faller Chapter 5 Dianne

Chapter 5

Dianne

Her name was Eliza.

Eliza Darquisse Dumont.

But everyone called her Dianne, and nobody knew why. 

Nobody, including Dianne, could remember why.

She was a pretty young woman, Dianne. And, while she had many suiters, she had no intention of becoming anyone’s wife or anyone’s mother. Not if she could help it. Olive coloured skin dabbed here and there with soft freckles and high cheekbones and shimmering black hair with copper streaks that reflected the sunlight on clear days. Her eyes were ever so slightly almond shaped and the colour of almonds too, which led some to speculate that she might have Oriental blood in her. 

Oriental.

That’s what they called it then.

It was an obliquely musical and distant word for something that the people in that place could only understand within a very uncertain frame. There was only one Chinese family and their take out food place, some half remembered thoughts of Marco Polo or Genghis Khan or Bruce Lee.

It raised her in their eyes above the Indian heritage about which she would never tell them. 

For the people in that place knew Indians, that’s what they called them then, all too well. They knew about the people who lived on the Island, who were not even good enough to be white trash. People who they feared and resented because they were as close to the absolute and despised Other as anyone in that place could know. There was no black family there then. Italians to them were not white and Jews almost certainly ate babies and had killed Jesus. 

Dianne was kind and gentle. She was pretty and she was decent. She couldn’t possibly be Indian.

Being kind and decent was an unusual thing then in that place. While our memories haze and soften our past into the “good old days”, there never truly was such a thing. At least not where Dianne grew up. Her goodness was most unusual coming from the family that she did, the one she would never tell anyone about.

She had been raised away from her brothers and sisters and her parents, part of the government scoop that took children away from Native families and placed them with white families for their own good. 

That’s what the government said. 

That’s what the government called it then. 

A kindness. 

As the youngest girl, she could not be sent into the woods to hide the way her other siblings had, and she had been found and taken. She had been taken in by good and decent white parents, and afforded a kind of luxury living away from that Island, of having and being able to keep her gentler instincts. It seemed then like a good bargain for giving up her past and her culture, especially since the church told her again and again that Indians were heathen Satan worshippers who had murdered and tortured priests. 

Dianne tried to be kind to the boy.

She knew that the boy lived an especially hard life, that he had suffered untold and unknown abuses that he would never speak of. Not to her and not to anyone else. She felt deep in her soul that he was meant to be a good boy and she believed that his cold and brittle distance from her and all the rest of humanity was a kind of armour, a kind of shield wall that the boy had created to protect himself from the ugly world of the Reserve, which was the only world that he had never known.

Dianne knew these things to be true without the words ever having to be spoken.

Some things have a truth to them that runs far deeper than the shallow surface skimmed by spoken words.

She had thought of perhaps adopting the boy, of taking him away from the Island, of taking him away from that world the way that she had been taken, but she feared the boy’s father. She knew the boy’s father. She had seen the look in his eyes when he was drunk and angry. And he was always drunk and angry. Dianne knew that the father was capable of terrible things. And she knew that the boy’s father was not the only threat to him on that Island.

That was another truth that ran far deeper than words that could be spoken.

Dianne was not at all certain that the boy would even be willing to go.

She did not pretend, even to herself, to understand the boy.

She could only do her best to love him.

She brought the boy food and clothing when she could, to that half burned down house. But she was always careful that none of her friends or anyone from her life could see her crossing the river. Most of them did not know Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont’s connection to that Island. And she was not ready for them to know about that connection. She did not know if she would ever be ready for that.

The boy never seemed to wear the clothes that she brought him, and he would wolf down the food without ever taking the time to taste it or to show any appreciation for what Dianne did for him. She did not know what happened to the clothes. 

Some of them surely, along with much of the food, were eaten by his goat. That boy would give the goat food even when he himself was starving.

He would not tell her about these things if she asked.

She never asked.

But she knew.

Mostly, she knew.

He was a strange and sickly boy. She did not think that this was solely due to his terrible life or even to the living of a cruel and terrible life. He was very smart. His grades were very good despite his sporadic attendance, and she believed him to be a good boy, though he showed little evidence of that, other than that he did not seem to do particularly bad things, the kinds of bad things that Dianne knew that boys and men and women and even girls did on that Reserve, the kinds of bad things that the boy’s family was known to do, because that was all that any of them knew. 

His Grandmother said that the boy could see things that most others could not see, that he could hear things that most others could not hear. The Grandmother said that the boy had Strong Power, Ka'shatsténhshera’kó:wa, she said, the same kind of power as she, his Grandmother was said to have. But Dianne had been raised a good Catholic girl and she did believe in such things.

Not really.

Still she loved the boy.

Still she tried to as kind to him as she felt that she was allowed to be.

She did not like going to that Island.

They had money on the Reserve now, Casino money, and they had cleaned most of the place up, but that Island still felt to Dianne like a terrible savage and cruel thing. She could feel the ghosts of cruelty that still lingered there in that place in her good Catholic bones. It was a place where people like the boy’s Grandmother believed in things that would surely send them all to hell, and where, even now, with all the money and the new houses and new boats, terrible things, things that had been done to people for generations, were still done. She knew that the boy believed in some of the old ways, some of the Wild ways, but he also read the Bible and knew it better than most people who called themselves Christians, even though he was just a boy. And Dianne believed, she wanted dearly to believe that the boy would come to the good Catholic God in his own way and in his own time.

She would not tell him what to believe.

He would not listen if she did tell him.

Dianne knew what it was to be told what to believe and what it meant to people on that Island to be told what to believe and what not to believe, and she knew about the horrible things that were done through the centuries to make the people believe in a thing that they did not want to believe. She was not naive. She was not a fool. She knew what horrible things had been done to people in the name of God and in the name of civilization. She knew what had been done to the boy’s Grandmother and Grandfather and all the Grandparents that were from that place by her own Catholic Church.

Dianne believed nonetheless in the overall goodness of the Church in the same way that she believed the overall goodness of the boy.

But she had also come to believe that a person should arrive at the things that they believed because they chose to believe in that thing, not because someone else had decided for them that they should believe it.

Many at Dianne’s Church would not agree with that idea. Dianne never spoke it out loud.

She did her very best to be a good woman, did Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont, and she succeeded at it better than most.

But still she worried that the things that the things that the boy’s Grandmother believed, and that the boy himself seemed to believe at times, would send the boy to hell. And Dianne did not want that for the boy.

Not for him.

She went out there to the Island when she could. 

On that day she went to bring the boy food.

Dianne knew that the boy had been taught to hunt and trap in the old ways and that he hid food somewhere so that he would have it if she did not come, but he was just a boy and the things that he could hunt and trap could not possibly be enough to sustain him, and nothing grew in the ground on that Island because of the years of chemicals being spilled into the river and the food that he hid could go bad and kill him. He was so sick, so thin and gaunt and fragile looking already. She feared that one day she would come to the Island and find him dead of starvation or poisoning or of the violence that was still so much a part of that unchristian and savage place.

There were churches on the Reserve. There were Christians. And those that weren’t were not all savage and cruel.

Dianne knew this to be true.

But it was a violent world. More violent even than the outside world, the world that Dianne knew. And the violence seemed to hang over the boy like a dark brooding cloud that might strike him down with lightning and thunder and mindless cruelty at any moment. 

Dianne felt deeply the boy’s loss even though it had not yet happened. 

She felt how a gaping emptiness would be left in the world where this boy once was. 

In her heart. 

And in the world itself. 

But she felt that his loss was inevitable, like the falling of the leaves and then the falling of the snow and then the falling of the rains that are separated by a too brief sunlight.

Dianne/Eliza felt an aching for the boy and for the brittle useless armour that this too often cruel world, a world as a whole that was cruel by default, let alone the world  of the island where violence could come so quickly and without warning, as much out of sheer boredom and not knowing of anything else as because it was just easier to pass on the hurt, had forced him to hide behind, the shield wall of not caring and of never being truly there, or in any place at all, so that when this too was taken from him he could tell himself that it had never truly mattered anyway, that he had never truly mattered anyway.

Dianne did not let the boy see, not ever, that she pitied him, that she feared for him or even that she loved the boy. She knew that such things were alien to him and that he would retreat from any sign of emotion further behind his brittle shield wall, perhaps so far behind it that she could never reach him again. 

She brought him food and sometimes clothing that he would never wear, and she let him have his distance. She did not try to reach beyond the wall or beyond his distance.

But she did love the boy.

She did not understand him. 

She did not even really know the boy but she did nonetheless love him.

That day, as she pulled her almost paid for car up the gravel driveway that was blotched and spattered with weeds and garbage in front of the half burned down house that looked like it might fall from rot and neglect at any moment, she did not see the boy. Usually, if he was here he would be standing outside, by the burned post. He stood there most often, eyes far, so far away. as if he was in some kind of trance. 

Just him and the goat.

He spent very little time inside the house.

He spent very little time inside at all.

The cockroaches and the ants and the flies and the rats had the run of the inside of that house which still stank of fire and filth.

It was not unusual for the boy not be be there.

But the goat was not there either.

He often went out to hunt or trap and he sometimes went on long walks that could last for days. Walks that the boy’s Grandmother said was an old sacred practice, a kind of communion with spirits. But Dianne suspected that the boy just walked to get away, to get away from the ugly and unkind thing that was his life.

The first few times he had done it Dianne had feared for the boy’s life. He went with no food or water and days without sleep, often so deep into the woods that no one could have found him, and he was just a boy, so small and frail and sickly. She feared that he would not find his way home or that he had no intention of finding his way home. But he always came back. And she began to learn not to fear for the boy quite so much when he disappeared on those walks.

Dianne got out of the car and grabbed her bags of food.

They had agreed on a place that she could leave food where it wouldn’t be found or stolen to easily, or torn into by the rats or the local dogs or coyotes. Or the goat that ate everything and seemed to hate the world even more than the boy. The food would probably still be there if he had gone on a walk, when he got back.

As she walked towards the house that still stank of fire, Dianne’s thoughts were on the things that would make up the remainder of her day. The drive back and the visits to friends and neighbours that took up so much of her days off.

It was a long moment before she finally too notice of the boy, the goat and a strange man walking away from her across the junk strewn field. She had been looking straight at them, but had been too lost in her own thoughts to see what it was that she was looking at. 

The man. The stranger.

Dianne knew right away that she did not know this man and that he was not someone she had ever seen on the Island or anywhere on the Reserve, though she did not know how exactly it was that she was so certain of that. The way that the man walked, the strange limping shuffling gait and the hunched over way that he carried his body filled Dianne with immediate and terrible dread.

Dianne had, in her nightmares, seen a stranger like this one come for the boy. She had always feared that some stranger, some unknown faceless predator would come for the boy while his father was in prison and while Dianne was away, and the nightmares always ended with the boy’s body in a field very much like the one that he and the man were now walking across, the body mutilated and violated beyond all redemption or human capacity for understanding by some faceless nameless human monster. 

Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont froze where she was, in mid step, and opened her mouth to scream.

But no sound came out.

The faceless hunched over man and the goat and the boy continued to walk away from her in that barren rusted out field and Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont could not move or make any sound.

The bags slipped from her numb hands and cans rolled and food splattered all over the dirty gravelled driveway.

And Dianne screamed without making the slightest sound.

While the boy, the goat and the man moved further and further away.

Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont screamed and screamed and screamed.

And no sound came out.

Not the slightest sound came out her mouth. 

Not the slightest sound.

Still she continued to scream into that terrible silence.

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