Carol GoldenEagle - Bone Black

The smoke from Wren’s kiln has been releasing all night. She’s been stoking the fire since returning home from the lake. She even got up at four in the morning to add more birch. Quiet, alone, unseen. Now, finally, the flame has died leaving only embers. Wren will collect the fragments from Billy’s remains tomorrow.

Wren decides to throw some clay on her wheel. It is a snow day anyway, so she might as well do something that will amount to good. It’s so quiet outdoors this morning. The thick blanket of snow masks every sound, even the wind is silent. Once indoors, Wren opens a new box of clay. It’s like some sort of homecoming each time she does this. The smell of fresh earth sends her a special greeting, like the clay itself is welcoming her to pick it up and start moulding.

Wren puts on an apron and gathers some slip. She turns on the potter’s wheel. Its hum is always soothing: the sound of creation, reminding her of the wind. As she hunches over the wheel to coax the clay into rising, her mind drifts to times when she and Raven gathered wolf-willow seeds from the bush. Their kohkum had taught them how to pick the seeds and clean off the husk to reveal a perfect, sharp, brown seed at its core. As they removed the outer husk, there was that smell of something wild and free. They’d sit for hours, stringing the wolf-willow seeds into the shape of a necklace or bracelet. A precious memory, and Wren finds herself wishing that her sister was sitting with her now, playing with clay.

She’s happy to be using her pottery wheel again: that whirl of promise that will transform a piece of Mother Earth into a form that signals rejoicing, something that has not been seen in Wren’s studio for months. Not since Raven went missing. Not since her husband encouraged Wren to do pottery with the kids at the women’s shelter. At least her time at the shelter allowed her to find some new kind of purpose. Getting rid of debris and things not useful. Like Billy. Wren watches the mound of clay as it spins around on the wheel.

She says a prayer to her sister: “Today, I make an image in your honour. It will tell the story of strength, and bone black will be the finish. His bones, for all the hurts we have endured but never deserved.”

Crafting and moulding, Wren forms the clay as delicately as dressing a newborn child. She puts her fist in the middle of the mound and it rises. She gently glides her fingers to the outside of the vessel. It needs a lip. Something that will allow it to speak. Within the sound of silence outdoors, the sound of silence within her own heart, Wren coaxes the clay into form. It’s almost noon by the time Wren finishes moulding and finessing this new piece. It’ll have to sit for another day before she can fire it, along with the bone black ash that’s in her outdoor kiln. Bones of Billy.

Wren looks at her long driveway. Snow covered. She’ll call the neighbours down the road for a plow later. Right now, she wants to see if there is a red dot on the lake. Billy’s red truck. Blood of my brother. Wren’s wish is that any evidence of her nocturnal activity will be wiped clean. She hopes the fairies have danced and that lake spirits have taken this offering to rid filth from the earth.

Wren removes her apron and leaves the studio. Minutes later and a short drive down to the lakeside, Wren gazes out towards the middle of the lake. The wind throws her hair over her eyes causing her to lose focus momentarily. The sun shines brightly as the shrill voice of a bohemian waxwing sounds. It jumps from branch to branch along the aspens that grow in the valley. The bird rests in a bush, where it eats the red buffalo berries that continue to hang through the winter months. Wren takes it as a sign from her bird cousin that there will be no red for her to see on the lake today.

Last night’s snow is sticky. The temperature has warmed since yesterday and the snow sticks to the bottom of Wren’s boots, making her feet heavy. There are no footprints in the snow other than the ones she’s making now as she walks. Thick snow lays heavy on the frozen lake as well. She glances toward the panorama and the fault line where she left the truck. Nothing. It’s disappeared, fallen through the ice to rest at the bottom of a very deep lake. There is no evidence of tire tracks on the pathway, nor on the embankment where Wren almost got stuck. Nothing looks out of place; nature’s canvas is wiped clean again by a blanket of fresh snow. By the fairies. Not even snowmobiles would go out on the lake this early in the season, so no tracks like that either. Only clean white flakes. Wren decides to celebrate.

“Red Sea parting, Young Dogs swallowed up,” she mutters to her waxwing friend. “There are fresh cinnamon buns at the gas station. Cinnamon, the smell of comfort.”

Wren returns to her vehicle parked at the end of the street, near an area bald of trees. Wren says a silent prayer for what she’s done. She prays for the inner child of Billy’s soul, the child who had lost his way and turned into a man who slapped and raped and punched. That innocent part of his spirit needs to be set free. Now, that part of him that was once pure will be allowed to dance with the fairies again.

Wren slowly makes the sign of the cross before putting her car in gear. A cinnamon bun awaits.

By the time she gets back to her farmhouse, Wren’s sweet cinnamon bun is only half-eaten. It occurs to her that while she wants to have feelings of elation, she cannot. What she’s done is wrong, she knows this, even if that piece of shit deserved what he got.

Instead of returning to her studio to revisit her newly created piece of pottery, she goes instead to her bedroom and retrieves a pink rosary from her bedside table that used to belong to Kohkum. Wren feels the need to connect with her grandmother’s spirit. She needs to seek guidance and validation that what she’s done was what needed to be done. No more guilt. It was like putting down a rabid animal, a humane act meant mostly to protect the innocent. Billy felt no pain. He just went to sleep, a slumber from which he never awoke.

As Wren holds the rosary, she’s thinks about prayer, and all the times her kohkum told her that the universe provides if you just ask. The memory brings her comfort. Sitting now at her kitchen island, Wren can see her kohkum at work baking bannock, swirling freshly picked berries in a pot to make a sweet jam. She hears her grandmother’s humming and she can see her gentle smile. Innocent times of love and belonging. Kohkum’s kitchen is the place where so much love was shared, and so much food to nourish body and soul. She thinks of the long walks Kohkum would take with the girls. The smell of fresh sap from trees and the lake-smell of algae carried by a warm breeze as they made their way along the valley. There was no pathway back then but it still was a stretch along the lake that was a bustle of activity, all the way from town to Valeport. There was a little cove of land that housed a dance hall, and local folks would dock their boats along the shoreline to make merry and get caught up on the latest goings-on.

That part of the valley has always been lush and remains so to this day, dotted with sloughs. It’s where families gather for picnics in order to watch scads of geese and ducks nest in the area. Kohkum would always tell the twins that along those sloughs grows a large patch of sweetgrass. It’s what we pray with , she’d often remind them. Then, the girls’ grandmother would say, “When I was a little girl, we did a lot of things differently. We harvested the land. No need to head to a grocery store or drug store. Creator provides here, provides everything.”

Wren can still see her kohkum setting down some tobacco while the girls ate Spam sandwiches with mustard that were packed for the hike. “I set down this tobacco,” she’d say, “to thank Mother Earth, the spirit world and our Creator for bringing us such abundance.” They’d sit near the marshy area alongside the lake, watch the ducks and listen to the voices of frogs.