Bone Black
Bone Black
Carol Rose GoldenEagle
Copyright © Carol Rose GoldenEagle, 2019
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].
Nightwood Editions
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cover design: Angela Yen
COPY-EDITING: Angie Ishak
Typesetting: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.
Printed and bound in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Bone black / Carol Rose GoldenEagle.
Names: GoldenEagle, Carol Rose, 1963- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190088974 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190089083 | ISBN 9780889713642 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713659 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8607.A5567 B66 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
To Terri Boldt
A wonderful auntie (even though she may not like to hear that, which makes me laugh out loud). Such a dear friend and soul sister. Love you so much—Namaste
Bone black: a term used to describe a glazing technique in pottery. Bones are burned at a high temperature to obtain bone ash. What is left, after being fired in the kiln, is calcium and phosphorous. It is white in colour. That ash is then mixed with iron or copper during the glazing process before the pottery is fired. The addition of minerals turns the glaze the colour of black. It is a unique finish, not often practised by artisans, and the process is ages old.
Bones
Wren Strongeagle was almost killed by a train when she was little.
She hadn’t turned five years old yet when she was standing on the railroad track. Wren and her twin sister Raven used to wander down to the tracks all the time. Some days, they’d be gone for hours after having wandered off the property where her grandma lived in the valley. They visited their grandmother often and eventually came to live with her. They call her by the Cree name, Kohkum.
The girls had a routine, especially in the summer. If they weren’t riding their bikes up and down Kohkum’s long and curving driveway, they’d be splashing around on the creek bed: a shallow waterway with a slow-moving current snaking its way between the grassy, hilly coulee of the landscape. Kohkum’s house was built in the valley part of the land, beside Last Mountain Lake in Saskatchewan’ßs Qu’Appelle Valley. It’s an area protected by buttes and trees and an ever-present wind on the Saskatchewan prairie, but with a breathtaking view.
So often, as little girls will do, Wren and her sister got sidetracked and followed the creek in the direction the water ran, toward the big lake. A long lake. Kinookimaw in Cree. Back when Wren was just a girl, the rail line was still operational. Its tracks carried passengers and cargo from the city. The train wound its way along a scenic route of the Qu’Appelle Valley, right beside the water’s edge.
Kohkum had always warned the girls not to play on the tracks alone. But as children sometimes do, they’d forget what she’d said and found themselves on the tracks anyway, picking up stones that they’d throw with all their might into the lake, playing a game they’d invented to see who could throw the farthest. It was usually Raven who’d win the toss, but neither of them kept score. It was just fun to be out and playing near the water’s edge.
And the girls were never really alone. The lake itself was always busy with people enjoying a day of canoeing, fishing or just being out on the water. They were friends and neighbours of Kohkum, living in town a kilometre or so from where the little creek drained into the big lake. They knew the girls by their names, and would always shout friendly greetings when they spotted the twins playing on the shoreline. The girls would give a wave from the shoreline or the train tracks, and they’d remain there until returning to their grandmother’s house when they started to get hungry.
On the day when Wren was almost hit by a train, a good day of throwing stones and laughing and waving at lake folk in their canoes, Raven had stopped to pick handfuls of sweet saskatoon berries along the trail that wound through the trees back to Kohkum’s home in the coulee. But something sparkly on the train tracks caught Wren’s eye that afternoon, so she lollygagged, sitting right on the tracks to see where that shininess was coming from.
She didn’t even notice that the train was coming. She didn’t hear its whistle, which sounded incessantly once the conductor saw the small figure on the tracks. Wren was enthralled, doing her best to pick up each tiny rhinestone she’d spotted embedded in the dirt beside one of the rail ties, and putting the glass treasures in the small pockets of her denim cutoffs.
People on the lake had noticed. As the train’s whistle sounded in an increasingly furious manner, two people in a canoe near the shoreline yelled and screamed as loudly as they could at Wren. Still, she didn’t hear any of it. It was like she’d been caught up in some other world that was bereft of sound and moved in slow motion.
It was at this moment that Wren remembers a bright light appearing beside her. She didn’t know what it was, only recalls being thrown from the track and the oncoming train. She remembers it feeling like an electric shock, the same type you would feel if you were to foolishly put a knife in a toaster for half a second, which she’d already done in her so-far-short life. It was that little shock that brought her back to real time.
Wren remembers the sound of that train speeding past her a moment later as she sat on the dirt, now breathless, mere metres away. She finally heard the train’s whistle and engine. She gasps even today, knowing that she’d have been squished if it hadn’t been for the sudden appearance of that bright light, and the force that pushed her off the track. She remembers feeling the light checking on her once again, to make sure she was safe, before it disappeared.