Vermette - The Break

Also by Katherena Vermette

North End Love Songs (poetry)

The Break

KathErena Vermette

TRIGGER WARNING: This book is about recovering and healing from violence. Contains scenes of sexual and physical violence, and depictions of vicarious trauma.

Copyright 2016 Katherena Vermette

Published in Canada in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the authors rights.

All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Publication
Vermette, Katherena, 1977, author
The break / Katherena Vermette.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0111-7 (paperback).ISBN 978-1-4870-0112-4 (epub)

I. Title.

PS8643.E74B74 2016 C813.6 C2016-900846-0
C2016-900847-9

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover art: Corinna Wollf

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For my mother

In honour of those who have been lost.

With love to those who have found
a way through you lead us.

Betty, if I start to write a poem about you

it might turn out to be

about hunting season instead,

about open season on native women

~ from Helen Betty Osborne

by Marilyn Dumont

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they dont have any.

~ Alice Walker

PART one

The Break is a piece of land just west of McPhillips Street. A narrow field about four lots wide that interrupts all the closely knit houses on either side and cuts through every avenue from Selkirk to Leila, that whole edge of the North End. Some people call it nothing and likely dont think about it at all. I never called it anything, just knew it was there. But when she moved next door, my Stella, she named it the Break, if only in her head. No one had ever told her any other name, and for whatever reason, she thought she should call it something.

Its Hydro land, was likely set aside in the days before anything was out there. When all that low land on the west side of the Red River was only tall grasses and rabbits, some bush in clusters, all the way to the lake in the north. The neighbourhood rose up around it. Houses built first for Eastern European immigrants who were pushed to that wrong side of the railway tracks, and kept away from the affluent city south. Someone once told me that North End houses were all made cheap and big, but the lots were narrow and short. That was when you had to own a certain amount of land to vote, and all those lots were made just inches smaller.

The tall, metal Hydro towers would have been built after that. Huge and grey, they stand on either side of the small piece of land, holding up two smooth silver cords high above the tallest house. The towers repeat, every two blocks, over and over, going far into the north. They might even go as far as the lake. My Stellas little girl, Mattie, named them robots when the family first moved in beside them. Robots is a good name for them. They each have a square-like head and go out a bit at the bottom like someone standing at attention, and theres the two arms overhead that hold the cords up into the sky. They are a frozen army standing guard, seeing everything. Houses built up and broken down around them, people flooding in and out.

In the sixties, Indians started moving in, once Status Indians could leave reserves and many moved to the city. That was when the Europeans slowly started creeping out of the neighbourhood like a man sneaking away from a sleeping woman in the dark. Now there are so many Indians here, big families, good people, but also gangs, hookers, drug houses, and all these big, beautiful houses somehow sagging and tired like the old people who still live in them.

The area around the Break is slightly less poor than the rest, more working class, just enough to make the hard-working people who live there think that they are out of the core and free of that drama. There are more cars in driveways than on the other side of McPhillips. Its a good neighbourhood but you can still see it, if you know what to look for. If you can see the houses with never-opened bed sheet covered windows. If you can see the cars that come late at night, park right in the middle of the Break, far away from any house, and stay only ten minutes or so before driving away again. My Stella can see it. I taught her how to look and be aware all the time. I dont know if that was right or wrong, but shes still alive so there has to be some good in it.

Ive always loved the place my girl calls the Break. I used to walk through it in the summer. There is a path you can go along all the way to the edge of the city, and if you just look down at the grass, you might think you were in the country the whole way. Old people plant gardens there, big ones with tidy rows of corn and tomatoes, all nice and clean. You cant walk through it in the winter though. No one clears a way. In the winter, the Break is just a lake of wind and white, a field of cold and biting snow that blows up with the slightest gust. And when snow touches those raw Hydro wires they make this intrusive buzzing sound. Its constant and just quiet enough that you can ignore it, like a whisper you know is a voice but you cant hear the words. And even though they are more than three storeys high, when it snows those wires feel close, low, and buzz a sound that is almost like music, just not as smooth. You can ignore it. Its just white noise, and some people can ignore things like that. Some people hear it but just get used to it.

It was snowing when it happened. The sky was pink and swollen and the snow had finally started to fall. Even from inside her house, my Stella heard the buzzing, as sure as her own breath. She knows to expect it when the sky fills with clouds, but like everything shes been through, she has just learned to live with it.

( 1 )

Stella

Stella sits at her kitchen table with two police officers, and for one long moment, no one says a thing. They just sit, all looking down or away, for a long pause. The older officer clears his throat. He smells like old coffee and snow, and looks around Stellas home, her clean kitchen and out into her dark living room, like hes trying to find evidence of something. The younger one goes over his scribbled notes, the paper of his little coiled book flips and crumples.

Blanket over her shoulders, Stella wraps one hand around a hot mug of coffee, hoarding the warmth but still shaking. In her other hand, she balls a damp Kleenex. She stares down. Her hands look like her moms did, older-looking hands for a young woman. Old-lady hands. Her Kookom had hands like this too, and now that shes an old lady all over, her hands are practically transparent, the skin there worn thin. Stellas arent that bad yet, but they look too wrinkled, too old for her body, like they have aged ahead of her.