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not worthwhile. I hadn’t been for years. Booze will do that to a man. But booze is not the root of the problem. Just a condition. When you lose something, something that was your whole world, two choices present themselves. Dig through the ash and burnt timber, through the bits of ruined clothing and blackened shards of dinner plates and waterlogged photo albums that was the sum of your life, and find something inside you that makes you want to go on. Or you allow that black pit that is born in the bottom of your belly to smoulder, and spend your days trying to dampen it with rye.
    I am a keeper of certain secrets, just as your mother, Lisette, is the keeper of her own. Me, I don’t know where this comes from. The Mushkegowuk people love nothing more than to chatter like sparrows over coffee in the morning, over beer at night. There’s something unifying, something freeing about rolling around in the dirty laundry of your neighbours, picking it up and pointing out the stains, sniffing it almost gleefully for the scent of grief.
    I need to share a secret with you. Just one right now. But it’s the one that hurts the most. Your grandfather, Annie, he wanted your ability for visions but only gained it partially. He didn’t want or care for what you have, Suzanne, your beauty, your charisma. But I wanted the gifts that both of you girls possess. Wanted them full on. I fancied myself a chief in an earlier life, a man of the people, leading them through troubled times, photographed like Sitting Bull, my profile stern in its wisdom. But I didn’t get your gifts. Or maybe I did, only just a little. Not enough.
    Months before I watched you, Annie, leave with your friend Eva to go to Toronto, something happened that maybe pushed us all over the edge. Suzanne, you’d been gone from home over a year at that point. Many moons, eh? Too many. Where’d you go? Call you mother. She worries.
    I need to tell you both about that night. Me, I like drinking at my own kitchen table, having friends come over. We can smoke in the house and drink as much as we want. I rarely drank anywhere else. Me, I’d become a homebody over the years when I wasn’t out in the bush. I’d even watch TV once in a while when I got bored. History Channel. Bravo. Discovery Channel. One show called Crime Scene Investigation . Good stuff. But one night, Joe invited me over, so I went. Joe, we call him Chief, Chief Joe Wabano, although he’s never officially held the title. He’s got the big belly of a chief and the paycheque from driving tugs up the bay to the isolated communities. And when he gets drunk, he likes to let people know exactly what he’s thinking.
    I must have been bored that night. My truck wouldn’t start so I walked the few miles into town to see Joe. Cold spring evening, and I remember how good it felt to walk, buzzed already from a few lonely drinks at home, the stars up above winking at me. A car passed me as I made it to the bridge by Taska’s, and as it slowed I saw it was Marius driving, two big white friends stuffed in with him. Suzanne, you and Gus were missing at that point, had dropped off the face of the world, it seemed. The Netmakers were blaming us, and we blamed them. But I didn’t think twice about all that at the time.
    Me and Joe and his woman, we phoned Gregor, the white schoolteacher and famous pervert, to join us when we got into our drinks pretty good. But it was a weeknight, and he had to teach the next morning. Too bad. Gregor would have driven me home if he’d showed up. I remember feeling restless at Joe’s, like I knew a snowstorm was coming and I was unprepared. You’ve got that gift, Annie, but much stronger than me, a gift that pops up in our family once in a while. It comes with your seizures, the ability to see into the future, and maybe, if you develop it, to heal. But you’re going to have to work on it, and it’s not like you can enrol at Northern College to learn what you need. Me, I pity your road.