sometimes, when the other Aunties came to visit, Klopinum would start a story, then nudge me sharply, and I knew I was expected to continue it for her. It was not expected that I use the very same words she used, but it was expected that whatever words I chose, the rhythm was to be as strong and as regular as the waves or my own breathing, and the heart of the story be unchanged. And when the story was done, nobody clapped, they nodded, and you knew inside yourself if you had done a good job of telling the story.
Most of the time the same basic story got told half a dozen different ways, variations on the same theme, but that August day Klopinum told me a story for the first time and then never told it to me again, although I asked for it often enough. "You'll remember it on your own," she answered. "You heard it when I told you, you know it, you don't need me to tell you that story."
She told me about the Creator. Not a man and not a woman but neither, and both, it doesn't matter. And there is no name other than the Creator, the Voice Which Must Be Obeyed. A good force, a good spirit, a good soul. The Creator. Made everything there is in this world and all other ones, made the birds and fish, the animals, trees, plants, rocks, flowers, and us, ma...
"You be good now," my mom would say and off she'd go, leaving her own kids at home, walking a mile or so to the job that provided the money there was no other way to get, the money that bought the food that kept us healthy. Sometimes, especially when she was on afternoon shift, Id half waken, and she'd be standing by my bed looking down at me, her eyes glistening damply in the one A.M. moontinted darkness. She had a real thing about those forms they sent home from school; she'd always sign, and they'd jab us in the arm with all this stuff she said would keep us from getting sick. Didn't matter if it was smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, she didn't even look at the form, she signed and we got stuck in the arm. But we didn't get the TB or anything else, except one summer I got undulant fever from cow's milk. She'd tell us, "Stop complaining, the kids where I work would give anything to be able to do what you do." Not much we could say in answer to that, just roll up the sleeve and get jabbed again, and put a good face on it. Life could be worse and for a lot of people it is.
Anyway, she'd go off to work, and Id feed the few scraggly hens I had in a coop under the steps against the front of the house, safe from neighbours' dogs and hungry 'coons. One of my first abortive attempts at capitalism, probably the reason I sympathize with wheat farmers today. Fill their water, gather the occasional egg, take it in the house and wash off the chickenshit, feathers, mud, and who knows what all, clean the sink, wash the dishes, clean the sink again, and the day was mine.
Get the red CCM from where it was leaning against the outside wall, start running with it ' pushing it alongside, then, when everything felt right, jump up on the seat, as close as I could get to the running starts the cowboys took in the Saturday matinees. Even then I wondered how often they fell off before they learned how.
Down the camp road to Fifth Street, then straight down Fifth, all the way to where it turned into Pine. Why two names for one street? Nobody ever explained. To the highway, turn left, then turn right, down, over the tracks to the reserve, past the big building, and you could see the church off to your right, standing in a field of grass, the whitepainted walls and big cross on the black roof sharp in the summer holiday sun. Down the street that ran along the beach; it had no name then, God knows if it has one now.
Dogs, dogs, dogs. Everywhere. With and without puppies tagging along behind. Some friendly, some waiting for the chance to rip your flesh, they'd run and boil around in the soft dusty road, yapping and barking, almost upsetting the bike, until someone would holler, and then the whole mad lot would chase off in search of some other entertainment. Kids yelled, or waved, or grinned, or ignored me. Adults sat on the steps or porches, the men in dark pants and undershirts, the women in cotton dresses, the old women with kerchiefs over their heads, tied at the back of their necks, white hair straying and wisping from under the blue or green cloth. The kids, like me, in old clothes, "play clothes" we called them to distinguish them from "school clothes" which had to be kept clean.
The open doors gaped darkly, even in broad daylight, windows shoved up and held open with a length of kindling stick, no screens in evidence, mosquitoes and flies probably waiting inside, but only the toddlers seemed to have any bites. Nobody ever seemed in a rush, nobody ever seemed to be out of sorts. Oh, once in a while you'd see some guy draped over a fencepost or on his knees by a ditch puking his guts out drunk, and sometimes there'd be a couple of guys sprawled near the steps they hadn't been able to manoeuvre, sleeping it off in the heat, but none of the sober ones seemed to pay attention to it. A lot of the kids had marks like the kind I wore a lot, those hot red blotches where the old man's hand connected with a good one, or those fire red strips where the belt cracked sharply against your skin. But in that town at that time all the kids were marked up like that, it was how they socialized you, making the boys into men and the girls into women, fitting them for the coal mines or the kitchen, the logging slopes or the bedroom.
Where the road, such as it was, ended, the path started. Unless you knew where you were going, you'd think the houses stopped at the place where the road stopped, but two minutes down the path, shoving the CCM through grass and tangleberry and ground blackberry that committed mayhem on your bare ankles, was Klopinum's house. Set all by itself. Small, tidy, if it had ever been painted the salt air and wind had fixed that; the boards were silver gray, grainy where the fine sand had rubbed the soft part and left the harder wood exposed in dry pencil-like strips. Her dog would come down the walk, moving oddly, almost half-curled in a sort of slinky-skulk, and for the first few visits, I was sure the dog was going to bite me. I could see teeth, see its lips wrinkled back in what I was sure was a vicious wolf-like snarl, and then I realized the dog was smiling. I'd never seen a dog smile before in my life' was afraid to mention it in case everyone laughed at me and said I was either making up stories again, or so dumb I didn't know a snarl from a grin. Sort of pale honeybrown splotches on a mostly white body, smiling and whipping its tail in circles. Klopinum insisted it was a border collie, but I never saw one like it before or since, although border collies are known to smile that way.
I suppose that dog had a name, but I can't remember what it was.
For years I didn't even know Klopinum's name; if she'd ever told me, I had forgotten. I just called her "Auntie." If any other Auntie came to visit while I was there, Klopinum would tell her my name and add, "her momma works at our hospital," and the other Auntie would look at me as if I had just been forgiven something. Twenty-five years later, in Alert Bay, on hearing my name, someone, a fisherman who sang country and western, asked "'where you from?", and I said, "Nanaimo." He asked if I was related to the woman with the same name who had worked in the Indian hospital. I said, "She's my mom," and right then and there I had to go to his house, meet his wife, see his kids, hold the baby, and out came the photo album. There was my mom, magically young again, standing by a white painted metal crib, her arm around a boy of five or six, both of them smiling, and another picture, the same boy in pajamas, sitting grinning from ear to ear at a small table, and on the table a stack of presents, a birthday cake, some funny paper hats. And my mom again, laughing, ready to help him blow out his candles. "She was like my own mom when I didn't have one," he said, and his wife told me to stay for supper. Before the meal was over there were brothers and sisters, an uncle and a few aunts, smiling, telling me to please tell my mom thank you for being so nice to Sonny. And when I got home and told her, out came her photo album and there was Sonny with my mom again, and even a picture of him in new clothes, going home to Alert Bay. It never occurred to me as a kid, but I wonder now, if any of that made up to her for the economic desperation that forced her to work such long hard hours, looking after other people's kids while her own ran half wild.
Sometimes Klopinum and I would just walk along the edge of the water on the lip of dampness where the spindrift had dried and crackled under our feet with the stiff brown baked seaweed. Sometimes we followed the path into the bush, stepping from hot bright sunlight to cool shaded dampness, our feet squishing the underlay, sending up scents and smells and tastes it took me years to rediscover.
"Look," she'd say, "yellow vi'lets. Smell," she'd say, "thimbleberry leaves. Here," she'd say, "chew this," and when I did, it tasted like licorice, only sharper, fresher, not as sticky-sweet.
Sometimes we wouldn't talk at all, other times we both yapped and chattered. But the best times were when she told stories.
"Hear that?" she'd ask. "Old Raven sitting up in a snag, minding everyone else's business. Hear her? Bossing and scolding and giving advice nobody wants to hear. That Raven. . . . " And she'd smile, and there would be a story. "Raven is the trickster, she fools and gets fooled, her voice is a sharp stone that breaks the day. And one day, Raven. . . . "
"Sit on this log," she'd say, "and let's watch Snipe working for her dinner. You never see that Snipe wasting her time. But if you watch her long enough you'll see that even though she's working all the time, she's having fun too. Hear her talk talk talkin' to her family? Hear them talk, talk, talkin' right back, everybody out there busy, busy, busy and havin' such a good time. . . ."
"Oh Eagle," she'd shrug, "what's so great about Eagle? Just a big garbage truck is all Eagle is. Just another kind of sea gull except she can't swim like a Gull does. Now, if you want a bird, look at Osprey! She never eats somethin' that's been dead in the sun, never eats a thing she doesn't catch all herself. You don't see Osprey chewin' away on spawn dead salmon. . ."
"Here, you twist the heads off like this, then peel fem. like this, see? I'll show you one more time, and then you can do your own." The prawns, pink with red stripes, still steaming from the boiling sea water, dumped in the colander to drain, dripping onto the bare boards of the porch. We sat on the steps and shelled them, all, ate a few dipped in butter, ate a few more. "All the small ones," she said, "are boys and all the big ones are female. See how they carry their eggs against them, between their legs, cuddled up so's the water won't wash 'em off too soon. The eggs are the best part, but you have to work for them, you have to suck and nibble and make all kinds of noise they wouldn't think polite at the church tea party." And she laughed gently, slurping deliberately loudly. "They all start off the same, they all start off boys, then when they're big enough, they change. Prawn has to be smart to get big. Smart ones get babies. Dumb ones are lunch for the fish. Dogfish are like that too. Start off as males, all the small, fast ones. When they're old enough and big enough, they change. The big females breed with a small male only maybe once every four, five years. Don't know how they manage that. Magic, I guess. The world is full of magic. It's everywhere. Dogfish breeds, but she doesn't have a bunch of eggs at once, not, say, like Frog or Salmon or most other things. Dogfish, her babies come out like blackberries. There's never a bush covered with nothing but ripe ones, you ever notice? Some green, some pink, some red, some maroon, some black. Dogfish, if you catch a female and open 'er up, she has one baby that's all set to be born, you can put it in the water and off it'll go, just a bit of egg sac left, and another almost as big but not quite, it might be able to swim, might not, and one a bit smaller, and smaller yet, right down to where there's just an egg with a little black dot in it. Every coupl'a days Dogfish has a baby. Magic. Lots of magic."
Klopinum wasn't much taller than I was, a round sturdy barrel of a Salish body and I have no idea at all how old she was that first summer. She wore brown lisle stockings and low-heeled shoes, a clean housedress with an apron over top, with pockets full of treasures. Her hair was almost snow white, no yellow streaks like some, and she kept it loosely pinned in a sort of a bun at the base of her neck. It escaped, often, and wisped softly around her head. "Oh, that hair," she'd say, "gettin' as hard to manage as a baby's." Her chubby short-fingered hands would reach back, the hair would tumble loose, briefly, then fingers flashing, she would do magic and the bun would be back, not a hairpin to be seen. Magic, the world is full of magic, it's everywhere. "There, that's better, drive me crazy otherwise. Here, straighten you up, too."
Klopinum had a round, flat face, her eyes almost lost in folds, wrinkles, creases, and her forehead was so prominent her eyes seemed hidden under the shelf of her brow. Her hands were gnarled, the skin wrinkled, and she ought to have been long past the age of running, ought to have been past the age to jump a beach log or clamber up a pile of rocks, but she did all that, and more. Laughing. "People forgot how to live, forgot a whole bunch of stuff, you want a good strong body, you have to teach it what you want it to do, otherwise you wind up livin' in an old wreck of a thing, not able to go anywhere any more. Don't tighten up when you run, you just run loose, and breathe like a dog. Your lungs go all the way down to your bellybutton, so don't breathe with your chest, breathe with your belly, fill up them lungs, use 'em properly. And if you get a bad cold, sniff warm sea water up your nose- and wash all those germs out. It'll hurt, but not as bad as bein' sick hurts."
Everyone was so convinced death was waiting behind every rock, waiting to reach out and grab a kid and break everyone's heart.
My mother with her inoculations and dentists.
Klopinum with her sea water and dried roots.
My grandmother with her North English spring tonic and mustard plasters.
"Eat salmonberries, they're good for you, they're the first berries, they'll clean the winter out of your belly and you won't get sick."
She had made blackberry tarts, I remember that, so it was probably August, and so hot and still the dust hung in the air, the heat waves shimmered above the sea. Klopinurns fingers were stained blue with berry juice and her feet stuck out straight in front of her. We were sitting in the sand, leaning against a bleached log. Her shoes were canvas sneakers, gray, and almost finished.
Most of her stories Id heard four or five or a dozen times and could almost recite word for word with her. "You tell a good story," she told me sometimes, and laughed softly. Sometimes, when the other Aunties came to visit, Klopinum would start a story, then nudge me sharply, and I knew I was expected to continue it for her. It was not expected that I use the very same words she used, but it was expected that whatever words I chose, the rhythm was to be as strong and as regular as the waves or my own breathing, and the heart of the story be unchanged. And when the story was done, nobody clapped, they nodded, and you knew inside yourself if you had done a good job of telling the story.
Most of the time the same basic story got told half a dozen different ways, variations on the same theme, but that August day Klopinum told me a story for the first time and then never told it to me again, although I asked for it often enough. "You'll remember it on your own," she answered. "You heard it when I told you, you know it, you don't need me to tell you that story."
She told me about the Creator. Not a man and not a woman but neither, and both, it doesn't matter. And there is no name other than the Creator, the Voice Which Must Be Obeyed. A good force, a good spirit, a good soul. The Creator. Made everything there is in this world and all other ones, made the birds and fish, the animals, trees, plants, rocks, flowers, and us, ma...
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- PublisherHarbour Publishing
- Publication date1986
- ISBN 10 0920080898
- ISBN 13 9780920080894
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages160
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Dzelarhons: Mythology of the Northwest Coast
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(1986)
ISBN 10: 0920080898
ISBN 13: 9780920080894
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DZELARHONS: MYTHOLOGY OF THE NOR
Published by
Harbour Publishing
(1986)
ISBN 10: 0920080898
ISBN 13: 9780920080894
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Softcover
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