Smoke River by Krista Foss Page B

reaches out a hand. She hasn’t expected this, how easily he offers a gentle touch, how it thrills the words right out of her. They walk in silence for a few minutes.
    “That was one nice ice cream cone,” he says finally. They laugh and go quiet.
    Stephanie thinks hard about what to say, then croaks out, “Brittany’s a piece of work.”
    She’s grateful when he laughs again. But more silence follows, and she is conscious now of the lines etching his palm, the warmth of its centre, the pads of his fingers pressing her thumb inwards like a broken wing. So much of just one hand to know and understand.
    “I could have been a bit smoother. You know, not just blurt out something in the hallway,” he says.
    She wants to cry with relief. “No, no. I was such a bitch about it.” He doesn’t say anything.
    She takes a risk. “You know that whole term of biology? I chose what I wore because of you.”
    He stops walking and turns towards her. They’re far from her house. He draws a finger along her jawbone. He touches her hair. “I kinda knew that’s what you were doing,” he says.
    He wraps his arms around her shoulders and pulls her inwards. She is enclosed, dizzy with sensation. He nuzzles her neck, and for the next fifteen minutes he breathes ever so quietly into her skin, holding on to her as if he’s been waiting, waiting most of his life, just for her. And Stephanie thinks,
Ah, this is what it is to feel alive
.

CHAPTER 7
    J une is coming to a close with a sticky slap; purslane and sorrel spring from the over-chewed mud of the development, thriving in the heat. Even pummelled into hardpack, the
o’tá:ra
is beautiful. Helen reaches into her satchel and pulls out a twist of dried tobacco, kneels in the dust, and lets the flame from her lighter lick the leaf edges before inhaling deeply. From inside her chest she pulls forth gratitude, sends it skyward.
    When she was a child, her mother told her their religion began with an illness. The sickness transformed a not-so-great man into a great one, because it brought him a vision. Helen imagined that the man suffered from a cough that blistered his lungs, woke him with chills and vivid, feverish dreams. Her own childish dreams were sharply coloured, but none of her dreams brought messengers drenched in supernatural light, speaking a message that would untether her people from the pale saviour of the priests and ministers who raised their churches, set upmissions. Among them Helen ached for such dreams, such messages. There were so many things her young mind failed to understand: neighbours’ children dressed like white kids, taken to the churches built by men who didn’t live among them, the painted exteriors like bleached bones.
    And sometimes those same neighbour children showing up on the back porch, cupping an aching ear or holding a sore stomach until her mother crumpled dried tobacco leaves in a small clay bowl, dropped in a woodstove ember, and blew smoke into the child’s ear or exhaled it over a glass of water for them to drink.
Hard not to stumble
, Lena whispered after them,
with a foot in two worlds
. But even she couldn’t protect her own children from this two-worldedness forever.
    Across the road, the commercial tobacco plants in Coulson’s fields are, to her eye, precociously tall and green, more than a week ahead of schedule. Even now, despite earning money from the crop herself, it bothers Helen how a living thing nurtured by resources shared by all – sun, soil, water, air – can confer its blessings on just a few. It’s like storing all the food and gifts at one end of a canoe, and in so doing making the journey perilous for everyone.
    As a youngster she smoked wild tobacco – Indian tobacco – that made her head spin, her lungs sore. She learned moderation that way, how strong medicine can heal you or hurt you.
Get sick only once
, her mother told her.
Otherwise you don’t respect it
. The wild plants grew along the edges of Emerson’s