A Quality of Light (2 page)

He never had to explain it. Somehow, I just knew. As I stood there in the pure openness of my boyhood, my father’s whispered note of earnest praise became the slender flicker of a tiny candle flame of faith I would nurture all my life.
Yes, yes.
That’s all he ever had to say to teach me. As that note became absorbed in all that surrounded us those mornings and absorbed by something warm and pliant inside ourselves, I knew that my father was telling me, with that single note, that the spirit of the Lord still moved across
the land. And as long as we were there, in openness, trust and belief, that the spirit was moving across and through and over and under every part of ourselves too.
Yes, yes.
He’d smile at me then, rough up my hair and hug me, and we would walk together in silence towards the creek, striding confidently, carefully, until our approach itself became another form of praise.

He taught me to approach the land like a hymn. Reverently, joyfully, gratefully.

So on those farm mornings, we’d stand together on the porch after breakfast and my father would gaze across those acres before we headed for the barn. He’d breathe deeply as though sponging up those pale morning ambers, grays, browns and blues that surrounded us, sealing them forever in a private chamber of his being. Then he’d look at me with eyes shining and I knew he’d just been to the valley again.

Those were the mornings of my boyhood. It never mattered to me then that I was physically different from the people I called my parents. What mattered to me then was that I felt like a Kane. Ezra and Martha Kane were my parents, and when I was ten my world was shielded, wrapped and protected by the overwhelming love and sense of belonging they planted in me. There were no Indians and there were no whitemen. There was only life. There was only Joshua Kane and there was only three hundred and twenty acres of farmland in southwestern Ontario. There was only faith and there was only devotion. There was only the motions of that soft, warm and pliant something inside of me that whispered a long, exhaled note of praise into the very heart of those mornings —
yes, yes, yes.

Then came Johnny.

My life as a Kane was lit in the indigos, aquamarines and magentas of a home built on quiet faith and prayer. But Johnny changed all that. Where I had stood transfixed by the gloss on the surface of living, he called me forward from the pages of books, away from the blinders that faith can surreptitiously place upon your eyes and out into a world populated by those who live their lives in the shadow of necessary fictions. He introduced me to the
fragments of falsehood that things like hate, anger, resentment and denial are built around. He introduced me to life’s stygian underbelly, a visceral world you navigate by instinct. He introduced me to Indians and he introduced me to myself. I became a better man, a better preacher and a better Indian because of Johnny Gebhardt. I am still Joshua Kane and I still go out into mornings with the whiteman that I call my father, to fish and farm and pray. Only now we carry sweetgrass, sage and tobacco in a bundle alongside our Bibles. We pray in church and we pray in the sweat lodge. We bring ourselves to our God in the same manner we bring ourselves to our world — openly, honestly and without fear. Johnny made that possible.

This is a story about the light that shone throughout my friendship with Johnny Gebhardt. It’s equal parts magic and reality because that, I’ve learned, is what life itself is all about. It’s a story about boys becoming men and men becoming boys because that, too, I’ve learned, is what life itself is all about. It’s about Johnny and me becoming Indians together, one because he wanted to, and the other because he had to. It’s only now I understand that those parts are interchangeable. And if there is a lambency to it all, then it’s the nebulous kind that lights our dreams, levitating us over footfalls and caverns, returning us to our lives with the gentle touch we find only upon awakening.

T
he telephone jangled urgently in the study. It was just before six. By the age of thirty-five I’d made a habit of a farmer’s start to the day, and the idea that more cosmopolitan people’s lives might kick themselves into gear that early always caught me off-guard. I moved quickly to answer before the ringing could disturb my wife and young son.

“Reverend Kane?” a weary male voice inquired.

“Yes, this is Joshua Kane.”

“Good. Sorry to disturb you at this hour, Reverend. It must be, what, six a.m. where you are?”

“Yes. Well, just before. I was up. Who is this, please?”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry,” the man said, gearing down into a professional tone. “Name’s Inspector David Nettles of the Calgary police, Reverend. You’ve got a friend name of Gebhardt? John Gebhardt?”

“Johnny? Yes. Is there a problem? Is he okay?”

“Well, he’s alive, if that’s what you mean. But we’ve definitely got a problem, Reverend. It seems your friend Gebhardt has taken it upon himself to solve the entire Indian problem in Canada. He’s holed up in the Indian Affairs office out here with a dozen hostages, armed to the teeth and making demands. Says he wants a special sitting of the House of Commons to deal with this situation down in Oka, wants the army out of there and wants a guarantee that
none of those militants will be prosecuted once the conflict is settled. He also wants a special investigation through the UN and an International Human Rights Tribunal to look at the Indian Third World in Canada, as he calls it. Real fuckin’ Rambo. Sorry about the language, Reverend.”

“That’s okay.”

“Well, he’s a real peach, this guy. Long hair, braided, with an eagle feather, war paint, beaded buckskin vest, moccasins, everything but scalps hanging from his belt. Hard to believe he’s a whiteman. Says if the government won’t come to the Indians, he’ll bring the Indians to the government. He’s been faxing us on the Indian Affairs machine. Faxing the press out here too. Signs all of them Laughing Dog. Can you believe it? He’s sending faxes faster than arrows.”

“What can I do, Inspector?” I asked, unsure of the role a minister in a small rural community might play in a drama like this.

“Well, we got him to the point where he says he’s willing to negotiate for the release of the hostages. But he’ll only negotiate through you, he says. Pretty close friend of yours, this Gebhardt, is he, Reverend?”

“Yes, pretty close. Or at least we were. I haven’t heard from John since …”

“Since when, Reverend?”

“Since a long time ago, Inspector. A long time. Are you sure I can help here?”

“You’re the only game in town, Reverend. Gebhardt’s got the doors and elevators wired with explosives, and he’s huddled in an office on the fourth floor with a couple of automatic rifles, grenades and enough dynamite to take out half a city block. Oh, and he remembered to bring groceries. Says unless you come and do the talking for him, he’ll start tossing bodies out the window. Yeah, you can definitely help, Reverend.”

The Johnny I remembered was not this crazed, armed reactionary. It was true we hadn’t seen each other in years and even though I’d received a letter every now and then, they had stopped about eight years back. I knew he had traveled a lot, even joking
once about living like a member of a nomadic culture, and that he’d spent the bulk of his time at various ceremonies, rituals and gatherings. He’d even written me at length about the winter he’d spent alone in a teepee just to understand how it must have been. He’d made his own bow, fletched arrows with sinew, tanned his own buckskin, trapped and hunted, and carved a ceremonial pipe stem. After that winter the letters had stopped. Yet the sketch of the man Nettles described was, from what I remembered of John, not so difficult to imagine. Twelve years before, the last time we had seen each other, he’d called me to act as a character witness for him after he’d been arrested for participating in a road blockade to prevent logging on traditional Aboriginal land in British Columbia. Still, that had been minor civil disobedience, trespassing, verbal abuse, a long way from armed hostage-takings. But if he needed my help to get through the mess he’d created, I would be there for him.

“How do I get to you?” I asked.

“Well, you’re gonna have to drive to the airfield at Walkerton. We’ll have an Ontario Provincial Police plane fly you to Toronto where you’ll switch to a regular flight to Calgary. There’ll be a ticket waiting for you and you should be here by late this afternoon. Okay?”

“Yes. I’ll need some time to make arrangements — my church, my family — but I can leave this morning.”

“Great. I’ll meet you at the airport when you land. I’m tall, gray hair, brown suit, wife says I’m getting the coach’s profile.”

“What?”

“You know, a little bit of the belly.” Nettles laughed. “Will you be wearing your collar, or how will I recognize you, Reverend?”

“No, I don’t wear a collar. Besides, Johnny’s not a real big fan of the church. I’m, uh, tall, black hair, dark skin. I’ll wear a blue suit,” I explained.

“Make yourself sound almost like an Injun, Reverend,” Nettles said with a laugh.

“I am an Indian, Inspector. Ojibway.”

“Oh,” he said quietly.

“I’ll want to go right over to John as soon as I arrive,” I said.

“Sure. We’ll debrief you first, though. Standard stuff on how to deal with people in these situations, what kinds of things to say or not to say, what we can accommodate from here, background on the situation, our contact person, that sort of thing. Oh, and Reverend?”

“Yes?”

“You might want to put your friendship in your back pocket on this one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you and Gebhardt had some kind of fight, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you might want to mull over why he’d only want you in this situation,” Nettles explained. “I think that memory will be your biggest tool here.”

“Yes. Yes, you’re right. I’ll think about that Inspector.”

I sat down heavily in my desk chair. I had always been a pacifist. Even before I’d made the decision to follow the path of faith my parents had instilled in me, I’d shunned aggression. Mine was a humble, quiet heart. Armed revolts, hostage-takings and threatened killings were distant from any experience I’d had. In the back of my mind I wondered whether the fibers of a friendship would unravel in the face of such a crisis, or whether the Johnny I knew and the Johnny who was cradling an automatic weapon in an office in downtown Calgary would meld suddenly into someone I could recognize, reach out to and save.

All things considered, it had been a difficult year to be Aboriginal. No matter how far removed you might have been from actual goings-on — and as a small nondenominational pastor in a farming town called Paisley, I was about as far removed from things Aboriginal as possible — people still seemed to regard you as an agitator and now, more recently, as a Mohawk. All Indians were Mohawk in that dry, hot summer of 1990. Everywhere you went your brown face seemd to qualify you as one with an opinion, a solution or at least an explanation. The fact that some of us had none of these puzzled most people.

The Warriors, wearing camouflage outfits and bandannas as masks, had engaged in a wild shoot-out with the police when they
had mounted an attack to dismantle barricades the Warriors and the Mohawk people had raised on a small road leading to a spiritual area known as the Pines. The Mohawks wanted to prevent a municipal golf course owned by the town of Oka from expanding onto land that they held as sacred. Oka was nestled against the boundaries of a Mohawk reserve called Kahnesetake, although the Mohawks referred to it as a Territory. One policeman had been killed in the dawn raid. The conflict had escalated, with pictures in the press and on television of masked, heavily armed Mohawks, white citizens rioting along bridges to Montreal that neighboring Mohawk communities had barricaded and stories of more and more Mohawk supporters streaming behind the barricades. The army had finally been called in to quell the situation. Nothing had been accomplished and it seemed, the morning of that telephone call, that the stalemate in Oka would linger forever. I sighed. Conflict was a wearying thing.

Shirley was shuffling around the kitchen when I emerged from my shower. She moved to sit at the dining-room table with her fingers curled around a coffee mug, a sleepy half smile on her face. In the sixteen years we’d been together, she’d always amazed me with her uncanny ability to know when I needed her most. We’d met in Bible College in Red Deer during our first year. Even then she’d known I needed her. A farm kid living and studying in the city for the first time, two thousand miles away from home, I was lonely, uncertain and withdrawn. She’d approached me on the third day of classes where I sat waiting in the most remote corner of the foyer, plopped herself down beside me, introduced herself, and then casually, gently and devotedly, reached inside me and opened me up. We shared our faith, we shared our awe and wonder at the simple beauty of natural things, our concern for people, good music, good books, baseball, and very quickly, silently, mysteriously, we fell in love. We graduated together and were married the summer we became ordained. Since then we’d shared churches and congregations and the birth of our son, Jonathan, who was now twelve. Shirley McCormack Kane. The only woman I had ever been with. The only one I ever wanted.

“I heard the phone. Is everything all right?” She eyed me over the rim of her coffee cup.

“No,” I said, toweling my hair and sitting down across the table from her. “I have to leave this morning. There’s an emergency I’ve been asked to help with.”

I explained very slowly and deliberately what Nettles had told me. Her face remained calm, except for a small worry line above her eyes when I described the amount of weaponry Johnny had at his disposal and the fortifications he had arranged around himself. I expressed my concern for the hostages and my uncertainty over such an old and untended friendship holding up through the pressure of resolving the situation. When I finished she sat back in her chair, sipped her coffee and stared out the patio doors briefly before turning to me and nodding.