Uncle Mick Character Analysis

“This is for Sherman,” she said, placing it carefully near the centre of the flames. “You’d better appreciate that. Say hi to your ba-ba-oo, Lisa.”

“But he’s not here,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” she said. “You just can’t see him, because he’s dead.”

I frowned. “Can you see him?”

“She gets it from you,” Ma-ma-oo said to the air again. “No, I can’t see him. He’s dead. He can come to you only in dreams. Be polite and say hello when you give him food.” She handed me a Twinkie and told me to throw it in the fire.

“Hello,” I said. I looked at the Twinkie thoughtfully. “Will he share?”

“Say his name. If you don’t say his name, another ghost will snatch it up.”

Ba-ba-oo had lost his arm in the Second World War, at Verrières Ridge. When he came home, he couldn’t get the money he thought he should get form Veterans Affairs because they said Indian Affairs were taking care of him. Indian Affairs said if he wanted the same benefits as a white vet, he should move off reserve and give up his status. If he did that, they’d lose their house and by this time, they had three children and my dad, Albert, was on the way.

“Geordie and Edith helped as much as they could,” Mick had told me […] “But they had their own family. My father worked hard all his life, and now he would say things like, ‘Agnes, I’m useless.’ She didn’t know what to do.”

The greengage tree was covered with a fishing net. The greengages were almost ripe, so Dad had put the net on to keep the crows from raiding our tree. Crows are clever, though, and find the holes or simply go under the net. I don’t like ripe greengages, anyway. I like them tart and green, hard enough to scrape the roof of my mouth.

White feathers tumbled down from the half-eaten chickens caught near the top of the tree, where the hawks had dropped them. The chickens were still alive. They flapped wings, kicked feet, struggled against the net. Their heads had fallen to the ground like ripe fruit. Their beaks opened and closed soundlessly, and their eyes blinked rapidly, puzzled and frightened.

Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game, or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.

“Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one—guess she was fourteen then—this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, bitch, and I’m proud of it.’” He laughed and shook his head “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”

“Oxasuli,” she said. “Powerful medicine. Very dangerous. It can kill you, do you understand? You have to respect it.” She handed me the root and I put it in the bucket. There were some more oxasuli bushes around, but she said to let them be. We slogged some more, found two suitable plants, then Ma-ma-oo declared we had enough. “You put these on your windowsill, and it keeps ghosts away.”

“How?”

“Ghosts hate the smell. It protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine. Here, you break off this much and you burn it on your stove—”

“Like incense?”

“What’s incense?”

“Like cedar and sweetgrass bundles.”

“Oh. Yes, yes like that. Smoke your house. Smoke your corners. When someone dies, you have to be careful.”

“Why?”

She paused again, frowning. “Hard to explain.”

“He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”

“What about Mom?”

“When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on […] She used to know who was going to die next […]”

“Mom doesn’t see anything” […]

“She doesn’t tell you […] Or she’s forgotten how […] Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more […]”

“[…] How do you do medicine?”

“All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.

Food is dust in my mouth without you.
I see you in my dreams and all I want to do is sleep.
If my house was filled with gold, it would still be empty.
If I was king of the world, I’d still be alone.
If breath was all that was between us, I would stop breathing to be with you again.
The memory of you is my shadow and all my days are dark, but I hold on to these memories until I can be with you again.
Only your laughter will make them light; only your smile will make them shine.
We are apart so that I will know the joy of being with you again.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.

The footsteps stopped a few feet away from me. I shook Ma-ma-oo’s shoulder and she grunted, unwilling to wake up. I turned my head slowly, but nothing and no one was there. As I was pulling the sleeping bag up over my head, something bright streaked across the sky. I paused. The clouds had cleared, the moon was down, and the stars shone hard and unwinking white against the late-night sky. Another frantic streak seared its afterimage against the darkness. I closed my eyes and made a wish. When I opened my eyes, three falling stars, one after another, raced across the tops of the mountains. The frequency built until the sky was lit by silent fireworks.

When we got back to Kitamaat, I told Ma-ma-oo about the footsteps on the beach. She raised an eyebrow at me. “You don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand. They’re just ghosts.”

“Alberni? Really? There’s a treatment centre where the residential school used to be?” one of the women said to Aunt Trudy.

Another woman laughed, then said, “Hey, how many priests does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“How many?”

“Three. One to screw it, one to beat it for being screwed and one to tell the lawyers that no screwing took place.”

“That’s not funny,” Josh said.

“That’s the point,” the woman said.

“Well,” I said. “You’re talking to the queen of fuckups and you’d have to do a lot more to take my crown away.”

He reached over and kept giving me nudges until I looked at him. “You weren’t that bad.”

“You weren’t the one that ran away.”

“You’re back now. You’re dealing with things. I didn’t understand what it was like to lose something. Now that I do, I think you’re doing fine. I mean, Karaoke didn’t die on me. She just dumped me and I flipped. I don’t know what I’d do if someone actually died on me.”

I laughed. “You call that flipping? That was a little spaz.”

“Yeah, well…”

We drifted off in a comfortable silence.

Remove yourself from the next sound you hear, the breathing that isn’t your own. It glides beneath the bushes like someone’s shadow, a creature with no bones, arms, or legs, a rolling, shifting, worm-shaped thing that hugs the darkness. It wraps its pale body around yours and feeds. Push yourself away when your vision dims. Ignore the confused, painful contractions in your chest as your heart trip-hammers to life, struggles to pump blood. Ignore the tingling sensations and weakness in your arms and legs, which make you want to lie down and never get up.

“This is for Sherman,” she said, placing it carefully near the centre of the flames. “You’d better appreciate that. Say hi to your ba-ba-oo, Lisa.”

“But he’s not here,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” she said. “You just can’t see him, because he’s dead.”

I frowned. “Can you see him?”

“She gets it from you,” Ma-ma-oo said to the air again. “No, I can’t see him. He’s dead. He can come to you only in dreams. Be polite and say hello when you give him food.” She handed me a Twinkie and told me to throw it in the fire.

“Hello,” I said. I looked at the Twinkie thoughtfully. “Will he share?”

“Say his name. If you don’t say his name, another ghost will snatch it up.”

Ba-ba-oo had lost his arm in the Second World War, at Verrières Ridge. When he came home, he couldn’t get the money he thought he should get form Veterans Affairs because they said Indian Affairs were taking care of him. Indian Affairs said if he wanted the same benefits as a white vet, he should move off reserve and give up his status. If he did that, they’d lose their house and by this time, they had three children and my dad, Albert, was on the way.

“Geordie and Edith helped as much as they could,” Mick had told me […] “But they had their own family. My father worked hard all his life, and now he would say things like, ‘Agnes, I’m useless.’ She didn’t know what to do.”

The greengage tree was covered with a fishing net. The greengages were almost ripe, so Dad had put the net on to keep the crows from raiding our tree. Crows are clever, though, and find the holes or simply go under the net. I don’t like ripe greengages, anyway. I like them tart and green, hard enough to scrape the roof of my mouth.

White feathers tumbled down from the half-eaten chickens caught near the top of the tree, where the hawks had dropped them. The chickens were still alive. They flapped wings, kicked feet, struggled against the net. Their heads had fallen to the ground like ripe fruit. Their beaks opened and closed soundlessly, and their eyes blinked rapidly, puzzled and frightened.

Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game, or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.

“Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one—guess she was fourteen then—this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, bitch, and I’m proud of it.’” He laughed and shook his head “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”

“Oxasuli,” she said. “Powerful medicine. Very dangerous. It can kill you, do you understand? You have to respect it.” She handed me the root and I put it in the bucket. There were some more oxasuli bushes around, but she said to let them be. We slogged some more, found two suitable plants, then Ma-ma-oo declared we had enough. “You put these on your windowsill, and it keeps ghosts away.”

“How?”

“Ghosts hate the smell. It protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine. Here, you break off this much and you burn it on your stove—”

“Like incense?”

“What’s incense?”

“Like cedar and sweetgrass bundles.”

“Oh. Yes, yes like that. Smoke your house. Smoke your corners. When someone dies, you have to be careful.”

“Why?”

She paused again, frowning. “Hard to explain.”

“He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”

“What about Mom?”

“When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on […] She used to know who was going to die next […]”

“Mom doesn’t see anything” […]

“She doesn’t tell you […] Or she’s forgotten how […] Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more […]”

“[…] How do you do medicine?”

“All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.

Food is dust in my mouth without you.
I see you in my dreams and all I want to do is sleep.
If my house was filled with gold, it would still be empty.
If I was king of the world, I’d still be alone.
If breath was all that was between us, I would stop breathing to be with you again.
The memory of you is my shadow and all my days are dark, but I hold on to these memories until I can be with you again.
Only your laughter will make them light; only your smile will make them shine.
We are apart so that I will know the joy of being with you again.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.

The footsteps stopped a few feet away from me. I shook Ma-ma-oo’s shoulder and she grunted, unwilling to wake up. I turned my head slowly, but nothing and no one was there. As I was pulling the sleeping bag up over my head, something bright streaked across the sky. I paused. The clouds had cleared, the moon was down, and the stars shone hard and unwinking white against the late-night sky. Another frantic streak seared its afterimage against the darkness. I closed my eyes and made a wish. When I opened my eyes, three falling stars, one after another, raced across the tops of the mountains. The frequency built until the sky was lit by silent fireworks.

When we got back to Kitamaat, I told Ma-ma-oo about the footsteps on the beach. She raised an eyebrow at me. “You don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand. They’re just ghosts.”

“Alberni? Really? There’s a treatment centre where the residential school used to be?” one of the women said to Aunt Trudy.

Another woman laughed, then said, “Hey, how many priests does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“How many?”

“Three. One to screw it, one to beat it for being screwed and one to tell the lawyers that no screwing took place.”

“That’s not funny,” Josh said.

“That’s the point,” the woman said.

“Well,” I said. “You’re talking to the queen of fuckups and you’d have to do a lot more to take my crown away.”

He reached over and kept giving me nudges until I looked at him. “You weren’t that bad.”

“You weren’t the one that ran away.”

“You’re back now. You’re dealing with things. I didn’t understand what it was like to lose something. Now that I do, I think you’re doing fine. I mean, Karaoke didn’t die on me. She just dumped me and I flipped. I don’t know what I’d do if someone actually died on me.”

I laughed. “You call that flipping? That was a little spaz.”

“Yeah, well…”

We drifted off in a comfortable silence.

Remove yourself from the next sound you hear, the breathing that isn’t your own. It glides beneath the bushes like someone’s shadow, a creature with no bones, arms, or legs, a rolling, shifting, worm-shaped thing that hugs the darkness. It wraps its pale body around yours and feeds. Push yourself away when your vision dims. Ignore the confused, painful contractions in your chest as your heart trip-hammers to life, struggles to pump blood. Ignore the tingling sensations and weakness in your arms and legs, which make you want to lie down and never get up.