Free Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King

feel as though you’ve just walked into a cave.
    By the time we get to Bright Water, my grandmother and auntie Cassie have already moved to neutral corners. There’s a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies on the table. The two of them sit patiently in the floral wingbacks, sipping coffee and munching gingersnaps, waiting for the bell to ring.
    “Hi, auntie Cassie.”
    “Tecumseh!” Auntie Cassie slips out of the chair. “Last time I saw you,” she says, “you were a baby.”
    “No, I wasn’t.”
    Auntie Cassie grabs both of my hands and spins me around slowly. “Now you’re as tall as me.”
    “Taller.”
    “And strong, too, I see.” Auntie Cassie laughs and takes my head in her hands and kisses me, hard, on the cheek. “There,” she says, “that’s better.”
    “He’s a little old to be running around with lipstick marks on his face,” says my mother.
    “How you going to know who I’ve kissed if you can’t see the kisses?”
    “Whole world knows who you’ve kissed,” says my grandmother.
    There is a ritual to auntie Cassie’s returns. Auntie Cassie tells us all about the places she has been, the things she has done, and the people she has met, and my grandmother sits quietly, perched in her chair, her chin thrust out like a beak, her thin, leathery arms folded against her body like wings, waiting for something to move in the grass.
    “So, we left Sydney,” says auntie Cassie, “and drove up the coast in Terry’s Volkswagen as far as Rockhampton. When we got there, Terry pulled off to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and said, ‘Okay, which way do you want to go?’”
    “I’d go east,” I say, even though I haven’t heard the first part of the story.
    “You can’t go east,” says auntie Cassie. “That’s the ocean.”
    “Okay,” I say. “I’d go north.”
    “That’s what Terry said,” says auntie Cassie. “But you know what I said?”
    “Who’s Terry?” says my mother.
    Most of the time, my grandmother sits with her eyes closed. But every so often she will raise her lids just a crack, lean out of her chair towards auntie Cassie or my mother, and work her jaw back and forth, as if she is chewing on something tough or nasty.
    “Pat had a thirty-foot sloop that we sailed from Papeete to Mooréa.”
    “Who’s Pat?”
    “But the best place,” says auntie Cassie, “was this beach just outside of Tofino on Vancouver Island. Chris has a house there and each morning we would go out and watch the surf break on the rocks. That’s all we would do. We’d take a thermos of coffee and some bread and jam and watch the surf.”
    Once auntie Cassie came home with an older woman who was supposed to be really rich. The woman had one of those fancy German cars and she talked with a funny accent. I thought she was from Montreal or Newfoundland, but my mother said that she was from Sweden.
    “I wanted to see the Red Indians,” the woman told me.
    “Here we are,” I said.
    The woman didn’t wear any makeup. Her hair was cut short and her skin was the colour of winter ice. I was staying with my grandmother at the time because my mother was trying to get the beauty shop set up in Truth. I slept at the back of the house and could see the trailer from my window. That first night, I could hear them laughing and having a good time. It was hot and I couldn’t sleep, so I climbed out the window and snuck over to the trailer. All of the windows were too high up for me to see anything, and after I had walked around the trailer looking for something I could stand on, I just walked up the steps and knocked on the door.
    There are people in Truth and Bright Water who think my grandmother is a witch, that she can do things such as turn herself into a bear or a wolf or a mountain lion whenever she feels like it. It’s not true, of course, but she can work words down deep in her throat so that they come out sounding like something an animal would make if it were angry or hungry, and