Free Born with a Tooth by Joseph Boyden Page B

bathroom and washed his hands and face, then went back to his chair. He wanted a drink. He wanted to get fucked-up drunk. He’d seen two other men die in two years on the street, but both had been old rubbies whose bodies just gave up and quit on them. Those two had prayed every day for death to come and take them. This was different. There was no honour or peacein this man’s death. Painted Tongue sat in his chair, rocking, and hummed, Bad trouble, there is bad trouble and I’ve seen it. He hummed it over and over again. Repeat one hundred times. Write it on the blackboard one thousand times. The old men and younger boys and girls who were crowded around the bar ignored Painted Tongue. They did not understand. When one of them got up to use the washroom, Painted Tongue weighed the odds of being able to grab her unattended drink. He went silent and watched until the people around him forgot he was there. He spotted a full bottle of Labatt’s 50 on a table near him and, when nobody was looking, he grabbed it and drank it down in two gulps.
    That’s it, that’s all, rubby, a big man said, grabbing Painted Tongue by the back of the neck and dragging him out the door. He heard people laughing as the big man gave him a final push, Painted Tongue’s elbow whacking hard against the door frame. I will cut your throat a wide smile with a bottle neck, Painted Tongue moaned as he made his way down the sidewalk. I will count coup on you, smelly bouncer, and take your woman for my own. I will teach your children that you are worthless shit.
    He walked to Kensington Market cradling his bruised elbow and found an alley that didn’t stink so badly of fish. No one bothered you in the alleys here where crates of rotting meat and vegetables were left out for the garbagemen to pick up late at night. Painted Tongue held his hurt elbow as he sat in the alley and thought hard. Other than the beer, he hadn’t had a drink since morning. His body shook and shivered. He wanted a gulp of vodka to take the copper taste out of his mouth. To calm himself he thought about when he was a child and he would sit with his mother on the rock jetty facing Christian Island. She liked to tell him stories of his father and the Ojibwe.
    He hummed himself the story of his father, and his mother’s words came pouring back in the alley. His father had been hired with other men at the Cedar Point Rez to build bridges in the bay, roads running up into the sky that linked the big islands to the mainland. The government thought that Indians had good balance high up in the air above the water, so building bridges was fine work for them. And the Indians were good at their job, Painted Tongue’s mother told Painted Tongue as they sat on the jetty facing Christian Island and its lighthouse. The Indians scampered around on thin beams way up in the sky and the men didn’t use safety lines because safety lines were for women. At Manitoulin Island Painted Tongue’s father fell from a bridge and drowned when a big wind blew up off the bay. The Iroquois wind spirit — the blowing spirit — did it, Painted Tongue’s mother told him, because the Iroquois and Ojibwe were old enemies. The Ojibwe made friends with the Jesuits long ago, and the Iroquois tortured and killed the black robes because they considered the black robes devils. But trouble between the two tribes had always been, from the time the earth was born.
    That night he tried hard in the alley to remember his mother’s story of how the earth came to be. He recalled her saying that before there was such a thing as land, a giant turtle rose up out of the water. Eventually, rocks and trees and animals and finally Nmishoomsag , the Grandfathers, sprouted from the turtle’s back. Painted Tongue remembers the look in his mother’s eyes, her stare out towards Christian Island. She believed the stories she told, and this made Painted Tongue want to believe