Nightshade. Tom Henighan
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over to the big work table at the end of the improvised studio and fumbled amid the bottles and brushes. “This was all I could find,” she told him.
She handed Sam a wrinkled scrap of paper. On it he read a single word: Weesakayjac.
Sam looked up at her. “You obviously know what that means.”
“I have a vague notion, but I’m not going to tell you. And I’d like it back, please. I don’t want this mentioned, not even to Paul.”
“You make the rules hard for me,” Sam told her. He sensed her distance from him and her lingering anger. “But I won’t tell Paul, just yet — although later I may have to.”
He handed her back the piece of paper. Clara poured herself another whiskey. “Want one?” she asked, but he shook his head.
“I have to go to dinner with Paul and Ginette. I need to be able to think straight. You really believe Daniel’s gone to Ottawa?”
“I’m not sure of anything. But just so you know the score, Sam, and don’t think Daniel’s some kind of paranoid with a martyr complex, let me tell you a few things about his background.”
She sat down across from him, holding the whiskey on her right knee, gazing at him with eyes that had suddenly taken on a glassy intensity.
“You should know that he grew up in the Sandy Lake region of Ontario during just about the worst time in its history. The Native groups there had been undermined by the growth of white society, and despite a lot of glossing over and good intentions on the part of the bureaucrats in Ottawa, there was poverty, disease, a plague of drunkenness, and in general a loss of morale as the old way of life disappeared.”
“The old story,” Sam said gloomily.
“Exactly … Daniel’s uncle was a powerful chief, but his father was an artist, a painter, who was attacked spiritually by some of the shamans for what he revealed in his paintings. Later, when Daniel was only ten, his father was murdered in a barroom brawl in Kenora. His mother died soon after and he was sent to one of the residential schools. I don’t have to tell you what that involved. In his early teens he ran away and was helped by his uncle’s relatives to resettle, but he was never part of the old community. He worked in the mines, and somehow learned to paint, but his alcoholism nearly killed him. Then one day he had a vision in the woods near Ghost Point, and he began to find some solace in the old beliefs, gave up booze for dope, and started selling some of his work in North Bay, Sudbury, and even Toronto. When I met him a couple of years ago he was doing pretty well as an artist, but he was a very lonely guy. We’ve had some good creative times together.”
Sam stood up and walked over to the work table. A jug lamp gave off a low, enigmatic light. It seemed impossible that the confusion of paint tubes, brushes, manikin heads, labels, trays, and Coke bottles — the junk of a life and culture intrinsically alien to the artist — could be turned into a vision of order, a critique of what was worst in the world around him. And yet the alchemy seemed to have worked, and, unless Clara was deceiving herself — which was unlikely — it was working at the personal level, too.
“Daniel’s had a few clashes with the authorities, I take it,” Sam said. “That can’t have been reassuring.”
Clara made a face and shoved her half-empty whiskey glass away. “Look, Sam, Dudley George was murdered in Ipperwash in 1995. So far as I know, he was unarmed and part of a peaceful Native protest. That’s 1995, not 1895! That kind of stuff should be ancient history. But somebody got nervous and a tragedy resulted. Most Native people, especially those who make it in white society, are wary of the police and the authorities. It’s not paranoia; it’s just common sense, based on bitter experience.”
“You think the Quebec police want to pin something on Daniel?”
“I don’t know. In some ways I think he feels safer here than in Ontario. But the lakes north of Ottawa, the Gatineau region, have become a second home for Daniel. That’s probably where we’ll go — if he hasn’t taken off already.”
Sam glanced at his watch. “Look, Clara, I’ve got to go out with Paul and Ginette. Don’t do anything rash. Don’t make any complaint just yet, even if you’re tempted to. Just find Daniel for me, if you can. I need to talk to him. If he’s in Ontario, that might work out very well, since I have to head back to Ottawa tomorrow or the next day. I think we can help Daniel. I’m sure we can.”
“I hope you’re right.” She smiled. “And that’s why I retained you. That’s what they say, isn’t it — retained.”
“I suppose so. And by the way, I’m ready for a small down payment.”
He walked across the where she stood, reached out and drew her to him. He kissed her and she took his kiss politely, tenderly, and without much passion, exactly as he had given it.
“I’m lucky in my friends,” he said.
“I hope so,” Clara said, “and I hope we are, too, Daniel and I.” She reached for the whiskey, took a sip, then cradled it in her hand as she led him down the hall to the door.
“I’ll think about Weesakayjac,” he shouted back, as he tramped heavily down the stairs.
Six
Sam settled down in his seat, then craned round to take in the bright, bustling spaces of the concert hall. The Salle Louis-Fréchette was new to him, and he found it an appealing place, sixties modern, attractive in its sleek lines, but not eccentric. He loved such halls (there were several in Canada, from roughly the same era) and he enjoyed these moments before a concert, when the audience stirred and chattered, rustled programs, and waved to each other, while newcomers searched for their seats and various members of the orchestra fooled around with their instruments onstage.
“Usual well-heeled but relaxed bunch,” he observed to Paul. “And I see some political and TV faces I recognize.”
“I caught a glimpse of my boss five or six rows back,” Paul told him. “I hate concert small talk but I won’t have to duck him tonight. He’s with an attractive woman — not his wife.”
“Maybe it’s his music teacher.”
“On loan from the vice squad?”
“I also saw Dr. Chen. Let’s try to have a few words with him.”
The audience settled in, the concertmaster appeared, then the conductor — a bald, thin man, with very long arms and a wolfish smile. He wasted no time in getting into the first piece.
Sam recognized it as vintage mid-twentieth-century avant-garde, a dense, highly cerebral set of variations on a yowling, unpleasant theme. The variations were named after geometrical forms, but they sounded as if the forms had been sighted on some unimaginable alien landscape, or in a schizophrenic’s nightmare. He could sense the audience holding their breath, marking time, pressed firmly in their seats and bearing with it. Their patience was being sorely tried, he knew, for the piece lasted about ten minutes. It was tentative in its unfolding, sombre and entirely unlovable. Some way into this offering, after a moment of dramatic silence, Sam nudged Paul and indicated the stage with a nod of his head. There was Ginette, among the violins, plucking and slashing with the best of them.
“Mercure, but not exactly mercurial,” said Paul when it was over, punning on the composer’s name, as they waited for the tepid applause to die down.
The second item on the program was equally sombre but very different in what it communicated. It was Tapiola by Sibelius, one of Sam’s favourite pieces, a symphonic essay evoking the great northern forests. Had the programmers intended to tie it in to the conference?
The conductor tore into this unique work, Sam thought, with tremendous dynamism and energy. They were plunged into the heart of the forest, and set on a journey, at first through open spaces, forest clearings, twisting paths. Quite quickly, however, everything became more complex and at the same time closed in, as the single theme, repeated over and over, thrust them forward. Time and space interlocked; the environment