I was drunk for years. Years. Time, when you don't consider it, has a slipperiness, an elusive quality you feel in the hands but shake off fast like water, and I was in the pit a long, long time. Because I was John One Sky's sister and Ben Starr's woman they let me go. At first it was out of sorrow for my loss, my losses, the story I would tell in long garbled sentences as long as the pitchers kept coming. Then, it was out of pity for a drunken young woman. Later, when I became untrustworthy and a pest, they let me go completely. So I wandered from party to party, bottle to bottle, man to man. I sold myself along the way, and that was the cruellest thing, betraying my beloved Ben for enough money to keep on drinking. But finally, the years, the miles, the parties, the puke, the jails and abuses broke me down and no one wanted me that way anymore. I stank. I slept in parks, doorways, abandoned buildings, and hobo jingles, stumbling into a world fortified by shaving lotion, mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, or whatever was handy. If there was a God in the world, he'd overlooked me and I became a crier, a weeper, tearfully begging change from passersby. Until the shadowed ones came.

I started seeing them everywhere. At first I'd rub my eyes, shake my head, and gulp down a mouthful of whatever I had to chase away what I thought for sure were DTs. But they stayed. Not real people, not even what you'd call ghosts, just hints, vague outlines I saw everywhere. Alleys, parks windows of buildings, on the street, everywhere I looked I saw them - felt them, really - not able to disbelieve fully or convince myself of their presence. Shadowed ones. The ones whose spirits can never leave this earth, the ones tied here by a sorrow, a longing stronger than life and deeper than death. When drinking wouldn't drive them away and the haunting got too much to handle, I walked into detox one day and quit drinking. Just quit. Suddenly, I was forty-four. I looked eighty. I felt older than a thousand years.

Hospital was best, they said. I sat there a month drying out and learning to eat again. From there I went to a women's program where I could have stayed as long as I wanted, but there was no one there I could really talk to. They were either really young and cocky or older and playing at being sophisticated. Those ones called their drinks "highballs," or "cocktails," or other long names a galaxy away from the "rubby," "crock," or "juice" that I knew. And the walls drove me crazy. I felt penned up, frozen to the spot, and even though I knew they would have tried to help me, the street was in my bones and I went back to the only world I knew and understood. They were waiting for me - the shadowed ones. I'd have been about four months' sober by then, so I knew that it wasn't the booze or DTs making me see them. No, death has a presence - thick and black and cold - and when you live so close to it for so long you get so you can see it. Feel it. Accept it and not be afraid. Everyone has a mourning ground, a place where the course of a life turned, changed, altered, or disappeared forever. It could be a house, a park, or just a place on the pavement where the wrong words were said, the worst choice made, or fateful action taken. Our spirits are linked to those places forever and when our sorrow's deep enough we return to them again and again to stand in our pain, reliving the memory, mumbling clumsy prayers that we might be offered a chance to change what happened, bend time so we could choose again. But it never happens. The shadowed ones just keep on doing that after death, returnig to those places where their wounds are buried, hoping against hope that something in the walls or the ground might emerge to save them. Mourning grounds. We all have them and it's only in learning how to live with our hurts while we're here that we're set free of them. When I came to understand that at age forty-four, I knew where I had to be. Where I needed to be. For them, the shadowed ones on the street that no one ever sees, the living dead. The homeless.

So I went back and lived as one of them. But I never drank again. Instead, I'd make runs for them when they were sick, nurse them when they needed it, or just be around - a voice, an ear, a shoulder - and by doing that I eased my own pain. When a fresh bottle arrived I always asked to open it. See, there's an old rounder ritual you hardly see anymore. When a bottle's opened you pour a small bit on the ground and say "there's one for the dead." That's what I would always do and that's where I got my name. One For The Dead One Sky. I've been here for twenty years and Amelia, little Amelia, resides in a place of memory, standing at all her places of mourning, shedding tears that salve her bruises, offering prayers that set her free. And the river is just a river after all, neither tepid nor cold, with a long log on the other side where the sun shines down like a spotlight from heaven, enveloping my family, my Ben, keeping them warm for me. 

It was my father who brought me the spirit of the land. He’d sink his furrowed fingers deep into it, roll its grit and promise around his palms, smell it and then rub it over the chest of his overalls like he wanted it to seep through into his heart. It did – and it seeped into mine, too.

            Very early some spring and summer mornings we’d pile sleepily into our fishing gear and head off in the old brown Dodge towards the distant Hockley Valley, whose small and ragged creeks were home to the most stubborn, wily and tasty trout in God’s universe. I’d lay with my head I his lap listening to the high-pitched whine of the tires in counterpoint to his soft humming of some Negro spiritual. He loved those songs. I can’t begin to count the number of miles I traveled that way, swept up in the romance of motion and the frail pitch and sway of a hummed “Kumbaya” or “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” The miles would pass quickly and we’d arrive in the valley about the same time as the sun – quiet, whole and shining. He’d lean against the hood of that old Dodge, head thrown back, eyes closed, slow deep breaths melding with the morning mist. And then, from his throat, a single exhaled note that would shimmer across the silence of those mornings. Yes, that note would say. Yes, yes, yes.

            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. 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.